Too many possibilities

 

I referenced all this yesterday, when I spoke of a new leap in complex artificial intelligence image generators, and therefore in the burst of images I excitedly make with them, but this leap might have finally scrambled my brain.

It is not a situation of "What can I do with this?" but rather "What can't I do with this?" Yes, there are things that this techno wonder can't do, things it gets wrong, things it does not do well, but they are hard to get to! And along the way, in the experiments mostly with past work, but also with new work, I am piling up so many amazing things to show you that I hardly know where to begin.

When I first began with this I worked with style changes of my photos, which were a leap better than earlier iterations, though not a total revolution, but I hardly understood the wealth of what I could be doing.

I'm not sure I understand it yet.

I started with image descriptions, characters, text, and famous people, and it was so good at all of that I had to try it out on my dioramas.

I'm currently stuck in the dioramas because they're pretty close to everything I've been aiming for and almost every one I try ends up in a delightful surprise. It's not perfect, but it is now possible the last bits could be done in edits, and even still, these are already far ahead of my earlier ones. And though I'm pretty sure I'm just scratching the surface here, I feel I'd better trot out some examples before I'm positively buried under my creations.

New tool bonanza

 

Whenever some new leap happens in the world of AI imagery there's usually a burst of new pictures here making use of the new tools. And so it was yesterday with some paintings made out of my cloud pictures. These weren't the best example of what could be done, but maybe today's commentary on yesterday's pictures is...

Cold snap

 

Taking a day of rest in our Theoule Sur Mer seaside digs, during this strange period where we have two apartments to live in, the temperatures have plummeted! When we started this epic traversal of the earth it was madly hot everywhere, and at least the first three weeks in Japan were slightly tortured by every single day being in the nineties. 

But time passes. I live in France with my dear wife. And the famously warm and sunny South of France is dropping dangerously close to freezing temperatures tonight.

These plants cannot handle it!

But don't worry! Everything is still pretty. There is a reason the greatest artists of the last century all moved here, the light is unbelievable. And when it gets cold it gets even better!

So I took a lot of pictures out the window, mostly of the clouds.

I'll try and find some of the good ones.

The new views

 

Soon to be leaving clerkmanifesto:

All these pretty pictures out the window of dramatic ocean scenes, distant snow capped mountains, and the doings of the beach in Theoule Sur Mer.

Coming soon (or now) to clerkmanifesto:

The city in its light, rooftop views, and architectural details.

And foxes, always foxes:

On the cost of trains

 

We made the hilarious mistake of moving to Saint Minneapolis in 1991 because we heard they had a good transit system there.

Though fairly broke in our youth, we nevertheless had a car within a month or two of moving. Over the next 30 years they made many improvements there, including trams, bike routes, and dedicated buses. It is still horrible and yet I'm sure many a young innocent is being lured there even now to ride on slow trams with starry eyed idealists, psychologically troubled drug addicts, and people whose license was confiscated. 

And that's the thing really, transit is so absolutely shitty every single place in the world (yes, I have now been now to Kyoto, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Paris, all places sited in one way or another for their excellent transit) that it gets graded on a curve instead of on its own merits. Even the most fervent urbanists and anti car activists are so skewed by a lopsided status quo that they can hardly see the merits (and demerits) of a place accurately. I understand, when everywhere is a mess of relentless toxic traffic, one wants to sing the merits of, I don't, Amsterdam. Venice? 

In the village of the blind...

And so we were, alas, maybe a little too taken in by the glorious transit of France.

We moved to France because we heard they had a good transit system!

Fool me once...

Our little town here is right on the coastal train line. What a boon! Trains race by all the time! 

And then we tried to ride one.

It doesn't stop here very often. You have to use an app to even get a ticket and, though I have mastered this process by now, I find it all wildly over formalized and inconvenient. 

And it costs a lot.

What should a train cost?

In the days when we were often going to Cannes, maybe eight miles away, we switched over from the trains to a bus that comes hourly. The bus, less pleasant I suppose, still came infrequently, hourly, but at least without being so inclined to take 3 hour breaks in its schedule, effectively stranding the unprepared. Also the bus was a quarter the cost.

A quarter the cost for a bus?

I have a pointed question to ponder, that, while a genuine question, does carry a bitter distrust about what and how a culture subsidizes things:

Why or how could a bus ever be cheaper than a train?

Abandoned apartment

 

While gingerly assembling our new attic apartment from a distance, we are still living here in Theoule Sur Mer, the charming little beach town that has ever so slowly fallen into something like a half slumber. All the lively cafes along the water have closed down completely by now, mid november, or they're open technically, but stay closed under any pretext they can come up with; rain, too windy, it's thursday, or staff bonding sessions are being held at a nice restaurant in a bigger town. And I don't fault them. It is pretty sleepy here. Not dead, mind you, people still stroll in to town all day and walk along the beach in their ones and twos. In the middle of the day maybe someone goes for a swim in the Mediterranean while their friends in sweaters take pictures of them. But that's about it. None of them are likely to be having a long lunch, or a drink overlooking the bay, unless it's super nice out, or thursday, or whatever special condition is met, at which point everyone is having drinks and lunch and it might as well be September.

Meanwhile I am watching it all from the pretty windows of our apartment building, a peach colored place with eight or nine units. And in our apartment may be much of the explanation. As I said, our building here has eight or nine units, all with lovely views of the ocean and an extraordinarily pleasent setting on something of a boardwalk leading off to road-free beaches and a (modest) nature area. And here's the kicker:

I'm pretty sure we're the only people who live here.

Seriously! I'm pretty sure we live in an apartment building of eight or nine units all alone, with every other apartment completely empty, although it is possible one old lady lives here very, very, very quietly. And another unit seems to be having a lot of mysterious work being done on it.

So, those aren't a lot of restaurant goers.

City pride

In a nod to a kind of faint veil of family privacy, here on this very public backwater of the Internet I will not say the name of the city we are moving to and leave it at that.

We are back and forth now to our new city, preparing our apartment, talking, walking, and having coffees, before catching an evening train home. And though clerkmanifesto will surely be evolving as much into a blog about this lovely city as it once was about the Roseville Library (also unnamed until very late in the game!), I wish to start with this small observation:

This city, the largest city of its region of France, is as yet smaller than where we have come from in the less famous city of Saint Minneapolis. And yet, so far, I have found it to be a bigger city than any I have ever seen in all of the United States.

New cities

 

Without Internet set up yet in our new apartment, we should be back by now in our temporary small beach town home, done with lease signing and flush with the joys of our first venture overnight in the big city. But to keep the daily posting of clerkmanifesto safe I will take this opportunity to show some various pictures of Cannes, Antibes, and Theoule Sur Mer (probably) from the past weeks that have not yet made it to clerkmanifesto (at least I don't think they have):

Colors of the Cote D'Azur

 

To keep things humming along here at clerkmanifesto while we are navigating a move to another city, and while we sort of hop between two homes for awhile trying to get everything sorted, I have a few scenic shots of the local area. The general subject matter is pretty strictly accurate to my phones plain photography, but the colors might be ever so slightly exaggerated in the post processing.

Slightly...

Big city

 

A few pictures of where we are off to today: