We went for a walk today while the skies were blue. They weren't blue for very long, but we were happy to have the sun grace our faces. Asia even managed to get a little sun burn. It looks like she's gently blushing. Which reminds me, what causes blushing anyway? I recall people saying that you blush when you're embarrassed. For me, I blush - usually without knowing why - and then feel embarrassed after. The order is backwards. What's the evolutionary advantage of blushing? It has something to do with socialization, for sure, since it only happens in the context of interacting with another. When you're alone there's no reason to blush. This suggests that blushing requires the blusher to feel self-conscious. Do monkeys or apes blush? Maybe when caught masturbating at the watering hole? I'll need to Google it later. When you use Google as a verb, do you capitalize it? Probably not. I'll look into that later, too.
After our walk, we came home and cooked. Then Asia started reading and I started playing guitar. It's been at least a few weeks since I last picked up my guitar. As I unlocked the case I noticed it felt particularly stiff when trying to pull it open. Probably from disuse. If the case isn't opened and closed frequently enough the case assumes it has become a coffin. I looked over at Asia after I'd played a few songs and saw her fast asleep. Lulled away to dreamland by my soft singing. Sunday should be spent this way, in general. Leisurely walks, watching birds, cooking, eating, reading, writing, making music. Winter months are perfect for this. In the summertime it is too easy to feel guilty for not doing enough with your weekend. Long days and longer nights invite play. These are the days one feels bad wasting. But in winter, when sun is sparse and the weather is wet, cold and unwelcoming, hibernation has its place.
I returned my new M2 MacBook yesterday and I'm writing this from the old Intel dinosaur. I sent it back because I need more than 32GB of RAM for my local instance of Stable Diffusion. While 32GB kind of did the job, it wasn't without undue stress on the machine. Memory pressure would often cause the swap to climb up to 10GB, sometimes more. This is largely due to lack of adequate optimization and bugs causing memory leaks on Mac clients, but I'm not trying to dig my computer an early grave. Giving it the extra wiggle room by doubling the RAM should keep the SSD safe. What I've figured out now is how to run Stable Diffusion remotely, using Google Colab. Setting things up this way outsources the GPU to one provided by Google for free. This helps with more computationally complex renders or tasks like training models or generating a batch of images at higher aspect ratios. It also helps me get around incompatibility issues. In the current implementation of automatic 1111 (the most cutting edge Stable Diffusion webUI) many features are not supported on macOS. By leveraging the remote setup with Google Colab, I can access those features on that machine if I need to. For basic workflows this likely isn't needed and having a local machine with 64GB of RAM should be able to handle the bulk of what I'd like to do. If I weren't so heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem I'd just jump ship and buy a Windows machine with a robust NVIDIA chip designed to handle machine learning tasks. But generative art is just one thing I'll use the computer for. For everything else the MacBook meets my needs perfectly.
Over the last few weeks I still haven't made any forward progress on the graphic novel. Once the new computer arrives I'll start digging back into it and try to have it done before July. My naturalization exam is this week and after that I'll have freed up time to focus on the graphic novel. Initially I thought the test was tomorrow, but I got my dates mixed up and it turns out it's on Wednesday. Does this happen to anyone else? The older I get the more I catch myself making mistakes when it comes to date and time. Part of it is that we use 24hr time in Germany (and most of Europe I believe), and this causes the occasional translation error due to 30-ish years of American timekeeping. Sometimes I'll mistake 18:00 for 8:00pm or 15:00 for 5:00pm. I mess up other times, too. I once told a friend in Ireland I was landing two hours earlier than I was due to due to similar miscalculations. But dates are a new one for me. Granted, dates are also written differently in Germany so this can lend itself to confusion. Here the date precedes the month, so March 12th would be written 12/03/23. Makes you wonder if you've travelled forward in time to December. I think in this coming week's case I must have experienced a combination of date and time dysfunction; 15 is 3, so I must have done some quick math and converted 15 to 13.
Whenever stuff like this happens I like to blame long Covid. Brain fog is just a codeword for my stupidity, early onset senility. The other day I was reading an article that said people who experience frequent nightmares are more likely to develop Alzheimer's and other cognitive degeneration. Unfortunately for me, I've been having regular nightmares for as long as I've been alive. As a small boy I used to have nightmares so bad my parents placed a red bucket beside my bed so that when I'd wake up gripped by that special kind of terror only the imagination of a child can manage, I'd have something to vomit into instead of puking directly onto the floor. Totally normal, right? Throughout my adult life I've continued to have nightmares, though not with the same frequency or intensity as I did during my youth. I'd say I have a nightmare on average once a week, or once every two weeks. Once every month or two I get a special treat: sleep paralysis. I've probably written about that here before. I don't care to detail the specifics now. Why am I even talking about nightmares? Ah, forgetfulness, right!
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