Talking to machines

The cover came back. Instead of tweaking what was a nearly-finished design, she moved everything around and ran AI on the remains. New Mexico turned into Cabo (one white sand is like another, to AI). I did a soft confront on her using AI to communicate with me, and she returned a soft admission. 

I am very, very tired of getting nothing from cover designers but more ideas I can play with. I'm back to making my own.

And I'm stuck on Early Fox because one of her ideas was so good I really want to see if I can make it work.

The space opera goes as expected. I'm okay with the first scenes taking a while. Now I'm into the tech density question; how much world-building here, how much in the entire book. It should go faster after this. It is space opera, after all. Whereas classic SF is (supposed to be) about the ideas and/or the technical execution, space opera is towards the adventure side of things. Less technical explanation, more fisticuffs.

Mostly.

That's my new fear. I've been stopping every sentence to look up stuff. It is nice that I sort of know my way around tech, so most of the stuff I've been dreaming up, like nanofoam fire suppressants, is already something somebody is writing up papers on and putting them in NASA Tech Briefs or JSTOR.

But as much as I mean for Blue to spend most of the book running around with a blaster in one hand, the plot I've constructed for book one (and the parts of her character that make her different and interesting) require there be a spanner in the other. There's a Robinsonade happening; the first third of the book absolutely will take some looking stuff up.

And in the last of my nowhere plans for nobody, I checked out one of the forks of LTX 2.3. Those are on confused legal ground. The original is free but there are restrictions -- in fact there are safety rails built into the model (which I generally consider a good thing).

So far the model I have been messing with is more accurate in some places, seems to generate somewhat less animated animation, and might be slightly faster. I have yet to get into the huge number of nodes that can give more control.

People are already using this stuff commercially. A lot of the energy towards staying on-model, and tightly controlling the timing and camera moves, is coming from people doing product showcases. I don't know if these are being used internally or going out on cheaper advertising slots, but this is happening. And some band videos as well.

So it ain't just dancing cats. Whether this is good or bad...