Okay, so I heard about this thing, dream ticker 2.2, a while back. Sounded interesting, like something that might be fun to mess with, maybe get some cool visuals or something. Figured I’d give it a shot over the weekend.
Getting Started
First thing, I had to find where to get it. Took a bit of searching, not gonna lie. Found a place, downloaded the package. Wasn’t too big, which was nice. Unpacking it was straightforward, just a regular zip file. Ran the installer, or what looked like an installer. It asked a few questions, like where to put the files. I just stuck with the default location, seemed easiest.
Installation finished pretty quick. No weird errors popped up, so that was a good sign. Found the icon it put on my desktop and double-clicked it.
First Run and Trying Things Out
It opened up. The interface looked… okay? Not super fancy, but not confusing either. Just a few buttons and a big empty space. I looked around for some kind of guide or ‘read me’ file, found a basic one. It said something about loading a ‘seed’ file or typing in some text prompts.
I decided to try the text prompt thing first. Typed in something simple, like ‘a cat riding a bicycle on the moon’. Just wanted to see what would happen. There was a ‘Generate’ button, or something similar. I clicked it.
- My computer fan started whirring pretty loud.
- A progress bar slowly started filling up. Took maybe five minutes?
- Then, bam. An image appeared in the empty space.
Honestly? It was kinda weird. Looked vaguely like a cat, vaguely like a bike, definitely spacey. Not exactly a masterpiece, but hey, it actually did something. It was kinda blurry and distorted in places.
More Testing and Fiddling
Okay, so the first try was… interesting. I spent the next hour or so just trying different prompts. Some worked better than others. ‘A calm lake at sunrise’ turned out pretty decent, actually. ‘A robot building a sandcastle’ was mostly a mess of random shapes.
I noticed there were some settings sliders. Things like ‘detail level’ and ‘style influence’. I started messing with those. Pushing ‘detail’ way up seemed to make it take longer and sometimes crash the program. Had to restart it a couple of times. Lowering it made things faster but more abstract.
Finding the right balance took a lot of trial and error. It wasn’t super intuitive. You just had to try stuff and see what happened. I didn’t really touch the ‘seed file’ thing, seemed more complicated and I just wanted to play around with text.
What I Ended Up With
After a few hours, I had a folder with maybe twenty different images. Some were junk, just digital noise. A few were actually quite cool, in a strange, dreamy kind of way. The ‘calm lake’ one was probably the best. I saved that one.
It definitely does something, this dream ticker 2.2. It’s not magic, and it takes patience. You gotta fiddle with it and learn its quirks. Don’t expect perfect results right away, or maybe ever. It’s more like a weird art experiment tool.
So yeah, that was my afternoon with it. Got it running, poked at it, made some weird pictures. Might try it again if I’m bored and feel like generating some strange visuals. It worked, mostly.
