I'm back

After a work trip for a week, another person trip over a weekend, then almost immediately travel for my father's death and funeral, followed after another week of vacation that was planned long in advance, to be followed in a week or two with yet another work trip to Mexico, I'm wondering if I ought to let my subscription lapse in a few days and just pick it up again a little later when things calm down. I'm honestly thinking very seriously considering just letting it sit for a month or so. Hopefully by mid April when I'm back from Mexico again, I'll have time to actually play again, at which point, I'll re-up the subscription for two more months using the one-off, non-recurring payment. 

In the meantime, I have time to read, especially while traveling. I've picked up my pace just a bit, and I've now read about half a dozen books so far this year. I'd like to finish a good three or four more in April, if not a few more. Some of the books are relatively short and quick, after all. I'm currently reading a D&D novel on my Kindle, a D&D hardback monster book, a Solomon Kane anthology, and some PDFs. I just finished the latest in my Freeport Trawl.

Anyway, I'm turning a bit more towards that, and SWTOR will lay quiet for probably a few weeks at least.

Kenth Odon as... Yondu

I've got two looks for him; actually both are Yondu. I think I like this one a little bit better. It's a slightly better coat for the look, I think. 

There's no way to get the arrow, so I said screw it and just gave him a regular blaster rifle. Actually, that's not true. I gave him a flaming blaster rifle.

Posted it on the reddit, and got two main gists of comments; 

a) why a trooper (operative) instead of a smuggler or hunter (answer; because I already have lots of hunters and smugglers, but fewer troopers)

b) needs the toothpick (no, actually I have no interest in the toothpick. It's a stupidly sanitized replacement for a cigar, which if there was one, I'd certainly use for all kinds of characters. 

I did go and add the winter outfit pen behind the ear to both outfits (only one showed above, I know) just to suggest the arrow, though.

Started using Grok for xAI images

Better than ChatGPT, not least because it doesn't have a limit. Anyway, here's a couple of my first images. Vash Galaide (Gavenk) in his most iconic spy tac suit.

These are just outfit showcases, and I had it set on a generic "neon cyberpunk background" which is close enough to Nar Shaddaa, I think. I've actually slightly modified the outfit since taking the screenshot that I'm using here. but it's close enough. The torso and headpiece are the most important ones, of course.

Curiously, it tried to turn Wulf Hengest black, and I had to go through a few iterations to get it right. By the time I did that, his face got just a little jacked up. Sigh. Well, it's still AI with all of its foibles, after all.

Anstal Tane AI version

It's often difficult to get ChatGPT to do what you want it to on image generation. I ran out of images for the day, without getting exactly there with this Anstal Tane set. All of these are pretty good, but none of them are quite right. But y'know. If I wanted exactness, I wouldn't use AI, I'd learn to create my own images.

He's looking a little stocky, and as the first image shown here (last one generated) the face has gotten "off" after multiple iterations. The first one generated, the closer image with the dusty sky, is probably the best, honestly, even if not exactly what I was hoping for.