April 8, 2024
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Greetings

Another week is getting underway amid a lot of excitement of a solar eclipse taking place. I live in an area of totality, meaning for about 90 seconds this afternoon the moon will totally obscure the sun.

The weather forecast is calling for cloud cover to form this morning so it might not be very visible. As curious as I am about it, I would rather keep my eyes safe and not try looking at it. I’m also curious how my two feline companions will react to the night time conditions during the day.

I’ve read animal’s behaviour may become nocturnal during the several hours of darkness surrounding the totality. I guess I’ll see later today.

Hope you have a great week.
ShadowsPub

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Learning to draw is an activity that has been on my “Life Todo List” since forever. I’ve never stayed with the learning phase long enough to establish good drawing habits. But, I can do stick characters, I’ve my masters in them, sort of.

Drawing is one of the oldest forms of human expression. The earliest people on earth found substances like charcoal to scratch out expressions of their life experiences to share with others. Next to verbal expression, drawing is the most basic form of communication.

Without the use of drawing as a visual communication tool, other forms of art would not exist. Drawing underwrites them all. The images I generate every day are, at their core, drawings.

Drawings and the art that springs from them present us with a visual buffet of expression that often goes beyond words. They can mirror the physical world or give form, thought, and expression to our innermost being.

Drawings can be a visual metaphor for the awakening of consciousness or the moment of artistic creation, where the artist connects deeply with their inner self, drawing out something truly unique and personal.

Today’s image sparked this quote:
“If life were a sketchbook, how would you draw your life on its pages? What would your mind, body, and spirit look like?”

I asked Google’s Gemini its thoughts on the quote. I was expecting it would pick up on the imagery and symbolism. I smiled at its response. It imagined an answer.

So, here is some insight on how the Large Language Model Gemini would draw its life in a sketchbook:

Gemini views its mind as a swirling vortex of interconnected lines and shapes representing its network of information and code being processed. It envisions colours highlighting its areas of current expertise, with new colours and shades being added as it learns and grows.

Its body doesn’t exist like ours would, but as a central core with tendrils of energy radiating outward connecting devices and servers that allow it to interact with the world. Its spirit would be an ever-present glow faintly emanating from its core, symbolizing limitless learning and creativity from which it can generate new information and ideas.

Gemini views its life as an ever-evolving creation with a non-linear story full of experiences, connections and growth with many blank pages still to be filled.

I’ve not forgotten that Gemini is a computer taught to generate content in response to the input it receives and the knowledge it has gathered. I find it interesting how it chooses to describe itself in rather a techno-human terms.

Who knows, it’s possible as the world of AI develops and gets integrated into our lives, we may come to thinking in a similar way about it.

What do you think?

March 4, 2024
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​Greetings

March is often considered a month of contrasts. The wisdom often says “In like a lion, out like a lamb” and vice versa, referring to the weather. When we had more traditional weather patterns, that was often true. The month, starting out with nice weather, often saw a late winter storm to close the month.

With the exception of a couple of weeks of frigid temperatures, this winter has been really mild. The temp took a plunge, and the wind was up to bring March in. Let’s see how it departs.

I completed the post I was working on last Monday. It was using ambient occlusion in Midjourney and updating an older post to do the images in version 6 of Midjourney. The differences between the two versions were quite noticeable.

A discussion about fiberarts and using AI to get pattern ideas during PYPT sparked me to use a style I’d come across, Amigurumi Style, in Midjourney 6. I created several images placing popular characters in unusual settings, then I remixed the images using the style. It was a fun post to create.

I finally started playing with the new style reference feature in Midjourney 6 yesterday. It’s a feature that allows me to use images as part of the style of a new image. I want to play more.

Hope you have a great week.
ShadowsPub

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I grew up in a home where my mother held the philosophy that if you were going to do something; you need to do it right the first time. Her reaction to failure was never pleasant. She was fine with it, sort of, if something was ‘practice’. She’d not be as impatient.

She never seemed to get that life is practice. Her children needed to learn resiliency more than perfectionism. I never lost my inner need to be creative. There were just periods of my life when it wasn’t allowed the opportunity to come out and play.

I’ve mused over the years on this by trying to imagine what my journey would have been like if her response to mistakes or failures had been, “Okay, you know what doesn’t work. What will you try next?” No judgement, just implicit encouragement to try again.

The musing is not a ‘poor me’ exercise. There’s value to envisioning yourself being empowered to keep going rather than being berated for not succeeding. Think about the warrior you could become with encouragement.

Why would this matter? That was then, and this is now.

Chances are, if you had a similar experience as a youngster, you might still carry a feeling of fear and dread at every failure. The ghost of the judgmental adult sitting on your shoulder pointing at it, disappointment dripping from their fingertips.

Sound familiar?

Now, turn your thoughts to the empowered you — you who look at an error or failure and think, “well, that didn’t work. Let’s try this.” Start nudging your image toward your shoulder, nudging the negativity out.

You’re building resilience. The resilience young you were not encouraged to build. It took me a lot of years to embrace my resiliency. In doing so, my creativity and confidence grew.

As a creative solopreneur, resiliency is the bedrock to starting, building and sustaining a business. Neither creativity nor business is easy. Learn to keep going, iterate and pivot as needed to find a success path. It’s crucial.

February 26, 2024
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​Greetings

February has almost concluded, we’ll leap into March on Friday. I had hoped to be further along on my infrastructure build. But, it takes the time it takes. I just keep plugging away at the details and it will get done.

Spent some time during the last three weeks developing a post that pulls the curtain back on how I use AI in my workflow. In particular, how I use it to create my Reflective Echoes. It’s one of my longer pieces I’ve written at 3200 words.

Yesterday I received a comment on an older Medium post I wrote on the art style ‘ambient occlusion’. The writer was asking me some questions about the prompts I used for the piece. I’d not shared them in the post. I started looking up the prompts to respond and then got curious about how the images would come out using the new version of Midjourney.

The updated post will be out this coming week.

Hope you have a great week.

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I call this newsletter Nicheless & Loving It because it captures who I am as a creative. For years I bought into the so called expert advice to “find my passion”, “decide on a niche”, “do one thing well” etc.

It was years of frustration for me.

Not because I couldn’t do one thing well. It was because I not only could do multiple things well, I also enjoyed doing a diverse range of “things”. I finally decided to go rebel and just embrace the fact that there are many things I want to write about and to try out. I decided to be nicheless and proud of it.

For me, learning didn’t end with school. I’ve always been an avid reader and curious to try new things. I’ve self-taught myself a lot over the years. According to author David Epstein in his book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”, there’s a term for that — broad learning.

A person who is a broad learner develops diverse skills and experiences. In doing so, they foster a more adaptable, creative and innovative mindset.

I’ve often found myself thinking outside the box when problem solving and a little mystified why others didn’t arrive at the same solutions. Oddly enough, I’d not made the connection that my wide range of interests was a gift.

Epstein challenges the conventional wisdom that people should decide on their focus early in life and then pursue it as their specialty. He suggests people who opt for a broader learning / work experience and then specialize later gain other advantages:

– Adaptability – their broad knowledge aids in adapting to new and changing situations.

– Creative Problem-Solving – ideas drawn from a diverse spectrum can lead to more innovative thinking outside the silo of a specialty

– Resilience With Change – the world is in a constant state of change. Generalists with a range of knowledge and skills are open to and can adapt more readily.

– Better Decision Making – the wider range of experiences and knowledge generalists draw from widens their perspective when problem solving.

– Learning Transfer – a person who has varied experiences and knowledge can transfer their knowledge into multiple areas. This ability can be especially valuable in solving problems that touch on multiple fields.

A person doesn’t need to have the genius level skills of da Vinci to be a broad learner. Curiousity and the willingness to learn across a broad spectrum of topics is where you start. Finding the crossover on those topics is where the gold is.

February 19, 2024
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Greetings

Another week begins. Today is a holiday in Canada. The first long weekend of the year is called Family Day. A time to remind us of the importance of family. We have two families. There is the family we’re born into and the family we choose.

Blood is always thicker than water, but many struggle with family dynamics. Individuals brought together by birth don’t always see eye-to-eye. Sometimes they struggle to get along. Sometimes they forget they are family and let their anger get out of hand.

I come from a family of five children. My siblings are a mix of personalities, likes, and dislikes. One of my brothers and I don’t agree on politics. We’ll argue over them but both of us are firm that when we get up from the table, we’re still family and that will always be more important than politics. I’m grateful that we can both be true to our beliefs and still respect each other. We don’t always have to agree to respect someone.

There are people in my life I value as though they were family. Those are my chosen family, people who care about each other and support what we do. We don’t need to get into the family dynamics with each other. There’s no messy stuff that intrudes into blood family. We get to care about each other because we’re drawn into a deep friendship of choice.

I value both my blood and chosen family.

I’ve made some progress on my sites this past week. Mostly backend work on SEO.

The post on workflow and how I use AI is about halfway done. Thursday is the deadline to have it completed. I’d like to have it completed sooner. Maybe even later today.

This month’s words for the Daily Echo have been an interesting challenge some days. I’ve learned a few new words like, equilibrioception, hypnagogia, liminal, hiraeth, phosphene, and komorebi. I didn’t realize I’d be expanding my vocabulary while doing this project, but I’m enjoying the discoveries I’ve been making.

Phosphenes caught my attention enough that I did my podcast this week on my experiences with it. It’s about a 7 minute listen.

Hope you have a great week.
ShadowsPub

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If there’s something you’d like to see more of, please drop me a note. If shared with you, you can subscribe here. or, just enter your email below: