A meme-god friend of mine sent me this:
Like it says: behind every sign there is a story. Use the comment section below to tell your interpretation of this one.
Midjourney has a new feature: “describe” – in which you can provide a picture and it will do its best to return a prompt that would trigger it to re-render the picture. I fed it that one, thinking maybe I could flip the response over to ChatGPT and ask it to tell me a story, but I got stuff like:
behind every sign there is a story the sign says,’don’t give the bison psychedelic substances, in the style of imaginative prison scenes, anglocore, ethical concerns, #vfxfriday, reduction of canine anatomy –ar 33:37
I don’t feel like working much today, so I’ll bite…
Are you looking for a title and one-line plot description, like: “Hunter S. Thompson’s Last Charge”?
The start of a horror story, like: “The tall prairie grass waved peacefully in the light of the setting sun, masking the genetically-modified ergot slowly spreading over the plain.”?
Or, something like a Far Side caption: “Little did Randy know that bison have a weakness for licking South American tree frogs.”?
@flex: I figure “do as thou will, shall be the whole of the law.” I probably wouldn’t write a full 30 page short story, but anything between that and Hemingway’s “for sale, baby shoes, unworn” is fine.
There is a native American tradition of the vision quest, in which a young man coming of age leaves the tribe, fasts and dehydrates for several days in the wilderness and then hallucinates of buffalo or other portentous things. It appears someone misinterpreted the “buffalo vision” portion of this.
“We were visiting our great-uncle’s farm. There was a crazy old coot with a bison ranch ‘next-door’ (but quite a ways away). We were allowed to watch as Mr Cooter would feed them hay. This seemed not all that interesting to us. One day we approached the ranch more closely than we were normally allowed and brought along some stinky plants from the irrigation ditch. (This was in the days before crop sprinklers and in addition to random weeds you could find frogs dragonflies and all sorts of flowers on the side of every farm for miles).
They loved those weeds! They were big scary beasts but they learned to not knock us over and we learned just how close you could get to them.”
The two stooges Jill and Jock took copious amounts of psychedelics of the lysergic kind. After hysterically running around town with their hands up, they settled for breaking into Old Milly’s bison compound.
“For the acid to work its magic you must be one with nature” says Jill moving his hands in some mystical art form, imitating Taoists.
“I’ll show you some nature.” goes Jock, creeping up onto a sleeping buffalo. Jock pulls out a strip of acid. “nature needs to drop some tabs.” He carefully inserts the tabs into the sleeping buffalo’s mouth. He sits crossed on the floor, next to the buffalo. “Now we wait.”