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 …
Category: Writing
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/13/24: States of Confusion (Great Lakes)
You could just as well call these the Upper Midwest states, but I think Great Lakes states is more picturesque, as they do border lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. And for a unifying theme I could have gone with ice fishing and mighty forests and Paul Bunyon, or, conversely, big city blue-collar life …
The Princess Who Ate Nothing But Potatoes
I asked ChatGPT to generate a story for me to ascertain the quality of the product. I took inspiration from this picture I generated from open.ai’s SDXL. It’s not quite a literal reading of the prompt I used, which was “a Medieval princess eating a heart-shaped potato.” But it’s unusual enough to serve my purpose. …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/6/24: Danish Dog Names
For a change let’s look at dog names rather than people names. Humans love their dogs, and it helps in training if the dog has a name that’s short and easy to say. Tucker, these days, is a popular name, as is Raven, Zelda, and Zeus. Some names don’t mean anything but they sound cute, …
The Romance Writers Association endorses the use of ChatGPT for writing… or not.
I recently became aware of how far the use of ChatGPT as a writer’s aid has come. NOT the use of it to write a whole book without human aid, because that is very far from the technology that’s available now. But this current trend towards it has a lot of fiction writers upset.
Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/21/24: Classical Greek Names (Male)
Authentic-sounding (NOT actually authentic, I want to make clear if you’re writing fact-based historical fiction) Greek names for men are just as easy to generate as those for women. And to accompany them, here’s a painting of the most manly man in Greek myth of all — Heracles! He’s pictured in his struggle against a …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/14/24: Love Magic
Since it’s Valentine’s day, I thought I’d do a list of spells and magical items related to love, or its lack. Caution, a few of these are NSFW! The fellow above is from Starry AI’s “pinup” art filter. The prompt was a variation of “bearded wizard with arms raised, a cloud of valentine candy hearts, …
The Romantasy Explosion
Since we’re nearing Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about… Romantasy. As implied by the name it’s a mashup of Romance + Fantasy, a subgenre exemplified, perhaps platonically, by Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, whose eponymously named first book came out in 2015. Marketed as YA, the fantasy novel was about a …