Mar 16
It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each …
Feb 11
Since I started to experiment with AI generated art back in August 2022 a lot has gone down. Chief among the developments, a lawsuit filed by a group of artists who claim the Midjourney creation site, the StableDiffusion AI engine, and DeviantArt, has plagiarized their work. Meaning, the AI engine was trained on images pulled …
Dec 05
I decided to have a little fun with my annual post on Christmas horror. Creepy-looking elves abound on the internet creating their own little Uncanny Valleys, and it’s just as easy for AI Art engines to make them as well, whether or not they were intended to be creepy. So I am trying an experiment. …
Nov 30
For many years my favorite science fiction novel was The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. The book was a comfort read for me. I had read it so often I could quote it, and given a sentence or two from anywhere in the book, I could tell what came before, and what came after. …
Nov 14
At the top, Dragon Empress; at the bottom, Empress Dragon. Both AI variations on the same source art, with differing word order.
Sep 19
Say the name Sauron and most people will think of this armored character from The Lord of the Rings movies, or a giant burning eye. But in the books Tolkien never spoke of Sauron’s Third Age physical form except in abstracts, saying only that he was “not fair” which could mean anything. So, inspired by …
Sep 12
The very first story I had published professionally (which means, by my definition, I got paid for, and I could hold the book in my hot little hands) was about a woman who turns, or is turned into, an espresso machine, and all the various sensations she experiences as coffee and creamer emerge from her …
Sep 07
Galaxies are one of those things that it’s easy to create a picture of. I remember in the 1970s all an artist needed was an airbrush, one or two pigments, and a fine paintbrush for depicting individual stars. When Photoshop and other painting programs came along, you could do the same thing with digital tools …
Aug 31
I’m going to do something different for this post of WW. I’m going to post AI-created portraits of randomly generated Narnian monarchs using StarryAI. (Starry-Eyed, get it?) These monarchs are intended to be used in Narnian fanfics, but they could be used in any work of fantasy fiction as well. First, Queen Thuma of the …
Aug 17
In this post I’ll talk about how Lewis wrote his fauns and satyrs, which are not the most child-friendly of mythological beasts. Are you ready? Because everything you think you know about them is wrong. First of all, the original satyrs of Greek myth did not have goat legs, horns, and tails. Those were attributes …