Poke Press Digest Podcast: Episode 66-Day 2 Events/Discussing the music of "PokePark Wii"

In the first segment (1:22-3:54), I interview Vince Krekeler of Day 2 events, the company that runs many of the regional Pokemon tournaments in the middle of the US. I took this opportunity to talk with him about how things are going for the first full season back from the pandemic, and gave him an opportunity to talk about some of the other events they run.

The second segment (4:56-45:45) is a discussion of the music of PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure. Anne from Pikapi Podcast helps me cover the soundtrack of this final fourth generation side game. As you might expect, PokePark's array of environments meant that we got to discuss a wide range of tunes. If you want to know what we thought of the game itself, we examine that after the outro:

Links:

Day 2 Events
Pikapi Podcast
Poke Casters Network

What if other Pokémon movies got CGI remakes? (via Stable Diffusion)

Ever since the release of Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution in 2019/2020, folks (including myself) have wondered what other Pokémon movies might look like if they got a CGI remake. While there's no practical way to definitively answer that, with the help of the Stable Diffusion image generation framework, we can get a glimpse of what such a movie might look like. I took stills from a number of Pokémon Movies and used a "Modern Disney" model in combination with an embedding I generated using stills from Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution (I also retouched the images afterwards to improve their appearance).

Technical Details:

Model Used: Modern Disney
Embeddings Used: Custom "Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution" embedding
Front End: Automatic1111
Base Render Resolution: 512*512 (upscaled to 1024*1024)
ControlNet Features Used: SoftEdge, Color, Canny, Reference
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3050