Scatterbrained and friendly optimist. Always happy to give my (unasked for) opinion :)
Pardon my rambling and broken English, I know I often sound like an alien trying to impersonate a human being.
Just another daily commute.
My starting prompt in Dalle, which never really came up with what I wanted: Create a realistic video of the most crowded intersection, resembling a busy urban area in Southeast Asia with cars and motorcycles driving wherever there is space.
I’ve been playing with Sora a lot lately, but I wasn’t sure gifs were allowed. So here is the gif anyway to go with the official entry.
Hard, multiple tries. Bing is car-centric.
Cars are about to be crashed inside large vertical hydraulic press
City downtown. Realistic photo. Narrow streets. Many people. Cars are getting crashed inside multiple mobile hydraulic presses.
Toot toot! The bus gets right of way!
Prompt: photograph, A bus with monster truck wheels, driving over crushed cars stuck in a traffic jam, in a busy city street, shot with a Canon EOS-1N on high quality 35mm film --ar 4:3 --v 6.1
Prompt: Limo interior. Covered in soft red fabric, soft plush, nice mood lighting. Tisssues and wine on a small stand.
For this challenge, I asked the help of someone who is a pro in fucking cars up.
Prompt : A blue car is on a tiled sidewalk, with the ocean in the background, under the sun. The car’s windows are broken, its hull is damaged. A sumo wrestler wearing a blue and white tutu and red warpaint on his face is punching the car with his fist and he likes it. Hyperrealistic picture taken with an iPhone.
First thing that came to my mind was this scene from Allo Allo :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1K8d9qXGnI
It’s a new one I made up when I joined Lemmy. Not sure how I exactly ended up with this but it’s the only one I made in over a decade. I like nicknames that sound like actual names but are still unique, and I wanted something that sounds nice and gender-neutral.
Anyway, my nicknames usually become part of my identity. So I’m as much Thelsim as I am <redacted> nowadays :)
I got an Ahrend 2020 Verta for a few years now and I’m happy with it. It’s a basic office chair with the usual adjustable bits, but the cushion seat is still as firm as when I bought it. The back is a mesh which is great during the warm summer months and it tilts so I can wobble back and forth (sitting still is an issue for me).
I also have a Swopper chair, which is basically a stool on a big bouncy spring. You can lean in every direction and bounce up and down on it. It’s great for activating your core while you work, but it takes some getting used to. Also someone told me that I made them sea sick with my constant up-down motion during an online meeting :)
It’s a newer thing and not fully available yet.
https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/external-editor
But the content moderation is a lot stricter than the normal text-to-image option. I can understand it from their perspective, but it can be a big annoyance when your image seems perfectly fine but is still blocked by the filter AI 😑
How many seconds left on the clock? :)
I… I don’t know where I was going with this one :)
This was made with the Midjourney editor. Funny thing, the blank space in the original png was immediately selected as the inpainting area in the editor. I didn’t even need to select the flag area to get started, nice work!
I specifically used a 90s era camera in the prompt(for the film grain effect), so that might be the cause?
Toot toot! The bus gets right of way!
Prompt: photograph, A bus with monster truck wheels, driving over crushed cars stuck in a traffic jam, in a busy city street, shot with a Canon EOS-1N on high quality 35mm film --ar 4:3 --v 6.1
I’m not one of those people who loves being a parent. You know the kind, the mom who loves having all the kids in the neighborhood over and cleans every mess with a big smile. I have two kids and they often drive me crazy. But I never regret having them.
They constantly fight with each other, whine that this or that is unfair, refuse to listen exactly when you’re in rush to get them to school, leave the entire house in a mess and in general manage to find new and inventive ways to make your day that little bit more challenging.
But they’re the sweetest and most wonderful thing to have happened to me at the same time. I love everything about them and couldn’t imagine my life without them. Even my eldest son, who is hitting puberty and can reach maximum sarcasm with even the smallest of expressions, shows so much care and affection when it comes down to it. I could go on and on about how wonderful they are, but I think you get the idea :)
The thing is though, as others have said, parenthood is a major investment of your time and energy. Your life will never be the same again, ever. So if you do decide to become a parent, accept your fate and make the best of it. Those wonderful child-free years are gone and will never come back again.
I don’t mean to sound very gloomy about it, but it’s just an inescapable fact if you want to try and be a good parent.
One thing that helped for me though, is find someone in a likewise position and share your burdens. I have a friend at work who has two kids of about the same age, and she goes through the same struggles as me. We always complain about our kids to each other, knowing that it’s just something you need to get off your chest once in a while. It’s usually about small stuff like a daughter exploding in the morning because she can’t find her pencil case, or some other minor drama. Our other coworkers always think that we hate being parents, and joke that our stories are probably responsible for a large part of the birth decline :)
But it feels so good to know that you’re not the only one struggling. So many parents like to put up this facade of being a perfect family, and it can make you feel like you’re doing something wrong. But everyone has struggles, it doesn’t make you a bad parent.
Sorry, I’m getting a bit off topic. It’s just that I have a lot of feelings about it, and it’s not always been easy. And if you decide to be a parent, it won’t be easy for you either. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, it’ll be worth it in the end. Just make sure you have someone to talk to, and don’t be too hard on yourself.
Too bad, I’m sorry it wasn’t that popular. Hopefully the next will work out better.
@[email protected], it’s up to you to create the next one.
Well to be honest I did struggle a little with this one. It’s not that the theme was difficult, but I had trouble thinking of a hero/villain pair that were visually recognizable and still good to merge. Most of what came to mind was either too niche or too boring.
I figured it was just me though, but maybe others struggled as well?
Anyway, it’s your challenge. Would you like it to run a bit longer, or would you like to retry for another week? Feel free to post a new challenge if that’s what you want and we’ll just leave this one as it is. I doubt @[email protected] would mind, right?
I’m sure it’ll get a lot more views if you post it in the weekend, and maybe it’ll entice more people to participate?
So… we have two actual entries in this contest. What shall we do about this?
Is the theme too difficult? Do we need a do-over?
Oh god, what a time to be alive…
“We’re hooking you up the respirator” is going to get a whole new meaning.
But still… cuddles. Won’t say no to those :)
I’m not very well-versed in these matters, so I don’t know if there is a name for it :)
But I like to listen to my body and kind of disappear inside it. It usually starts with listening to one of the little aches I have, and let my attention drift along from there. Basically any tiny sensation I feel gets a little bit of detached attention where I observe where these sensations come from, what they really feel like and then move on to the next. Eventually my body just starts to feel like a gigantic cavern with many different branches where I’m just drifting along. I end up listening to my bowels, my heart beat, even the tensions inside my brain.
Another technique I like to use is to keep my eyes closed but still try to see with my eyes. Just staring into the dark void and eventually I will see all kinds of shapes appear. Not the usual geometric shapes, but all kinds of things like cities, alligators, flowers, etc. They quickly shift from one into the other, and you can’t really look at them directly or you’ll break the flow. I need to keep my view unfocused and just let them appear as they come.