Brains

I had a lingering sinus thing that had me incredibly brain-fogged. The fog lifted just in time for me to renew some registrations that were gonna end up in hefty fees if I delayed longer. And put in some "look good" hours at work.

And it has continued lifting. Now at the tail of a quiet weekend I'm starting to grasp the threads of the Paris novel. I'm remembering things. Yes, Rodin did do a sculpture of Victor Hugo, even if it was his Balzac that proved so controversial. And he loved his dancers -- although that ballerina with the ribbon is a Degas. Like that's a surprise. Doesn't mean Hux can't reference it.

But the more I read about Rodin, the more I want to do another of what I call the Hux-cams. 

This is not a dual-time story. It is mostly Penny, in the present, puzzling out clues in this book from the early '20s. But the character Major Joanathan Huxley does appear, seen in brief glimpses through his memoirs.

Huxley's word appear in four ways in my book. His clues are presented the same way as they are in his book; enigmatic epigrams opening new chapters. Of course I have more chapters than I have clues, so I had to add a few random quotes from him as well, and it has been tough coming up with something witty enough to make it look worth quoting. He's no Oscar Wilde. More to the point, I'm no Oscar Wilde, and I'm the one who has to come up with the stuff.

Penny also describes and synopsizes, sometimes with fragmentary quotes. But there's one more form. And that is complete multi-paragraph excerpts. So far I've written three. There's a description of the butte of Montmartre, probably from a good decade before the story from some of the details in it. There's a brief scene from getting out at Gare d'Orsay to reaching the entrance pavilion of the Paris Exposition of 1900. And there's a scene where he meets up with friends outside le Bateau lavoir -- it doesn't get named in this scene, not even in English.

So a bit at Rodin's studio would be great fun. Huxley claims to have posed for one of his students, and he also might have a fling with one...I'm leaning towards the Finn, Hilda Flodin, as the tragic Camille Claudel is a bit of a live wire in that particular span of years. But there's also the Welsh Gwen John...

Thing is, that would take a bit of heavy reading. In the previous scenes I've managed to mostly escape names and details that could be too easily found wrong. This would be very much those historical people.

Okay, there is a brief mention by Huxley as a chapter heading; “…at which stalls I found a copy of Willy’s Claudine à l'école, which tantalizing rumor had was largely the fertile imagination of his young wife, Sidone.” (it introduces the chapter where Penny visits the bouquinistes along the Seine and gets Huxley's book stolen off her by a young traceur. )

(Colette is rightly famous by the time he writes the book, but like me, he is slipping back and forth in time and in this quote he is expressing what his younger self had understood.)

***

Meanwhile, the second computer, currently stealing the second monitor, is installing Dreambooth to go along with the ControlNet installation (and pre-trained models) I'm adding to my AUTOMATIC1111 install. I have yet to get to grips with any of those. The window for this implementation of the DreamBooth code is...daunting. 

I did manage to get it to sort of do one of those future bedroom things you see as the static image on YouTube 10-hour soundscape videos. It is tough to teach the AI sensible shapes, but it excels at deep, rich, complicated textures and lighting effects.

There's another whole essay there, but for another night. Right now my biggest ambition is to get ControlNet up on solving the hand problem so I can re-render that weird hand on my second cover. And then try to turn it loose on the model for the second cover. Well...turn it reined in, just letting it add a little more detail and texture. Depth mapping may help there, too.

If I try any more art I need to start experimenting with painting the kind of rough that it wants to see. I was able to do that once; had a text prompt spit out an amusing image of some future cop type but the gun was really wonky. So I went into Windows Paint3D (what a ghastly program) and dashed up a magic-marker shape that got a little closer to the right composition. Threw that back in for inpainting and in just two runs it spat out a nice detailed glowy-bits future ray pistol thing.

So that's the idea; compose traditionally, throw that in with img2img or depth mapping (there's also an "interpret a sketch" pre-trained model in ControlNet that sounds promising), and let the AI shape the prompt on the basis of that composition. This is very different from how you would normally do digital art.

There is at current an annoying space between what the AI does well -- all too well, really -- and what we humans do well. The AI is lie the Salon, willing to spend the endless hours of drudgery smoothing out every brush stroke for seamless blends and those subtle spray-painted lighting and volumetric effects that are endlessly fiddly to do. The humans are Impressionists, capturing shapes and ideas and compositions in rough strokes.

Thing is, you can't get the computer to see things the way you do. And you can't blend the way it does. So the space where you can try to paint over its mistakes is a very wide gap requiring way too much of the most boring kind of work to cross.

And am I glad the blow-up of AI postdates the setting of my Paris novel? Damned straight I am.