It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much to talk about that’s new. The Labor Government is trying to get through industrial relations legislation which some argue will take us back to the 1980s. If true, that will be diabolical. World leaders have gathered in Egypt for another useless gab fest about climate change. And the war in Ukraine drags on.
We’ve had another lunar eclipse – you know, that ‘blood moon’ thing when the Moon passes through the Earth’s shadow. All over-dramatised, of course. It was cloudy here, but I took the precaution of taking a photo the day before. Lunar eclipses are not all that rare, though the next one won’t be for another four years.
Australia is out of the running for the T20 men’s world cup but there were some fun results. The Netherlands beat South Africa (gasp) and the once-mighty West Indies was bundled out in the first few rounds. How many of us remember the West Indies teams of the seventies and eighties? That incredible fast bowling attack – Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Andy Roberts etc, Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards smashing them around, Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes opening etc etc. Those were the days. World Series cricket – great stuff. Imran Khan was a young buck back then. They all faced Lillee ‘n Thompson with Rod Marsh at the wickets. Tony Greig was there and so many others.
[sigh]
In last week’s blog I showed you some of the comic efforts by Midjourney’s bot. This time I thought I’d show you some of the things it’s really good at. Mind you, it’s getting better all the time. A new version has come out that has fixed many of those bloopers from last week. But this time, I’ll just show you some of its wonderful output so far.
Perfume bottles. I needed hardly any iterations. The very first set of thumbnails had usable images. But they were so good it was fun to try a few variations. Note the way the light is reflected around the bases.
Baby dragons. I asked for cute baby dragons based on Anne McCaffrey’s dragons in her Pern series. A couple of iterations is all it needed, then it became fun to see what it could produce.
Midjourney is very happy to work with flowers, too. I asked for a vase of roses.
You can create objects ‘in the style of’ too. Here is a set of perfume bottles in the style of Faberge.
It’s great at art. You can ask for an image ‘in the style of’. Here’s a field of sunflowers in the style of van Gogh.
These are two portraits ‘in the style of Rembrandt’. I did have to fix up the helmet. As drawn by MJ it looked as if he had a colander on his head. 🙂 MJ is terrible at helmets. So far.
A winter scene in the style of Pieter Bruegel.
And so on.
Apart from being great fun, it has been useful in visualising scenes that only exist in my head. Great stuff for writers.
Have a wonderful weekend, folks.
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