snow with shadows and partly covered lawn ornament.

It’s been a while, trying to set up a workflow to add proper alt text and publish widely. Still working on it.

Winter at Mad Beaver

House Sitting in the New Year

Still trying to get some kind of posting workflow happening, very much a work in progress.

I’ve been down the AI rabbit hole with Stable Diffusion, using the AUTOMATIC1111 script- keeps things relatively easy to set up and update. What’s fascinated me most is the animation extension, Deforum. I’ve created a new Youtube channel for the experiments-
https://www.youtube.com/@webmadmansstablediffusionexper

There’s also some folders in my Junk Drawer-
https://sketchbin.webmadman.net/2022/stablediffusion/
https://sketchbin.webmadman.net/2023/stablediffusion/

I just finished this video for my main Youtube channel-

In putting the video together, and other exploring, I generated large number of images. I wanted to share a few here. The captions are the artists I prompted.

I’ll. hopefully, be posting more. Maybe dive into the workflow of these things.


AUTOMATIC1111 getting started- https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/wiki

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series The Dream

The people that communicated with me in the Dream were from the future. It was difficult for them to pull off affecting all the people in the world at the same time, but they also let me know that they would not be contacting people of the past again because it was making the future… complicated.

For a long time, they were only able to observe the past, without being able to affect it. What they discovered, was that people from our time period in particular, had little to no psychic defences. Part of it seemed due to individuals being psychically isolated from each other, our environment and even to ourselves internally- we “live in our heads”, relating to everything through constructed abstractions. This allowed the people from the future to influence us without us realizing we were being affected by something outside of ourselves- our obsession with being autonomous rational actors preventing us from examining, and questioning, the roots of our ration, giving them the opportunity to implant ideas that we assumed were our own. This, however, lead to unintended consequences.

Those consequences were not initially apparent. At first, it seemed like their actions had no real affect whatsoever, but they slowly started to realize what they had done. What they did didn’t affect their timeline, but rather, it created new timelines that started to grow in parallel to their own. Some of those timelines developed the ability to influence, and compete, with their own, a complicated turn, to say the least.

So the Dream was an attempt to nip the problem in the bud. To give us the heads up on how we may be being influenced and maybe develop some psychic defences against such influences.

As the Dream was ending, however, I got another impression entirely. I got the sense that the Dream was actually coming from one of the parallel timelines as an attempt to weaken the original one, so who knows where we’ll end up.

It has been a while since my last posting- things are finally starting to settle in after some much needed work on the back end of the server my site is on. So onward and upward!

There’s a new part of The Dream percolating in my brain, so that should be popping up soon.

Spring has sprung and I’ve been reconnecting with my camera.

At some point I’m going to be doing a post about Evolvotron (https://sourceforge.net/projects/evolvotron/). You can check out some of the things I’ve made with it on my Diaspora* profile- https://diasp.org/people/89b2dc1028d50132232400259069449e/photos

I’ve set up a profile on itch.io- https://webmadman.itch.io/ I will be putting more experiments up as they emerge.

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series The Dream

My experience of the Dream came from the imaginal realm, I suppose- what communicated with me was all the lesser known and forgotten stories. The place of Dreams isn’t far from the space created between the story teller and the listener, and the membrane can become porous at times.

It’s really hard to get everything that isn’t something, to come together to be something cohesive, so the Dream was a bit of a fluke, and isn’t likely to happen again, the stories managed to say, in unity, through the magic of the Dream. These were all the stories with nuance, ambiguity and raw situational clarity. Deeply personal and specific (in-jokes and asides with a crowd of one), to draw that into a single declarative voice was definitely a one shot deal.

The Dream was a warning about the story of the conquering hero, and how it was absorbing and erasing all the other stories. A while ago, the conquering hero got the impression that if enough people believed in it, it would become “real and immortal”, and so, it set about to make itself the only story told- to turn all tales into a simplistic battle of good versus evil, the world reduced to binary black and white, with itself at the centre as saviour.

There was a mounting crisis that had brought about the need for the Dream- as the conquering hero has been realizing that it will never be ‘real’, that nothing based on life is immortal, in the physical sense, all the stories are turning bleak and lifeless. The realization of it’s own inevitable end has lead the conquering hero’s story into a destructive arc of dominance and annihilation.

The Dream, for me, was a plee to get us to see past the centre and realize there’s more to the world than this flattened Earth.

The trick, it would seem, is how to dis-empower the conquering hero without turning them into a villain and repeating the same story, yet again.