Enter The Eagle

 Objectively, this scarcely deserves a paragraph in a Grab Bag but subjectively I've been waiting a whole year to post it, so indulge me!

I don't generally do streaks. (Cue Ray Stevens.) I'm opposed to the whole idea of them, psychologically speaking. In theory...

Of course, once you find yourself on a streak, it can be hard to stop. Even more so if there's some visible reward for keeping it going for a certain length of time. Every day you see that reward edging incrementally closer. It makes it hard to quit and walk away, even if the weight of expectation of success and responsibility for failure both get heavier by the day.

Oh boy, that's a lot of psycho-twaddle for a dumb badge on a stupid web site, isn't it? And for something that takes, at most, less than a couple of minutes every day. But as you get closer and closer to the finish, the fear that you might fumble gets more real all the time.

Especially when you've already flubbed it once. This was my second run at the damn thing. I muffed the first after not much more than a couple of months and I was pissed! Imagine if I'd done it again after most of a year!

I was determined not to make the same mistake the second time. I'm very happy - but even more relieved - to be able to say I didn't.

I'm talking about the completely pointless badges you can get for using NightCafe, specifically the ones they give you for making a new image every day. I posted about the way it all works back in May so I won't rehash the details. I'll just recap the relevant bit:

The specific badges I've been working on, if you can call it working, are Bee, Owl, Horse, Bear and Eagle. These animal-themed awards come from making a new image on your first day, then on the 30th, 100th, 200th and 365th days in that order. 

The ostensible purpose behind making a daily image is to earn the free credits you get for doing it but I had more credits than I was ever going to use long ago. What kept me at it was knowing one day I'd be an Eagle!

I mean, it's better than a Bear, isn't it? Let alone a Horse. Why they picked the animals they did is a total mystery. There's certainly no obvious progression there. 

Eagle, though, does seem like the winner. Would I have been as motivated to maintain the streak if they'd handed them out in reverse order and the end-point had been Bee? I don't think so.

The oddest thing is that Eagle is where it stops. Not the daily rewards. They carry on indefinitely. Not even the bonuses you get for reaching the same trigger points in the second year. No, what stops are the badges. 

Given the sheer number of badges you can get - there are well over two hundred and  fifty of them - it seems bizarre that they wouldn't have carried on with them for the second, third and every other year, as long as the streak continued. I'm very glad they didn't. If I knew I was going to become, say, a Condor after another year, I might have felt obligated to carry on with the streak, even if it meant going through Camel, Duck and Aardvark on the way.

As it is, though, I feel completely liberated now from any responsibility to myself or tradition to carry on. I don't need the credits (I have nearly eight and a half thousand stored up and, after a controversial rule-change was reverted, they never expire.) and as far as I know, I keep my Eagle badge either way.

I most likely will carry on, though. For a while, anyway. It's part of my routine now: first thing in the morning, open NightCafe, find the automated prompts, pick one, collect the rewards. 

As a result, I have a ridiculous number of completely useless images of anthropomorphic otters, owls, lions and badgers, most of them dressed as though they're headed to a Steampunk convention. 

The daily suggested prompts are very, very repetitive. As well as the aforementioned anthropomorphic animals, there are lots of nebulae, ancient libraries, private detectives, futuristic cities, the occasional fairy and, for some inexplicable reason, quite a lot of toasters.

For a while, I thought they were based on images I'd made. I did generate a few pictures of badgers a long while back. But I've made plenty of images for posts here in the past that don't feature any of these things, some of them a few times, and none of those prompts seem to have... erm... prompted any follow-ups. 

If I miss a day now, so be it. The streakwill reset to zero but I won't care. 

That'll be a relief. The tension as I came nearer and nearer  to the finish line this time, was intense. I'd authorised NightCafe to send me reminders every day but it isn't all that reliable. Sometimes I don't get any at all. The last few days, just to be sure, I wrote myself a reminder and propped it up in front of my monitor so it would be the first thing I saw, when I sat down at the PC every morning.

And now it's over. It's the longest intentional streak I've ever attempted. I have every hope it will be the last of its kind.   

 

Notes on AI used in this post

For completion's sake, I suppose I should document that one image of an otter.  The prompt, which I had nothing to do with, was

"An anthropomorphic otter scribe, hunched over a colossal desk overflowing with scrolls and ancient texts within a grand, abandoned gothic library. Towering shelves reach into the gloom, illuminated by a single ornate lamp casting dramatic cinematic lighting. The otter's focused expression and aged parchment textures are highlighted amidst the imposing architecture, evoking a sense of quiet study in a storybook illustration style, with atmospheric backlighting and rich, muted colors inspired by the works of Arthur Rackham and the atmospheric lighting of a film noir scene."

It's a lot, isn't it? The otter isn't even all that anthropomorphic, really. It's just a regular otter in an odd position. You'd have thought the AI could at least have given him a waistcoat or something. 

The model was Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. I didn't choose that, either.