What a difference a denim makes

Amelia is working for me now. One change, and it is like she is a brand-new girl.

Of course there was knock-on effect. Penny talks about her media arts background in the first scene now, meaning she goes on about her show in the next, and by the time I hit the steps of Sacre-Couer there's a whole new thing about Huxley's book.

Which came easily. I'm making huge progress on this re-write, and I'm finally starting to enjoy the story I've got. And if it takes bribing myself with dinner for every bit of writing I get done, I'll take it.

How do you solve a problem like Amelia?

I got a little further on Sometimes a Fox before I had to stop for another from-the-top edit. With luck, though, this one will be less aggressive.

It was the character of Amelia that finally set it off. And you know what was the last straw? Olive trees.

Specifically, there was a triptych of prints of an olive grove we got back from one client at work and there was a new client interested in them. Except we were missing one. It finally came in a box with a return address from Epic Games (!) but my boss wasn't sure that was actually an olive tree. "I'm not a horticulturalist," he said.

The thought crossed my mind that my protagonist, Penny, should be able to recognize olive trees. Them being the Gift of Athena and all (and her spending time in Greece). In fact, she does, in the Japan adventure. But that train of thought was just leaving the station, and pretty soon it had the character Amelia from the latest book making a remark and...

That's when I decided I really needed to try again with her character.

I don't mind the banter. Really, I don't. I think I've been doing too much of it. I find it easy to write, but I don't know if my readers (all three of them) enjoy it as much as I do. Still, I'm willing to let this book go and try to fix it in the next one.

It is the idiot lectures.

They aren't really idiot lectures, in that much of what Amelia is info-dumping isn't essential to the story. It is what the story is about in the larger terms, of course; we're in Paris, experiencing Art, so we need to talk about it some.

But that's only one side of it. I don't like characters who seem to be only in the book so they can deliver exposition. I also don't like that Penny is spending most of the book waiting for clues to drop in her lap. She's basically just absorbing everything.

Sure, there should be some clues in this Paris treasure hunt she can't solve by brute force, and needs that off-the-wall inspiration, that weird chance happening that allows them to break through.

But I have whole sequences in which Penny has absolutely no idea how to proceed, and is just absorbing random Art and Paris stuff until a bible quote, a Degas sculpture and a colorful swear from Captain Haddock finally hands her the thread.

I want the conversations about art. But it has already been in my notes -- and I've started to apply it -- that these scenes are more about two characters talking about art then it is the substance of their conversation; it is the personalities, the emotional beats, the delights of sharing a cafe au lait in the mezzanine of a great art museum with a friend.

***

Anyhow, I gave her a jeans jacket. Amelia has been in a sundress since pretty much the first draft of her first scene, but it felt less and less in character. She is a neophyte tourist, and she is charming and soft-spoken, but the slightly granola-girl look isn't it.

She's a Carolina Girl. She's a proud Tarheel. And from -- a point later in the book -- from the tech capital, the very urban Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "Triangle" area. So, sure, the Steel Magnolias thing is still there, but she's not playing shy and sweet and hiding her steel under that. She's the wholesome, friendly, girl-next-door -- with steel under that. With that country self-sufficiency and confidence.

Because none of this is about that character in abstraction, that character in some other book. It is about how she plays with the themes of the tourist experience, Paris Syndrome, Penny's way of doing a "deep dive" into the cultures she visits, etc.

And her need to define herself. She's accepted -- in Japan -- that she is a hero. Still and always a reluctant hero, but she has accepted that this happens to her and she is up for the challenge. But she doesn't know just what this means, especially in a real world that doesn't respect genre and fictional depictions of how things are supposed to go.

Which is really the point of Nathan Frost. He's the rival treasure hunter, only he is stuck in the real world. Adventure isn't happening for him because it really isn't that easy (if it was, a lot more people would be trying it). He's found the rare book with clues to lost gold but no, there's no gold at the end of that search.

***

Taking Amelia away from being the guest lecturer changes how Penny is approaching things. And, yes, as part of this edit pass I'm having her be more focused, less willing to just passively absorb facts and more worried about who stole the book, who this Nathan person is, and of course, what the next clue means.

I wonder if I'll have the book finished by the end of THIS year.

Glow of Accomplishment

The laser is up and running.

The main thing not done is the louvres over the air inlet, with a slot for dust filters. That's a HEPA filter on the top there under the salvaged power supply fans. And LED strips on the inside of the box, which are nicely visible through the blue-laser blocking orange acrylic. At last my eyes feel safe around this thing.

I want a second drag chain but I haven't figured out exactly how to place it. My Ender3 popped the Bowden Tube one time too many printing out the lower drag chain (which I designed myself in Fusion360) so I finally put a new Micro Swiss all-metal hot end with direct drive extruder on it.

Not bad for a week of feeling so sick I finally went to Kaiser to go get checked out. They were having drop-in vaccinations as well so I ended up with almost zero fluid balance; two shots in the left arm, five vials of blood out the right. And intense headache the next day.

Gas gas gas

I play Satisfactory to unwind. Seriously. It is nice to take a break from trying to clean, repair, and organize a shop and a home to trying to repair and organize...a whole alien colony.

First expanded my turbo fuel line (turbo fuel is an unlocked recipe that gives the stuff you refine from crude oil a bit more kick. Especially in the jetpack.) Created a refuel station in the Blueprinter, dropped a bunch around the map and assigned some trucks to run fuel out to keep them topped off.

Downside is, player-driven vehicles will top off their fuel tanks if they just drive past. The AI vehicles are coded (since Update 5) to only take as much in their tank as they calculate will get them to the next stop. Which means they are constantly running out of gas on some distant road and you have to go play AAA for them. So these aren't gas stations per se. They are drop-off stations for the fuel trucks.

Turbo fuel also stretches further in power generators. This is my most productive generator farm -- only eighteen generators, but they are all overclocked.

One of these days I'll finish decorating the outside of it. Meanwhile the Spider is my sole nuclear power plant. Well, the plant is in the lake. The Spider is all the zero-waste fuel reprocessing. It also sends some refined uranium to an outpost building of the Fort Hood facility:

Fort Hood was my "excuse to build shit." Since I wanted to explore more of the game world, and there are some dangerous creatures out there (damn those spiders!) I built a facility that entirely churns out explosives and ammunition. I could have gotten much crazier with it, but I limited myself to only the stuff I actually expected to use. That tower there is where the drones come in flying radioactive material to be fabricated into....nuclear hand grenades!

Also, the box canyon was a little bit too small for my needs.

There's a little boutique refinery setup, running fuel both for the turbo-rifle ammunition and for the TESS-A stations in this part of the world, smokeless powder, rubber and fabric to make filters for the gas mask (you go through filters fast.) Since there is no oil in that corner of the game world there's a long pipeline from the other major power generator facility.

That gets me everything but the gas grenades. Those require biomatter. You use leaves or branches, the same way you create biofuel for your early-game generators. Or you can use bodies. This rather sinister building recycles the corpses of alien creatures into more weapons to kill them with. And I'm telling you -- those spiders deserve it.

And, yes, the Minecraft like building assets means the game is biased towards Brutalist architecture. You can go in other directions, but it really does like large blocky concrete.

For this area, I also experimented with covered conveyor belts. They do look a bit neater...but they are a pain to set up and a nasty tangle inside. So not really worth it.

Fortunately there is no need to ever expand. There's only so much ammo I can use. The one thing I might do is blueprint some arms depots and assign a truck to go out there and keep them topped off with guns and knives...just in case.

Unstable Diffusion

Still messing around with AI, although it looks that -- PhotoShop's ad campaign to the contrary -- the tools really aren't up to automating the ugly parts of the process of making book cover art.

In a nutshell, the things that are a pain to do (like fixing bad blends, restoring textures) the AI messes up in various horrid and creative ways. And the things the AI does well (like really deep textures and complex lighting effects) are exactly the things you don't want back in the stages when you are still editing the thing.

Here's the imagined workflow; start with some stock art, change the clothing and pose. Add the right lighting and focus effects. Get everything balanced and properly composed. Now do a final clean-up and dazzle pass to fix tiny errors and add a little sparkle.

AI pretty much sucks as a partner for that workflow. At best, you can approximate by being extremely iterative. I've spent a bit too long in the inpainting stage. Select a shirt sleeve that looks wrong. Hand-paint over the worst of the problems. Run the AI a few dozen times -- twenty second a run really adds up here -- until you find one that seems to be in the right direction. Bounce that render back to the workspace, lather, rinse, repeat. Also dozens of times.

At the early stages it can be rather spectacular. But you are still dealing with the tragedy of the commons and how to speak search engine; you have to put it in terms the AI understands, and show it a picture that it can recognize. If you get it right...

Say you want to add a fresh apple to a table. Make a blob of red paint. I'm serious; the most primitive pen tool in the cheapest came-with-Windows paint program is plenty. Then emphasize the prompt terms, perhaps with specifics that will lead the AI to look in the right directions. And crop the selection carefully.

And if you get it right, a fully detailed photo-realistic apple will appear.

The ways in which it may go wrong are too many to list. The table turning into an apple is just one of them. The AI is also notorious about not parsing well; "Man in white shirt on the beach" returns, ninety percent of the time, a white sand beach. With or without a man in a shirt. It is basically like talking to the terrible search engines they have these days, which I am convinced are basically like those tempt-you shelves they build right in front of the checkout counter at the store. With any possible excuse they will send you towards what is popular with many people -- and profitable to them.

***

So I wanted to mess with my own model. Actually sort of got it working; threw in several photos of my own holocron and got the AI to render something that looked sort of like it when prompted.

But Dreambooth continues to bork. Here's the thing; these are largely labors of love by programmers and people in academia. Which means the current tools are largely by programmers written for an audience comfortable with at least basic python-tinkering. The installation of Automatic1111 is all "CD to the webui directory and pip the dll lfrom github...

And it is all multiple programs maintained by different people. Automatic1111 is a GUI -- a webui -- front-end to what would be a Python command line to the Stable Diffusion core, which depends in turn on a dozen different plug-ins like Coda and Torch to do the math, interface with the GPU for the computationally heavy work, etc. And then can host extensions like Dreambooth which may come with their own dependencies.

The current Automatic1111 expects xformers 1.18 or higher. The developer for xformers has already brought it up to 1.20, and in the BAT file for the Automatic1111 installation there's an automatic pip for the most recent version but, fortunately, it still works.

What doesn't work is Dreambooth, which requires under 1.18 -- which the developer no longer supports and isn't on github anymore -- but there is a 1.17dev function that will work if you edit several of the py files that point to it. And figure out how to force an unsupported version of xformers that can no longer be installed directly but has to be hacked in and possibly built manually in your own environment...

So basically my install keeps borking and throwing up "please install xformers!" and I'm just living with it. Any day now there will be a new version along and it will break everything again in some new and exciting way.

Meanwhile, I have writing to do.