My installation of Easy Diffusion (the thing I use to AI generate art) has gone wacky.
Not only has it become crazy slow and unreliable – there’s even a delay in frigging typing in the prompts, and I often have to close and reopen the browser tab between renders just to keep the damned thing from freezing or crashing its tab – but the number of what I call “monstrosities” or “mutations” keep going up.
They are the bizarre, Cronenberg does Akira type distortions that crop up when generating images via AI because the AI does not actually understand what it is generating, it just reproduces and combines patterns.
So you get extra limbs, headless torsos, body parts emerging from random places, or my least favorite, two character’s bodies kind of melted together so that there is no boundary between them.
I told you it was Cronenberg’s Akira. Body horror indeed.
That’s been happening ever since I started making AI art, but lately it’s been happening a whole hell of a lot more, and it’s grinding my gears.
I keep having to add more things to the “negative prompt” – like it sounds, it’s where you list what you do NOT want to see – just to get something that isn’t a nightmare.
Anyhow, here’s some smut I managed to make despite it all.
I can’t help wondering if the two problems – poor performance and rising mutation rates – are somehow related. Like there is something interfering with both.
If so, I dunno what it is. I haven’t changed anything in the browser or in Easy Diffusion itself, It is possible something updated itself, though…. I am incapable of turning updates off because of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
I can’t stand the idea that other people are using a newer, better version of the software than I am. I guess I am afraid of being left behind.
If only staying current on other things was that easy!
Imagine a future where everyone’s brains are fully integrated into the Internet at all times and both their cognitive subroutines and their basic and extended knowledge were being updated all the time, nearly instantaneously.
Of course, not every person would get the exact same updates. People would still be pick and choose their “news” sources. So, sadly, people would still argue over the facts to a certain degree.
But there could be something like Wikipedia to act as a body of knowledge that people more or less agree is more or less impartial and accurate most of the time.
Anyhow, where was I? Oh right. Smut.
Damn I make good stuff.
I still make images like ALL the time. I have games installed but I rarely play them. Watching YouTube and making art is way more fun.
And I am even, technically, learning a skill.
AI is the future, man. And I am catching that wave.
More after the break.
The dark of the dark
I don’t know when I became a shadow.
But I know I wasn’t always one. I’m certain of that.
Yet when I try to remember a time “before”, all I get is the smell of case hardened steel, the image of a door welded shut, and the feeling of gently but firmly bouncing off of something very, very solid.
Like I’m a balloon bumping against a window.
From the inside…. I think. Maybe not.
I’m not all that interested in what’s beyond that wall anyhow. I don’t need answers. I’m content to flit from darkness to darkness, mingling with my kind, watching and observing the world of the living and the light, knowing my place is beyond them and around them and at times almost with them, but never of them. Never again.
And I am fine with that.
I think I was human once. If so, that makes me sad. Sad to think that some poor wretched soul had to die for me to be born. He must not have been a very happy person if he gave up his humanity to join us in the shadows.
Oh yes, there are more of my kind. It’s hard to say how many because we tend to stay as far away from each other as possible.
I think that’s because we don’t like being looked at like we look at others.
But personally, I have encountered hundreds of us. You see, we wander, all of us, and wanderers can’t help crossing one another’s paths now and then.
We don’t like it. But we can’t help it. It’s not like we plan our routes.
We just wander.
As far as I can tell, we’re not alive, and we can’t die.
It’s hard to be sure, of course. It’s not like I can tell you how old I am. Numbers stopped meaning anything to me a long time ago.
But some of my memories of my time as a shadow seem very old indeed. And I have glimpsed other shadows who seem far older than I.
So as far as I know, we can’t die.
But we can become shriekers, and that’s worse.
Shriekers are beings of madness, rage, and malevolence. They scream and cry and babble incoherently and claw and tear and sink their fangs into anything living they encounter, trying to drain them of all their life energy.
Luckily, they almost always fail. In our world, life is far too strong and bright for us to have much effect on at all, and what little effect we do have takes calmness and concentration to exert, and shriekers have neither.
They only can succeed in doing harm to creatures whose life force has ebbed very low and who have great darkness in their souls.
Whether the darkness is their own or not.
Any of us could become a shrieker at any time, because a shrieker is what happens when a shadow goes insane.
And when you only exist as a flickering shadow, madness is never far away.
That is why I write these words, or think I do. The one thing we shadows know prevents the madness is expressing ourselves, and so we write these notes and leave them for one another to find, and thus keep our minds clear and ourselves sane.
This, I have now done. I hereby testify that I am clean. I feel no anger or hate. I still love people, and watch them for all the right reasons. I take joy in their joy, feel pain from their pain, and delight in watching them grow, prosper, and pass.
I am of the dark. But I still love the light.
And long may that be.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.