It's an Exciting World

I had a pretty lonely week in London. People backed out of hanging out or didn’t respond when I asked. Steph was still in Zurich, so I just put all my time into the hackathon at work. They had outside participants come in to use the presence platform. That included Avatars, Dictation, Text to Speech, Anchors, Interaction Toolkit, Eye and Face Tracking, and Room Scanning. I was there because I was one of the main designers for Colocation and Room Scanning. I was surprised to find that my work featured in the public materials along with a photo of me.

https://developer.oculus.com/resources/unity-ssa-hs-app/?locale=en_GB

I also published a stable diffusion animation article. I’m really happy with how the animations turned out:
https://onceuponanalgorithm.org/stable-diffusion-animation-for-characters-with-controlnet/

Steph got back very late on Thursday, and on Friday we watched some Voyager. She was excited to be able to talk to some of the actors from that series, including one of her favorites. She compared the Tom Paris character to me, and herself to Belana Torres. It fits pretty well.

Saturday we headed out early for Oxford. We didn’t have any issues and got there mid-morning. We started with a nice coffee by the canal, then headed to the Ashmolean. The museum was being redone when I was last there, so it looked very different. The exhibits were the same to the ones I was able to see last time for the most part. I got a picture in front of Worchester, and in front of the kebab stand we used to go to and sent those to Robert, who I had studied with in Oxford over the summer.

Steph and I had a nice lunch in a little restaurant/grocer in a small alley. We then walked around the city before heading to Christ Church. We did the tour at Christ Church and relaxed for a bit at the AirBnB before going to a few pubs. We hit three pubs including the White Rabbit, and the Lighthouse.

We watched some Voyager that evening before passing out. The next morning we took it easy and then went to Blenheim Palace. We walked around the palace and gardens, but the main event was the joust. I was hoping for an actual competition, but it was a performance. The costumes and horses were better, as were most of the jousting acts. They weren’t as cheesy as the renfair in California. The stunt riders in California were better.

Steph flew to Zurich for this week, and it was a hard week. Everyone at work was getting nervous about the planned layoffs that we expected to happen on Wednesday. Monday I was hoping to have some people over to play around with AI. I had stayed up to 2am the night before getting my new animation system working, but everyone ended up pulling out last minute. It made for a really lonely night since Steph was also gone for the first time since we’d gotten to London.

Tuesday was better with some MTG Commander, and I had a great time playing the deck I always play. I didn’t win, but I did make everyone go after me a few times. I purposefully didn’t play the deck to the limit, as some of the things it could have done just wouldn’t have been fun.

Wednesday was the reckoning at work. It was a hard day. I still got a sizable amount of work done, despite it all. The announcements were timed for US West Coast friendly times, so it was a lot of waiting for everyone. I had some coworkers back to my place and we played Codenames. I really enjoyed having people over and chatting with people over a few drinks at a bar a little later on. I came home somewhat relaxed and pretty sure I wasn’t getting laid off. I also got to have some much needed conversations with my siblings on Wednesday afternoon. I had a night of refining my AI animations a bit more, and then had a long soak in the tub. Archer cat was worried about me and wanted to cuddle me, he is so sweet.

I called my parents the next day, and the prepared for the Zurich trip this weekend to visit Steph while she is there. I also relaxed with the Archer kitty while listening to a book in one of my favorite series.

London this week has been particularly nice. The flowers are coming out and the trees are getting leaves. It has been a good deal warmer and sunnier than March was as well. I’ve really enjoyed the walk into work and the walk around the neighborhoods.

As part of walking around and flowers blooming we finished the planters and put them out on the balcony. They make me happy to see the flowers and plants in the wooden boxes. The nice small pots that are left over will be kitty grass growing locations, and I’ve planted the next round in the oval one.

Steph and I went to the National Gallery as well. It was a great visit, and we got to see a lot of famous paintings. We’ve seen a number of them on the historical and art based youtube channels we watch. I was amazed at how detailed some of them were in person, and how big others were. I got to see a number of nice Canalettos, but they were all of Venice, surprisingly. We saw some still lifes by one of Steph’s favorite painters. There was a small gallery of well done art by famous people, with the subject of ugly old women. The exhibit was called the ‘ugly duchess’ and features some Da Vinci sketches and similar paintings by other famous artists. I was also quite impressed by the building itself.

We played some grounded with Michael and Michelle. The game was a lot more complete and stable compared to the previous time we’d played it. We made some bad choices on base placement, and got overrun by spiders. We moved to a better placement and called it a night.

Work was still crazy this week, but I was able to break away for the important things, including going to the Science Museum with Steph on Wednesday for Lates. The museum was huge, and had a lot of interesting exhibits. They had one on science fiction that had a lot to say about AI, while saying not much about AI. I was a little disappointed they used actors instead of putting the work in to have it truly be AI, but I can understand that it is risky to rely on that kind of tech for a museum with children in it.

They also had a deep fakes booth set up for people to sit down and get their face changed to some famous person’s in real time. It wasn’t great resolution or that accurate, but it was a great example of the tech. It was a booth and not a normal exhibit. There was also a silent disco, which is the first one I’ve seen in person. I would be up for participating next time. It was especially amusing as everyone sang along to the music.

We also went through two other sections in the museum, one on clockmaking/watchmaking and the other healthcare. They were both fascinating and fun to go through.

I played around with AI a lot more. Steph thought of the idea for historic rap battles. We need to get the visuals and voices more polished, but the content comes together really nicely with GPT4, The pictures are from Stable Diffusion, and the voices are Microsoft Azure.

We didn’t do much over the rest of the week, and on the weekend we went to see Bakeoff the Musical with Nancy and Punit. We of course had to pregame with some baked goods. The musical was significantly better than I was expecting, and it was clear the cast was having a great time. They had one of the most touching scenes I’ve seen in any media in a long time. They also had a twist at the end that was completely on theme and made it so much more feel good. They had terrible campy moments, but went so over the top with it that it was no longer campy and was good again. I think it would be better if they went that over the top with the actual campy moments on the show, but that is a lot to ask.

Sunday we went to the Yonder climbing gym in Blackhorse with Punit and did the competition routes. We made it up to route 5, and then route 6 was a limited finger overhang route, so we were too tired to really attempt it. We then went to Big Penny Social, a brewery/restaurant. My food was great, but I guess the others didn’t really like theirs. The beers were pretty good and the atmosphere was great. I’d for sure go back, especially after another Yonder session.

I was able to take Monday and Friday this week in lieu, since the last week I’d worked a lot.

Monday we went to the Tate Brittain and saw a lot of great old artworks. I really enjoyed the bronzes by Henry Moore. Steph especially enjoyed the paintings by JMW Turner. There were a ton of paintings by Turner across 5 or so rooms. He had a lot of periods and styles he used that were drastically different.

Work was still crazy, but I was able to get things together well for it.

Friday we had a call with Irene (Hi Irene!), then went off to the Museum of Egyptology. It had some amazing artifacts including shirts that were over 4000 years old. I also especially liked the cat objects, and there were quite a few.

That evening we went to see John Wick 4 at Everyman.

I also had some great experiments with Stable Diffusion + CharTurnerV2 + ControlNet for consistent characters in different poses. I was amazed at how well it worked, with these results being about a 1 minute generation for each image. I need to see if I can get the same character to show up in a subsequent generation with Image to Image. I also want to get the same character in different outfits.

I went climbing wiht Punit and Roel at City Climb in Aldgate, which was a pretty nice gym. I had a good climb, and did some great routes with Punit. Roel was able to do some of the routes with better handholds.

We had a great conversation about AI and I played with AI for most of the rest of the day.

We got back from Madeira late on Monday and had to wait a bit for a train up to King’s Cross as there were some transit issues. We got back to the kitties who were so happy to see us.

Tuesday was a lot of work, and I played one commander game of MTG.

Wednesday it snowed in the morning, but by mid-morning it was a slushy mix coming down. Steph was kind enough to meet me at Hiden, the Japanese curry place in Coal Drop Yards. It was pretty good, but Andrew’s mom does it better. I worked late again, and got a good bit done.

Thursday was a crazy day. The landlord had a guy come by to look at a leaking window, and then the sea shipment with most of our stuff finally arrived. As you can see in the title of the post, it was 15 weeks for it to get to us. The sea shipment was mostly unboxed and we just had a ton of stuff on all the tables and couches and bed. Steph and I got to work putting things away. I took breaks of work meetings, and then we also got deliveries of our gifts to ourselves for my yearly bonus payout. I gave us a budget of £500 each to spend on high quality things that would make our day to day life better. Steph chose a nice bedside lamp / phone charger as well as a really nice set of dishes. I chose a cat tree and planters for plants along the windows. She went over by a bit, and I went under by a lot, but maybe I’ll think of something else that would improve our daily lives.

Friday Steph finished unpacking as I went back to the office. I was able to get my work done earlier than expected, and I came back to work more on my AI Storytelling app.

Saturday we went to the Yonder climbing gym to watch climbing videos about women for international women’s day. We also got a good bit of climbing in. It was a really cool space that was climbing gym with coworking space above it. Saturday we got some more of the way through The Crew.

The next week was a lot of work, and hanging out with people from work. We had some great food at Dishoom and Little Georgia, but I worked a lot and didn’t do much outside of that group.

We finished The Crew on Sunday with Michelle and Michael, so we now need to find another game to play with them. I might be able to use my work computer to play on Steam, but it would have to be pretty late.

Steph and I had a chill Sunday. We went to the Tate Modern and saw a lot of strange exhibits. Steph got some poses in front of the ones that looked a little silly.

Some of my favorites include:

• The mudlarking exhibit of the areas in front of the Tate Modern and Tate Britain. They had lots of interesting things they pulled out of the river. None of them were particularly significant, but each had a little story to it. They made a really nice arrangement in one of the old wood and glass display cases. The most interesting thing was the drawer of pipes. They had a lot of bottle caps arranged in a rainbow color display. They also had lots of glass bottles and vials.
• The large display of window blinds was strange and interesting. I really, really wanted a giant cord that I could pull and raise all the blinds.
• The side by side video of a Filipino drama show, with a recreation using genderswapped actors and a very different acting style. They had such a different feel and effect, but were spot on scene by scene.

We didn’t stop by any of the paid exhibits, since Steph didn’t have the Arts Card with her, and we also had spent nearly 2 hours inside on just the free portions. We might go back for a second round and prebook the paid exhibits on a weekday morning. We could see the entrance and it looked absolutely packed inside those exhibits.

On Wednesday we went to see Magic Mike Live. It was way better than I was expecting. They had the fake MC start out, and the acts they were doing at the start was about what I’d expect, minus the ridiculous banter from the fake MC. The show was like a burlesque, but not themed, and with a lot more physical performance similar to a cirque show. I had a good time, and Steph really enjoyed it.

On Thursday I stayed late at work to play MTG Commander with everyone. I used the Grenzo deck, which is really fun and random. I didn’t really get it going too strongly, but I had a good time playing.

Friday morning we went to the Better gym and did some max weight lifting. We were still figuring out what our max lifts were, and we were both pretty sore afterwards.

Friday evening we had Nancy, Punit, Roel, and Marlien over to watch the finale of Physical 100. It was a well done set of challenges, although some of them were deceptively simple. We hung out for a good time afterwards. They saw the Alice book, and they saw my itch.io games. I think they liked it, and I’m really looking forward to the AI day on Sunday.

Saturday Steph and I had a nice walk to a pottery showroom that had some gorgeous pieces. We also stopped by Russel Square. They had a lot of blooming flowers, as it is starting to get into March. We headed back and played some Crew with Michelle and Michael. It was much harder this time, as we were playing the later, harder missions.

We planned a trip to Hever Castle for an overnight on Sunday. I took Monday off from work to make the most of it as well. The castle is famous for being the home of Anne Boleyn. It was also fully refurbished in the late 1800’s and looks good compared to many other castles of the time. There is also a snowdrop walk and great castle gardens. To get there it was a combination of three different rail routes, but overall a smooth experience. The only issue came up when contactless payment didn’t work on the rail out of London at one point, and the announcement said we’d have to pay a penalty fare if we didn’t get off. Luckily we just had to pay a small upgrade fare.

The walk from the train station to the castle wasn’t too bad, but it did have some very muddy parts. We got to the castle and dropped off our bags before walking the grounds. We started off with the snowdrop walk, which was nice and took us through most of the open sections of the garden, then we walked around the lake and took a relaxing sit at the Japanese Tea pavilion. There wasn’t any tea, but there was a great view of the lake. Then we continued around the lake and went to the walled and hedged parts of the garden, stopping off for two rounds of coffee.

We also went into the castle proper, which was pretty impressive, if small. There were a lot of interesting paintings and furniture. The hard part of it was telling what was the reconstruction in the early 1900’s and what was the original furnishing, walls, or windows. I think most of it was from the reconstruction. There were callouts to parts of the castle that were from the times of Henry VIII, including the sleeping chambers he was expected to have used.

We chilled in the room for a bit, as well as around the Victorian styled castle village that was actually built in the early 1900’s. We sat in the adorable sitting room and tried out hand at some Snooker, which we were terrible at. We ended the game at 13-8, which is pretty bad all around. Then we went for a lovely dinner in the castle dining room.

The dining room wasn’t in the castle, but in the victorian styled village. It was nonetheless a gorgeous and intricately carved set of rooms. There was a huge fireplace that we had breakfast next to the following morning.

We made our way through the gorgeous countryside the next morning with some fog and sun mixed together for a lovely walk. We got to London via London Bridge rail station and decided to walk the south bank. Since last time we went by the Golden Hind they weren’t open, we went back and into the ship.

The rest of the walk along the south ban was really nice, and we went down onto the river bank and I looked around for any artifacts like in the the lost alchemist. It couldn’t have taken anything, but the tide seemed to be really low so it was worth taking a look. We then went into Westminster Abbey and it was a lot more impressive than I was expecting, especially on the historical front. Unlike most churches, the people who are buried there are major historical figures. It was also a lot more expansive than most churches we’ve been inside. They had some garden sections as well.

We then walked to the Victoria Bus Station and got on one of the older double decker busses that had been converted to serve afternoon tea while driving around London. I really enjoyed it, even though we’d already seen most of the places they wanted to show us.

We then headed back to the apartment and cuddled the kitties for the rest of the evening.

Not much happened for the rest of the week, as I was working long days.

We continued watching Physical 100, and the draft is currently favoring us. It is fun to draft participants in shows like this. We have two drafts going with different people and are winning both.

Saturday I went climbing with Alexander from work. We did well on up to V2, but I couldn’t quite get a V3. Alexander was able to as the last route he did.

Steph and I then ran errands for most of the rest of the day. We got some new plants, and some things around the house that we’d been missing.