Mallory's Camera

Not only has it been raining for the past two days, it's been cold! It's not even supposed to break 50° F today. I've been forced to haul the space heater back out.

My life continues to be ver-r-r-r-ry quiet. I don't lack for friends, but few of them live here. There are days when this is a source of agita for me, but fortunately, today is not one of them.

NightCafe gets no ❤️LUV❤️ from the Kool Kids, but I like it since I prefer bringing animated illustrations to life to so-called photo realism. Fantasy R Us!!!

Hilary Mantel is a bit rich for bedtime consumption. All those unfamiliar vocabulary words! "Persiflage," anybody? I mean, it's a great word, a perfect word, but who wants to read in bed with a book and a dictionary?

So, I've been putting myself to sleep with an old favorite: Pride & Prejudice.

And in the spirit of Pride & Prejudice, I scampered off to Marshall's yesterday to buy some long, flowery dresses that no self-respecting Regency heroine would ever be caught dead in, but hey! they were cheap.

I say "scampered." I really mean "limped." Because once in Marshall's, I felt as though I was going to faint.

Maybe I have COVID, I thought.

I never did catch COVID back when everybody else was catching it. Or maybe I did catch COVID but I was one of those asymptomatic COVIDers the CDC warned us about, out there insidiously infecting everybody else.

I'm not running a fever. But all those other symptoms—shortness of breath, hacking cough, traveling body aches, headache, extreme fatigue—were a check.

So, I bought the first three things I shoved into my shopping cart—fortunately, they all fit—and raced back home to do a COVID test.

Nope! Not COVID.

Maybe it is the the mysterious malaise that leveled BB & Flavia for three weeks. They actually went to a doctor. Verdict: a rhinovirus. A nasty rhinovirus.

Since the three of us were inhaling each other's carbon dioxide in a car not too terribly long ago, I'm gonna assume I have what they had.

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As a sidebar, I'll note that I do hate shopping for clothes, and I don't understand at all how anybody can possibly like it. I see loads of clothes I like, usually on actors on the various streaming entertainments I indulge myself with. But none of those clothes are ever for sale at the stores I can afford. The stores I can afford are filled with the most awful dreck in the most hideous colors and patterns, and the stores are lit up with migraine-inducing fluorescents, and the other shoppers are extras out of some colorized B-roll from Night of the Living Dead.

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I went to bed early and slept nine hours, and feel maybe 85% this morning, but I expect that to fade.

The only going-out-of-the-house thing I have to do today is Adrienne's meet-and-greet, which I volunteered to help her with.

I wish I hadn't!

Adrienne has delusions of being Nancy Pelosi.

The other day, she was introducing me to someone: "And here's Patrizia who does... uh... social media—"

"I designed your website," I reminded her tartly.

She never even thanked me for designing her website!

And then yesterday, she emailed me some statistics about food stamp cutbacks in Ulster County (severe) with the note: Lets look into this.

You look into it, be-yatch! I thought. I am not your fuckin' staffer.

I remind myself that this is a networking opportunity. Networking has never been something I'm particularly good at, subscribing as I do to the naive notion that human connections should be sincere & spring from the heart.

But it's never too late to learn.

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And speaking of learning...

Here's Today's Exciting AI Video!



Sora would not touch the medieval cats marginalia at all! I wonder if that's some weird kind of copyright hypervigilance?

So, it was back to NightCafe with some prompt tweaks. This prompt worked a bit more successfully than yesterday's, except that that the black cat is no longer turning pages and the strange hulking cat on the lower right keeps sprouting disturbing phantom limbs.

Everybody I know is going to Europe.

I am filled with FOMO because Europe! Culture! Museums! Ancient palazzi! Civilization balanced on crumbling plinths! The Camino de Santiago! Rivers flowing past castles! People you can't eavesdrop on in cafés because they are speaking in strange inflections with uvular "r"s!

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Well...

Not quite everyone.

There is that one extremely nice woman I know, 20 years younger than me, who was just diagnosed with a progressive neuromuscular disease that no amount of PT is ever gonna help her compensate for.

And, of course, all those people I read about in the paper—the Gazans being starved & driven from their homes, yes, and that steady torrent of Central American migrants at the southern borders.

But if you want to limit the sample pool to people who share my accent: all those once-highly paid computer programmers struggling to make ends meet by doing DoorDash because by September 2025, 90% of all computer coding will be done by AI. Those senior citizens in their 70s and 80s whose Social Security checks are being garnished because they owe on student loans, and Trump is relentless. (That planned $45 million birthday parade ain't gonna pay for itself!)

Those two last items have an odd kind of synchrony: Colleges & universities are still pushing computer programming as a career, and the best & brightest STEM students are still enrolling in that curriculum—and in the process, accumulating staggering amounts of student debt. Not putting two plus two together, these best and brightest!

I look at these things to remind myself: You have it pretty fuckin' good, girlfriend. And you don't have to fly out of Newark Airport!!!

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Anyway.

The creative high from making my little Mabel-the-Cat-meets-Aslan-the-Lion video lasted two full days. Not coincidentally, those two full days were also sunny & beautiful.

Ah, the thrill of pure imagination! Willie Wonka sings about it.

Then day before yesterday, it began to rain, and it's stayed grey and overcast ever since. The planet needs water, upstate New York is still officially in a drought, blah, blah, blah, but fuck this shit! STOP RAINING.

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I'm obsessed with the idea of making a successful AI movie.

Malcolm Gladwell's observation that you have to put 10,000 hours into something to get really good at it rings true to me.

So far, I have put maybe 30 hours into making AI videos, so it is not surprising my second attempt at AI video production was far less successful than my first.

Although when I put it up online, a singularly creative person I esteem highly texted me: What in the world is this ?? I ❤️❤️❤️ it!!!!!!

We Pure Imaginationists love our fanbase!

I've started playing with AI video generators! I texted back. 'Cause, you know: I don't waste enough time, so I need NEW ways to waste time.

For this one, I took an old 1920s photograph of the Lower East Side and tried to prompt the AI to show a woman walking down the street into the 2020s. What I REALLY wanted to do is turn the color up gradually as she enters the future—but AI won't colorize so I had to do that key frame by hand (rather garish.) Getting the gradual colorization would have required hand-coloring each of the frames: Wayyyyy too labor-intensive! Also, I couldn't find Yiddish street sounds, so I had to use Turkish street sounds.



My first two AI videos were done on NightCafe.

When I woke up last night at 2 a.m., I decided to play with Sora because I read somewhere that director Tyler Perry was so impressed by Sora that he canceled a planned $800 million expansion of his Atlanta-based film studio. He figured that within one year, Sora would have completely transformed the filmmaking industry.

The prompts I gave Sora tried to recreate a scene from my ongoing Work In Progress in which June Miller (better known to Henry Miller aficionados as Mara/Mona) walks away from the Orpheum Dance Hall in Times Square one night in 1932.

I couldn't get the time period at all! I don't know whether this is me being unequal to the task of making good prompts or the limitations of the AI.

But what's kinda interesting is that the character bears a marked resemblance to Uma Thurman who played June Miller in Philip Kaufman's 1990 movie, Henry & June.


This brings me up to 32 hours of AI video practice. Just 9,968 hours to go before I become a PRO! 😀

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Anyway, it is off across the bridge today to weed and plant tomato seedlings at the Community Garden. True, it is coolish. But I think we are done with the frost for the season.