Gordon's Alive!
…and setting his clock back an hour this weekend. I had a helluva time getting Qwen Image to even get near Brian Blessed’s Vultan costume from Flash Gordon to dress my not-entirely-accurate avatar up for Halloween.
Claude started out with a spectacularly bad attempt to describe the costume:
A regal, imposing hawkman warrior in elaborate gold and bronze metallic armor. Muscular figure with a broad-shouldered silhouette, wearing a gold lamé bodysuit beneath ornate segmented breastplate. Massive wing-like shoulder pauldrons with feather-segmented design in graduated shades of bronze, copper, and gold. Large articulated mechanical wings extend from the back with an Art Deco aesthetic. Distinctive gold helmet with a pronounced beak-like visor suggesting an eagle’s head, featuring swept-back feather-crest elements. Deep purples and burgundy accent details throughout. Wielding an ornate energy mace or staff with a spherical glowing head, metallic handle matching the armor coloring. 1980s science fiction aesthetic blended with art deco design, theatrical and operatic in scale, with an antiqued metallic finish rather than pure polish. Character from the 1980 Flash Gordon film.
When called on it, it “researched” the correct costume and at least got into the general ballpark, but still without getting a single component correct. I couldn’t find a decent high-resolution still to feed in as input, so I just hacked at the prompt until it looked like it was kitbashed from Thor cosplay leftovers.
“Trunk or treat” is an abomination
(You can’t change my mind)
Number of kids who came to my door? Fifteen.
Bags of candy left over? Less than fifteen. I figure my niece’s high school is going to need some donations.
Oddest thing was that a third of the kids showed up without bags for candy (the pros had pillowcases, which I respected). They were in costume, but they expected to receive one or two pieces and hand them off to an adult waiting at the curb. This doesn’t work at my house, where a double handful with my hands isn’t going to fit in theirs. Fortunately I’d been to the grocery and had half a dozen plastic bags to give away.
(“this will look terrific on Arato-senpai!”)
Gals on the right
I decided to take my retro-sf wildcards and use them to generate wide-format wallpaper for my gaming PC, which has for several years been using a photo of a penguin appearing to operate a DSLR camera (I think it came from a Bing wallpaper rotation).
It wasn’t obvious when I was generating tall images, but Qwen Image has a strong bias toward putting the subject dead center. You can tell it to put her on the right side of the image, but explicit instructions to “place the main subject on the left side of the image” are almost always ignored, if not reversed. Compositionally speaking, this is kind of frustrating. It’s possible, just quite difficult to arrange in the prompt.
Of course, this is the same model that thinks freckles are the size and color of pennies, and “faint scars” should be rendered as deep gaping wounds. Seriously, what was Alibaba using for training data, medical-school cadavers?
Competition!
For the past few years, providers have been promising to have high-speed fiber Internet service in my area. Cincinnati-based AltaFiber seemed to be expanding rapidly, then went quiet, but for the past few weeks there’s been major digging going on along the nearest main street near my house, and yesterday I spotted little flags and paint markers in the utility easement at the edge of my back yard, and sure enough, Friday afternoon some big equipment arrived and spent the afternoon pulling cable from one end of the street to the other, accompanied by little door cards announcing the imminent arrival of AT&T fiber.
Since it’s not available yet, they won’t give me the details of the package, but that’s okay, I don’t actually want it. What I want, and had wanted from Alta, was leverage to use in a call to my current provider. They offer new customers more speed for less money than the package I’m paying for.
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