Friends of the Armchair Traveller

  A collaboration between JiiLii Ai Design and me. Recently I’ve spent a lot of time working with different AI platforms. I think I've tried about half of them. I’ve gravitated more towards Kling Ai in the past few months and discovered there are many great Ai artists on that platform. I started liaising with a few artists and formed new connections. Then I started playing around again on Instagram which I left when I gave up Facebook in 2021. In my new experiment of delving into Instagram I came across the work of “ JiiLii Ai Design” . I also discovered some of the work of this Artist under another heading “JiiLii Ai Art” . I was amazed by so many items JiiLii posted there, still images, animé s, “collages” and short movie clips.  A few examples of these items: View this post on Instagram A post shared by JiiLii AI Design - JiiLii (@jiiliiaidesign) View this post on Instagram A post shared by JiiLii AI Design - JiiLii (@jiiliiaidesi...

 Two years ago many friends introduced me to AI bots,  Sora and Runway and Luma Dream Machine.   There were some others whose names I have forgotten. I tried out experiments on all of them but I was not impressed much with any of them, there were so many glitches, artefacts, the wrong number of fingers on a hand, the wrong number of legs on a horse, until about the middle of 2024. In mid 2024 I was working on a new idea which I'm presenting today.  "Dining With Stella"    I made this short in conjunction with my good friend Alix Jackson. Alix is an animator who also knows a lot of technical things I didn't know then, and I'm still catching up!  We completed an early verision of "Dining With Stella" but I didn't want to release it at the time as it had so many "bugs". I bit the bullet last week and decided to fix it up so we could release it.  We also have more episodes of Stella and Peter in the pipeline, some of which we'll release ...

On "Good Friday" this year I was sitting around enduring the usual Good Friday events, fund raising for the Children's Hospital (a worthy cause), the AFL footy, the clash between my own view of the horror of the religious cultural meaning of Easter (Torture, Death, Resurrection, Hot Cross Buns, the Easter Bunny, Easter Eggs) and my cultural separation from all of that, when I decided to write to my friend Richard and see how he felt on that day. Richard and I have been freinds for just short of 29 years when he was a student in the Doco course I ran at Vic. College of the Arts. We've always had wonderful communication, to and fro, on every topic under the Sun and way beyond the Sun into the depths of Eternity. We often argue from entirely opposite sides, completely different points of view.  I'm deeply irreligious just as he is deeply religious. W e both enjoy vigorous discussion but  we've never had any sort of angry breakdown, we've never hurt each other...