There's no crying in publishing --

Mostly.

This isn’t going to be a ‘helpful’ post per se, I’ll do one of those (likely at the conference!) tomorrow — ‘cause I’m in a ‘barf my emotions’ mood, sorry.

I’m having a rough day. I’m on hold with Facebook again, in a chat, because I need them to figure out something for my ads manager since I’m rebooting it up (my old FB got blocked, long story) and my printer in China has a disagreement with me on some things, and I’m particularly anxious about going to the Upscale Conference tomorrow in SF.

I had a paid meeting with an AI guy yesterday to discuss the use of Comfy UI and whether or not it’d help me get closer to automating my animation studio dreams — and I’m glad I chatted w/him, he was smart, and definitely cleared things up.

But I’ve lived around techbros for SO LONG in the Bay Area, and they’re fine one on one and a lot of my good friends are in tech, but on the whole —

Basically I’m gonna have to gird my loins for a long 48 hrs of feeling left-the-fuck-out at this conference because none of them are going to think I have any chops.

In fact, the guy I chatted with yesterday, who was nice enough, didn’t get super level with me till he saw my trailer work, and then he was all, “Whoa,” and I was all, “YES. I TOLD YOU. I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A LONG TIME.” (which, in AI-time, means since 2022, lolsob.)

But, people don’t look at me and think “competent AI animator” because I’m an older lady covered in tattoos and it’s just UGH.

I am SO OVER having to prove myself to people.

I dunno. Basically I think tonight I’m gonna decorate my currently pristine burly AF laptop that I got *so* I could do all my AI stuff, with all my stickers I’ve made *of* my AI art so that people might figure it out? That I’m real? And I’ll try to be nice and all, and open myself up to opportunities. Find Zen Cassie from somewhere deep inside.

At the very least I’ll see some cool demos and know what’s about to come out. I’ll report back on those for sure.

Moving on though, here’s the cool shit I’ve done with AI today/yesterday afternoon:

This is the soft velvet bag I’m going to be sending my AITA? hardbacks in — I made the design in Ideogram and sent it to a printer in China — these just landed yesterday.

And, I just ordered 30 of these from Bookvault:

All the gold stuff is going to be gold foiled! These are for my Patreon subscribers — I’m going to do retro-covers for all of my books coming up, I can’t wait! And I freakin’ LOVE this image, it’s so fun!!!

I had to touch up her hand inside — gosh — I think I made this cover in Ideogram too? Lemme go check — yeah yeah yeah —

So this image originally didn’t have any text on it at all. (Why? Maybe because it was TOO AWESOME to have text, lol.)

So I gave my PA this alternate one, and we pulled the text from it to use:

I’m putting in some of the options I ran thru to try to get text before I went with this one:

And for the cover itself:

There were like days worth of efforts to get things perfect:

You’ll just have to believe me, heh!

Because I do want this substack to encompass the totality of my AI-using journey, I think it’s fair to talk about other things that’re AI-adjacent as they occur, and — I’m getting hit up hardcore by a publication I used to support for money.

But the people who are running it hate AI, and have said as much, to me (or in public) repeatedly.

Which makes me disinclined to give them any of my “dirty” AI cash, you know? Heh. But then I also think, “Oh, shit, is this what it’s like to be a Republican?” and GAH, because I am exceedingly liberal, annnnnddd…I don’t know.

Plus also I can just — OMG FACEBOOK RESPONDED, BRB.

I’ll unpack this later. (Maybe. We’ll see.)

xo!

Cassie