Still Winter

 

Squeezing in a quick one.

I went out on Sunday night. We had a good time. My initial intention was to leave after an hour or so. Instead I stayed until 23:00. The owner of the restaurant had replaced the candle at the table twice due to it melting. One friend I hadn't seen for several years - three perhaps. It was nice to catch up and see a familiar face. It wasn't uncommon for us to take lunch together when we were still working on the same team, or to occasionally run into one another around Neukölln. He has an easy disposition, light and humorous. His daughter must be at least three now, and he's got another one on the way. My other friend, who still works at the same company as me, also just had a child four months ago. Naturally, the question circled back to me about when I'd be having a child, or if I wanted to.

The answer isn't clear to me. If you'd asked me three years ago I would have confidently stated that I wasn't interested. Now, I'm not so sure. There are many reasons not to have a child. Chief among them is perhaps how many children are currently orphaned and looking for a home. People seem generally quick to adopt a dog facing the same circumstances, but seldom a child. A close second is the ecological crisis we're currently facing. Something seems wrong about bringing a child into a world that's collapsing under the weight of unchecked capitalism. Then there's cost. Not just financial cost, but the opportunity cost of having a child. There are, I'm sure, many sweet and beautiful moments to experience as a parent, moments which can be experienced in few - if any - other ways. These are appealing to me, and I think fatherhood would offer ways to grow and learn that are unique and special, but couldn't the same be said of any sort of time-intensive and challenging specialization? I guess the jury is still out.

The weather is again wet and rainy today. It's still winter. Still gloomy. Berlin's seasons contain within them micro-seasons, false starts, false endings, and are famously fickle and inconsistent. Tomorrow is a holiday, International Women's Day. The stores will be closed in celebration. Soon I'll need to run outside into the rain and trek down to the supermarket for a few things before my final afternoon meeting. 

I've been digging myself deeper into Stable Diffusion, learning about how to train custom models on a specific subject - in this case, myself. Who else do I have 20 photographs of that I could use as a dataset? Essentially what you do is assemble this group of images (in my case I could actually only find 10 decent photos), crop them to 512 x 512 pixels, run them through a computer program that uses black magic to learn the patterns of your face and hair and eyes and profile and any other defining attributes of how you look, and it's then able to spit out a model you can use to prompt with. For example, I can ask it to draw me as a wizard, or a renaissance-era nobleman, Super Mario, the president or a monk. You can even ask it to imagine you as a famous figure and watch with wonder as it blends the two people together into one. Some of the images it creates are of frightening, eerie accuracy, while others are laughably obscene, ridiculous and absurd. 

I haven't made any progress on my graphic novel in weeks. A determination needs to be made about whether to switch from Midjourney to Stable Diffusion for completing what's left. Doing so will create a dramatic, glaring shift in style that may be too distracting, maybe even alienating to the reader. Then again, the way the art has been thus far could be said to be alienating due to the book's characters not maintaining consistent appearance or clothing. Each time our protagonists look slightly different, creating a subtle and overt sense of disorientation that never leaves. At first I enjoyed this quality, believing it to be dreamy and fantastical, pleasantly imperfect. Now, after having seen what Stable Diffusion is capable of, I feel hamstrung going back to Midjourney.

Out of time.