Sometimes I don't have a lot to write about. Sometimes I need a break from The Internet Constitution (so I assume you do too) so I don't want it to be every single week, and prefer to have as many weeks between the series as I spent consecutively publishing about the idea. Content direction is something I always think about. Maybe I get distracted easily, but I'm constantly trying to improve what I'm doing, how I do it and what I offer to you.

The things I'm enjoying the most, and am most passionate about right now are (in no particular order):

• Working on the card game and making AI assisted art
• Opinions on random things going on in the world
• Live streaming
• Conversations with people about their lives and opinions
• Roasting coffee

The stories were supposed to be extended into January to go along with the remainder of the CSRQ content, but I can't figure out how to make them in a way that's interesting, funny and not potentially mean, so I'm not doing them anymore. They'll run through the end of 2023 and that's it. I'm also not going to do the lifting charts here because it feels like it's more pollution in the feed than actual value.

For the remainder of the year I will be streaming on Fridays by myself, getting back into a good rhythm of solo streaming, and that may include artwork creation (we'll see). Part of the reasoning behind that is that the holiday season is very busy, so I don't think I'll be able to get people on Fridays this month. I also have a trip next week, so I only really have 3 Fridays left this year, and two of them are during the heaviest family/party time of the year, and the last one is this Friday (but I might try to have someone on for some fun).

Starting after the new year I will be adding Wednesdays back into the streaming schedule at the same time as Fridays. I love streaming, and I feel like it will give me the opportunity to get more guests if I have another night available for them to appear. I will also be working on new short form content for YouTube and Rumble and micro-content for TikTok/Instagram Reels/YouTube Shorts based around the card game and dailoy news/politics (the entire point of the cards). The plan for exclusives here is expanding on that art creation and some of the jokes as well as some content that I'm not allowed to post on YouTube. For the most part, the Rumble exclusives will end up being just CSRQ updates, which are currently expected to run out at the end of January, unless they keep publishing and I can get more of their victim insider content.

Another set of exclusives here will continue to be the articles/blogs, the Monday streams, and polls and discussions around the card game. I might also start doing a lot more posting about roasting coffee if I can figure out how to do it well and if there's any interest there.

Long story short, 2024 will continue to be an evolution in my content creation, and as I get close to completing another revolution around the sun, I want to state how grateful I am for all of you, because without you I'd just be talking to myself, and that's a little nuts.

A few weeks ago I had no idea how to do anything with AI image generation except type in basic prompts into an online demo model and hope something came out of it that I liked, and if it didn't I would just keep hitting generate over and over again until I got something I wanted with minimal (if any) changes to my prompts.

Then I decided I wanted to do more, and learn the tools. So I installed Automatic1111 onto my computer and started playing around, and I made a lot of garbage. Then I did some reading about the different settings and add-ons like LoRAs, Embeddings and different base models, and I played around with those for a bit, and still made a lot of garbage. So I started looking for other people's prompts, playing with those in addition to the settings and tools I had to learn how they interacted with each other.

Mind you, I had already played around with the image to image function of the tool to do the Shad method of cleanup on poorly photoshopped images, and that actually worked well. What I started working on was actually creating something whole cloth from the AI tool alone without any outside intervention.

Up until recently, all my artwork had been done in Photoshop and Affinity Photo, including everything I had designed under the Ridgedale Brand name. I started using AI generation online for some of my thumbnails in the method mentioned at the beginning of the article, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to understand the tools, and after playing with other people's prompts, installing and tweaking LoRAs, adding new base models and embeddings, I started to get the hang of things. Then I stumbled onto an article that actually went into detail on building prompts, and there was a ton of great info in there that really helped me start to understand. I learned how to describe what I want, which requires more words and more specificity than I am used to, how to place my various descriptions in the right order to get what I want, and how to weight all of the above with the LoRAs and Embeddings to make everything come together. I went from poorly describing a goblin and blending it together with Chuck Schumer's head to make an image over the course of a few hours:

To being able to generate something very very close to what I wanted over the same time period using nothing but positive and negative prompts and one LoRA:

I won't go into too much detail on the process for these images, but for the Schumer goblin I had to do a lot of manual work in Affinity and in the AI tool to end up with what I got, where I was able to get a boat load of great images while creating that lizard woman, and this is just the best one in the process, and it was part of my learning process anyway, so there was tons of tweaking in the prompting to get it to what it is. The more I do it the better and faster I'll get.

When it comes to producing content for the card game that I'm working on, I will be using the mixed method. I want it to be AI assisted art, not AI art. And now that I have learned a lot more about the process, and will continue to do so, once I get all the pieces in place I'll be able to generate a lot of content very quickly, and up to the standards I want, which is far higher than I would have been capable of without this tool.

I will be talking about this process a lot more here and likely on the video channels because that's kind of where the content is going. It won't be the only topic, but it will be the primary replacement for the stories (which conclude at the end of December) and CSRQ when it finally finishes up.

If you want to be involved in some of the creative decision process, I've been putting up polls and having voice chat discussions in Guilded to bounce ideas off of other people. If you're a paid supporter here and you're not in the server, let me know and I'll invite you. If you're not a paid supporter, consider supporting and you can have a bit of a say in the process and see the polls.

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