Badgers And Bears

As longtime readers will most likely have realized, I'm in the infatuation period with Neverness to Everness right now. Not so much the honeymoon period, although that too. 

The honeymoon period is where you want to spend all your time playing the game and everything about it seems amazing and wonderful. The infatuation period is worse because you also want to tell everyone about it.

And no-one wants to listen. Honestly, who wants to hear someone banging on and on about their new crush? Who wants them bringing it up in every conversation, at every opportunity, shoe-horning it in when it's not even remotely relevant? 

So, in an attempt to inject some much-needed variety into what would otherwise be a stream of posts about a game most people aren't remotely interested in, judging by the page views (Seriously, I was expecting a spike but what I got was a slump.) I'll see if I can't come up with something else, just for a day. God knows, we'll be back to Hethereau soon enough. Oh yes.

And guess what? Today just happens to be one of those very rare days I already had earmarked for a specific topic. I hardly ever do that. 

It's not that I marked Friday 1 May in my calendar or anything. It's that I was always planning to post something about the day I earned my next badge in NightCafe and today just happens to be that day.

Yes, I was a Horse and now I'm a Bear! 

Don't look at me that way. I didn't make these titles up. If I had, I sure as hell wouldn't have called anything a bear. I like most animals but I make an exception for bears. Bears are not nice at all. They just have inexplicably good PR.

MassivelyOP today has an Overthinking column on the pernicious nature of log-in rewards, dailies and similar schemes. I posted a comment that's mighty ironic when you consider what I'm about to say next, which is that not only do I do the NightCafe daily every day, without fail, but that I treat it like it's one of the most important things I do all day. 

If I even suspect I might be about to miss one I come out in a cold sweat. I did miss one - actually several - way back in last year and it still gives me the shivers thinking about it. 

Nightcafe has a lot of badges you can earn. Win. Get. Whatever you call it. I mean a lot.

When you get a badge it gets crossed off the list. As you can see, I don't have many. Which is fine. I don't want any of them except for the login streak ones. Those I do want.

Why? Beats me!

This is the thing with streaks, isn't it? You get stuck in one and you don't want to break it. For reasons.

I got started on the streak for an actual reason. One that made sense at the time. Every day you log in and do the log-in daily, you get credits. It used to be ten but now it's "at least five" because they halved the guarantee but they also added random bonuses. 

You can get as many as fifty credits if you're extremely lucky. I've only had that happen once. I often get more than five, though.

Credits are obviously what you need to use the service, so if you don't want to pay a subscription or buy credits directly, you'll want all the free ones you get.

Except you won't. Not really. Or I don't, anyway. 

I use NightCafe fairly regularly. Mostly it's when I need an illustration or two for a post that doesn't naturally generate its own in the form of screenshots, videos I can embed from YouTube or photos I can take myself, any and all of which I will use in preference to an AI illustration, now the novelty of AI has long worn off, along with the gilt, the glamor and the glitz.

I don't have too many posts like that and usually it only takes me a handful of prompts to get something suitable (Useable, anyway.) so I don't need a lot of credits. The first generation each day is free, anyway, and often one shot is all it takes.

I'd guess that in an average month I might get through twenty credits, tops. Some months I don't use any. I currently have 6,517

Earlier this year, there was a move to have free credits expire but the idea was received so badly the plan was canceled. Instead, some changes were made to reduce how many free credits you can get and how you can use them but I can't honestly see it's made much of a difference. I still get far more than I'm ever likely to need and I can still make as many AI images as I ever did and as fast as I ever could.

And yet I keep on doing the dailies, even though I don't need the credits. It's all because of the streak. And the titles. Badges. Whatever you want to call them. 

I was a Bee, then I was an Owl, then a Horse and now I'm a Bear. Why those particular animals? No idea. 

Next comes Eagle. I want to be an Eagle. I like Eagles more than I like Bears. Not that I especially like Eagles either but they're better than bears. Everything's better than bears. Well, nearly everything...

Getting to be an Eagle means logging in another 165 days without a single missed day. I'll be an Eagle in October or I'll be mightily pissed off because if I'm not, that'll mean I missed a day and I'll have to start all over again. It's a brutal system but then that's how streaks are. Streaks are pure evil.

For a while I was using the daily log-in to run an experiment. I posted about how I used the same prompt every day to see what variations I could get. After I got bored doing that, I started making up prompts on the fly but that soon got to feel like too much work so I slumped into just clicking on one of the suggested prompts each day.

The suggested prompts are weird. I've used today's and it won't reshow the window so I can't give a specific example but it's always much the same.

 There are maybe a dozen prompts, almost always revolving around the same themes and subjects, some combination of spacecraft, spacemen, dystopias, cities, dirigibles, noir, neon, art deco, badgers, foxes, aviators, explorers and detectives.  

For a while I thought it must be pulling ideas from the prompts I've submitted. I still think it probably is doing that but if it is, it's making a very odd selection and it's certainly nothing even close to random or even varied. It's broadly the same set of prompts every day with some mild variations, with the very occasional, extremely left-field entry, like last week's "vintage toaster aggressively ejecting a perfectly browned slice of toast, all rendered with the exaggerated colors and graphic intensity of 1970s pop art magazine illustrations"

There have to be more prompts in my back catalog that mention dust bowls, corn-fields, line art and retro-futurism just from the aforementioned experiment alone but none of that seems to come up at all. Nor do superheroes, hedgehogs or dogs, all of which I must have prompted for at least as often as badgers or foxes. Not to mention line art, which I prompt for almost every time.

The only input I have to the whole sad, sorry process is flipping through the options and picking whichever takes my fancy. I tend to take the fox option every time it presents itself and most of the badgers. 

In NightCafe's world, Badgers are all grizzled old P.Is or crusty academics. Foxes lean towards aviation and space travel and also sometimes present as animals rather than anthromorphs.

There is absolutely no point to me doing any of this, of course. It's even less a valid use of my time than the Overseer missions I do every day in EverQuest II. At least those occasionally give me some reward I can actually use, even most of it just takes up space. 

Arguably, running even a single AI image every day might even do harm to something more than just my sanity and self-respect, although I can't say I'm able to make myself feel all that guilty about the five or ten seconds of processing time it's taking.

The really sad part of all this is that I enjoy it. OK, maybe not "enjoy" but I do sort of look forward to it each day and I do sort of feel pleased with myself when I'm done.

It's part of my routine. I feel very slightly good about things when I remember to do it, as if I've done something I ought to be doing and someone is going to be pleased with me because of it. I haven't and they're not but that's not the point.

If I stopped doing it, though, I'd almost certainly not miss it. Well, not after a week or two. These are lightly ingrained habits, nothing etched deep. They fade fast Or I hope they do. Not that I'm about to test it.

Are they also harmless? Maybe. 

I do have a lot of pictures of badgers now, anyway, so that's something. I mean, you can't have too many pictures of badgers, can you? And now I've shared some of them in this post, you can have pictures of badgers too. Granted, they aren't very good pictures of badgers but then that's AI for you.

I bet you wish I'd posted something about Neverness To Everness now!

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Nah. Not going there. I didn't write the prompts, I didn't choose the models, I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything, and anyway it was all the fault of those pesky NightCafe kids...