I haven’t been posting much ASFR content on here lately, but I’m pretty pleased by this happy accident of a Midjourney prompt, which was for a futuristic London subway, but came out… skewed sideways as often happens. Female wrongdoers were placed into transportation sarcophagi for their journey to the processing facilities. Such displays acted as …
Category: Science Fiction
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/15/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 4)
There are interpretations of the Milky Way other than the arms of a distant galaxy. The Milky Way candy bar, invented in 1923 in Minneapolis, is still going strong domestically and globally. Its inventor was one Frank Mars, who gave his name to — you guessed it — the Mars Bar. You’d think he chose …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/8/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 3)
The Greeks weren’t the only ones to create origin stories for the Milky Way. Centuries before them, the Babylonians had their own version: it was the tail of Tiamat, the dragon/serpent goddess of primordial chaos, placed there after her defeat by the god Marduk. Likely the first version of the chaos vs. order megamyth, not …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/1/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 2)
The painting above, by Peter Paul Rubens, offers a different take on the Milky Way’s origins. I like it a lot better than Tintoretto’s which appeared last week. For one thing, it feels more real. There’s a story being told as your eye travels from element to element in the painting. But it’s not the …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/20/24: SFF Theme Burgers (ChatGPT)
Because ChatGPT did such a good job of generating Hawaii-themed cocktails (granted, edited by me to make them more unique and coherent) I decided to see what it could do with hamburgers. Gourmet burgers in fact, themed after science fiction and fantasy books. In this I was inspired by a Seattle coffeeshop where I and …
Telepathic Humanoids
I’m pretty pleased with this series of images I generated in MJ lately. Even though “telepathic” apparently meant a concept more like “television” to the AI, they’re still timeless, ethereal and spooky.
Worldbuilding Wednesday 11/14/23: Venus and Mars
The phrase “Venus and Mars” is a potent one. Not only does it bring to mind Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, and Mars, the god of war and brutality, in all their opposition, but also nights of stargazing, self-help books on relations between the sexes, astrology columns, and (as above) anthemical rock albums. …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 11/01/23: Ultraman Kaiju I
The many, many incarnations of Ultraman over the decades gave fans a decorative Rogue’s Gallery of foes, most of whom were out to destroy Earth or conquer it. The show’s writers were careful to give them all distinctive names, which, oddly, the attack teams somehow always knew despite never seeing that monster before. Most sounded …
AI Art Adventures: Blending a crown
If you’ve read my posts on AI versions of Narnia’s White Witch, Green Witch, and Queen Jadis of Charn, you’ll know I have a fascination with exotic costumes. I blame this on watching the Sonny and Cher Show in the early 1970s. (Some of my grade school designs for Cher would have put present day …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/22/23: States of Confusion (The Wild West)
On to the second part of the Western states! As promised, I am puncturing some cowboy myths. Cowboys didn’t always ride horses. They likely weren’t white. It was a career that attracted the outcasts of society, so many were black, Hispanic, mestizo, Native American, or of mixed race. It was not considered a fun or …