Price Point

Dearest Rachel –

Yesterday found me between responsibilities, for the most part, at the ‘office.’ I had sent off what I considered to be the last of the reports our auditors needed for the annual review, and while the month has ended, I was still waiting for information from other people in order for me to actually assemble the books (indeed, I’m still lacking some information that would allow me to finalize June, to a certain extent – although since I’m constantly restating the monthly figures from camp due to changes to past invoices based on actual attendance versus projections at the time of billing, maybe I shouldn’t concern myself so much with that), so I was wandering around the internet, looking into the latest in AI information. It turns out that many of the team behind the Stable Diffusion program that I’ve been using have departed Stability.ai, forming their own company and releasing a new art program, which is light-years more robust than the program I’ve been using – or even the upgrades their old company is putting out. Among other things, it has much less difficulty in drawing hands, and can actually write words and even coherent sentences, which previous programs have been notorious for having difficulty with.

Now, as impressed as I’ve been with the current – old? I guess it counts as such, especially since I’ve been using it off and on for a year and a half already – program, I can easily recognize the effects of these improvements. If I can incorporate your photos into something that can be used by this program, the sky could be the limit. The trouble is, most of the content creators talking about this direct me to the company’s website, and require me to go through their platform, rather than trying to work on it on my own computer. That’s a reasonable choice for the dabbler, especially for those who don’t have a sufficiently powerful system of their own, but that’s not a problem for me. I want to be able to work with it in-house, especially given that I probably need to train a whole new LoRA that is based off of this new system, and I doubt I can do that through Black Forest’s own website (or if I could, there’s the question as to whether there’s a time limit to it, like with the first time I tried this, and if the images revert back to them once that time passes).

However, there is at least one creator I follow who has a means to set their program up locally, and has even created a customized batch program to set up the framework system (called ComfyUI) that it runs on, like an operating system. The catch to this is that his program is available only to those folks who are his patrons, and paying him a subscription fee. And this is where I both find myself balking, and wondering why I do.

After all, it’s not as if this subscription fee is all that much of a burden, financially speaking; it’s barely the price of a tall Starbucks these days (not that I patronize the place, any more than you would, back in the day). And unlike your patronage of Flamez, I could say I’m actually getting value for money in the form of this installation program (and possibly many others, if I go through his back catalog of videos – although it might be a struggle, given that he has something of a challenging accent to deal with. Interestingly enough, it’s not one you’d expect; it’s decidedly Slavic, as far as I can tell), as opposed to simply getting a name (or, in your case, a pseudonym) at the end of his videos.

And yet, I can’t help feeling resistant to setting this up. It’s not a matter of this being beyond my price point (although perhaps, having been an internet denizen for so long, I’m accustomed to getting my information for virtually free for so long that this rubs me the wrong way when it probably shouldn’t – after all, this guy put in this kind of effort to assemble this). Maybe it’s the fact that a subscription puts me on the hook for an indefinite period of months – although at the same time, I don’t have this issue toward the suite of Adobe programs that I barely use, so that doesn’t seem like a worthy excuse.

Maybe it’s that I don’t feel like I have the time at the moment to really delve into this program yet; I don’t want to lay cash down on the barrelhead until I’m ready to jump in and use what he has to offer. This would track with my current reluctance to pop for a subscription with the latest dating app I’ve been looking into – the one that set me up with K in the first day of putting my profile out there. It keeps telling me I’ve got people liking it, but I can’t even see who they are (let alone contact them) unless I subscribe. At least with this particular app, it’s a lifetime subscription, and one that’s less than I paid for a year at eHarmony. But if I’m not about to start using it, why fire it up just yet? I’m thinking that’s part of the mentality of this particular expenditure, but I’m not completely sure about that.

It does mean that I’m not about to go into the weeds of what this program involves, since I haven’t gone so far as to even get it set up on my system. I’ll probably pay for it soon enough (as I will for that dating app, I suppose), but until then, I can’t help but ponder, with some amusement, the fact that I’m balking about doing so in the first place.

And until then, too, do keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I suspect I’m going to need it.