Getrickst!

 

Although I've had the new MacBook for a few days now, this is my first post written from it. The keyboard is definitely an upgrade from my previous model. Somehow I think I like the keyboard from the in-between model slightly better though. Oh well, we can't have it all. Most of my time has been spent in a swirling whirlpool of Stable Diffusion rabbit holes. Stable Diffusion is an open-source generative art program. I'd mentioned Stable Diffusion here in the past when comparing it to Midjourney. Boy, was I mistaken. Stable Diffusion is far more powerful than Midjourney. While I still prefer the output from Midjourney better, I'm in awe of the level of granular control Stable Diffusion offers. Midjourney is a mallet and Stable is a scalpel. The learning curve is much, much steeper for SD, but each day I learn more and become more proficient. What's nice about SD is that it's free. MJ comes at a pricey $30 a month subscription fee. 

The more I learn the more I'm convinced that this technology is game-changing. Strides have been made in the last few months which have unlocked massive qualitative breakthroughs for SD. I'm still trying to digest all the content I've been consuming, from topics of models, sampling processes, in-painting, controlnet, upscalers, LORAs, textual inversions and image-to-image rendering techniques, just to name a few. Each of these could probably be a semester course at university, and the technology is rapidly evolving literally every day. What's possible today wasn't two months ago.

But enough nerd talk. Who gives a fuck about computers and generative art anyway? Yesterday I went for a walk because the weather has been absolutely gorgeous for the last two or three days. On my walk I'd recorded a message to Asia describing how clear and blue the skies were, how everyone was out sunning themselves in the grass or against trees. In the shade it was wintry, but in the light it was like being wrapped in a warm blanket. Seasons exist which aren't true seasons, at least in terms of the traditional definition. They don't last long enough to qualify. These unnamed, secret seasons, exist in the ephemeral space between winter and spring, or summer and autumn, as one season is ending and another is soon beginning. Yesterday was such a season; a micro-season if you will. It wasn't quite winter and it wasn't quite spring, but this novel fleeting feeling of warmth and life during a season dedicated to icy stillness and darkness had been kissed by the promise of coming spring. It was beautiful. 

On my walk I ran into a friend. She was walking her dog. I saw the dog before I saw her. We were both on our phones, recording voice messages to future listeners. We stopped and chatted in the park, enjoying the weather and the serendipity of it all. She told me about her new job, and how the kindergarten she'd be working at didn't provide coffee for the faculty. Can you believe it? You expect these people to educate the next generation of the future of the human race without being properly caffeinated? What kind of cruelty is this? Isn't it bad enough that societies already massively underpay teachers? What's next?

As we were talking her facial expression changed and she said, "oh wow," looking behind me. So I turned to see what had caught her attention. Right in front of our eyes, walking across the grass between a pair of trees, was a large humanoid robot. We watched as it marched across the field towards a man who was photographing it. The man photographing it, probably stunned by the sight of it and desperately needing to document the moment, seemed unfazed by the fact that the robot was inching closer and closer. What would the robot do once it reached the man? 

"My god," my friend said, her dog beginning to bark, "what's happening?"

Once the robot got within reach of the man, it smacked the smartphone out of his hand and grabbed the man by the throat. It jostled him for a second before throwing him aside like a rag doll. It bent down, picked up the phone and crushed it in its claws. Then something strange happened.

The robot took two steps towards the man, but from the angle we were viewing from, we could only see the look of terror on the fallen man's face and the back of the robot. We could hear the man shouting nein, NEIN, but we didn't understand what the robot was doing. The little antenna on the top of its head began to spin. A shrill oscillating sound, like a siren, seemed to come from the spinning. The pitch got higher and higher as the robot bent towards the man who was crawling backwards on the ground with his hands to his ears. My friend's dog, Kiki, began to whine and whimper, turning from the sound. My ears were ringing too.

"Ouch," my friend said holding her ears, "it's so loud."

My head was pounding. The frequency was inducing a splitting headache. Everyone nearby had their head in their hands. Just when I thought the sound couldn't get worse, it did. My vision was getting blurred and I found it hard to breathe. Then, I saw the man on the ground beginning to convulse and tremble. He appeared to be having a seizure. Nobody was able to move to help him, the sound was so paralyzing. Within seconds the man stopped moving. It looked like he'd been knocked unconscious. The sound stopped. I've never heard a silence like that before. Nothing stirred. For a moment I thought I might have gone deaf, until I hear the sound of my own breathing. My heart was racing. The robot took two steps back, looked right, then left, and then walked calmly away into a thick patch of trees.

"You okay?" I asked my friend.

She nodded yes as she bent down to check on Kiki. We heard calls for help as nearby joggers rushed to the man. We approached too. We found him still unconscious on the ground, but breathing. He was covered in sweat and it looked like he'd pissed his pants. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, black hair, otherwise clean and heathy looking. 

"What should we do?" my friend asked.

"Not sure there's anything we can do," I said. Someone was already on the phone with the paramedics. "Did you see where the robot went off to?" I asked her.

"No, somewhere into those trees," she replied.

I couldn't see it. But given what had happened, I wouldn't have chased it even if I knew where it had gone. It really didn't like being recorded. The whole situation seemed so surreal. The robot itself didn't even look realistic. At first I thought it was made of cardboard, like a shitty halloween costume. Then the man on the floor mumbled something incoherently.

Everyone bent their still ringing ears closer to try and understand what he'd said.

"...das ist...ist..." he muttered.

I didn't catch that. I looked at me friend to see if she understood. She didn't either. At least he was beginning to seem somewhat lucid. The whole situation still seemed so unbelievable to me. Not only do robots exist, but they can incapacitate us just by emitting a sound. The movies in Hollywood got it all wrong. There was no need for bloody battles and bullets and guns and explosions. The robots were more civilized than that. Where did that one come from? It must have escaped from some lab. What would it do now? Run around like Frankenstein's monster until it ran out of batteries? Or maybe it was solar powered? If it were smart maybe it would find a way to charge itself using a power source for an electric vehicle late at night. 

I began imagining wild scenes and started to get carried away when all of a sudden the robot came back out of the woods. It wasn't alone this time though. An entire camera crew had appeared.

"...ist ein Witz," the man on the ground finished, opening his eyes and leaping up from the ground.

We'd all been tricked. It was part of some stupid TV prank show. I'll be damned. I looked at my friend and she looked at me and neither of us could believe it. The robot took his helmet off and revealed a laughing human face. All the film crew and the man on the ground were laughing. None of us were. We were still in shock, like when you wake up after a bad dream and you know you're safe, that it was only a dream, but somehow the fright still hasn't left you. They got us good. Just goes to show...

Anything can happen when you go for a walk. Anything.