davidd's A DOLL A DAY 2023

I think they need to be let out of their box to have adventures!

TrueFan wrote:So, is Janie your favorite or your least favorite? She gets to do all the "fun" jobs.

We shouldn't have "favorites," right? But whenever I go looking for someone to "help out" with a "project" (or photo shoot), it seems like Janie is always there, looking enthusiastic and ready to try anything.

It looks like a wonderfully un-people-y beach.

Alliecat wrote:It looks like a wonderfully un-people-y beach.

Appearances can be deceiving. Selective camera angle, etcetera etcetera. It's not, like, shoulder to shoulder beach chairs and umbrellas, but it's not un-people-y... except before 7am, when all you'll see are a few people with surf-casting rods fishing.

---

19 January - A Doll A Day 2023:



... which turned out to not be the root cause of the problem. Oh, no, it couldn't possible be anything as simple as a thermostat or even a heating element.

Who does 'dive shop guy' look like? An actor? Ugh I can't place the face!

He looks a bit like Keanu Reeves

CatDragonStorm wrote:Who does 'dive shop guy' look like? An actor? Ugh I can't place the face!

It's an older action figure head, from around 2003 or so, and was from a line of historic Napoleonic-era figures from a company called DiD (Dragon in Dreams).

---

22 January - A Doll A Day 2023:

On "trash day," Triv and Janie found an old travel case left out on the curbside, so of course they dragged it home to look it over more closely.



No, the "Amelia Earhart" labeled travel case did not actually belong to the famous aviatrix. Earhart licensed her name to a line of luggage beginning in the early 1930s. The brand has passed through a variety of owners over the decades, and still occasionally appears on travel bags. This particular travel case appears to be a style manufactured by the Orenstein Trunk Company of New Jersey, USA, and dates between 1943 and 1950. (Credit to the Henry Ford Museum website for that helpful information.)

Unfortunately, in addition to having a musty, slightly moldy interior and corroded hardware, a hole of about four inches in diameter has been punched through the bottom side of this travel case, tearing through the canvas outer cover and splintering all the way through the plywood core to the inside.

Too bad!

I wonder if you could rework it in to some sort of streampunk wonder?

Hope you got your hot water fixed. The girls might want a shower after digging through the trash...

Alliecat wrote:Hope you got your hot water fixed.  The girls might want a shower after digging through the trash...  

I hope it's fixed, too!  The problem has not been fully addressed, but it is at a point of "it's working so don't mess with it" which is good enough for now.

---

23 January - A Doll A Day 2023:

I wish I was on that beach. Or any nice warm beach not here.… As I sit waiting for the latest northeast gale to fell another tree on top of my garden thanks to my neighbour’s destruction of the windbreak.
Enjoy it.

Alliecat wrote:.… As I sit waiting for the latest northeast gale to fell another tree on top of my garden ....

It's unfortunate that you live downwind of the new noisy neighbor.

---

24 January - A Doll A Day 2023:


Janie and Triv finally finished tacking up the planks, or pickets, on the fence they have been repairing, making sure to leave a a portal for Gabby, the neighborhood cat, so she can continue to make her daily rounds unimpeded.

25 January - A Doll A Day 2023:


Who needs dolls or action figures or even cameras when "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) image generation applications can create pictures of anything?

The two images above and the one below were all spit out by a free online AI app called Dall-E2 in response to a few typed-in verbal prompts.

Nah, I think lots most of us will still enjoy actually handling dolls.
I can't figure out what the thing at the front of the box is supposed to be?

Alliecat wrote:Nah, I think lots most of us will still enjoy actually handling dolls.
I can't figure out what the thing at the front of the box is supposed to be?

Yeah, the novelty of the AI art apps is already wearing thin for me. I'm sure they will continue to improve, though. Essentially, AI generative art is just another, fancier iteration of Photoshop. There is an option for most of the AI art apps to upload an existing image for the app to use as a starting point.

I think the thing in the front of the box is supposed to be a skull, although I suppose it could be a giant maggot!    The AI art apps are often very poor at rendering faces.

---

26 January - A Doll A Day 2023:

Who needs actual dolls... or a camera?

I used "Pullip doll" with some additional modifiers as the text prompt for the AI generative art app Dall-E2 to generate these images.


I left the "color bars" watermark in the lower right corner of these images, which is the only identifying mark I can see that identifies images like this as being fully computer generated by a free online image app. It's easy to blur out or remove the watermark.

The EXIF information (embedded photo information available on most unedited or moderately edited digital images) includes:

User Comment - Made with OpenAI Labs

The images aren't perfect, but most of them would pass as being "real dolls" at a quick, casual glance. These images are generated with a "free" version of an online app, and I used only minimal prompts with a few words.

There are more sophisticated "consumer level" AI art apps available -- MidJourney is popular, and StableDiffusion is considerably more sophisticated, offering far more options for fine-tuning inputs, and even accepting specialized plug-ins to optimize the app for specialized image generation.

The commercial future for digital illustration and even for photography looks as though it might soon become extremely limited if nearly anyone can create cool, photo-realistic images using freeware or low-cost "pro-sumer" apps.

ugh nooooooo

I remember when digital photo manipulation [which I still hate] began threatening to take over from “real“ film photography… I was very resentful because it was like cheating, and they were often competing in the same contest category. I still think most people who play with the enhancements nowadays don’t know good basic photography and overcook everything. I’m not going to get up on my ear about digital dolls though.
I kind of like the little mutant Blythe, and I would even buy maybe the blue hair one and certainly the one with black/blue hair and turquoise eyes. I think she’s cute.
*looks again*
Like, can someone make me a custom of this doll??

Alliecat wrote:I still think most people who play with the enhancements nowadays don’t know good basic photography and overcook everything.

Yeah, an example of real-but-not-really photography is "astro-photography" with long exposures, noise reduction, multiple layering, and extensive enhancement that is giving people unrealistic expectations of what The Milky Way looks like in a "dark sky" environment.

Good luck finding a "dark sky" environment anywhere anymore. But that's a subject for a different rant.

Here's a sloppy photo with deliberately overcooked colour and contrast for your amusement, gussied up with saturation and contrast adjustments and several iPad app effects:

---

27 January - A Doll A Day 2023:


And for good measure, how about a "generative art" version using a photo of the Gavin doll as a prompt:

They look like pound shop dolls! The two in the police uniform have a sort of melty texture them which prevents them looking completely real but the rest I would have believed were cheap knock offs but still plastic and not AI. Its both a bit fascinating but creepy.