I started working with generative art over on artbreeder during the pandemic, and one lesson I learned was that if you want to make interesting art, you really gotta try combining things that haven't been combined before, because that's how you "warp" yourself into weird, unexplored pockets of the latent space.

One thing I've been experimenting with recently to try to achieve this is taking highly fine tuned "old fashioned" checkpoints from the pre-Lora period of SD -- the kind that implemented a theme that would definitely be done as an extra network now -- and merge them, especially when the themes don't quite match, and just seeing what results I get.

This is an example of that. This checkpoint merges Sprite Diffusion and Final Fantasy Tactics.

The results aren't amazing by themselves, but it does seem to be able to give me consistently good retro-gamey pixel art if I prompt it to, while defaulting to a weird, ethereal, unearthly photographic style. The triggers for Sprite Diffusion don't work for me, but 'fft' does.

I see this as a stepping off point for further experimentation.