Doing some unsuccessful things in AI art / Midjourney and got this fun image.
Just bumping serious things off the top of my poast list. Life should be about fun, as Tequila Yuen said to Undercover Alan before chucking some grenades at the C4. Wisdom of the sages.
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On my most recent May Flowers post, I commented with AI-assisted illustrations for the entries. The last m’flower was a poem written in first person, that included a section wherein I blast on some creepy bugs with guns. So my illustration was chosen from a set of midj images like these…
And how did I make these greatamericansatanesque clowns emerge from an AI mo’ chine? By feeding it this terrible screen capture from my rap debut video (at right). Like many artists, I find the image of myself – or the idea of the image – to be intellectually interesting. It makes me feel some kinda way, like who is this creature that is I?
The way it works is called “image prompting.” Your prompt in an AI art program is the words you use to tell the AI what you want. When it is just words, it’s referencing the tagging system of the program. When it’s an image, well, I don’t really know what it’s doing. AI art is the work of a “denoising algorithm” that uses statistical probability to place pixels, with those odds altered by the prompt. There’s an explanation out there for how image prompting works that I ain’t bothered to dig up because I don’t care that much. I figure it’s one of two things: Genuinely using the image to nudge probabilities, or just reverse engineering the image into a verbal prompt and using the undisplayed verbal prompt to control the AI.
So welcome to my jungle. I gots fun and games. Wherein the fun is masturbatory omphaloskepsis and the games is art that nobody asked for. I’d lead in with the cliche of “you asked for it” but you very much did not. I hope you get a chuckle or divertingly creepy vibe from the display. Proceeding thus,
This first set was just putting my image as the prompt and running my “pretty girl” style filter over it. I’ve posted these girls in comments somewhere, I kinda love ’em. But are they mees from another mother? Would this love be a thought crime against nature?
Another time I mashed my selfie up with the “glitchcore” AI art from that one post, and again, I did note them in the comments. It’s like dollar-store replicant daryl hannahs. Getting a little less transgenda lookin’, which is a shame, from my point of view. I think passing is a scam meant to drive trans suicide rates, like dieting is for… everybody at this point. Whatever.
This one was mixing my selfie with an image derived from a crappy old version of stable diffusion, 2022-style. You can see that image on my bloge in a Spooktober post. Closed eyes are the sensuousness, when equipped with horse eyelashes. Gothique.
The next set is the least passing trans gals in human history, courtesy of mashing myself up with a random pretty-ass 19th century painting lady. Think she was a nymph or something, don’t care enough to dig up the original pic. Again, I love ’em.
What’s the most obvious lady pic in human history to mash oneself up with? The Mona Lisa. This produced a character that looks very much like NaNoWriMo dot org’s most imperious mod of yore, so I viking hatted her ass, and it was a wild success.
Remember that part in Blue Velvet where Dean Stockwell lipsyncs to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams? Fucking epic. This was mashing my selfie up with him. Kinda reminds me of Phil Hartman, aww.
Here is where things got really interesting for me. I used a strange painting of Salome in a Babylonian throne room. The style might be called expressionist or symbolist, I think, and had a fuzzy and drippy effect almost like you were seeing the scene through rain – despite the golden glow. Cool piece, again, I forget whodunit, but I was very intrigued to see the AI interpret that as motion-blurred degraded VHS! This is me as tour guide at a desanctified cathedral or castle…
I took that set and mashed it up with an image of a demon from a funky grimoire, and a cool pic of the dudes from The Damned, resulting in these fucked up Marilyn Manson hillbillies. Very amusing.
Leaving out the cathedral set to only have my selfie mixed with the demon, we get… wigbeard! Amazing. I love it. This is also a good example of the strange things that happen when you mix a photo and a drawing in AI art.
The first image below on the left is actually from artbreeder, which is kind of a fun website. I added some human “DNA” to an image of a cute puppy, creating an abominable bog mummy standup comedian. On the right you can see what comes of that mixed with my selfie – some kind of queer grunge bassist who wasn’t cool enough to OD.
Mixing my selfie with a beautiful AI pic yielded these VC Andrews -styled queer cuties, who I mixed with some other stuff to get the characters from this other one. Anyway, by my affectionate words you may be starting to get an idea of which ones I find genuinely appealing. Ignoring the fingers, of course.
The one on the left below was mashing myself up with the edgy angel from the cover of the Kult TTPRG, and to my great amusement, it became some kind of hair metal groupie from the late eighties. Mashing her up with another image full of homunculi yielded this bumper crop of selfcestuous cultist little people.
Those lil’ gals became bigger and gayer and sleepier in subsequent iterations.
it’s a good time, but has this narcotic quality about it… soporific… think im gonna fall asleep now… gnite.
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Got a donation with a suggested topic I don’t quite understand. I wonder if it’s a sex thing. Phrased, “A butterfly/artist go-lightly. ;-),” it contains evocative words. I got evoked. Let me answer it as impressionistically as it hits me…
A butterfly, an artist, go lightly between lives, between colors, between forms. Yea tho any given moment be as solid as a chrysalis, what lies within is the fluid that bridges one unknowable state and the next.
Know me now? Think again. Know me in another minute? Keep guessing. My love and my passion are colors of light that oscillate through bandwidths beyond your limitations. Transmutation, alchemy, coagulation, dissolution, thesis and synthesis, these words are pathetic feints at the meaning that underlies my life. Take my heart if you dare.
This has been a metaphor for butt stuff. Thank you.
I’m going to write 1000 words now on something that amuses me. I came up with the name for this fundraiser while I was in the dentist chair, and told my dentist about it. She was amused, said, “Well, it’s all about getting attention.” That it is, but it can also be about yuks.
Inspired by this financial predicament and my funny little idea, I scribbled the banner image in a notebook, right there in the car. Here’s the drawing, snapped with my cellphone camera later that night:
I snagged the banner from my last fundraiser to get an idea of the proportions I needed to squeak it into, using that as the foundation in photopea. It was tricky. First order of business, I had to scale the self-portrait to fit the right end of the banner well, not get cut off too awkwardly.
Next I stretched a copy of the title to fit the space left to it, leaving room above and below for the words I meant to add later with a text tool. This did not fill the space with my hatchy background texture right, so I used a combo of distorted duplicate layers and the clone tool to fill the area around the words.
You may have noticed the title is blurred subtly toward the left side of the image. If this was not meant to look like a sketchy pile of shit, I would have taken a new photo of the image to get past that. However, sketchy style, stuff can look rough. I copied a layer and did unsharp mask until it looked more legible, which blew out the other end of the pic. Then I used a quickie layer mask to make only the part I wanted look crisped.
At this point, my boyfriend would be preserving every layer, but I get refrigerator blindness when I see a bazillion layers, so I merged that shit.
Next comes text. I like something in the ballpark of horror novel cover fonts, circa the early 80s. So Benguiat -esque. Photopea’s collection of I-presume-legally-public-domain fonts does not include Benguiat, and this one was kinda sorta close enough. I did it bold, but it didn’t look bold enough, so I added a one pixel stroke in the same color as the font. I used outer glow instead of drop shadow, changing it to a dark color and blending style, to make the white font pop from the predominantly white page.
Remember the floating star from the original photo? I was thinking ahead when I drew that. I knew I wanted to make it white and splash it around the finished image. One of my “Great American Satan” bits of iconography is the five point star of the american flag, inverted to resemble the goat pentagram of satanism. I made a layer of pure white and copy-pasted the star into a layer mask on it. I adjusted the levels to remove most of the background, then brushed out the rest in a few seconds. I applied the layer mask, and voilà, little star.
Then I carefully scaled it and put it into parts of the image where it wouldn’t interfere with the composition. A little dark glow to make them pop, and I really liked the end result. The scratchy pen strokes have almost a 3d quality to them.
Oh, and one last thing. The color of the image at this point was a slightly pukey pink-grey-brown. I made a red white and blue gradient layer, then scrolled through blend styles until I found one I liked, then reduced the opacity a little, to get the subtle americana look of my beauteous masterpiece.
This image amused me a lot. The idea for the name amused me, and the image turned out great, at least to my eyes. The drawing aspect isn’t brilliant. My skills are a bit degraded from lack of use. No, not because I’ve been doing AI. Just because I don’t have an ideal space for drawing, and my vision is getting worse, and I’ve been busy with lots of other things – particularly writing. But the drawing didn’t have to be great. It’s a scratchy mess in a scratchy mess.
That’s a bit shy of a thousand words, so maybe a bit more about how I’ve done as an artist, throughout my life. I used to be among the best few artists in my high school of about 2000 students, which gave me a big head. I came to art school, and I was only in the top 20%, which was a bit humbling. Then, as part of that education and practice, I started paying closer attention to the artwork I like, and comparing myself to the greats.
That was very humbling. Enough to make me decide, hey, I don’t even wanna bother competing with that. There’s this philosophy espoused by the H. Jon Benjamin character Coach McGuirk, on the old cartoon Home Movies, goes something like, “Why bother to do anything if you’re not immediately good at it? Playing guitar is hard. Martial arts are hard.” I was only willing to do what it takes to be skilled at art as long as it wasn’t difficult. When it came to the big leagues, I was like, eh, minor league is good enough for me.
Maybe this is projection, but I think everybody does this, and the greats of art just had more talent to start with than I did. For them, it was easy, the same way I had enough talent to coast past a few thousand other kids, once upon a time. Years of practice helps. I have no doubt that many of my fellow high schoolies could have spent a decade of discipline getting better than me if they had the time and inclination. But the discipline to get good at something through effort is a much rarer quality than raw talent itself.
But in the words of ZZ Top, I might be mistaken.
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Say what you will about famous cat artist Louis Wain, but… No, don’t say what you will. People have the same simplistic narrative they always try to map onto his life and his works, but dude did not draw and paint cats because he was ill. He drew and painted cats because it was fun. His most famous images were stylized with psychedelic energy because they were inspired by wallpaper design of the period, not hallucinations. Anyway, not here to rehash that discussion.
I’m just here to say, Louis Wain’s cats have the power to make things better. My boyfriend was making images in Midjourney that reflect his soul – melancholic sexy young fellas on the edge of death, from some unknown goth disease. He added Louis Wain cats as “image prompts” and they cheered up the dying men. Astonishing.
Without Louis Wain cats:
With Louis Wain cats:
Incidentally, adding any ol’ cat doesn’t work. These guys are barely aroused from their dire condition, tho perhaps slightly improved with the admixture of inferior cats.
Anyway, add Louis Wain influence to your AI art. Your guys will be happier for it.
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ps: don’t even say booptysnoop haptyback’s name in the comments or i’ll die. you don’t want to kill me, do you?
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year I have been worse than usual in composing very slight ideas to justify whatever cover I was able to squeak out of Midjourney and Photopea. In Midjourney I’m using versions 6.0 and 5.2 and Niji 6. Some of these needed a lot more Photopea, some practically nothing.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY TEN: BEASTLY
TITLE: UNDER THE BEAST MOON
CHARACTERS: Aramis Spinoza: the Wan Dreamer, Rath Darrow: the Beast
PREMISE: A pallid young dude trips through the forest looking for his lost memories. He’s sure they’re out there, somewhere, and won’t be dissuaded. But the world has turned into a gnarly beasthouse, and everything wants to eat him. A dark stranger appears and tries to get him to give up his quest, retreat to safety, but he refuses, and as they travel love begins.
THE HOOK: Dark Stranger Rath is actually one of the beasts – so powerful that he can devour other beasts for food – and was actually about to eat Aramis when he changed his mind on a whim. Or is it something more? He tries to maintain a human guise, so as not to scare the dude, but he can’t keep that up forever…
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY ELEVEN: MUTATED
TITLE: MUTANT REIGN
CHARACTERS: Jonathan Israel: the Mutant Man, Jonathan Tullio: his Powerless Sidekick
PREMISE: The two Johnnies are buff gay mechanics in a retrofuturist metropolis. Tullio is more of a tinkerer, Israel more of a philosopher. Something gets in the water or whatever, and rats are mutated by evil, heeding the call of some kinda Ratlord. Some of them are the size of small buildings with horns and scales and fangs, not even recognizable as rats. Israel somehow gets mutated by the same evil, but can control it, and uses his powers to fight the monsters. Tullio tries to keep him safe with gizmos and fisticuffs, the things a non-superpowered guy can do.
THE HOOK: What if the mutation takes control, and Johnny Israel becomes a rampaging monster? Will Johnny Tullio have the stuff to do what’s necessary? Probably love wins.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY TWELVE: HYBRID
TITLE: ROSE GOLD
CHARACTERS: Isadora Kors: a CyberMonster, Stuck Steppy: her Human Lover
PREMISE: Isadora and Steppy are street punks in a world run by evil corporations, so like, this could take place any time in the last several decades lol. Steppy is known as Stuck Steppy because she keeps catching knives in streetfights. Isadora catches the biggest knife of all trying to save Steppy, a machete that ends her life quick.
But corporate medics notice her cells match a certain profile and route her corpse straight to Brycine Prosthetics, where they sustain the life in her tissues long enough to reanimate that bod – with experimental photosynthetic cybernetics. I guess every cyberpunk has its rose thorns, just like every cowboy sings a sad sad song.
THE HOOK: Isadora is part plant and part machine and part the lady Steppy loves. She can be rescued from a lab, but without the lab, how long can she live? Drama.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY THIRTEEN: DEMONIC
TITLE: MEN ARE EVIL
CHARACTERS: Linda Goldman: a Lady, Mark Anthony Aguirre: a Man, or Is He a Demon?
PREMISE: Linda and Mark Anthony are trans for trans lovers in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco when the world began to melt in 1974. They’re scrounging together the funds to medically transition and Mark Anthony decides it’s time to start doing the testosteroni. The problem? It starts transitioning him into a Demon.
THE HOOK: The horrible transphobic feminists were right – being a man is inherently evil! It’s impossible to change who you are, what nature makes you, and all gender essentialisms are dogmatical troof of the universe. Or maybe they just accidentally scored a bad batch, in their economic desperation. At any rate, Mark Anthony must destroy the world with fire unless his loving lady can cool his jets. Will he have to detrans just to survive? Fuck that noise.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY FOURTEEN: AND THE REST
All Those That Lost Previous Voting, Lumped Into One…
ARTIFICIAL, CELESTIAL, CURSED, DREAMER, ELDRITCH, GHOULISH, GIGANTIC, INANIMATE, MINUSCULE, NATURAL, OVER-POWERED
TITLE: A HOUSE UNDER HEAVEN
CHARACTERS: Brooke Storm: the New Girl, TallDeer Rayburn: the Philosopher, Dollhouse: a Mansion, and Celeste: the Stars Themselves
PREMISE: Brooke is that clumsy but enchantingly beautiful new girl in town, and the popular kids want her to be theirs, but she is drawn to ghoulish (GHOULISH) trans dude TallDeer Rayburn. TallDeer cracks wise about how everybody is skeletons inside and to the grave we shall all return and stuff, and nobody likes him. They circle each other in weird courtship until the night he reveals – he is Accursed (CURSED) by Philosophy. In an effort to understand what a Man really is, for the purposes of transing his genders, TallDeer’s meditations brought him in contact with Plato’s Realm of Forms – a real place where the ideals of all things exist, and the rest of our reality is its pathetic shadow. This eldritch (ELDRITCH) knowledge makes him dangerous. The more he knows of your soul, the more abstract you could become. It makes sense, trust me.
THE HOOK: TallDeer is like, my philosophy will kill you Brooke. I love you too but it can never be. She’s like, take me you darkly majestic (OVERPOWERED) monster. He takes her to his mansion in the woods, and things start to suck…
Brooke and TallDeer have some bad arguments and it’s like Bella and Beast up in there. Brooke retreats from the middle floors, yea, unto the roof. Up there she falls in love with the depths of the night sky, and it comes to love her back (CELESTIAL, NATURAL). That sky comes to her in dreams (DREAMER) in a human-like form so they can bone down. TallDeer finds out she’s been untrue and is like, no! Banished from rooftops!
Brooke goes to the basement, where she finds a dusty little (MINUSCULE) dollhouse (INANIMATE, ARTIFICIAL) that is a replica of the mansion she’s trapped in. Out of rage at her imprisonment, she knocks it on the floor, and the whole building shakes. It cries out, no, I’m the building you’re in, this is the tiny version of the real me (GIGANTIC). She is sad for him and commits to patching him up. TallDeer is like, you damn well betta! You broke it you bought it.
But then she falls in love with the dollhouse / mansion, who is a swell guy when you get to know him. TallDeer is filled with sorrow and rages until he realizes there’s no keeping that girl from being in love with the world. He uses his eldritch overpowers to embody the sky and the mansion in human bodies named Celeste and Dollhouse respectively, and lets her have her lovers.
In gratitude she forgives TallDeer, and invites him into this Polycule. They lived happily ever after but probably fucked up the fabric of reality somethin’ fierce.
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MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year I have been worse than usual in composing very slight ideas to justify whatever cover I was able to squeak out of Midjourney and Photopea. In Midjourney I’m using versions 6.0 and 5.2 and Niji 6. Some of these needed a lot more Photopea, some practically nothing.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY SIX: NAUTICAL
TITLE: GOSETTE AND VIVIAN AND ONE MILLION TON OF FISH HEADS IN OIL
CHARACTERS: Vivian Pearl: the Beloved, Gosette Aland: a Shapeshifting Abyssal Monster
PREMISE: Shud ya desira ken hin fra yon, hinna Portinsmuth sonly ine or tuther – men fra woem, blake fra wise, rond fra thin – an most acrux? Folk fra Fesh. Folk are a’ye an I, Fesh are a’yon beests adeep – amorfin and bespeckt wid scale an wesker.
Wellasn’t ye kennit, ine feshmen set hes mine against God, crosst ine fra tuther to be folkwoem, so enamerd he upon harta ine folkwoem true. Shud God despiset, so shud we, an sure we’ll do arpart thet God prevale. Aymen.
THE HOOK: State een base, slubbit and bubbit, form flu een den oot, born von deef and vor deef retorn. But nine, seen I she – Vivian, aland and adeer, perfected een state as still. Soght I state as still, form perfected, and a hand will hold as fingers abone and aflesh fare-firm. Call you I Gosette Aland, or perish aneath the million ton.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY SEVEN: LEGENDARY
TITLE: JEFFREY WOODS, MY BELOVED
CHARACTERS: Jeff the Killer: Reformed Creepypasta, Samantha “Sam” Sapphire: Not Like Other Girls
PREMISE: Legendary juvenile mass murderer Jeff the Killer was finally captured – or did he turn himself in? As a child, he was not able to be executed nor sentenced for life, under the state laws of the moment, and he was released with monitoring upon his twenty-fifth birthday, a changed man. But the scars of his misdeeds remained, so that all could recognize him on sight.
A blind cowboy with a headstrong fiery daughter hired him to be a ranch hand. At first she threatened to tell her dad and get him fired, but she saw the solemn look of remorse in his eyes, and instead committed to teaching that suburb slicker and maniac to do cowboy things – up to and including lovin’.
THE HOOK: How can you do normie stuff when you’ve seen flesh torn asunder, life leaving the eyes of your victims, and delighted in it? Every neck looks like a target, even that of yer darling dear. Jeffrey must learn not only how to live free without doing murders, but how to roll ’em rope, and brand ’em. Rawhide! Also some hetero shit I guess.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY EIGHT: FIERY
TITLE: YOU’RE TO BLAME
CHARACTERS: Ian Astbury: Lead Singer of The Cult, Monica: the Fire Woman
PREMISE: Ian Astbury, lead singer of The Cult, was alone with his lover in front of a crackling fireplace, and she casually quipped about how meaningless his lyrics are. A far-away mysterious look overtook his features, and she asked about it. He recalled and told to her for the first time his reason for writing Fire Woman. It was about his ex-girlfriend of a few fateful nights, Monica – a supernatural being.
THE HOOK: Monica was a djinnah, made of smokeless flame during the creation of the Earth. She was always drawn to people, flirting and having the romance that she could achieve before the sad news came to light – She can’t fuck because she’ll burn your junk off. Fire Woman, you’re to blame.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY NINE: SEASONAL
TITLE: BUNNY NIGHT
CHARACTERS: Suela Gonsalves: a Waitress in Sleazy Dive Bar, Vica Perez Salvatore: her Fellow Waitress, WereBunny
PREMISE: In honor of Easter, the Coyote Ugly-esque dive bar “Mac’s” held a Bunny Night. The waitresses would wear tutus and bunny ears. But little did they know, holding such an event on Sunday offended Resurrection Jesus (as opposed to Baby Jesus, who is more chill), and he sent the Easter Bunny with wrath. That blood-drenched leporine stalked Mac’s invisible at ankle level, looking for a way to sow disaster. He nipped Vica’s skin, and she contracted a curse.
THE HOOK: What a terrible night for a curse. Vica became a giant rabbit woman. Problem is, a frightened herbivore will attack any perceived foe, so it can get away and raid a produce aisle. She slaughtered the sinful bargoers. The survivors teamed up to take her down, but Suela betrayed them to help Vica live. She always had a crush on that girl.
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MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year I have been worse than usual in composing very slight ideas to justify whatever cover I was able to squeak out of Midjourney and Photopea. In Midjourney I’m using versions 6.0 and 5.2 and Niji 6. Some of these needed a lot more Photopea, some practically nothing.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY ONE: INSECTOID
TITLE: I WAS A TEENAGE LOCUST
CHARACTERS: Knute Burley: the Teenage Locust, Rita Lawson: the Babe, and Joel Simons: the Teenage Kestrel
PREMISE: Joel and Knute are buddies and the most popular guys in school. Joel is low-key jelly of Knute’s slightly superior appeal. When Knute gets mutated by a pesticide accident into a giant Locust, people are at first terrified, but people are won over by the mild-mannered and genial way he goes about his old life, despite deformity, and he becomes even more popular. Rita was once torn between two lovers, but the mutation becomes the clincher.
THE HOOK: The story is passionate because of the intensity of the love triangle. What is it that’s so appealing about Knute as a locust? Pity at his hideous state transforms to fascination. Joel’s jealousy leads him to want what Knute has, and recreate the incident. But he transforms instead into a giant kestrel, a kind of bug-eating falcon, and ruins homecoming. The struggle is surreal.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY TWO: SHAPESHIFTER
TITLE: I WAS A TEENAGE KESTREL
CHARACTERS: Joel Simons: the Teenage Kestrel, Fernanda Wahl: the Love Interest, General Butch Ulster: the Antagonist
PREMISE: Joel was electrocuted and presumed exploded at the end of I Was a Teenage Locust, but he’d actually flown far away, on wings of despair. He plopped into a village where he resumed human form and tried to forget the past. But he could only suppress his kestrelness in short bursts, leading him to monster out at inopportune times. Fernanda, the spicy redhead all the boys were after, took an interest in his brooding charms and mysterious behavior, which itself transformed shapeshifter style into affection for his birdy alter ego.
THE HOOK: The story is passionate because secret boy has secret power, and girl is o’erwhelmed by the majesty of nature gone wrong. Also an army general decides flying people must be commies and tries to root him out and take him down. Love under the gun.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY THREE: PARASITE
TITLE: THE LEATHER JACKET
CHARACTERS: Corinthia Brandesford: the Protagonist, Theobald Fenimore: the Love Interest, Buer: the Leather Jacket
PREMISE: Corinthia met brooding Heathcliff type Theobald at the wee-kend party of the Umpwutherington Brandesfords’. He never took off his leather jacket, which was a rather hideous affair, worse as time went on. But he was a feet-sweeper-offer. On the other hand, was he wearing the jacket or was the jacket wearing him?
THE HOOK: A demonic jacket has taken over a man’s body. He’s witty and wacky and totally into Corinthia. But Theobald’s exploitation is a necessary aspect of this relationship, which was surely against god’s will.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY FOUR: SHADOW
TITLE: ENDYMION’S SILHOUETTE
CHARACTERS: Dashiell Stockton: the Creator, Shadow: the Created
PREMISE: Dashiell was part of a circle of naughty gay men, who knew they were accursed by god for being true to themselves, and sought therefore to find what other condemnable things they could get up along the way down. Black magic, in fact. Usually he was just the sex appeal at the ceremony, but one weekend he was left behind while tripping on morphine, and found himself alone in the sorcerer’s chambers when the reverie broke. He did a little unsupervised magic of his own, raising a shadow version of himself. They talked for hours about secrets of the cosmos and sensuous delights. This wasn’t just another version of himself, was it? A demon? A fallen angel? They get it on.
THE HOOK: Is it real or is it selfcest? Forbidden love.
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MONSTER HEARTS DAY FIVE: ARTIFICIAL OR NATURAL EXPERIMENTAL
TITLE: SWEETNESS
CHARACTERS: Dr. Delicious: the Man, Sugar: the Natural, and Aspartame: the Artificial
PREMISE: Dr. Delicious lived in an anime world of colorful tiered cityscapes where people in the street were not animated, just drawn mid-motion while crowd patter played in the soundtrack. He used cyber-alchemy to conjure the spirit of Sugar, a girl with auburn hair and amber eyes, a killer with kindness, an elemental of white crystal and overgrown grass blades when there were no humans around. But his boss said no, she is not enough. Bring forth the spirit of Aspartame, hollow and potent, brightly colored and utterly ephemeral.
THE HOOK: Love triangle again. Sugar and Aspartame vie for the affections of the alchemist, embodying their own bizarre qualities, but he is a bad dad(dy dom) and they may sometimes seek affection in each other’s arms. Who will win? (Whoever wins the poll. Day Five’s poll hasn’t closed, but is close between Artificial and Natural monsters, Artificial up by one vote.) Science won. I thought doing a post for the two frontrunners in the poll would be a safe bet, then worst place came from behind for a dark horse victory. Congrats, Experimental.
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no idea what to say about these, how to explain how i arrived at them. i just think, this might be the first time i’ve created AI images of a scene i want to be a part of, haha…
My dude and I were making some AI images, and while I’ve been doing more sensible things like the image on the left, he’s been doing glitchy weirdness like the image on the right. The one on the left is in Midjourney’s 5.2 engine, the one on the right is from a version created by and for Asian countries called Niji. I may have some terms wrong in all that.
I tried mashing them up by using the images themselves as prompts. Here’s just the images, in original flavor midjourney:
Here’s the same mashup, but also using the text prompt he used to get his original image set, “neon pixel art cover, in the style of horror manga, webcam photography, psychedelic manga, trick of the eye paintings, ascii art, disfigured forms”:
Here’s me switching from midj to niji, with just the images as prompt:
Then in niji with the text prompt included…
I think the winner is the last one, on the right. The one on the left has the head duplication problem from early midjourney outputs, like a few versions back. Kinda fun if you don’t recognize that, though. Nonetheless, cannot hold a candle to “lascivious psychic ghoul temporarily doffs the skull mask to use third eye on you.”
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