Rock band Wet Leg. There’s a new ai art engine called Sureel.ai that uses “responsively sourced” image references. Hamsters, and iPad games featuring hamsters. This one’s gonna hang around for a while. I missed the Squid Game train, but there are dozens of hamsters on YouTube playing rodent versions, which is more entertaining. Quiet on …
By themselves, the pics in my last post about hamsters and exercise wheels were pretty stupid. But it’s always possible to refine them. I had put “flying” in one of the prompts, but instead of giving me a hamster flung off his exercise wheel and flying through the air, I got superhero-type hamsters wearing capes. …
You’d think that a cute, fluffy, chubby, adorable little hamster having a mishap on its exercise wheel — a sight common on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and the like — wouldn’t be a problem for AI to generate. Especially as it’s an element common to many peoples’ childhoods, a hamster running so quickly he flings himself …
Some of the first human beings ever to leave Africa colonized southeast Asian tens of thousands of years ago, using continental land bridges for transit as the sea was much lower. Since the end of the Ice Age, the islands were isolated; but the beginning of recorded history brought more visitors, among them Indians and …
AI has stepped in it again! This time, in Glasgow, Scotland. A children’s event called “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” — a none-too-subtle allusion to Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — opened in a sparsely decorated warehouse to parental reactions so violently dismayed some wound up calling the local police. The story is below. …
I recently became aware of how far the use of ChatGPT as a writer’s aid has come. NOT the use of it to write a whole book without human aid, because that is very far from the technology that’s available now. But this current trend towards it has a lot of fiction writers upset.
Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones, a documentary about Rolling Stones guitarists and founder Brian Jones and how and why he may have died. Hint: It was murder, and it was covered up by the police. r/fantasyromance. Youtube livestreams of airport arrivals and departures. My favorites are London Heathrow and LAX. Nirvana and …
Since we’re nearing Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about… Romantasy. As implied by the name it’s a mashup of Romance + Fantasy, a subgenre exemplified, perhaps platonically, by Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, whose eponymously named first book came out in 2015. Marketed as YA, the fantasy novel was about a …
Creating Chinese New Year coloring book images in Midjourney. Author Jenny Trout’s’ lengthy recap of Sarah J. Maas’s Faerie fantasy A Court of Thorns and Roses. If you’ve wondered what all the fuss was about, but don’t want to read the book itself, read this instead. Shipping container houses. Face/Off, an original Syfy show about …
I haven’t had much success with reading challenges these past years. In 2023, I finished 5 out of 12. In 2022, it was eight out of twelve, with a little cheating: three-quarters. So THIS year, I’m only going to pick six. That’s make it a little easier to chew. 19. Like a novel, only real: …