I was looking around on Deviantart for anything new related to Star Fleet (which I didn't find) and I clicked some banner by accident that took me into their AI image generator that apparently gives you 10 free spins of the carousel wheel per week.
I was quite happy with some of the results. I like the mode that it's chosen above.
It's neither creepily photorealistic nor insipidly cartoonish.
In any case, it finally gave me a good depiction of Dr McDonald, who is completely not-at-all based on any real person. She walked away from Simetra's medical-industrial complex and uses actual medicine to keep the Sylph squadron pilots in the utmost fighting condition.
For long trips and holidays, I thought it would be good to have something better than a phone and smaller than a laptop.
The FZ-M1 also resembles, a bit, the pup pad from Paw Patrol, which is quite a lovable show.
Unfortunately, there's no good screenshot of the pup pad's GUI, or the geometric background that they use in the show, and nobody seems to have thought of mocking one up either.
So I had a little play in Photoshop. The background is from Pngtree and the individual logos were helpfully provided by PNGEgg.
The resulting file is here for anyone that can use it for a similar project.
I found the link to this AI-generated animation of Dai-X on nitter:
X Bomber Big Dai X Animation - Iromirai
I found the way that the top of the mask 'wobbles' a little distracting, but the overall impression is quite impressive.
It looks to me that the AI engine drew reference from the 2000s Transformers movies, as well as the styles of the machines from Gundam 00 and AGE.
I think that, if they did a Star Fleet-based movie today (especially, if it were made in the West), then Dai-X would probably look something like what you see in this clip (even though the original design hasn't really aged).
I feel that, if there were any risk of a remake ever being produced, that they would want to 'tweak' the original design to try and meet the expectations of any new audience.
All my usual sources of Star Fleet news have been very quiet over the past few weeks.
I've had to put the game on a back-burner for various reasons over the past month, but I will be getting back to it.
In the meantime, one thing that we have in Northumberland is a very large second-hand bookstore: Barter Books, in the old train station in Alnwick.
It has a lot of old children's annual books, like TV21.
We've picked up a lot of Stingray and TV21 comics there, but since our daughter was quite small, I've picked up quite a big collection of Rupert annuals.
There's something about how charming and imaginative the stories and adventures are and we read them a lot.
I saw on Saturday that Barter Books had somewhat replenished their supply, so I hoovered up these four: 1971, 1982, 1993 and 1998.
Sorry if you had problems accessing the site around 7pm last night and ran into a 508 error,
The site was running very slowly or not loading at-all, and in cPanel, you could see that 99% of the CPU time for the account was being used up.
I found a whole load of IPs in two different network ranges that were running constant bogus queries against the forum and other things.
It was also being run from quite a range of device types, judging from the user agent strings.
So I blocked both IP ranges from cPanel and everything was back to normal right away.
At one point, there were 80 'guest users' on the forum spamming the server with constant queries.
The traffic was coming from a VPN company in Singapore. So the origin of the disruption could have been anywhere.
It makes me wonder why anyone would set up the resources and direct them to stun a PR3 website about an old TV show.
I don't think it's been a bot net because of the different types of devices involved.
We had this same sort of thing about a year ago from an AWS farm near Langley.
I think I mentioned it a while back, but I saw that Skype has now been shut off by Microsoft.
I feel that they should go back to MSN Messenger because at least it was fun.
Another thing that I remember fondly was Odigo, which plugged into AOL and ICQ services, among others.
It had a radar where you could talk to people near you, or that had similar interests, and it had a very particular graphical style to its avatars and UI.
It played the sound of an arrow hitting a target every time a message came in.
The UI had little panels that slid in-and-out and the client had that skeuomorphic quality where it looked like a communicator device: like Trillian.
That was when graphical user interfaces were actually graphical, unlike Teams, which is all grey backgrounds and featureless buttons.
I have a new Star Fleet story by Suzy to share with you.
You can find the two parts to download on the Fan Stories page, or just click below:
Part OnePart Two
We have another update from Ben over at X Blogger!
I like this episode because we get to see quite a lot of the colourful ice planet as well as some unique Alliance vehicles and installations.
Thanks to all who joined for a very pleasant Star Fleet Teams, last week!
We will be doing another in October, for anyone who would like to join us.
I will have a bit of a look into doing it over Discord, since Teams Personal doesn't feel all that personal, at least to me.
I see that Gary's hard work on the battlecruiser has been spotted by Star Fleet fans in Japan, so there's some positive recognition. 😀
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