The two-week grace period is now in effect.
Hello,
Please read the previous post for context. We're entering the final two weeks of NCL's operations, ending on January 15th, 2024. NCL will be permanently shuttered on January 16th, 2024, and the VPS that hosts this site (including all associated data) will be deleted. Our original plan laid out these two weeks to allow users to move their accounts elsewhere.
Local communities and their associated content will not be saved; the best option for users is to migrate to another instance and create new communities there. Users may wish to create a local backup of their posts for safekeeping. Users moving to a new instance may wish to use Lemmy Migrate, which allows subscriptions to be moved from your current account to an account on another instance. Any further questions can be directed to [email protected].
Thank you for a great 2023, everyone, and I
The End of NormalCity.life
Hello,
In my previous post, I outlined a detailed plan for the likely shutdown of NCL (NormalCity.life). The hope was that the post might encourage donations, alleviating the ever-growing financial burden of running NCL. The hope was that this and a few other issues would've sorted themselves out by December. Unfortunately, we are not in a better position today than when I wrote that first post. It's not an announcement I take lightly, but NCL is shutting down for good in January.
You can look back on that post for the specific plan we have in place for the shutdown, but I wanted to spend a little more time going into some of the reasons why NCL is ceasing operations. I suppose the best place to start is why NCL exists at all. In June of this year, Reddit had a significant upheaval concerning API pricing. If you recall, a sitewide protest resulted in much of the site being inaccessible for a significant period. People were upset with how the web
Even if a handful of people made small reccuring donations each month, we could keep the server running and ditch the timeline I've shared here. I'm seriously worried about the increasing server costs: I'm just a single person paying out of pocket, and yet we're on track to pass $50 per month in the foreseeable future. I don't really make enough to keep this running without some help; it was easy when it was less than $20 per month, but things have grown to the extent that NCL simply can't run on that tier of VPS anymore. NCL doesn't make any sort of money from running this (as it shouldn't), but it's also hard to justify the cost without support. I believe I've included our donation link if you'd like to pitch in. Any small donation, recurring ones especially, can help to keep us afloat. NCL has tried to stand out with more lenient moderation and an apolitical focus, which are uncommon in the Lemmyverse. I hope we can continue to fill that niche in the future, but we can't do it without help, unfortunately.
should know this already. :)
What in the gosh darn condescending non sequitur is that? I have a special kind of dislike for people who, instead of trying to promote learning for anyone and everyone at any stage, instead choose to ridicule people for having missed some trivial detail that has about as much in common with Bash as does COBOL (basically nothing). Web scripting is, unsurprisingly, its own skill, and it's very, surpassingly, extremely, stupendously, and obviously conceivable that someone could have years of Bash experience but only recently started putting around with scripting for things like API access or HTML parsing. But you should know this already. :)
It's a road on a man-made land bridge before and after this aqueduct. In this shot here, it's a bit hard to see, but the road is actually on a slight angle to make more room for the aqueduct. The walls around the road are only for this section, as out of frame the road is almost certainly on top of your bog standard land bridge.
I never remember this happening. Unless the Kazon make a return in S6/S7 (as I haven't finished those yet), the closest thing was the Silver Blood Harry™ (died with the rest of the duplicate ship) or the Deadlock Duplicate Harry™ that replaced the Harry that was killed when attempting to repair a hull breach.
Everyone knows the old rhyme, "Step in a cargo hold, break your back."
I did a reverse image search, and I guess it's by someone named Moosoppart.
The Future of NormalCity.life
Hello, regular users and passers-by,
NormalCity.life first came online some three months ago as a response to the Reddit protests that were taking place at that time. I wasn't really sure whether or not NCL would be a success, but I thought it would be worth the risk. We've had our ups and downs, especially with several initial configuration headaches and issues with spam accounts. We're still here, though, and plan to be online at least until the end of this year. That's really what I want to talk about, though, as server costs are still steadily increasing.
I host NCL in the cloud because it's faster and more secure than a honkey-tonk network configuration here at home. Of course, that comes with a cost. Initially, it was palatable for the small user base we had at that point. Now, for whatever combination of reasons, we've maxed out our storage again. If you noticed issues with the site today, that was the reason. I had to upgrade the plan to a higher tier, which means it costs mo
They even have a page about the past tense written in the past tense.
Isn't that a stylistic constraint of all Memory Alpha wiki submissions?
Ok, and?
We need to make the disrespectfully disinterested "Ok, and?" comment a thing on pics. It seems to parody the weird negative overtones regarding innocent content effectively.
I'm just glad that I can resell microphone windscreens as Tribble plushies if I ever need another source of income.
I had no idea FOSS tax software was a thing. Huh. I'll try and play around with it at some point and let you know.
Morton up in here spreading free salt.
Star Trek: Dark O'Brien
It's fine, the plot of the next (and all subsequent) episodes forgot about that for him.
Patching a newer version of the Youtube app resolved the issues with playback I was having.
Perhaps, but I sucked at touch typing when I was younger.
No idea; does autocorrect even exist in an inbuilt fashion on Windows? I've never really tried using anything like that.
Oh, and here's a one-off test I just did without autocorrection turned on. With a few more tries, I'm sure I could get up to 100+.
Next Stage
A promotional card from the 1989 DRK Next Stage! press conference. A prototype rally car made from officially-licensed parts was exhibited on a private course. This was several years before the final version was made available for sale.
SDXL 1.0 Grid: CFG and Steps
Prompt:
A modern smartphone picture of a man riding a motorcycle in front of a row of brightly-colored buildings.
Settings:
Rendered using various steps and CFG values, Euler a for the sampler, no manual VAE override (default VAE), and no refiner model. All images were generated at 1024*1024. This is using the 1.0 version of SDXL.
Summary:
Subjectively, 50-200 steps look best, with higher step counts generally adding more detail. A CFG of 7-10 is generally best, as going over will tend to overbake, as we've seen in earlier SD models. Prompting and the refiner model aside, it seems like the fundamental settings you're used to using will probably still hold true for SDXL. Granted, prompting is a bit easier for photorealistic outputs now, and the refiner model might allow you to use fewer steps for the initial generation with the base model.
Essentially Vaporwave
Since I was revisiting some of my attempts to use AI in my work, here's perhaps my very first attempt at combining vaporware with text-to-image generation. It's super messy and not really all that spectacular, but it's pretty cool to think that we've come this far in only two years. I mean, this (VQGAN+CLIP) was already impressive back in 2021, and it looks absolutely weird and incoherent next to even the first official public release of Stable Diffusion (from August 2022). This piece is one of those that I tend to ignore in my portfolio, as it's not all that great on its own, bit in with context, it helps to highlight the march of technological progress and changes to how I approach art in general.
Origami - Folds of the past and present.
https://normalcity.life/c/origami
A community about origami, on Lemmy. From what I can tell, this is the very first community of its kind on Lemmy; a bit surprising, if you ask me. I've been getting more into trying to fold my own origami designs, and I run the instance where this community is hosted. I guess you could say my stake in the community is two-fold, but I wish to build a community that's more than paper-thin. If you like creating origami or want to learn more about it, please stop by. I'll probably release the first of my freely-licensed designs here, assuming I can create anything that isn't an eyesore. It would be cool if others did the same, but a place to share knowledge and cool folds is the real end goal. So, that's really it: origami, but on Lemmy.
Abandoned
I believe I posted the revised version of this piece a while ago, but this is the original version. I checked, and it doesn't look like I directly posted this anywhere. There's another version I made using img2img with my dreambooth model that is marginally better. I'm always trying to combine ideas in new ways, and this one was more of a visual metaphor of how the appreciated aesthetics of vaporwave have changed over time. It feels like the indie photobased charm has largely gone away, save for a few places like our Reddit counterpart, r/vaporwaveart. The larger subreddit, r/vaporwaveaesthetics, has an affinity for glossy renders that are often a bit too clean and polished for my taste. I appreciate it when people try new things, and aren't afraid to stick with an art style they like, even if it isn't the most popular thing in the world. Still, vaporware has been around for long enough now that the tru
The Entry
Similar to The Gaze, this is a parody of Caleb Worcester's once-steadfast affinity with his formulaic art style that was designed to maximize revenue. Somewhat ironically, it seems that this art style is driving some traffic to this community here on Lemmy. I'm not saying I hate this art style, but I do think it's funny that even the first major public release of Stable Diffusion could nail it without much trouble. I think it goes to show you how unoriginal Caleb's stuff used to be. Heck, I even made a post ages ago on Reddit detailing how he had even failed to properly credit people when he used their CC-BY 3D assets. From what I can tell, though, he's straightened up his act and is really starting to produce some unique stuff, all in Blender.
In any case, this piece was one of a few initial tests I did with Stable Diffusion, even before the weights were made publicly
At Sunset
My goal is to share basically the entirety of my public-facing art portfolio; I think we might be close to the halfway mark. This is another experiment in minimalism from a few years ago; I believe this was from the summer of 2021. Nothing too crazy here, but I do revisit variations on the theme of flat colors and bold lines now and again.
Statue Garden
I believe this is my most recent piece (as of 7/13/23). A classic mismash of vaporware tropes into a basic composition.
Defederating Smaller Problem Instances
Hello,
I just wanted to let you all know that, due to potential legal issues arising from caching content from a few questionable smaller instances, we are defederating them based on our policy against illegal and sexually explicit material. While we generally adopt a policy of letting users on our instance do as they please, several smaller instances are venturing dangerously close to allowing CSAM material on their instances, which we'd like to distance ourselves from for legal and ethical reasons.
We won't mention the instances here by name to avoid sending them traffic, but they are fairly small, with <5k members. We may defederate other instances of this nature in the future, although this is something we will only do if it's deemed absolutely necessary. We only defederate instances based on exceptional cases that run counter to our instance-wide rules. We do not defederate instances for superficial reasons, like qualms with moderation practices or for mere political conte
HugeWave
A piece inspired by the cover of Tatsuro Yamashita's Big Wave album. A fairly low-effort thing I did ages ago to try and add a film effect on top of an image, which itself isn't all that amazing.
Stuff from the Other Angle
The Other Angle was one of the first video art pieces I made.
I made a background from The Other Angle, a view-from-cockpit video, by translating this background around behind an image of a cockpit to make it look a bit like a flight simulator. You can see the full video in my portfolio, which is fully CC0. Obviously, the inspiration for this piece was from Hiroshi Nagai. He has a few paintings of planes passing over cities at dusk/dawn, and I thought it would be fun to try and do a first-person adaptation. Even on its own, though, I think the background is fairly eye-catching.
Here's the cockpit image I used for that video. It's stylized and tweaked
Internet Exploration
Not much to say about this one other than it was one of my only attempts to create depth and shading using gradients. Mostly, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Updated to 0.18.1; Back to Open Registration
Hey,
Just wanted to say that the server was updated to the latest stable release, and everything appears to be working as intended. We're also back to open registration now that CAPTCHAs have been re-added. If you want to create an account and see what we're about, there is no longer a wait to do so.
Have a good one,
EuphoricPenguin22
Intelline
A bit of a sequel to Friendless Friends. This is one of the few posts I've received significant attention from on r/fakealbumcovers. All of the images I used to create it are obviously in the public domain if you're familiar with my stuff, and the whole piece is as well. This one and everything else can be downloaded for free at the link above.
Navigation
A piece from June of 2022. Loosely based on the album art of Navigator by Omega Tribe. From the pre-Stable Diffusion era of my AI-assisted work, where I was experimenting with stylizing photobashed images from Creative Commons. I used this tool, although Stable Diffusion's img2img feature and ControlNet have arguably made it obsolete. It is pretty fast to run on CPU, though, which might make it a fun filter for people with more modest hardware.
I made a few other pieces in this style outside of vaporware for art requests on r/drawforme, although any AI tool usage has been banned for some time there. The sheer irony of moderators dictating how people should be able to spend