The Perfect Duology is in the Bones

Duologies and trilogies are plentiful in the fantasy genre of literature; double-features and proper trilogies are common in cinema.  Until about a week ago, I’d never thought about whether or not non-fiction books could be read in terms of a pair or a trio — even when it’s obvious.  I finished reading Sue Black’s book Written in Bone a week ago and realized it and her previous book All That Remains would be the perfect non-fiction duology.  If you’d like a trilogy, start with John Bateson’s book The Education of a Coroner.

My favorite part of the human body is the clavicle, the collar bone.   I learned in Written in Bone that “[while] all primates possess a collar bone, it is rudimentary in many mammals and absent altogether in the ungulates, which include a variety of animals from horses to pigs, and even the hippopotamus,” and the reason that cats can squeeze into spaces that appear too small for their bodies is that they have “very rudimentary clavicles” (Black, 159).

Oh, and it’s not even a mandatory part of the anatomy.  Clavicles can break easily and puncture the “subclavian artery and vein,” and they can be “taken out as long as the muscles can be stitched to each other” (Black, 160).  The collar bone “is the first bone in the human body to start to form and it does so in the fifth week of intrauterine life…” (Black, 161).

If you want to see a good example of teamwork, look no further than your own body. Everything that you do requires a lot of coordination between many different parts of you, most of which you don’t (have to) consciously think about to achieve like standing, sitting, picking up an object with one or both hands or even your toes.  It takes “at least six muscles in your forearm to activate the wrist and the joints of the index finger and thumb” to perform the action of picking up a writing utensil with said fingers (Black, 228).

Now, consider everything going on inside of you that you never have to think about unless something doesn’t feel right.  That’s the closest any person is going to get to truly multi-tasking.

~!~

What am I reading now?  Charlotte Bronte‘s Jane Eyre (Signature Classics edition) and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  If you’ve ever been somewhere online where discussions of “scariest book you’ve ever read” happen, someone will inevitably mention it.  I’ve had House of Leaves for a while and decided to start it after finishing Written in Bone.  The book spends about fifty or so pages setting up atmosphere, narrators, and more tangible plot points that are creepy…and then page sixty-eight hits and jaw-drop.

I was reading in bed, and it felt like i was watching a horror movie where characters are chased or exploring abandoned, dark buildings.  Obviously, the scary factor increases for a reader who can visualize what they read, making it much more intense than it would be for someone who has no mind’s eye.  I read Jane Eyre during the day and House of Leaves at night.

I also have the Poe album which is a companion piece to the book.  Poe is Mark Z. Danielewski’s sister.

When You Get a Chance to Balk

It was the first game of the season
the beginning of sleepless nights
and endless mornings.

He ate too much cereal
and chewed up
too many strips
of beef jerky
or handfuls
of crunchy mushrooms.

He wanted his aim perfect
and as true as he could manage
if his memories were reliable
as more than what probably happened
on any given midday.

His lunch was late that day too,
his uniform clung
to his sinewy torso
like an exhausted flag
across a barricade.

He panted,
he cursed,
he spat out the disappointment
of a bad first impression.

His prize,
his kill
didn’t break eye contact,
fell right down
without a whimper
without a snort.

But later proved to be
unfit to eat
or stuffed
or transformed into
wall decor.

— yiqi 15 January 2024 12:31 am

~!~

The first line of this poem came to me when I was listening to Florence and the Machine’s song “Grace.”  The rest of the stanzas came to me while listening to “The End of Love.”

Pray Your Gods into the math equation

As I was doing my nightly dental routine and listening to Taylor Swift’s Evermore album, I thought about my favorite band, Toad the Wet Sprocket.  The lyrics to the chorus of their song “Pray Your Gods” flitted through the mind’s eye, and I thought it would make for great prompts in more Stable Diffusion-assisted illustrations.  The chorus is as follows:

Pray your gods who ask you for your blood
For they are strong and angry jealous ones
Or lay upon my altar now your love
I fear my time is short
There are armies moving close
Be quick, my love

Here is the song:

And here are the images I liked the most per these specific prompts and in the styles of Manga, Digital Art, and Fantasy Art:

“pray your gods who ask you for your blood”

“they strong angry jealous”

“lay upon my altar now your love”
“time is short be quick my love”

“armies moving close”
“calvary moving close”

I continue to be in awe.  If you are an illustrator and can actually draw any of the above images with pens, pencils and paper or (non)Adobe products, how long would it take you to draw one of visual aids?  Not a group of four, but a single image in any of the groups?

Cinematic Style Pulls Through

In my previous post I discussed playing around with Stable Diffusion and that the Cinematic style was not impressing me.  Well, after a few more rounds of ordering and adding words differently, I got that style to do what the others could not do: create a visual aid for my favorite Chinese idiom :

杯弓蛇影

“Bēi gōng shé yǐng” — literally, “cup bow snake shadow” or “自己嚇自己” (self-deception).  The full articulation is “為了不真實的事而心中驚異不安,” which means, “due to imaginary things, your heart is not at peace” aka “you’re stressing out over things that aren’t real.”

This representation is both literal for the words that I input, “cup reflection bow arrow serpent shadow,” as well as the meaning of the idiom.

And then I had to do one of the most popular Chinese idioms that everyone who’s ever taken a Mandarin Chinese language course will have learned:

人山人海

“Rén shān rén hǎi” — literally, “people mountain people sea,” which means “overcrowded, too many people.”

This one was done with the “people mountain people sea” in Manga style.  Here is the best image that is also a literal and idiomatic interpretation.

Lastly, I entered another phrase that many Mandarin Chinese learners would know:

滾蛋

“gǔn dàn” — literally, “roll an egg” or “go roll an egg,” which means, “go away.”

I entered the words, “go roll an egg,” and of the four Manga style images, this one was the best; it’s so cute.

My Drawing Skills

Or perhaps lack thereof.

It’s not as though I can’t produce anything of aesthetic response with a pen and paper… I’ve done it with both hands before and with nail polish, and yet I would not consider myself to be very good at drawing anything.  I can doodle, sketch, and draw a lot of abstract, swirly things, but I don’t value those abilities as much as my writing.  Inspired and encouraged by a former colleague, I spent a few days dabbling in Stable Diffusion to find out how well it would decipher bother esoteric and concrete phrases.

First try: “disappointing psyche” in the Neon Punk style.
~ I was amazed.  If I were a client or a creative operations coordinator, I could articulate, “we want neon magenta and purple lights, and think cover of an urban fantasy novel,” and I’m sure a human would get this overall tone, but would it look the same?  I don’t know.

Second try: “confused spirit” in the Fantasy Art style.
~ I liked this one the least.  The one in blue has the most perplexed expression, and they’re shrugging to some degree, hence “confused.”

Third try: “poignant confession” in the Anime style.
~ The middle picture on the left is the most literal interpretation, but I like the big one on the right the most.  It evokes the desired emotion.

Fourth try: “translucent goddess” in the Manga style.
~ I don’t know if Stable Diffusion knows what “translucent” means beyond “not dark,” but it sure knows “goddess” in Manga style.  I would never be able to draw something like this.  Three of them look like siblings, one of them looks adopted.
~ Is choosing “Manga” style the reason why they turned up looking like characters in Chinese mythology vs Greek?

Fifth try: “disappearing savior” in the Digital Art style.
~ I had not messed around with the negative prompts yet, so I may be wrong about this, but I don’t think Stable Diffusion knows what it means for something to “disappear” or to be “disappearing.”  The closest it could do was “discarded,” which is what these images signify to me…”discarded savior” rather than “disappearing savior.”
~ I’m imagining preliminary sketches for a role-playing video game.

Sixth and Seventh try: “cat periwinkle devil seduce/periwinkle demon seduction” in the Fantasy Art and Neon Punk styles.
~ Lisa Frank + spooky tales.

Eighth try: “messages to my sweetheart the drunk” in the Digital Art style.
~ I like that the bottom two images indicate the behind-the-scenes math was interpreting literally (sweetheart, drunk), and the top two images went for encompassing mise-en-scene.

My observations thus far:
~ I realized very quickly that “less is more.” Don’t say “downtrodden feline,” say “sad cat” instead. Ha!

~ I struggled with “unreliable narrator” — the Photography style churned out a woman posing for a camera…and a camera by itself.  What?  The Cinematic style resulted in something like stills from a classic Hollywood film with a ballroom and people in formal attire.  One picture had a man and a woman observing whatever was going on in the background that implied, “Oh, these two are not going to have identical memories from the events of this evening,” but she didn’t really have feet, so I decided it was a fail.

~ I understand more fully on a psychological level why some creatives may feel panicked or resentment towards AI generated art.  Imagine having spent all that time and money getting an art degree or pursuing any kind of formal education in it (or a lot of self-teaching in the last decade) when suddenly any random person with an internet connection a 6th-grade vocabulary can “orchestra-conduct” out an image that is as “pretty” or “cool” as the formally trained.

~ I also understand on a process level why a lot of creatives are less afraid and more excited about the possiblities.

~ I know I’m in the shallow end of the pool, bird bath even, when it comes to what Stable Diffusion can do.  I haven’t bothered with the Pixel Art of 3-D model style because I’m not yet curious what that would look like.  Clearly, I like the aesthetics of Fantasy Art, Digital Art, and Neon Punk…they’re more emotionally resonant for lack of a better term.

~!~

And now for something astoundingly different.  I’d done a Duck Duck Go search for my portfolio site because I didn’t feel like typing in the URL in the browser when I came across this post on reddit with my name in it and quoting part of an article I wrote for TCM, in the SAT subreddit no less:

Here’s the answer per SAT’s practice test:

This practice test quoted part of the last sentence I wrote in this article:

What?!  I am flabbergasted…. the irony of being in a practice SAT test when I didn’t score as highly as I hoped I would.  Seriously, it was not a source of pride.