Year in Review 2022

These years certainly run together, but I'm not sure if that's because of kids or the pandemic or general ennui or some mix of all three.

Anyway...did I write anything I'd like to read over again?

1. Some Movie Ramblings from January
2. Some Dual-Role Actors Ramblings from July
   
3. Tomb Raiding
   
4. We went camping!
   
5. Tux's Eulogy
   
6. Virus Invasion
   
7. Trip to the Farm
   
8. Star Wars Clearing House
   

Also, we have the two Daddy Daycare Trips:

1. La Brea Tar Pits
   
2. Adventure City
   

Happy New Year!

More AI Fun: With the Kids

My son was inspired to give me a prompt for the AI art generator when I was showing the fam the pics I made for my recent post. The last picture I generated was "a cat and a dog play ping pong with a flaming frog" was the cue for him. We tried a few "dinosaurs playing ping pong" before moving on to the main event.

At first he wanted "a cat fights a dog on top of a train," but that seemed WAY too easy. Once i replaced 'dog' with 'tornado', I knew i had some generator-breaking material. Once I generated the fist image (using NightCafe), I simply cycled through their different style filters.

So, here we go:

"a cat fights a tornado on top of a train"

This was the default style setting, I suppose, and I don't remember what, if anything, it was called. I'd be pretending if I said I knew what I was looking at. Is that a hamster? A cat's butt? I see train tracks, but no train.

From here, I started clicking on new styles. First:

Renaissance

And then:

Impressionism

I guess it makes sense that there's no train in the Renaissance era, since there were no trains, but if it's just a style? But then the Impressionists forgot the cat?

We're off to a great start: smoking cat butt, ghostly cat Renaissance scene, and a smoky Van Gogh-lite train.

Magic World

This was a setting that had, like, a Gandalf-inspired wizard-type of character in a shire. I thought we might get a tough kitty and some magical swirls of a fighting a tornado. Instead...a misty train valley and a beacon of light. Ohhhh-kay.

Wood-block Print

Who knew they had a "wood-block print" setting? This one at least has a cat and some windy/smoky/stormy thing going on.

Since each rendering took anywhere between ten and fifty seconds, the kids interest was waning and we were getting ready to move onto other things for the day. The last style setting had a too-good-to-be-true name:

Architectural Rendering

It's also one of the best pictures? One of the weirdest, at least. The cat IS the train, so the battle is internal...?

Is the fear about AI art generators more about artists becoming obsolete or more about the general sharpening of AI's abilities?

Here are some dinosaurs "playing ping pong:"

Renaissance

Impressionism

Holiday Sticker Fun

My mother has a tendency to send holiday cards, and not just the normal ones. She sends cards for Valentine's, Easter, St. Paddy's, the 4th, and whatever else they have. It's pretty wonderful. Getting physical mail reminding you that someone cares is pretty cool.

Recently, she's been including sticker collections: a large blank body frame and various mouths, eyes, noses, and other accessories, all so a person can make their own character. The first one that was solely mine was earlier this year for Easter. I wanted to have some fun, and make my easter birdie a little crazed:

I used two different eyes and made the eyebrows screwy. I liked it.

When Thanksgiving came around, another sticker set came for each of us, and again I wanted to have some fun:

I got the snowman for Christmas. Once I turned the mouth upside down I figured out how to make it crazed---make shock and surprise the ethos:

Family fun is fun...

Inconsequential Hot Take Alert

After finishing the first season of Andor on Disney+, Corrie and I decided to watch Rogue One again, this time in an attempt to view it through the prism of it being an Andor story. I know that Tony Gilroy, the creator and showrunner of the Andor show on Disney+, was tasked with writing on Rogue One, and I know that he wasn't the sole writer. I also know he was never the biggest fan of Star Wars.

After watching Andor and then Rogue One quickly in succession, one can tell what's Tony Gilroy's material and what isn't, and it's why it feels like it starts as an Andor episode and then transitions into a Star Wars movie.

The first season of Andor, essentially "The Education of Cassian Andor," is a template for how a two-bit criminal ends up willing to kill and die for a cause, and it's very good. Believable and tense and nary a Jedi or Sith lord in sight.

As for the "Hot Take" in the title: Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie. Maybe it should be: "Rogue One is my new favorite Star Wars movie."

Let me lay our my points in bullet-fashion:

• With the knowledge gained from the 12 episodes of Andor, I care deeply about how the revolution is unfolding, and now we see Captain Andor? Cool!
• There is a saucy droid and a tough sidekick, BUT it's the same person/thing!
• As a corollary, there is no very annoying character.
• Jyn Erso's story is both heartbreaking and condensed, as we get her on the run at age 5-ish and her holding her dad as he dies a la Luke/Vader in just over an hour.
• Galen Erso is about as bad-ass a mole as the Rebellion has, and Cassian nearly assassinates him anyway.
• Forest Whitaker has a tough decade-and-a-half in the time between rescuing Jyn and being sought out by her (as he's half-robot by the end). Then he dies in spectacular fashion. 
• Instead of a bonafide magic dude (Jedi) we get all-around badass Donnie Yen as a blind force-sensitive kung-fu master, and his machine-gun toting sidekick.
• Darth Vader's here! So is video-game-looking Peter Cushing! And there's still room for an ambitious bureaucratic bad guy in Ben Mendelsohn.
• The third-act space-fight feels just like the one in Star Wars (the 1977 OG), only in this one the action set piece shifts to an analog attack, as the Rebels ram a disabled Star Destroyer into another one.
• Only a third (give or take) of the rebel squadron gets away with the data that Andor and Jyn retrieve.
• And then everyone else dies! All the characters we just began to care about are blown the hell up!

I've spent too much time writing about this franchise. There was the time I wrote about prepping for going to see The Force Awakens back in December of 2015. There was another time where I went back and rewatched the original trilogy right after Lucas sold the property to Disney, and even looked at my old toys. One time I even droned on at length about the Holiday special. Another time I wrote about Solo, and another I mentioned The Madndalorian just because I wanted to share the comparison pic of Mando and Boba Fett.

I may like The Mandalorian best as a product. Later on I'll write again (and waste more of my and the reader's time) about my theory about the different universes within the Star Wars universe at large. To preview, here are the names I've ascribed to them:

• The Ewan McGregor-verse (676 minutes long so far)
• The Solo-verse (136)
• The Luke-iverse (389)
• The Andor-verse (718)
• The Mando-verse (1026) (this includes the Boba Fett show, which probably should have remained a movie)
• The Rey-verse (438)

Too much wasted time...

Oh, and even as I wanted to include the two television Ewok movies, they didn't fit into my poster collection scheme that is meant to go with the post. Also, they're not cannon. Shouldn't I include them anyway?

See how much energy I've wasted on this so far?

Playing with AI Art Generators

I have mixed feelings about AI art generators. I'm not sure they'll ever grow out of their current position as "novelty," but to imagine a world where they serve a specific purpose (in the arts, or, in the capital-A Arts) doesn't seem like a bridge too far.

Photography probably occupied a similar boogeyman position when it first developed and became available to the masses. And e-readers caused much hand-wringing among publishers of actual physical books, like "the end of the Book is nigh," which I think is laughable. A lack of literacy is more alarming to me than the rise of a tiny, plastic, book-shaped/book-purposed thing.

So, really, what is the real fear about AI art generators? They don't stop professional artists from trying to speak to the human condition...

Anyway, I was playing with various generators from various websites, for free, and seeing what I could do. This could be an interesting venture later, a deep dive that could yield some bizarre, broken AI-like images. Today, though, I just Googled "ai art generators" and tried three of the ones the search engine returned. The results were mixed. Maybe next time I'll use the same prompt to gauge which I like best. 

This first is from the NightCafe Creator programming. The first prompt I offered was:

"cafe full of black panthers"

I can see what the AI was trying. And I guess I like it. The atmospheric Parisian look is something I probably would have unconsciously tried to achieve had I felt compelled to try to paint the idea.

Maybe, as an untrained amateur painter, I shouldn't gauge the results off what I would do.

The second prompt I offered was to Hotpot.ai and was:

"outdoor library populated by smoking revolutionaries"

This image took FAR longer to achieve than the first. Maybe that was a property of the generator or the prompt or both, but I didn't feel that the result was good enough for the wait. So far, I prefer the first image. What makes that character a revolutionary...and are they smoking? Is that an oxygen mask after years of smoking? Also, my prompt was plural, as in less lonely...just saying.

That picture inspired me to get frisky. I wanted something far more chaotic or "cuckoo bananas" as a friend says. The last prompt I entered into a third generator (who's name I can't remember) was:

"a cat and a dog are playing ping pong with a frog on fire instead of a ball"

Well, it's certainly more chaotic. It looks like two cats, and maybe their heads are paddles...? It's certainly bizarre, but barely legible as to WTF is happening.

I still prefer the first.

There remains ample room to have fun with this...

Bringing the Woodland Inside the House

Again in our lives during the December winter season we've partaken in the pagan tradition of taking a piece of the outdoors and bringing it into the house.

We've been purchasing real trees for a few years now, pining-up the house's natural smell, and decorating them with shiny baubles and lights. The expenses ratchet up a little more each year, but that's natural. And the ornaments...our ornament collection is the only thing in our possession comprised of objects that Corrie has more of than I do.

This year we went out and got what seemed like an enormous tree:

It's not Rockefeller Center huge, obviously, but for our downtown apartment, it's the tallest tree we've ever gone after. We were looking for one that would be tall and relatively skinny at the bottom (a tight diameter). This was successful on both counts.

I'll try and show a picture from last year also, just so I can compare.

Here's this year, with the skirt and train setup:

2022

And here's last year:

2021

The perspective is close, and the violet that shows through in the saved pictures is weird, but probably makes sense from a science standpoint.

My brother made a good (financial) point the other day on our bi-weekly Skype calls: invest one time in a fake tree and then get a wreath each year for the smell. This isn't a terrible idea. It's not very practical for us for two reasons:

1. Corrie will NEVER go for a fake tree, and;
2. We have two kids and a thousand square feet, so where do we store a fake tree for 11 months a year?

I really don't care, and if it was solely up to me, I might never opt for a tree. But I also enjoy having it after we get it, so maybe I'd get one. But that's a universe where I'm single and childless, so so many things would be different, contemplating is facile and probably a waste of time.

Anyway, I love our new tree! Even if it was essentially a $300 afternoon! It smells so awesome and makes the whole apartment glow. 

Go pagans! They had some shit figured out, didn't they?

Thanksgiving 2022: "Autumn at the Water Park in Arizona"

December marches on and the trip to Arizona feels like it was months ago. In reality it was only weeks, but here we are.

We visited my mother in Phoenix for Wednesday through Saturday, and stopped by my 95 year old Grandma Lorraine's before starting the drive back to the Southland. We've been making the drive on and off for Thanksgiving since moving back to California and changing jobs, which makes time off more plausible.

In that time, my mother has been putting us up in a hotel; her and her partner's place is small (but still bigger than our apartment), and would be cramped for us and the kids. This year, she changed her normal hotel choice and went with the Great Wolf Lodge.

Up until this past summer, I was wholly unfamiliar with the Great Wolf organization. One of Cass's friend's mom sent out the feelers about a possible birthday party at one of the locations. Corrie looked it up online and thought, "We're not going to rural Minnesota for a kid's party."

It turns out there are quite a few Great Wolf Lodges around the nation. The first is in the Dells, in Wisconsin; another near Duluth; and then they begin sprouting up all over, even one in Garden Grove (in Orange County and Anaheim-adjacent) and one in Phoenix.

The kicker for this place, the main attraction, is that it's an indoor water park attached to a grand hotel. Activities and attractions abound inside. Mini-golf, rock-wall climbing, mirror mazes, kiddie bowling, eateries of all kinds, and even magic-wand fueled "game" that had kids running all around pointing plastic sticks that lit up at all manner of things.

Those games and attractions were in the space between the "enormous hotel" part and the "enclosed water-park" part of the place; think the Overlook from the shining with a warehouse stitched on to the backside.

The waterpark was very nice. It was never too hot, never too cold, you never got sunburned or otherwise savaged by the sun, they sold food and alcohol, there was a wave-pool never more than five feet deep at the deepest point, and all sorts of waterslides and water-play zones for the littlest kiddos. Cass was tall enough for every single option, and did everything at least once.

Some stuff he could do solo (some stuff was solo by nature), some stuff he and I did together, some stuff he and Corrie did together, some stuff the three of us did together, and there was even a slide (with a big tube) that we all did as a family with Camille. 

Camille even slept for nearly an hour in my mom's arms, a rare form of cherished snuggle time.

Thanksgiving came and went, I over-brined the turkey and then just over did it, and my potato experiment didn't go as I had planned, but overall the trip was very nice.

I don't have all that many pictures, because I mostly left my phone as far from the water as I could.

Kids playing with Grandma

Here's to seeing my mom again in a few weeks. The "Holiday Season" takes on new meaning with little tiny human roommates.