A chill, nostalgic morning in Melbourne – and my nerdy efforts to ‘recreate’ the scene with AI

Folks, I am having such a lazy Sunday morning.

My always-active wife is away enjoying a sunny holiday up north with her mum and sister, but it’s cold and raining here in Melbourne (classic Melbourne in Spring), so the kids are on their tablets and I’m just chilling at my desk with a coffee and the interweb. Loooovely.

And it reminds me… I have this really vivid memory of a rainy Sunday about 10 years ago, before the kids were born, when we lived in a beautiful old sharehouse in Carlton. I was home alone one morning, sitting in the living room as the rain gently tapped on the window beside me and the old corrugated gal roof above, reading a book and enjoying a coffee.

I had fewer responsibilities then, no overdue client job or renovation project hanging over my head to stress me out… an incredible memory, haha. Today feels a little like that.

The book was Old City Blues, a gritty manga-inspired sci-fi graphic novel by Giannis Milonogiannis, and somehow it’s worth a lot now? My copy is still sitting on the shelf behind me. I’d never sell it, though. Great book. Looks like you can read it free online, actually. Now that’s a bargain!

I don’t usually listen to music while I’m reading, unless it’s something suitably atmospheric, but I do remember this track spinning in the background. Perfect for a rainy day, if not so much for a gritty sci-fi story! It was probably already on before I said down to read.

Trying to recreate the moment

So, when I started out with this blog post, I wanted to see if I had any photos of the home to help set the scene.

I couldn’t find any – which is unusual for me, given my proclivity for supplementing my terrible memory with photos of just about everything – I used ChatGPT and Dall-E 3 to create a scene that ‘felt right’. That generated ‘photo’ is below.

But, look, I eventually found a couple of photos! 👇

You can even see the window and the seat in one of them. (And my now wife’s lovely shoes perfectly matched to a lovely glass of red, haha.)

Alas, ChatGPT had a hard time matching my description (or I had a hard time offering suitable instructions).

Seems it’s currently unable to make tweaks to an otherwise satisfying image – every requested change effectively results in a wholly new image, losing all the parts you were happy with. As you can see below! So I’ll stick with the one I’ve got.