Never Let AI Run the Train.

 AI is a wonderful tool, in the hands of a craftsman. It's not an automated typewriter, any script devised by AI is overburdened with adjectives that are used ad nauseum, and the script is usually meaningless. AI is like a six-year-old with a search engine built in. A six-year-old child will do what you tell him or her to do as long as you're standing there watching over that child. Like many children, AI will tell a fib, and Microsoft's CoPilot is the worst liar I've ever seen. I know what you're thinking, a Microsoft product being fast and loose with honesty? Say it ain't so!

Here's an example of giving AI a task without enough instructions. I found a photograph taken in 1903 of the locomotive roundhouse in Harvey, North Dakota, and I asked AI to colorize the image and add a few locomotives. This is what I got:

Except for one error, it's not bad, right? Do NOT let AI run the train!

Newsletter 06-14-26

 

                It's been a busy week here in Casa de Duleigh. As I promised, I was going to pause work on Stormwatch Chapter 16 and concentrate on writing my Nude Day contest entry starting Sunday, June 7, and work through to completion, and then return to Stormwatch today. And that mostly worked. More about that later.

                I opened my new blog and so far I have three posts; my most recent went up this evening. Two of the posts are all about the fun I'm having with AI. Not just the cover art I've been creating, but the local history of my hometown that I've been rebuilding with AI. First was the Lehigh Valley branch line through my village, and now a rendition of the water mills that were built in 1811. It was the first industry in my home village and there are photographs of it when it was a huge sawmill surrounded by gigantic logs in 1826, but it was trimmed down to the much smaller structure it is today, My complaint is that there are no photographs between those two images, 1826 and today. So I made one with AI. My blog is at:

https://duleigh.blogspot.com

                As I said, I took an entire week off to work on my nude day entry. I had really hoped to have it completed by Wednesday or Thursday; I didn't expect to go past 8,000 words; that's just over two pages at Literotica. I took care of my chores and duties at the sheriff's office on Monday morning, then cut the lawn when I got home. I then had lunch and sat down at my PC to work on Nerds and fell asleep. When I woke up, I made an outline, started an introduction to nerd-games and called it a day.

                Tuesday was a waste as well. I finished my morning AI work (I try to make something every day) and then tried to bring up my notes from Monday, but I couldn't get to my storage drive in the cloud. Then my TV froze. I discovered I had lost internet and cell service. The main cell "Backhaul" line went down when a car hit the wrong phone pole just south of town. From ten AM to six PM this little town was incommunicado; we were cut off from the world. All the notes I had collected and put together for Nude Nerds were stored on the cloud, where I couldn't get them. Lucky for me, I have many files of classic anime stored locally. I had forgotten the headache it is too read subtitles on the anime while someone screams in Japanese and you're trying to watch the action.

                At six PM, my phone was blowing up with all kinds of messages. Most of them were from friends who texted me saying, "Did you lose cell phone too? Mine went out this morning." I also had a voicemail from Doctor Voldemort, the head of the clinic that I had mentioned last week. On Wednesday, I called Dr. Voldemort back and left a message that I got his message. I had to go through three people to do that. Now I know why that clinic gets top dollar; they need to charge that much to pay all the paper shufflers. We got to talk, and he accepted the fact that I'm not going to drive 100 miles for a non-vital test. He then said, "This was my fault; my instructions were inflexible and the nurses enforced them too strictly." Nice - he took responsibility, then blamed it on his underlings. I was not surprised to discover he was an officer in the US Army.

                In the end, I only got to work on Nerds in the Nude on Friday, Saturday, and today. But it's finished! 10,010 words. Right now Madam Beta/Edit, KMaz, is going over the wording and, as usual, she's coming up with fine suggestions. A new member to this newsletter, MediocreAuthor, a fellow author at Literotica and WRIST, is preparing to educate me on the changes in RPGs since I last played in 2009. I was hoping to finish this on Thursday so it would be ready to come up for you tomorrow, but life didn't want that to happen.

                Nerds in the Nude takes place on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. For those of you who have never been there, the UP is beautiful. The white pine forests, the cedar swamps, the countryside is just beautiful. Every time I visit, I want to throw out a tent and stay (until it gets cold). For the story, I invented a town next to a river that's so obscure, native Yoopers have no idea where it is. The story is about three couples on a semi-isolated beach on a warm day on the Upper Peninsula. I hope you like it. I'm guestimating that it will be ready to read on Lit on June 17. That's just a guess; I'll send out a note when I get a publication date.

                Good news: the friend that I mentioned last week, the blind girl who got so sick, Gigi. She's ok and back to her chipper, happy self. Her dog, Fred, is still grumpy about getting barfed on twice, but he'll get over it. It was a touch of Food Poisoning; she called it Montezuma's Revenge. I said, "Gigi, Montezuma's Revenge comes out the other end." She said, "It did. It started when we got to the ER." and that's why I don't live in the Southwest anymore.

                Trivia at WRIST was fun; I won so my record is 7-1-1 now. We had a player from Australia in the game; he's an author at Wrist and at Lit. His time zone is twelve hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone, so he was playing trivia along with his morning coffee. He then joined us for music on Saturday, which was a great evening. We started out with four players, and folks joined in one by one.

                I'm starting to get some notes together for Gods Save the Queen 5. It's going to be centered on the yule holiday season on Kodu, so I'm now hit with a puzzle I wanted to avoid - how does one celebrate Christmas on a planet with no Christmas? This story will be based in the Yuletide season, so I guess Yuletide would make a good name for the book… but gathering yule traditions is the job that I'm faced with now. So if any of you have a Yule tradition that you'd like to see take root on the planet Kodu, just drop me an email and we'll see if it fits. I had an idea. This book is five years down the road; everyone is used to a witch for a duke and a wizard for a duchess. Octavia had handed out wreaths that had something glowing in there, but after the season the light goes out. But the people can bring their wreaths to Octavia and she'll recharge the wreaths for a donation to the school fund. (the One Eyed Duke Pub is a school for the kids of Elm Springs until three pm) I'm looking for traditions like that for us to use.

                That's it for now. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to drop me a line, and if you want to chat live you can find me on Discord at  https://discord.gg/UJWb7tzX3P

    (Writer's note - Nerds in the Nude went live the next day)

Restoring History in my Home Town with AI Part 2, The Williamsville Water Mill

 Once upon a time the village of Williamsville had numerous mills, the largest of which were built by Jonas Williams and Johnathan Dodge. A large creek runs through Williamsville, and if that creek were in Colorado or Nebraska, it would be considered a raging river. 

Ellicott Creek was a marvelous place to play while growing up. It wasn't very deep, so it would take a concentrated effort to drown. We would hike along the banks up and down the twenty feet wide creek, digging up crawfish and fishing for catfish and trout. There were even eels in that creek, but we left them alone. 

On the south side of Main Street, the creek was dammed to create a large mill pond. The pond has a large island in the and that is Island Park, the heart of the village. Island Park was known for peaceful ice cream socials and maybe the occasional game of catch. That is until the Jolly Boys incorporated and used the island to raise money for youth activities. A huge carnival would take over the island. Rides, games booths, food, and the biggest money maker of them all - the Beer Tent. Draft beer was slung by the pint or by the growler (a large collectable bucket) When we started out, we served Labatt's Blue on tap (Nirvana!) and Old Vienna as the premium beer (Nirvana squared!) The Old Home Days parade and carnival still exist but it's a shadow of its former glory.

Ellicott Creek was power. Mills were built on either side of the creek, on the east side the biggest mill was the Dodge Roller Mill which was one of the largest grist mills in the county outside of Buffalo. It turned cereal grain into flour and middlings. The Dodge Mill burned down in 1894 and the owner, Jonathan Dodge, died fighting the fire.

On the other side of Ellicott Creek was Williamsville Water mills, it too was a grist mill and made flour and there was a large lumber sawmill there too. The mill was powered through a raceway from the mill pond that created Island Park. The sawmill portion was torn down leaving the water mills that stands today. 

The images here are all the historic images that you can see. If there's more, I have yet to see them. One thing the Williamsville Water Mill was famous for was apple cider. They pressed cider every autumn up until the current owners made it into an ice cream store. I always wondered what the mills looked like in 1930 at the height of apple cider season, I think it looked something like this:

Next: The B&O in the Boston Valley

Restoring History in my Hometown with AI Part 1

 AI art is a writer's craft. Your job as an AI Artist is to tell the system what you want it to produce. That's what fiction writers do for a living, we use our skill with words to describe what we want the readers to picture in their minds. 

It's a bit different with AI because you have no frame of reference. With more advanced AI such as ChatGPT 5.5 you can design that frame of reference, then save it and call it back up. I have designed my main characters in AI along with my standard book covers so when I want to design a book cover for my next book, I'll tell AI "This is a book cover for Stormwatch 6. I want an image of Josh and Veronica in the summer woods; Josh is carrying cut wood while Veronica is cutting with a chainsaw." 

The AI will know the size of the image, how much room it must reserve on top and bottom for titles, and it knows what Josh and Veronica look like. I'll let AI make a test image then we'll correct and tweak it until it's at a point where I like it and can send it to KMaz for Beta Reader approval (She picks the best cover images!) Once it's approved, I tell AI to fill in the text on top and bottom and it goes to my publisher. 

In this series I'll share with you the images I make for my books, for contests, and just for fun. I use ChatGPT 5.5, and Night Cafe Studio both individually and together. Both have their advantages and both have issues that drive me crazy. Night Cafe has a lot of tools to make the image look like a painting or a cartoon and can animate the image. However it's hard to fix an issue with Night Cafe. ChatGPT has fewer art tools but it's so much easier to change something in the image or repair something. Quite often I will design an image in Night Cafe, then put in in ChatGPT for tweaking. 

Something that is near and dear to my heart is Western New York. I can't afford to live there now, but I still have that WNY Pride. A huge part of living in Williamsville, NY for me was the Lehigh Valley Railroad. The Niagara Falls Branch of the Lehigh Valley railroad was four blocks from my father's home. I would hear the locomotive approaching and dash up there to watch. Back in the 1970s the Valley had fallen on hard times, maintenance was deferred, track was under slow orders, locomotives were ancient, buildings were collapsing. To a young teenage boy this glorious desolation was perfection. I took roll after roll of photos of ALCO RS11 #7643 and developed them all myself in the high school darkroom. I enlisted and went off to basic training and my mom thanked me for my service by throwing out all my black and white photos.

7643 was gone! I was devastated. I found a few online photographs of it sitting in Pennsylvania, but images of the Lehigh Valley in Western New York are few and far between. Then one day I found an image of the old train station on South Long Street as it was back then. That's my old stomping grounds, where I got all of my photos. I dug out the image of 7643 and sat down and had a talk with AI.

LV 7643 Westbound in Williamsville NY
AI Art by D. Evans

It was a lot easier than I expected, and it came out perfectly. This is the late autumn/snowless winter (they happened) in Williamsville that I remember. I asked AI to place the locomotive on the tracks in front of the station, and seat it long cab forward. Back when this locomotive was built, railroads couldn't agree which end of the locomotive was the front. To run long cab forward is not a challenge to locomotive crews that ran steam locomotives with that huge boiler out front. Add a billowing cloud of smoke and a dozen or so box cars and you have an image that occurred every other day in Williamsville NY.

This image brings back so many memories. The track is gone, but the building still stands, the Western New York Railway Historical Society repaired the building and painted it up like new. The previous owners, International Chimney protected the interior walls with plywood so the interior looks like it did back in 1920. 

The old station is now a museum with a small switch engine with a new coat of Cornell Red pained up as Lehigh Valley 253, and a sky-blue caboose from the Arcade and Attica railroad. The tracks are gone and like many other abandoned roadbeds in WNY, it's a walking path. The pictures I've seen are quite beautiful, but they just don't have the cool if 7643 at work.

Next - going back more than a century for a glass of apple cider.

Newsletter June 7, 2026

 

Good Evening!

                 Welcome to Sunday evening. It's been a really busy week without leaving the bookshelf. I can't believe it's been seven days since we last chatted, and so much has happened. First is the shooting war I've opened up with the Mayo Clinic. Every morning when I get up, I check my calendar because I have a blood test that I need to run every two weeks. The test is called the INR test, and it tests your blood for its ability to coagulate. When blood coagulates, it creates clots which grow; however, I have blood clots in my lungs, a condition called Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension. That means those blood clots are causing high blood pressure inside my heart. I take a blood thinner to keep those clots from growing, and the INR test shows just how "thin" my blood is. I put a slide in the tester, put a drop of blood on the slide, and sent the results to the Mayo. A person who isn't taking warfarin will have a result of 1. The dose of warfarin I take changes, but my INR should show between 2.0 and 3.0 with 2.5 being perfect. If it's too high or low my daily dose of warfarin will change.

                 On Monday the Mayo sent me a message telling me they don't trust home test devices and everyone has to come in and take a test with their home tester, then submit a test to the lab. I said, "Sure, I'll be there in August for my semi-annual test and torture session."

 They said, "No, we need you in before June 30 because: protocol. We can't wait for August because: protocol."

 I replied, "You want me to drive 100 miles round trip for one small drop of blood?"

 They said, "Yes, is there a problem with that? If you don't do it, we will withhold medical treatment."

                 This nonsense went on all week. They said I could have a different lab do it, but they rejected every lab I mentioned because they weren't a "Mayo Lab." I had enough. I have a very rare and fairly fatal condition, and I don't need them aggravating my condition so I decided to aggravate theirs. I started sending emails. To my personal doctor, to my Mayo Specialist, to the company that makes the testers asking innocently, "I've been self-testing since 2013, and I've never had a clinic panic like this. Is there a problem with your product I should be worried about?" If you see headlines that read "Mayo Clinic Withholds Medical Treatment From Disabled Veteran" that's me.

 While I'm stirring that pot, there's another issue that's too close to me. On Friday nights, I play Chat Room Trivia at WRIST.pub with several erotica authors, then on Saturday, we play music videos in the same chat room. It's a fun time and not exclusive to authors. You as readers could pop in and see what's going on, maybe spin a music video as well. Instrumental to both nights is my friend Gigi. Gigi is young, under 30, and a writer at WRIST. She's also blind. She's got a great sense of humor, lives with her teacher/caregiver, but she shocked us yesterday. She said she suddenly got very dizzy and "barfed on Fred." (Fred is her Akita guide dog) her caregiver put her in bed, but she felt better a while later and got up and the same thing happened again so she was rushed to the hospital. We, in the chat room, were panicking because someone said, "That happened to my mom when she had a stroke!" Thanks, dude. If you have room on your prayer list, add Gigi to it. Better yet, stop into WRIST.pub, look up her stories, and when you cool off (she can write some steaming hot smut!) leave her a note.

                 I'm getting around to doing something I've been wanting to do for a long time - a blog! (Finally) It will be a repository for these newsletters plus my digital art. I'm having so much fun with the art, but I don't have a place I can display it other than at Night Café. A lot of my art is coming from outside of Night Café now, and I've found a niche in recreating history that's been lost. I used to take railroad photos in my hometown, but now the tracks are gone. The railroad completely disappeared in 1978, and my mom threw out the images I was saving. I've already restored two moments in the history of my little village (Williamsville, NY) and I'll try to recreate more.

                 I'm trying a new email client this evening - Betterbird, from the makers of Firebird. It's kind of confusing, but it's starting to come into focus.

                 If you're looking for something to occupy your mind and dazzle your senses but not wander too far off the beaten track, go to YouTube and check out 8K Clarity. It's mostly short nature films in breathtaking 4K, 8K, and even 12K HDR video. It truly is breathtaking.

                 Writing news: I'm more than halfway finished with Stormwatch Chapter 16. The Chamonix Howe arc is coming to a close, and I'm hoping that it will be everything you wanted. I'm currently writing the "showdown" between Macy and Cholly's grandmother. Because Valériane Lévesque does not speak English there will be a lot of French in the text, and English translation will be there. Lots of emotion; it's hard to write when I'm tearing up. Chapter 17 will include the trip to Nisi Arcadia and visiting Ellie. Chapter 18 will include the fundraiser, the barbershop contest, and the wedding in the woods… I may have to move the wedding to Chapter 19, we'll see.

                 Today is the last day of working on Chapter 16 for a week. I'm taking a break from Stormwatch and going to spend my writing time working on a Literotica National Nude Day contest entry. Mrs. D will be out of town, so I should have plenty of time to finish the story. If I remember right, I haven't given this contest a try since 2022. I am not in it to win it, having come in second place in the April Fools Day contest, I'm not eligible to win, but there are side benefits to being in the contest - you reach a lot more people, and pick up a lot of followers. Soon as my contest story is done, I will be back to Stormwatch Chapter 16.

                 When Chapter 16 is finished, I'll start on Gods Save the Queen, Book 5 Part 1. This book will be brighter and less bloody that Book 4… but to be honest, Book 4 is selling quite well.  Book 5 is an emotional release for readers, a truly joyful holiday celebration in the Snowcross mountains. Like book 4, book 5 is a story I love and can't wait to write. My ouline is kind of sketchy so I have to add a lot to flesh it out to novel length.

                 That's it for now. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to drop me a line, and if you want to chat live you can find me on Discord at  https://discord.gg/UJWb7tzX3P