Yes, she is funny

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, humor, comedians, sociology

At my grandmother's funeral, many years ago, I was with my then-fiancée, in the second row behind my parents. At some point, someone coming in had a minor mishap—nearly tripping—and my fiancée laughed. She laughed rather loudly, and then stifled it. And turned very red. I just held her hand and we waited it out. I was glad for her laughter, really. It calmed me somehow.

Fast-forward nearly thirty years. I had a very major cancer operation and came home looking like a corpse. Being able to do nearly nothing, I alternated between reading, watching inane TV, eating and sleeping. That Sunday evening I happened to turn on ABC to watch, for the first time ever, America's Funniest Home Videos. Tom Bergeron was the host. I laughed my fool head off! I felt great for the first time in a long time. I watched that show faithfully for the next decade or so. I don't credit the show for my amazing survival (nobody lives 20+ years after having what I had, but I did). But it sure helped. I called it my Laugh Therapy. It has been a few years since I had time to watch AFV, or anything else, for that matter. I lead an active life. But from what I hear, a lot of popular themes from the show in the early 2000's aren't used any more. Too many "professional offended people" complained.

One would think that the country (and most of the West) is overrun by the always-offended folk who are bigger buzz kills than the dourest of Puritans in Colonial America. They don't like it when anyone laughs at anything...unless it is them doing the laughing, mostly as Schadenfreude against conservatives' embarrassment. However, consider that, less than a quarter of Americans use X/Twitter, and the noisy, vocal trolls are just a percent of that. That is what drives Cancel Culture, 1/4% of the country. Talk about the tail wagging the dog! But we should expect the tail to be in a bad mood, it's right next to the s**thole!

The best defense against humorless idiots (most especially the Woke, in my view) is to laugh them out of town. Kat Timpf, for one, is doing just that. Her new book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything is Funny, and We're All in This Together, is a big breath of fresh air to me and to anyone who just wishes folks would loosen up a little. So what does she think is funny? It's better to ask, what doesn't she joke about? The list is very, very short. Maybe nonexistent. Start with the most taboo subjects: disease and death. Go on from there.

Kat Timpf is a comedian. Her current gig is Gutfeld on FOX. She doesn't just do comedy. She writes (writing lots of columns is good practice for writing a book) just as much, often her own soufflé of libertarianism and satire. Particularly in the political arena, she's an equal-opportunity abuser.

How's this for dark humor. Riffing on "the Quarantine" of 2020, upon hearing "Anne Frank had to hide in an attic…" a few too many times: "Pioneers probably didn't have time to notice the little annoying things about their pioneer family, because they had that exhausting, dangerous cross-country journey to distract them. Plus, if you were a chick, you were just constantly getting pregnant and giving birth, and then some of the kids you had already given birth to would sometimes die along the way before you reached your horse-driven destination. So no, they probably were not noticing how much their husbands' whistling bothered them because the were too busy discussing whether or not they should, I don't know, eat the body of the kid that just died in order to have the strength to pop out the next one." (pp39-40). That is from the chapter "No one wants to hear you whine (unless it's funny)". 

This is a serious book, under the satire. She is making a plea for allowing humor to work its magic as a universal releaser-of-really-bad-feelings. As it happens, comedians are the second-biggest target of the humorless Wokemeisters, right after Christians. As a lapsed Catholic, perhaps Kat ought to be glad she doesn't have Christian faith just now. Christian comedians are doubly Cancelled these days.

Bottom line: She is in favor of the freest of free-speech environments possible. Then, her final chapter consists of instructions on when not to speak: when the police want you to. It is three pages of instruction on handling several scenarios. Not a joke in the chapter, because police, by the nature of their job, need to be entirely humorless. Of course, when you're with a cop friend off duty, joke around all you like. But not whenever there's a chance you are under suspicion.

Kat is, as generations X and later are, pretty free with her use of expletives. It seems that, for all the generations subsequent to mine, various derivatives of the F word are the general adjectives of choice, and the S word is the generalized noun of choice. I watched a few of her routines that are on YouTube; she rarely dropped either bomb, but she did occasionally do so. I am an old-school entertainer (think of Red Skelton or Roy Rogers): in the public arena we have a choice, to ennoble our audience or to debase them. Blue humor causes snickers, not honest laughter. Go watch an old video of Red Skelton doing a Clem Kadiddlehopper routine, or Gertrude and Heathcliff the seagulls. You'll laugh with tears until you get a smile-ache. Not a cuss word from end to end. Are you an entertainer? Leave your audience feeling better about themselves because they were with you. (But if there is a Woke heckler in the crowd, that fool you want to drive out in pelting shame! It can be done without cussing. The rest of the audience will be thankful.)

Learning Playground Samplers

 kw: artificial intelligence, automatic art, evaluations, instructions, photo essays

The learning curve for the Playground AI art generator is a bit steeper than it is for Dall-E. But the level of control is amazing. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about testing Playground's Filters. Here I introduce what are called Samplers. They seem to work by emphasizing different aspects of the prompt. The web site has a video available that explains Samplers, but the examples are all based on the description of a suit of armor. I don't try to illustrate video games; I like landscapes, both semi-real and sci-fi imaginary, and also domestic scenes. The prompt for all the images shown here is:

Several customers in various places within a very well-stocked music and musical instrument store

I also used the same Seed value for all: 618732496. This was chosen after generating several images using random Seeds; I picked one that made an image I liked, using the Playground v2 Model and the default Sampler, Euler a, which means "Euler ancestral". I don't know how the Sampler names arise, but I do know that Euler was a pioneer of linear algebra, which is used very much by AI software.

Eight Samplers are available to free users of Playground. The learning video has a table of certain characteristics, which I clipped:

The video was made a couple of years ago, so the list of Samplers has changed. The present list of free Samplers is, in the order I used them:

1. Euler a (a="ancestral") 
2. DPM++ 2M Karras (I abbreviated it in the file names) 
3. DDIM
4. PNDM (which I entered as PDNM in the file names)
5. Euler
6. DMP2
7. DMP2 a (a="ancestral") 
8. LMS 

The Heun Sampler is now among those in the paid-only version.

The ones marked "Varied Output" in the diagram tend to hew more closely to the prompt, but can diverge from it widely. The others, "Similar Output" are similar to one another. I just used one prompt to make all 16 images, so I'll have a different impression, as we'll see.

I don't have a good handle on the difference between "fast" and "slow" for these. Free users' generation times range from half a minute to several minutes to "we can't do that now, too busy".

I used each Sampler with both the SDXL and PGv2 Models. The image sets are screen shots from Explorer windows, so they show the file names I used to keep track of everything. I present four images, two pairs, in each portion below. These were generated with a different aspect ratio: 1024x576, or 16:9 like HDTV. Forthwith:

My first impression is that the PGv2 Model is closer to what I had in mind than SDXL. With both Models DPM-Karras provides more "stuff" in the music store than Euler a.

With both Models, DDIM and PNDM are very similar to one another, only differing in small details. These are quite different from the first two Samplers.

These two Samplers are most similar to DPM-Karras. In the two images on the left, DMP2 has produced some funky mini-guitars (they look almost like bent violins) above the guy on the right, and with Euler the customer on the left is female.

Now we see that DPM2 a is like Euler a in being "more different" than the others, while LMS is very similar to Euler and a few others.

Conclusions at this point:

• Euler leads a cluster that includes DPM++ 2M Karras (abbreviated in file names) , DMP2, and LMS in having a certain "look" to the image, with either Model.
• DPM2 a emptied the room of occupants with SDXL, but lined up four of them with PGv2. DPM2 a also added a grand piano. This earns it a "Varied Output" designation from me.
• DDIM and PNDM form another cluster, with either Model, that is distinct from all the other Samplers' output.
• Euler a produced a unique look, with some similarities to the Euler cluster.

In the future I hope to repeat this series using a landscape-generating prompt, perhaps one with an "alien city" in the scene. The reason I changed the aspect ratio from the default square (1024x1024) is that, using an upscaler such as Upscayl I can double the size of an image, which also doubles the detail density, to make a 2048x1152 image, which works well as wallpaper on HD (1920x1080) screens. No outpainting needed: I just need to "negotiate" with Playground until I get an image I like all at once.

Final Fourteen

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past couple of days, I've finished the last fourteen pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. There were two (of six) bits of verse I'm sorry I read, and four others that were "OK". One was clearly well-written prose broken into a "poem" in lines of nearly equal visible length; otherwise unremarkable. Another is worth a short remark:

"Blue" by Erin Wilson is short, and very sad (gut-punch sad), and I dare not say more because it's too easy to spoil.

Three of the prose pieces are worth mentioning:

• "Dear Damage" by Ashley Marie Farmer – Apparently a true story, of an attempted (and failed) murder-suicide brought on by unimaginable pain. Where's a Kevorkian when you need one? Though I am a Christian, I understand, and sympathize with, the need to determinedly end one's own life in certain circumstances.
• "Dreaming of Water With Tiger Salamanders" – This is also nonfiction. Most of it is an essay compounded of equal parts pandemic panic and climate panic, in a setting of "development" of land that ought not be developed. The author (or narrator) is the token biologist who must accompany a development crew, by California law. The two panics are overhyped. On the other hand, I am in favor of strong laws forbidding "development" of arable land (with a Capital penalty) and forbidding destruction of habitat for vulnerable species (slightly-less-than-Capital).
• "Black Land Matters: Climate Solutions in Black Agrarianism" by Leah Penniman – An excellent essay on the efficacy of traditional soil enrichment. The historical flow as I have observed it is sadly almost predictable: in recent years it has been determined that the Amazon rainforest is not a "jungle" but a now-neglected (and much abused) garden, which includes huge areas enriched by biochar and river-bottom muck to make it more fertile. It is only now becoming clear that significant parts of the African continent have a similar history of cultivation. I learned of the impressive usefulness of biochar when I edited a PhD dissertation for a friend who did research with biochar. This essay focuses on many traditional practices, and on their continuation by American Blacks, where they have been permitted to own land. A formative experience in my own young life was a visit to Malabar Farm in Ohio, where conservation tillage was "rediscovered" a millennium after the fact, as it happens.

There were several other stories that were good reading, but rather thin on ideas. The four noted above have strong ideas, and I am an idea guy. I read, not just for escape, but to see what people are thinking, to glean good ideas.

I've finished the Pushcart volume. At 462 pages, it took me a while. Mostly, it was well worth it.

Four out of five — Not so bad

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past day or so I've had time to read only five pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. I'll ignore one of the five. The others:

• "A Most Generous Offer" by Joy Guo – It took a while to see where this story was going. Superficially, it's about an inherited apartment. Really, lack of communication risks loss of everything.

• "The Blob" by Molly Gallentine – Flashing forward and back, with the old film The Blob as a metaphor for climate anxiety, while the protagonists attempts artistic climate activism. The image is the beginning of the movie theater scene from the 1958 film.
• "Marmalade" by Fred D'Aguiar – In the aftermath of a breakup, the kids are hurt the most. Of many treatments on this old theme, this is one of the best.
• "Toward a Unified Theory" by Wayne Miller – It's hard to say if it is intended to be one poem: very short bits of free verse with a strong TITLE every 4-8 lines, and lots of white space. No relationship to the overall title that I can discern.

Sometimes, being puzzled is as valuable as being gratified.

Spiders from Hong Kong outrun those from Singapore

kw: blogging, spiders, spider scanning

 

Just when I'd got used to seeing another extra 400-600 views per day, just from Singapore, today I saw this, for the past 24 hours:

Here, the usual "Singapore plus everyone else" is the low terrain on either side of the "mountain". Naturally, I had to see if this is also Singapore. As it happens:

No! Views from Singapore are indeed many, at 555 for the day, but Hong Kong, in an eight-hour spree, racked up 5,225 views, or about 650 per hour. Considering that the total number of posts in this blog is about 2,500, I suspect that my blog is one of perhaps millions of blogs that are being gulped down wholesale to train AI text models such as ChatGPT and, where images and text occur together, diffusion models such as DALL•E or Playground. I checked into the top posts for the past day:

Everything below the first ten posts has been viewed no more than twice in the past 24 hours. The "text vacuuming" going on is unfocused. At this point, I don't what more to conclude. It would be interesting to learn if other bloggers are experiencing new and unusual numbers of hits, most likely from automated text vacuums.

Leaning into the Apocalypse

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry, essays

The eight items I read today in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others, are evenly matched, four in verse and four stories/essays (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference). I'll touch on most of them.

"Memorials" by Tyler Sones – Remembering the localized apocalypses in the author's memory, one near Waco, Texas and the other at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. The word "apocalypse" just means "taking off the cover", and by extension "revelation". It is, by itself, the title of the last book of the Bible. The content of the apostle John's visions has colored our understanding of the term. The author describes a fiercely Bible-centered culture in which the two attacked homesteads were embedded.

The image was produced using Playground AI; a milder view than what is warranted by the text, but a more appropriate prompt would have been rejected.

The verse "Dawn 2040" by Jorie Graham is intended to evoke a post-apocalyptic scene, set just sixteen years in the future (perhaps 17-18 when the piece was written). Overblown, in my view.

"Fight Week" by Laura Van Den Berg – A young woman, a prize fighter, is drawn into a drama and inadvertently does a good deed. It leads to a step change in her fighting skills.

I'll limn three other pieces with the two words that came to mind as I finished each:

• "Nomad Palindrome" – Extended palindrome. [At 87 words, one of the longest I've encountered]
• "Jorie, Jr" by Michael Czyzniejewski – Superman metaphor. [there's no relationship with the author of "Dawn 2040"...I think]
• "The Emperor Concerto" by Julie Hecht – Musical rumination.

Four hits in a row!

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past 24 hours I read just four pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. Surprise, I liked all four, so I'll give all four "the treatment".

"Two Breaths" by Christina Rivera Cogswell – A wife and husband scuba dive at night to observe Manta rays off Kailua-Kona in Hawaii. The Hawaiian word for the Manta, hahalua, means "two breaths". The woman cannot get her mind off her two children, asleep at home. Much of the story is her stream of consciousness as she copes with near-panic, something she didn't experience before becoming a mother (mothers reading the story will sympathize). The image was created using Playground AI.

"It is Once Again the Season of Corn" by Onyekachi Hoh – Thirteen couplets of free verse, full of observations and wishes. One of these, "let all the rifles become violins…" evoked the image. The final wish is for an orchestra. The image was created using Dall-E3, which threw a horse into the image I liked most.

"The Magician's Assistant" by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick – Four quatrains of free verse: after the act is over and the magician has sawn her in half, the assistant sews herself back together. Her thought near the end is poignant: "the applause is for his miracle and not hers". I also used Dall-E3 to produce this image. Dall-E3 didn't like the first prompt I tried, "too violent", so a more innocuous one produced this image.

"Tomorrows" by Lakiesha Carr – A slot machine addict, coping as best she can. It's no surprise that her familial feeling for fellow slots players exceeds all others. At least she has an income. This image was created using Playground AI. Note that we can control the aspect ratio of PG-AI images.

At this point I am just past halfway done with the volume.

Fifteen more, half pointless

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past two-plus days I have read fifteen more pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. Of the fifteen, nine are "poems". One of these, "Chemo Becomes Me" by Lily Jarman-Reisch resonated with me. I have been on chemo, and though I didn't lose hair (as the poet did), there were other effects. Also, this poem has rhyme and rhythm, being in couplets with a coda.

If the other eight free verse items are a kind of intelligence test, I utterly failed. To me, they are a waste of words. I suppose they really, really meant something to their authors.

I particularly liked "The Locksmith" by Grey Wolfe LaJoie. Though the words "autism" or "spectrum" never appear, the locksmith's condition is evident. Nonetheless, he copes. I was sympathetic to someone who must ride a bicycle because he can't get a driver's license. For about a year I didn't drive; because of an accident, the "best" insurance premium I could obtain was the cost of my car, per year. So I rode bicycle until the points dropped off my record.

The pieces that were stories affected me variously. Two worth mention are "The Ba'al Shem's Daughter" by Glenn Gitomer and "Everychild" by Alix Christie. From very different perspectives, they tell of parents who have lost control of a child, and cope about as badly as possible. I'll leave it to you to read and find out.

And I do hope you will read this volume and these stories. Maybe you'll even like the poems.

Coda: I prompted Dall-E3 with "A pushcart in the style of a bookplate sticker". Here are a couple of its offerings:

An experiment with a versatile AI artist

 kw: artificial intelligence, automatic art, evaluations, instructions, photo essays

I have been using Dall-E2 for a couple of years. Recently Dall-E3 became available at no cost in Bing. However, the free version doesn't have outpainting. I went looking to see which automatic art products do outpainting, and I found Playground. There are two versions of the same product, apparently aimed at quite different audiences. The one I use is at playground.com. It is also available by typing www.playgroundai.com, which can be confusing because the alternate version is at playground.ai!

As with any free version of a paid product, there are limitations. In this case, they are:

• 500 images (or "generate" actions) per day.
• 3 Canvases
• You're running on a slower server

Actually, I think the last issue is that paying users get bumped ahead of free users in the server queue, so at busy times, you can wait quite a long time.

For more than simple image generation, there are a lot of controls! After getting basic experience, I decided to experiment with them. Here I will focus on one: Filters. These two images were generated without any filters, using the same Prompt and Seed, but different Models (more on all these soon).

Getting Started

You log in by connecting to a Google account (you must have one). Then you see this control screen:

I already produced a couple of images, to be discussed at the very end. To take the screen components in order:

• At top left is the Playground Logo. Clicking the "v" next to it opens a submenu, including Logout.
• So far, I ignore the three things at top right.
• Below the Logo we see that we are in Board view. Images generated here are ephemeral and vanish when you log out. Images in Canvas are kept, and more things can be done to them. For our purposes here, I used Canvas in a limited way, which I'll describe soon. Since I downloaded all the images upon creation, I don't care if they vanish.
• In that same row, there is a control to let you import an image. This is more pertinent to Canvas.
• To the right of that, I have the Columns control set to two columns.
• Down the left side, we first see Presets. This became available February 10 and I haven't used it yet.
• Next we see Filters, which we'll be discussing in the bulk of this post.
• Below that is the Prompt area. The prompt shown is "Gormenghast Castle"; the software doesn't like how the castle name is spelled, thus the red wiggleworm.
• Next is Expand Prompt, which uses an AI engine (probably ChatGPT) to add a lot of words to the prompt you typed in. I haven't used it.
• There are more controls available by scrolling, but they are not pertinent at the moment.
• Down the right side, we first see Model. Three diffusion models are available, Stable Diffusion 1.5, Stable Diffusion XL (recently renamed this; it was formerly Stable Diffusion 2.0), and Playground v2. SD 1.5 is going to be dropped in a few weeks, so I don't use it. I used the other two for this experiment.
• Next one may choose Image Dimensions. I usually use 1024x1024; I'll discuss why a different one is highlighted at the end.
• Prompt Guidance is next. I usually leave it at 7 when using Stable Diffusion XL, and at 3 (the default) with Playground v2. Lower numbers give the Model more freedom, and higher numbers instruct it to hew more closely to the Prompt. This makes more difference when the Prompt is long.
• Quality & Details settings will make an image look more or less detailed and "finished". Paying users can use more steps than 30.

The next image shows more controls found in the right side:

• Refinement adds fine detail. Although I can set it higher than 15, Playground doesn't seem to like that; Generation times out. It probably works better for paying users.
• The Seed is all-important. When producing multiple images (4 is the max in the free version), the "Randomize" box must be checked. When a single image is selected and the box is unchecked, a seed that's about to be used is exposed. You can type or paste in a seed up to 9 digits in length. I suppose that means that any particular prompt can produce 10 billion variations.
• The Sampler has a number of options, which I hope to experiment with on another occasion. "Euler a" is the default, and I haven't yet tried others.
• Below, off-screen, is a Public/Private option which isn't available in the free version.

Getting the Seed

To get started, I had to determine a Seed. When you generate images in Board view, you don't have access to the Seed used. Images generated in a Canvas have the Seed shown when you click on them. Thus, I generated four at a time using the Stable Diffusion XL model in Canvas, tinkering with a simple prompt, until I saw an image I liked:

• The Prompt I settled on is "Small town near a winding stream".
• The Seed for my favorite is, as shown in the image above, 802745251. I used this seed for all the images shown below.

Back in Board view, I tested the Seed to be sure I had what I wanted. I saved the resulting image with the file name "901 Stws SDXL None", according to a numbering scheme I worked out beforehand. SDXL is my abbreviation for Stable Diffusion XL. I changed the Model to Playground v2 (PGv2 is my abbreviation), generated again, and saved the file with a similar name; this image pair (the same as that shown near the beginning of this post) is the result, clipped from an Explorer window.

The two images have similar composition, but differ quite a lot in detail. The two Models have different things they "pay attention" to.

Producing the Images

Now that I had a Prompt and a Seed ready to go, I proceeded to use filter after filter. First, there are 15 Filters that work only with SDXL. I used screen clips from an Explorer window with the View set to "Extra large icons", showing the icons in three columns. I gathered them by sixes. Comments follow each group of six.

The image file for the first Filter is numbered "02" because I used "01" for "None", and later renumbered it "901" to get the Explorer window to sort the way I wanted. These are all from a higher viewpoint than the "None" version. The icons in the Filter selector make it clear that they are designed to affect portraits the most.

Three of these resemble the first six. "Mysterious" has a look I like for some purposes, and it is back to the streamside viewpoint. "Niji SE" is also closer to "None" in its viewpoint, while "Pixel Art" shares the elevated viewpoint of most of them, but is blocky, as we would expect.

These last three are more similar to the first eight. Of all those with an elevated viewpoint, I like "Counterfeit" the best. 

Now for the SDXL - PGv2 pairs for the other 23 shared Filters (prefixed A through W). They are presented in groups of four images, or two Filters per group, shown larger than those above. The last set has a bonus.

It is interesting that "Vibrant Glass" with SDXL has removed the village. With PGv2 it put the glass in the stream. The "Bellas Dreamy Stickers" Filter frequently puts a border around the image with SDXL, but seldom does so with PGv2. Its images would make good bookplates or logos.

"Ultra Lighting" produces a very pleasing look. "Watercolor", when looked at in detail, has a very definite painted appearance. Either of these images could be cropped, perhaps to a 4x3 ratio, doubled or tripled in resolution using a product like Upscayl (the one I use), printed and framed, and hung on your wall. Or it could be moved to Canvas for outpainting, etc.

With many prompts, "Macro Realism" produces extreme closeups that may or may not resemble the output of other filters. Here it only bows to the Macro world by having a narrow depth of field, especially with PGv2. "Delicate Detail" sometimes makes a big difference, sometimes not. Here it is similar to some of the others, but otherwise unremarkable.

"Radiant Symmetry" will sometimes produce very symmetrical mirror-image views; these are only approximately symmetrical. "Lush Illumination" is another of my favorites. Note that some areas of the images differ a lot between the two Models, but the cloud is very similar.

"Saturated Space" usually has a SciFi look. I note that SDXL put a boat in the water, while PGv2 put spaceships in the sky. I am not sure what the goal of "Neon Mecha" is, but at least in PGv2 it seems to evoke technopunk.

"Ethereal Low Poly", where "Poly" means "polygons", evokes older renderings on computers with limited memory. "Warm Box" is most similar to "Lush Illumination", with perhaps more geographic exaggeration. We're halfway through these…

"Cinematic" and "Cinematic Warm" evoke the look of movie sets.

"Wasteland" is, of course, saying, "Industry overdid it." "Flat Palette" uses a restricted range of hues, for a rather painterly look. I see that, while many of the Filters straighten out the "winding stream", at least a bit of curve is found here.

"Ominous Escape" seems similar to a couple of others. I don't know what it is for. "Spielberg" attempts to evoke film sets used by that great director.

I am not sure what is the point of "Wall Art". For many of the prompts I've tried, the image is dominated by an exaggeratedly ethnic face, most frequently Black. Both of these images really could become a picture in your dining room. "Haze" is just that: a foggy morning look.

The last Filter is "Black and White 3D". What it does is obvious. Less obviously, with SDXL it produced a European look. 

The bonus is the result when I tried the same Seed but no Filter with the Prompt "Gormenghast Castle", a stray memory from reading the oblique novel Titus Groan decades ago (read it at your peril; it ranges from obtuse to profane). The castle is supposed to be so huge nobody can explore it all in one lifetime. I see that in my haste I put STWS rather than SDXL in the file name on the left. This image looks like it could be a book cover. In the PGv2 image it looks more like I imagine Gormenghast Castle could have looked.

Way, way back near the beginning of this essay, in the screenshot of Playground, the SDXL image of the castle sits next to a taller image with a different look. The only thing I changed was the aspect ratio of the output image. I was hoping for a "book cover" look that is closer to the shape of a book, but it was not to be. That's the breaks when you commission an AI Artist that has a few billion (or trillion) little decisions hidden inside its operation.

The folder of image files I created for this post is a good reference I'll use when I have a particular "look" in mind for an image.

At least in terms of physical space taken, this may be my longest blog post!

Some items worth reading, some not so much

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

Since the prior post I've had time to read seven more pieces from 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others.

Some of them had me wondering, as this fellow is, "What could possibly have led the author to write this?" I'll comment on the others, though there was only one that I actually liked. It comes first, then the others.

• "Dreamers Awaken" by Scott Spencer – A memory of someone about my age of Jim Crow America in the 1950's. The real core of the story is his longing for acceptance, which transcends culture, race, and time.
• "Two People" by James Langenbach – Free verse vignettes of a couple's lives. Saved from total obscurity by sort of going somewhere.
• "What if Putin Laughed" by Steve Stern – A long discursion on the meaning of "schlemiel" (a Yiddish term for a semi-lovable loser), which is found to be a long lead-up to a two-line joke about V. Zelenskyy confronting V. Putin. A clever joke, really.

Just as a side note: I used Dall-E3 to produce the image above. It took a few tries. I was tempted to use this image instead, but none of the pieces really made my head explode.

Some of this year's Pushcart items

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

The cover illustration for 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses is red on orange, as seen here (the colors change almost yearly). It was edited by Bill Henderson and an editorial board. For my purposes, the appeal of these stories varies from year to year. This year seems average, with eleven of the 63 items under my belt so far. I'll comment briefly on a few that I liked.

As is my habit, if I really don't like a story, I don't mention it. In this case, though, I've picked four to comment on, of these first eleven. I sorta-liked most of the other seven. As I read more, I'll post successive portions.

• "Sunny Talks" by Lydia Conklin – A cross-generational coming-of-age story about the trans experience. An older woman who wanted to transition to male gender, who now calls herself non-binary, is aunt to a trans boy who had the opportunity to transition (at least chemically so far), who is an Internet influencer in the trans community. The feelings are raw; this will make many uncomfortable. For that alone, it is worth reading, and even the more because it is brilliantly written.
• "Tender" by Sophie Klahr – A rare bit of free verse that I actually enjoyed. That is very rare! The theme is loneliness and death. The writing is sufficiently tight that I cannot see how setting it to rhymed, metric verse could avoid ruining it. There are but 14 lines, though I would not call it a sonnet (perhaps free verse aficionados would do so).
• "Backsiders" by Kathryn Scanlon – Horse people, as told by a horse person, apparently over several interviews. This one isn't stated to be fiction, so I take it as genuine. From what I know of people in the horse racing circuit, this is straight-up journalism, from a more personal viewpoint than usual.
• "The Future is a Click Away" by Allegra Hyde – A fantasy on "The Algorithm", as it becomes so aware of our inner rhythms that it anticipates what we want and delivers it just before we might have requested it…until it overdoes it. I have lost count of how many times I have checked reviews for something—and forgotten to use DuckDuckGo—and purchased something, then seen ad after ad for that thing for a period of several weeks. I've wanted to write to Google, "I already bought it. Leave me alone! Don't you have a record of my purchases, also?" But I always think, I don't want to give them ideas…

As is usual for this annual volume, the writing is excellent, even if the subjects are not always to my liking. So far there is only one story I got a page into and then skipped the rest.

An icon of the Old West

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, outlaws, stage robbers

He was a Civil War hero, wounded twice. He didn't smoke, drink or visit bordellos. He was polite and spoke as an educated man. He married and had children, then abandoned them. He seldom swore, and though he carried a shotgun to ply his trade, only discharged it once, and that was an accident. He claimed he never stole from persons, only from Wells Fargo—but he actually reaped more from cash and gold sent by registered mail, so it's hard to credit such a statement.

He was Charley Boles, known to post-Civil-War San Francisco society as Charles E. Bolton, and to stage drivers and lawmen in northern California as Black Bart. On a few occasions, he left doggerel poems behind at a robbery scene, signed "Black Bart, the Po8".

As the picture shows, he disguised not just his face but his whole costume; he usually wrapped his boots in cloth to make himself hard to track. He walked, and never rode a horse when "working", making tracking him even more difficult. He could walk 50 miles a day.

He robbed 26 stagecoaches over a period of 17 years, and after a four-year stint in San Quentin prison, three more. During the short post-prison period he corresponded with his family, but didn't return to see them. Then he vanished from history. Nothing is know of his fate after November 20, 1888, when he committed his last (known) robbery. The 29 stage robberies of his that are known make him the most prolific stage robber in history.

This is a brief sketch of the history detailed in Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West's Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber, by John Boessenecker. The illustration above is from p159. The author tells in his Acknowledgements that he gathered material about Black Bart for fifty-plus years. The depth and breadth of his research is evident, making for a fascinating account.

Singapore spiders, and others

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

The past few days I've noticed a big increase in views of this blog. It has been a while since the last flurry of spider scanning. Here is what the past month looks like:

The usual daily activity is 30-40 views; about 1,000 per month. Let's look at the past week (Blogger doesn't have a custom date setting):

Matters get a little more clear when we look at the sources:

In the past the primary spider source was Russia, sometimes Ukraine. This time it is Singapore, with supporting roles from Hong Kong and China. If you add these numbers, leaving out those three countries, then add back in 45 for China and 90 for Hong Kong, you get a usual month of views for this blog. In a typical month, China may have 1-2 views daily and Hong Kong 2-4. Singapore is a rare "customer".

I wonder what they were looking for? The total blog has roughly 2,500 posts…

For love of the deep sea

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, adventurers, submersibles, memoirs

Spoiler: Susan Casey did indeed get to dive with Victor Vescovo in his ultra-deep-diving submersible Limiting Factor. Here they are about to dive to the base of Loihi, as we Haoles call it. The Hawaiians call the soon-to-be-a-Hawaiian-Island Kamaʻehuakanaloa. More on that anon.

Ms Casey's book is The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. She has been enthralled by the ocean as far back as she can remember. She recounts her own life briefly, and chronicles the growing knowledge of the deep sea as humans have prepared more and better ways of seeing into it and of going there.

Many may still think of "the abyss" as a near-lifeless volume of water, and of the ocean floor as a vast stretch of "unoccupied" real estate with resources we can harvest with impunity. Their understanding is a few generations out of date. Two striking facts emerge from putting eyes in the deep sea, whether robotic (in remotely-operated vehicles, or ROVs) or in person: Firstly, life is everywhere, right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches; and Secondly, our trash is everywhere, from plastic bags and other litter even in the deepest holes, to fibers and bits of "stuff" in the flesh of fish and other animals captured all up and down the water column.

The book lacks an index, which precludes my going back to find the name of the new species of amphipod (they look vaguely like shrimp without the long carapace) which incorporates plastic fibers into its tissues, because, well, it has to. That's easier than trying to exclude them!

Along the way we learn of fish like bristlemouths (they have lots of sharp, very thin teeth), smaller than a finger, that exist in such numbers that they outweigh the entire mass of all mammals put together. Wouldn't you know it, as soon as they were discovered, fishing businesses began to speculate about how to make a net that trawls deep enough (a few miles), with fine enough mesh, to catch a few trillion of these for, well, whatever use can be found for them. That's ignoring the equivalent trillions of squids and jellyfish and hydrozoans (like chains of jellyfish—some are 150 feet long). This "bycatch", if deemed less valuable than the fishes, will be discarded, dying and dead, by the thousands of tons. I wonder what that will do to the chemical balance of the ocean? Ms Casey writes, "The idea of commercially fishing the twilight zone is off-the-charts stupid. That doesn't mean we won't do it." Lust for money makes people stupid.

We also learn of snailfish, the deepest-dwelling fish so far known. They live as deep as 23,000 feet, or 7,000 m. These snailfish came to bait dropped on the ocean floor.

Pressures of several tons per square inch affect the ways proteins work, and so far, snailfish and a few other fish species have been able to evolve ways to counteract certain pressure effects, but they haven't made it all the way to the bottom of the deepest trenches, which measure about 37,000 ft, or nearly 11,000 m. Other animals have done so, and are seen crawling around in the deepest of deeps.

The author devotes a chapter to the things she learned at a conference about seabed mining, and about efforts to prevent it or delay it. Large areas of the "abyssal plain", the flat-lying areas at depths between three and six kilometers (10,000 to 20,000 feet, or 2-4 miles), are paved with polymetallic nodules. Once called "manganese nodules", they consist of oxides and hydroxides of many metals. The transition metals (Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn) are the most abundant, but many other metals are present, including "rare earth" metals, which aren't really rare, but they are rather hard to separate from their ores. At one time they were thought to grow rather quickly. It has been learned that their diameter increases by one or two millimeters per million years.

Polymetallic nodules grow slowly enough that many animals live on and in them. The beautiful sponge in this picture distracts from the numerous "little white things" seen on the nodules. Consider this: every time scientists get the opportunity to sample the seabed, they find that about half of the organisms they bring up have never been seen before. This is also true of samples taken at deep hydrothermal vents, the "black smokers" and scarcer "white smokers". We don't know enough to know what we'd lose if millions of acres of the ocean floor were to be scraped clean, or if thousands of metallic "chimneys" at hydrothermal vents were "mined". We do know that the mid-to-deep creatures are intimately involved in the carbon cycle, which would be dramatically altered, and not for the better, by all the large-scale extraction businesses just mentioned. 

Hey, climate change activists? How come the Cancel Culture hasn't begun to target deep ocean mining firms? Here's where you can have a much greater impact than all prior efforts so far, combined! Get on it, my favorite fanatics!

So far we have just investigated a percent of a percent of a percent of what the ocean contains. Nearly all land life is found within 20 meters of the surface; in tropical rain forests, a decent proportion extends to four times that high, but those account for just a few percent of the total area. The volume of the terrestrial biosphere is thus about 3,000 trillion, or 3 quadrillion, cubic meters. The volume of the ocean is 1.33 million trillion, or 1.33 quintillion, cubic meters: 444 times as much! While it's unlikely that there is 400x as much biomass in the ocean as on land, it is quite reasonable to expect between 10x and 50x. And we don't know what 99.99% of it is!

In her quest to get to know the ocean deeps, naturally Ms Casey was eventually brought into contact with Victor Vescovo, who spent around $40,000,000 to have a full-ocean-depth submersible built, and to obtain ships and other equipment and crew, so he could dive to the deepest point in all five sections of the ocean. I reviewed his book about those experiences a couple of years ago. He has since made more dives in those locations and many more, sometimes solo, and more often with scientists accompanying. His sub Limiting Factor has been purchased by an organization named Inkfish Ocean Exploration (they don't have a website that I can find; it's owned by Gabe Newell). She accompanied a couple of the cruises, and was then asked if she wanted to take a dive herself (Did she ever!).

In 2021 she went on a dive with Vescovo to the base of the Kamaʻehuakanaloa seamount, to retrieve a costly piece of equipment that had descended and failed to ascent...and they had time for some exploration. While this dive wasn't in a trench, it did reach a depth greater than 17,000 feet, or 5 km. At the time, the number of people who had been on dives that deep numbered a couple of dozen. That number is growing, partly from the efforts of Inkfish and even more from manufacturers such as Triton (who manufactured Limiting Factor) that make 5- and 6 km-rated submersibles. Some of these can hold six or more persons. In addition to the immense scientific value of having eyes in situ, the huge impact just being in the deep ocean has on everyone who experiences it is slowly changing the public perception of the deep ocean.

I had an idea. Take every executive from a seabed mining company to see the nodule fields for themselves. I think of it as a kind of intelligence test. If someone takes such a drive and still has only dollar signs in his eyes, take him back down and leave him there (I suspect very few females could be that rapacious).

Failing that, get this book and read it. Read other books about the deep ocean. It's a problem that it costs 1,000 to 100,000 times as much to go one mile down as it does to go one mile up…in many places you can hike a mile up a mountainside in $30 sneakers and wearing jeans and a warm shirt. A tourist ride in a submersible costs in the $50,000 to $500,000 range. A bit more than the typical ocean cruise, and it lasts only a day (plus getting to and from the dive site). And bookmark this NOAA site, which access to livestreams from ships employing deep-diving ROVs to see what's going on, typically about a kilometer deep, but highly variable. During dive season (typically April to November, at least in the northern hemisphere), I like to have one of these cameras going on my screen. In the off-season they have highlights videos available.