Thursday, October 20, 2022

Drinking up that 20 year old budget beeng...

Recently, I've been brewing up small chunks of a random 2005 6 FTM for kicks. The only reason I brew such dregs of my collection is because somehow it's the only easily accessible beeng in a tightly packed closet. For probably about ~$3 for the entire beeng, it's decent enough and I'll save my analysis for the end.

I was going to take a classic photo of puerh in a gaiwan but I thought why not let those new fangled AI image generators show you something more interesting.  I've been laboring all morning to get my beefy GPU to cough up images of a balrog having tea with Sauron at the foot of Mount Doom. 

What AI thinks when "Sauron drinking Chinese tea with a Balrog"

The AI doesn't quite get it and the best I could do is summon vague copies of Sauron with some tea paraphernalia.  Critics might say my prompts are not refined enough or my sampling inputs need adjustment but it's not quite time yet for AI to conjure up the subtleties of true tea enjoyment in a dark fantasy setting. Nonetheless these images are infinitely superior to what I myself could draw from scratch.

AI rendition of Sauron's tea party

I give up forcing the dark lord to enjoy tea and now contemplate this brew, the '05 6FTM Yinji Yibang of the green wrapper.   I was foolish enough not to gird my stomach with a proper pork lunch and sheng even aged two decades on still gives me that familiar stomach ache. Let's be real, it tastes more like an 8 year old, if that.  I may simply wait another few decades.

While home aging in Berkeley overall has yielded expectedly subpar results(nothing new to report here), hoarding early has at least saved me a lot of money in this dreadful age of inflation. I was in line at the grocery store where the grandma in front of me paid $10 for 4 organic onions.  I guess inflation is the true evil of not only this world but of other realms. Inflation must have been pretty crazy at the end of the Hobbit with Smaug's hoard of gold flooding Middle Earth. 

AI does not quite get "Sauron enjoying tea"


Some answers in case you are curious:
  • Yes the Rings of Power is an atrocity that can never be forgiven. Everybody knows the real romance is between Sauron and Celebrimbor.
  • I am using Stable Diffusion open source 1.4 version with Trinart model
  • No I will not buy a RTX 4090, just on principal.