Instructions Unclear

I was too absorbed in Midjourney yesterday to take a break and write something. I wouldn't say I was in a creative flow state, but rather a struggle against the machine to have it draw me a character pointing "this way." At times it's absolutely fucking maddening to work with this program. I spent hours on single panel last night and couldn't get it to give me what I wanted. Granted, I am trying to get it to give me something very specific - a character in the same outfit and hairstyle and of a similar background environment and in a similar artistic style to what's been used so far for this point in the story. It doesn't make it any less frustrating though. At times it gets so close to being usable while still remaining totally unsuitable. I'm trying to avoid using Photoshop to correct things when possible to preserve the authenticity of the claim "AI-generated graphic novel." I'll make exceptions to fix a missing eyeball or edit out an extra limb or phantom figure in the background, but I only permit these occasional minor tweaks instead of extensively manipulating the image output. In a sense, my suffering is self-imposed. Isn't it always though.

The weather outside is frightful. Rain and clouds for days. The only brief glimmer of joy is watching the birds outside flit from branch to branch or wrestle with the bird feeders on my neighbors' balconies. During lunch I watched a red-headed woodpecker shoo away a small sparrow as it pecked and plucked seeds from the feeder, whirling around in a merry-go-round sort of way. The sparrow hopped a foot or two away and watched with quick irritated head movements while the woodpecker dined on what was only moments ago the sparrow's feast. After a few long seconds of deliberation the sparrow made another attempt at getting at the seeds but once more the woodpecker drove the sparrow off. From the hours of 2 - 4 the small birds seem especially active. They're more vocal, though not quite as vocal as the early hours of the morning when their songs signal the start of a new day. In the afternoon they seem more curious and eager to survey the state of the backyard. When it snows, from my window I can see their small tracks stamped in the area around the long beer-garden table there. Some of the birds are large, and some are predators. Often times you can hear the high pitched sound of some type of hawk or falcon and, on rare occasions, they even land on the branch in front of my balcony. Beyond the woodpeckers, sparrows and blue tits, there are wood pigeons, crows, nearby peacocks and roosters, and at times owls. None of these are quite exotic as say, a kingfisher, or as magical as a hummingbird, but being able to glimpse into their hurried little lives and listen to their songs lends a profoundly peaceful quality to what would otherwise be a grimy, noisy neighborhood in Berlin. Right now I feel like I'm in a cabin inside a nature reserve. That's how isolated it is from the city sounds.

Years ago, when I first moved here, around this time of year actually, I'd been out partying all night and had returned from the club after accidentally snorting speed. How does one accidentally snort speed, you might ask. Well, it's easier than you think. All it takes is for someone to hand you the wrong bag of white powder and, then, what you thought a second ago was ketamine turns out to be something else entirely. Needless to say, I needed sleep. The girl I was dating at the time, a German girl who lived just outside of Berlin, was arriving to visit. She found me in a ruined state in my bedroom, hungover, kaput, fried. She eventually forced me out of the apartment so that we could go get something to eat for lunch. She was vegan and I didn't have anything at home to eat. We walked down the stairs, made it through the courtyard and the long hallway that opens out onto the street. As soon as I pulled the door open I was met with a blast of sound and spectacle so sudden and sharp that I was momentarily disoriented, stunned, disabled. The entire street was consumed by an enormous party. There was a sea of people and all the sound and fury. 

"Oh yeah," she said, "it's carnivale." 

I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and how we hadn't heard even a hint of it from my apartment. German soundproofing. It's important for shielding the screams of the children imprisoned in your basement from alerting the neighbors. Actually I think Fritzl was Austrian, not German. 

Well, it's about time I get back to the grind and try to get an image of my comic book character pointing. If I start now hopefully I'll be able to get the panel sorted out by bedtime!