Images, Music, and Carbonara

Last night's dinner.  I made a spaghetti carbonara last night for my mother.  I made it right, pan frying the pancetta and adding chopped garlic, whisking the eggs with the freshly shredded parmigiana, adding the boiled spaghetti straight from the boiling pot into the pan to mix with the garlic and pancetta, then dropping that mix into the whisked eggs adding half a cup of the spaghetti water.  Holy smokes!  It was a home run.  

This was after taking my mother to the ENT to see the audiologist.  I wouldn't go back with her when they called her name.  I told her she could go back and lie all on her own.  When she came back, the audiologist came with her.  She told me she had taken impressions of my mother's ears to make molds that will make it easier for my mother to put the hearing aids in her ears.  I grinned.  She said, "I told her she has to wear her hearing aids all the time."  I grinned again.  "That should do it."  The audiologist laughed. She is a nice person, young and friendly.  I'm trying not to say she is cute.  She is.  When she tried to login to the computer to make my mother's next appointment, it took a long time.  

"Gen Z.  You just can't do anything."

She looked up with actual surprise to see me laughing.  

"That's not true," she said.  

"I know. . . I know."

We go back in two weeks.  

My other wore her hearing aids for the rest of the hour.  Ha!

It was still too early for a cocktail and too late to run back to my house, so I sat with my little laptop, checked texts of which there was none, and emails, of which there were many, all ads, so I set about "unsubscribing" from them.  Then I opened ChatGPT and put in one of my verboten images and asked it to describe it.  In mood and tone, my images are always described as being "in the manner of a renaissance painting."  Nice.  I took the description and worked on a prompt for rendering in a manner I've rather created and refined over time in the system.  Each rendering was incorrect, however, something just not quite right.  I was at my mother's on a pretty, late afternoon day.  What else was there to do?  So I kept refining my prompt.  You have to be very careful or you can get bumped out of the workflow with the message, "I couldn't render that image as it violates. . . . "  

So I was careful, and then, of a sudden. . . voila!  What I think is the most beautiful image I/it has created yet. 

The saturated colors, the skin tone agains the raven hair, the facial features. . . and I was finally able to recreate the original pose.  

I wanted more.  I asked for the figure to stand in contrapostto.  

Boom!

I got the dreaded message.  

No, no, no. . . if I left the page with no more than a description, I would never get anything like this.  It would all be lost.  I stayed on the page and tried every which way to work with and fool the system.  Futile.  Once it labels the thing verboten. . . fuck.  

It's a language model, but it is something else.  I can put the same words in twice and get two different images.  I guess it is a language model that works from a bank of images it has scraped from the internet, catalogued in language, so when you make a request, it just takes from categories.  I don't know enough abut that, but I will find out.  Will anything ever be replicable?  That is the hallmark of science, you know.  It must be replicable to be valid.  

But, I would suggest, the artist can never paint the same picture twice, either.  

After dinner, it was the same old same old.  I need to break the pattern.  It is not a healthy one.  My mother went to bed at eight and I watched something, I think, on Netflix.  Oh. . . yea, I tried finishing "Hunting Wives," but realized why I quit watching it in the first place.  So I turned to YouTube and listened to music.  I think that is a good thing to do before bed.  No drama, just soothing beauty.  Yea, yea. . . you know what I listen to.  

And then I was off to slumber.  I had a continuing dream all night long.  Some of it was pretty and some of it was fearful, but if I woke in some horror or panic, I would think about that carbonara and fall right back to sleep. 

I must end this now.  I have my own doc appointment at nine to get another gel injection into my knee.  I'm hoping this will work once again.  Fingers crossed.