UnexpectedGuest

Somewhere around 1998, on a whim, I bought the X-files season 1 box set and discovered Gillian Anderson, and I've been a fan ever since.
Yes, I even have autographed photos...
Lately, I've been thinking I'd mix up my desire to re-watch X-files and play with Stable Diffusion, specifically the Low-Rank Adaptation (aka LORA) that let you model elements in it.
So I spent a few hours making screenshots and building my first LORA, obviously of Gillian Anderson, aka Scully.
The first results are encouraging (I'm far from a specialist, and the power of Stable Diffusion is matched only by its complexity):


As the X-Files show took place over several years, Gillian evolved visually over time, so I challenged myself to do one LORA of Scully per season.


These two images come solely from a LORA made from the captures of the first two episodes, a job that requires ... a lot of time (capture, crop, describe and then sleep while my 2080 is working).
But I'm pretty happy with the first results, even if I'm learning as I go. See you in a few weeks for the release of the hopefully nice Scully_s01.safetensors.

I want to believe.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Indeed.
Raising my head to look at the sky at night always explodes all my landmarks. Immediately I feel insignificant: in space of course (I'm just a few atoms in the middle of infinity) and in time (I'm really just passing through).
And it helps me put my daily life into perspective. If everyone understood that, there would be fewer idiots, and they'd choose their battles better.

First tests with my eQuinox 2 telescope, I'm quite satisfied :)

Recently I played quite a bit with Stable Diffusion, a program for generating images from text, and it's amazing.
I'm not going to try to show here some unmatched ability (that I don't have) to generate extraordinary images, the Internet is full of tutorials on the subject (I recommend for example Sebastian Kamph's YouTube channel, he is both talented and educational).
However, let's talk about the unexpected fact that these images ... stimulate my imagination.
Indeed, in order to illustrate in an original way the textual descriptions of my imaginary world of Gilianar, I played with Stable Diffusion and besides the quality of the images produced, I discovered with surprise how this tool gave me new ideas.
Let me explain.
Let's say I want an image of a dragon perched on an old tower. With the following prompt

ancient yellow and green dragon with a large wingspan perched on an old broken stone tower

I get this for example:

Not bad for a start.
Stable Diffusion's modus operandi is to generate a lot of images, then once you like one of them, to modify it in a loop until you get a satisfactory result.
So let's modify it, but this time starting not from the textual description of the beginning, but from the image above (yes, Stable Diffusion is amazing, I already said it).
By playing with the enigmatic parameter Denoising strength, one introduce more or less chaos in the following images and so that's where magic happens, it's as if a part of a story was written without us.
After a few generations, an image clicks in my head.
"Oh yeah, that's cool, it looks like a forgotten tomb, let's keep this one!"

So much for the grave, now it looks more like she has boobs and she is instead near the entrance to her nest, on which she watches fiercely.
What if she protects her eggs? Deal!
A few random images later with guarding her eggs added to the description, this one fits my mood:

Definitely a good start for a place and the history that goes with it!

Thank you Stable Diffusion, I was just looking for original images to illustrate my texts, but I actually found more than that, now I own an iterative idea machine!

Beyond the rather banal police plots, the real heroes of Tony Hillerman's novels are the Native American tribes, especially the Navajo, torn between traditionalism and the modern world.
I loved reading Tony's novels a few years ago (the reason for Kokopelli, my avatar), but above all, I love reading his books again.
Yes, they are not very accessible at the first reading, not everyone masters the Navajo vocabulary and their culture light years away from modern Europeans. If the first immersion in this universe is difficult, when you come back to it later, the pleasure of discovery is replaced by the pleasure of really appreciating this world, because you understand it much better now, you have never forgotten it, I personally never left it.
Traveling the dusty trails of the Four Corners with Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, we get to know the Navajo tribes and their very special world. Around a hogan hidden in the middle of stunted juniper trees, we feel more than we understand the beliefs and traditions of a people who roamed these lands long before the white man brought them syphilis and whiskey.
Since I accompanied Jim in his caravan on the edge of an arroyo, now when I hear the wind in the leaves of an aspen tree I am transported to this region whose austerity hides to my eyes an incredible richness.
There are days when I would like to be a Navajo, not the one who turns his back on his land to look for work in Phoenix or Albuquerque, but the one who walks the slopes of Black Mesa away from a world where CO² is the enemy and AI the future.

Read Tony Hillerman, and don't stop at the first pages, the initial investment is the key to this fascinating world.

After spending a few hours reading Monte Cook's Ptolus D&D campaign setting, it became obvious that creating a whole world was as appealing to me as playing someone else's. So why not giving it a try?
I don't know anyone who has died of shame, at least not officially, so I'm going for it. Gillianar (do you see the wink?) is a world designed for D&D, but above all to have fun materializing my ideas, my dreams, even my deliriums.
Ideas come quicker than I can write them down, it's quite exhilarating. I know I won't last the distance (let alone approach the 800 pages written by Monte) and that I might get bored pretty quickly, but getting started is pretty exciting :)
This universe will be freely available here, after all I'm writing for me and not to get rich.
It's just a pity that I waited for the advent of ChatGPT to try to write something, but at least it will all come from my fertile brain and not from an AI as good as it is :)
To the question "Where do I start?" I answered with "Draw the world as it is in your head", the first result (there will be a lot of changes I think) is the image bellow. Yes, 99% of it is probably just a compilation of what I've read or seen in medieval fantasy, but that's okay. For me :)

See you soon, and while then, roll high or die!

Nothing :)
So here's my new t-shirt!

Between the lock-down, the aquarium being out of stock for months and the fish not being available either for sale or among hobbyists, I had a hard time to move forward with this project but here they are.
So welcome to my Cyprichromis leptosoma, which will have the upper layers of the water column. Always moving, nice colors, not aggressive, very nice fish.

Welcome also to the Neolamprologus similis, which will rule the shells on the bottom of the aquarium.

They have all already taken possession of the place (a dedicated aquarium, I did not take the risk to put them in the 1000 liters), and for the moment everything is going well. I hope to have fry soon, because watching all this ecosystem is still ... magical. Especially when we look at how the world is going around us. Selfish? Maybe. Life-saving, clearly.

The Profilux is mine \o/
So, instead of choosing a Profilux 4 for my two aquariums, I finally bought two Profilux Mini WiFi: it's cheaper and I won't have cables running all over my living room.


For the moment, I have installed only one and here are my first impressions:

• The network configuration of the Profilux Mini is quite painful. Yes, I, the man who juggles with IP and subnets, suffered. The Android application forgot to be user friendly and only those who paid for their box will go through with it. Veni, vidi, vici, passus sum.
• Of course, the pH probe has to be calibrated, and reference liquids are not provided. I still haven't figured out how to display the measurement history but I'm still looking, I hope I'm less stupid than the average person.
• The measurement status display portal is accessible via http on the local server of the Profilux Mini and on the myGHL portal.
  
  But in both cases ... no REST API of course. So I'll have to parse the web page like a pig, and the naughty one weighs 13MB . Who said optimization?
• Let's say that the pH probe (after manual calibration) is much more accurate than the 10€ one on Amazon. So my water finally has a pH of 8.13 instead of the 8.8 previously measured. Not very serious, it's in the minimum but still acceptable values for a Tanganyika biotope.
  
  So now I'm going to play with my friends curl, grep and awk to find my hidden pH and temperature values in my web page.
  And only when it's working I'll be able to insert all this inside my beautiful Banana Pi dashboard.
  As we say in French j'ai du pain sur la planche, which could be translated into I have a lot of work to do.
  Stay healthy, stay happy :)