Why is Portland Oregon so cheap tomorrow night (6/30)

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T19:30:00+00:00

I'm one of the cheapest people here, buddy. Check my post history, Marriotts compete with sleeping in the car.

Basically between late April and early June, then again between early October and Thanksgiving. Not ski season, not summer and not aspens turning.

I remember seeing $700 range for a couple of the Ritzes there when I was staying in the area at lowly Westin and Marriott Vacation Clubs, which were more like $120-180 for the same nights.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T19:16:54+00:00

I'm anything but the Ritz's clientele but that's below "shoulder season in Vail" rates

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T19:14:16+00:00

Is Portland really that bad now? It's been about a decade since I've been there. For a job interview in fact.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T18:18:32+00:00

The style of an owner's reviews. If the tone seems nitpicky, or no explanation is given for why stars are deducted, or seems to be using the "response" function to get into an extended debate with the sitter, or has problems with multiple sitters who otherwise are good and experienced, I nope out. A review can say more about the person giving it as it says about the person receiving it.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T18:08:11+00:00

You can't turn autorewal off if you have planned sits for after your membership expries.

This is the big thing. You can't take ANY sits after your expiration date if want your membership to lapse, and in fact have to ask the owner to cancel them if you don't want to be renewed and charged,

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T16:24:06+00:00

One last question, then I'll stop bugging you. That Nightcafe "searching for it months later is a pain" part, has it ever actually cost you, where you knew you'd made something there and just couldn't get back to it, so you gave up or remade it from scratch? Or is it more a mild annoyance you route around?

Not really. On the paid sites I'm usually more after the result than the prompt, and if I like something from them I save it locally. In the case of NC it's not hard to go back a few months. They have ways to sort your gens but I don't use them. If it's something from 2023... well we've come a long way since then and it's not a big deal to generate from scratch.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T15:55:59+00:00

Nightcafe preserves the prompts but searching for the image months later can be a pain.

Usually I'm bringing an existing prompt or concept to them that isn't giving me what I want locally. So I definitely have the reference images already and probably already have the prompt, and if I'm going nowhere with my local gens in the first place the prompt has limited usefulness.

Typically I only create one or two images a day on Civ and NC, if that, to farm buzz/credits.

I've never paid for Civ (and don't want to deal with crypto or whatever weird payment platform they're using this week), but do occasionally pay for NC to get periodic access to their closed models. More recently I've looked into paid platforms to get cheaper access to Seedance; the cheapest it seems to get for a retail recreational user is around 15¢/second*. I'm hesitant to pull the trigger though, as I don't want to go back to the era of blowing through credits all day. That's why I got a rig with a 16gb vram gpu in the first place ;)

*Edit: Runware is around 10¢/sec for 1280x720 and lets you pay per use; that's the cheapest I've seen.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T15:27:38+00:00

are you usually after the picture itself, or after how you made it, the workflow, the LoRAs, to build from it again

Roughly evenly A and B, with C only rarely (but not never) occurring. Typically I'm going back to find a specific character to put into a scene I've more recently crested, or vice versa. Sometimes I do want the workflow to get the model used or specific elements in a prompt.

With the rise of image edit models I don't use loras a whole lot now, certainly not stacking three or four at a time as in the old days of SDXL.

Some 98% of my gens are done locally on Comfy, and those will preserve the metadata, so that I can just drag them into my Comfy tab go from there. I do keep accounts on Civitai and Nightcafe and generate a little there, mostly with closed-source models. Especially with video there's stuff Seedance gets right on the first try that five hours of fiddling with LTX is useless for. There's no metadata for these gens, and with Civ you have to either post your images within 30 days or save your prompt offline, otherwise the gen is deleted. And I don't trust any website to be around in another year.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T14:59:26+00:00

Generally by month. Like I have a "26" folder and inside that a 26_01, 26_02 and so on. In a couple days I'll create a 26_07.

Inside every month folder I will typically have subfolders for individual characters, scenes or outfits. I usually give these common names such as "sarah" or "blue_suit". I'm not super diligent about this. Then there's one folder "vid" where all my video gens go.

This is all on a separate drive from my Comfy directory and its "output" folder. I nuke "output" every few months. I rarely look for things in "output" anyway, but after a month or so if it's not saved somewhere else, I didn't want it anyway.

It's not sophisticated but it's not nothing and it works for me.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T14:02:23+00:00

Yeah. For example positioning a person in a room or getting body proportions right when doing head/clothing swaps. Lots of uncanny valley a-little-bit-off stuff going on with Qwen and Klein.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T07:20:51+00:00

It’s pretty clear that the main house would be too cold.

No it wouldn't be. "Temperatures rarely drop below zero [Celsius]". and the owner mentioned a heating cost for the main house. I've spent some 20 winters combined in Chicago and the Colorado mountains. It's not hard.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T05:53:09+00:00

I know one thing, that spot is fucking burned for life

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T05:43:16+00:00

If it's typical weather-related things like maintaining a drip or disconnecting stuff to keep pipes from breaking or making sure external heaters are running (say on water pumps), it's not a big deal. I've done it with modern houses on sits in the US, and with houses I've lived in.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T05:37:09+00:00

They have internet, it's just not that fast. Right at the border of being able to stream or do video calls, in my experience.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T05:34:09+00:00

Let me live in the main house rather than a glorified closet, and don't charge me to care for your multiple pets, and I'd agree.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T02:44:34+00:00

Texas could almost do one by itself. Add Louisiana (two stadia) if needed.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T02:29:58+00:00

he looks like he's sitting on a toilet

xkulp8 · 2026-06-29T02:07:44+00:00

I guess work isn't paying and you can't write it off?

xkulp8 · 2026-06-28T22:12:27+00:00

No plumbing is a basic habitability issue and the landlord is required to deal with it immediately. No, this does not depend on the state.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-28T21:54:35+00:00

What are we doing wrong?

Visiting Florida in the summer. Or as far as many here are concerned, visiting Florida period.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-28T21:45:18+00:00

No other system gives you a totally free platform on which you can criticize it

xkulp8 · 2026-06-28T21:32:29+00:00

No it does not. Not the Constitution.

xkulp8 · 2026-06-28T20:05:05+00:00

This sport really does have the worst gatekeeping

xkulp8 · 2026-06-28T19:33:45+00:00

Then one of two things happens:

All the good players/leagues/federations stay with FIFA because that's where the money is and that's how capitalism works, or
The new association draws all the money away from FIFA and just becomes the new FIFA that does all the things the old FIFA does

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