The first Friday of the month is coming like a BattleMech, and I will be at the local Games & More on North Broadway from 5PM to close to give you a taste of BattleTech Alpha Strike.
I bring everything you need to play, so all you have to bring is yourself.
Yourself and clothes. Please. I will consider it a gift.
See you at 5PM on Friday if you want to play.
Happy Labor Day to all of you.
Especially a Happy Labor Day to you who are laboring on labor day.
Not everyone gets a three day weekend for Labor Day. Not everyone gets to BBQ hot dogs on Labor Day. Not everyone gets to go to a Labor Day protest.
The world we live in is built on those people who labor on Labor Day, just like any other day.
Happy Labor Day to all of you.
Lifeboat was a story I wrote for an anthology about families in war, and how different races come together to form odd bonds. The primary characters were soldiers from different races in the middle of a war enjoying a quiet moment for a good natured game of “I Spy” when the spacecraft they are in loses all power. I went into it not wanting to have a fight. A crisis, yes, and to explore how they reacted to it, but I didn’t want any weapons fire or killing anything. I had a plan for it, but the final scene caught me by surprise when I wrote it. I had to go back and slide in references to make it seem like I planned it all along. Authors can be crafty in that way when it comes to telling people we knew what we were doing, when we were really just letting the words flow and finding out where they went in real time.
The background I used for the jackofharts substack was both the most complicated and the easiest one I have made for my substack posts. I went to dezgo dot com like I did with the others, and asked several of the render engines to give me a holographic redhead with green eyes and an alien dress standing in front of a futuristic wall. A few more odds and ends to tweak it, but every single engine I tried failed spectacularly. They could give me the girl, or the background. Not both. Not certain exactly why, but the more arguments or prompts you add to an engine, the more chaotic the results get. I asked them for too much, and they couldn’t give me any of them.
So I went into Flux and asked it for a military themed futuristic compartment with a hatch. A few more arguments, but that is the general drift. Now Flux is one of the most amazingly beautiful art engines. Spectacular results, even if it is harder to focus and more random than others. I ran maybe fifty generations through, loved most of them, saved them, and sorted through until I found one that really did what I wanted. Then I went into Envy and asked it for a hologram of an anime redhead with green eyes and an alien dress with NO BACKGROUND. That is an option at dezgo dot com. Once again, there were a few more prompts, but that is the general idea, and I ran maybe half a dozen images through before I got what I wanted. Envy is real good about that. If you can tell that engine what you want, it will give it to you real quick.
I then brought both images into my ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro 7 that I still use and placed the girl on top of the background, in a different layer so I could manipulate everything. Increased the transparency so you can see the background through her, and added the title and my name. It maybe took a day to generate the images I used. It was figuring out how to get what I wanted that was the challenge, but once I changed my methods, it came easy and quick.
The Storm Breaker background I created for my Jackofharts substack was another case of a long and relatively difficult process. As usual, I wrote a series of prompts that fit the story. My original prompts were trying to get all four characters in the story, but those created wildly unusable results. Most render engines break down when you attempt to use more than one character. And the more characters you add, the more the results break down. So I settled on just showing a cowboy wearing a brown duster and cowboy hat walking away from the camera in Texas, into a hurricane or a storm in the background. Abstract art with large brushes.
I tried numerous engines and derivations on that general prompt at dezgo.com until finding that Dreamshaper XL Lightning would get the closest to what I wanted. As I found when doing the Goblins in the Marketplace background, it really liked to show the face, even when I told it not to. So I went through hundreds of generations where it simply ignored every derivation I could come up with of “don’t show a face” to get down to around a hundred that were passably what I asked for. I cut those down to around forty that I liked, and then down to around four finalists that I thought would look good as a cover image.
It is ironic, considering how hard I worked to get images that did not include the face, the one image I kept not deleting even though it showed a profile of the face was the one I picked in the end. It had a storm background that would be easy to put words over, and it carried the energy I wanted. Captain William Carter, hunter of otherworldly creatures and threats to mankind, walking into a storm.
Raconteur Press has published a charity anthology, Hairballs, Hiccups, and Hope, to help and Lori Janeski with medical expenses due to a serious auto accident. A number of very good authors donated a story to the anthology, and many more offered their story for it. They did not pick my offering, but I hope you give it a shot. Help an author out, get some good stories to read, and feel good about the whole endeavor.
The Martian Affair on Amazon
Forge of War on Amazon
The Audacious Affair on Amazon
Angel Flight on Amazon
Angel Strike on Amazon
Angel War on Amazon
The Family Affair on Amazon
The Thunderbird Affair on Amazon
Wolfenheim Rising on Amazon
Wolfenheim Emergent on Amazon
The Gemini Affair on Amazon