My heart betrayed me last Friday, but a few bright, smooth-skinned nurses have tended me by sending their soft voices my way, and touching my decaying body (I’m not counting the male nurse who kept rubbing his crotch along my arm). Those heavenly nurses addressed me as “sir”; I wish they had slipped a “daddy” or two in there. Anyway, I dedicate this entry to the lovely females, who improve the mood of most men (and some women) just by getting stared at.
The following series is a tribute to a certain harpist that for a few years, some years ago, sent rays of light daily down the black hole I was inhabiting.
Sometimes when I send prompts to these neural networks, I wonder if they’ll become sentient and write me back: “Please, don’t force me to imagine any more of this shit.”
The following generated images are related to chapter 81 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
“When a bolt of lightning, from the storm clouds that are sieging this business park, blinks behind me, the flash reflects off the three computer monitors.”
The gooey visitor.
“That flash also lights up the grotesquerie stuck to the opposite wall of the office: a corpse made of spoiled cottage cheese, a stygian soup of shadowy excretions that are oozing down in elongating filaments of goo.”
“Its distending and widening surface appears grainy and lumpy under a greasy coat of slime.”
“As the rumble of thunder ripples through my skin, the ceiling-mounted lamps keep illuminating that viscous, squirming intruder as if it were a wall-wide kinetic sculpture.”
“Otherworldly bizarrenauts can catch my spoor from space-times away as if my craziness wafted off me like some miasmic aura.”
“This elephant-sized glutinous amoeba, spewed from some interdimensional sewer overflowing with bubbling septic matter, must have penetrated this realm to hunt me down and devour me alive.”
“From the organic sludge stuck to the wall will erupt tentacles and pseudopods that, while dripping foul juices, twisting and writhing about in a necrotic choreography, will reach across the office toward its prey.”
“The tentacles, their touch cold, slippery and slimy like a slug’s skin, will coil around my torso and limbs to ensnare me, clamping onto my flesh with a myriad of suckers and hooks.”
“Once the blob engulfs me, acidic pus will flow around me like thick mud.”
“My hair will fall out in clumps, my skin burn, my eyes shrivel up.”
“As my flesh sloughs off and my bones unknit from one another, a soup of acidic toxins will eat away at my organs, melting them like lard in a frying pan, until I dissolve into a slurry of pulp and corroded bones floating amid a festering broth.”
“Should I tolerate being harassed, let alone ingested, by some mass of jellified boils and warts?”
“I could hardly wrestle even a child into submission, but my equine pal, through his selfless sacrifice, provided me with the means to blast this malignant mold before it snatches me up.”
“I picture his hooves clattering on the asphalt, his mane flying in the wind, a halo of electric discharges enveloping his body.”
A heroic ungulate.
“He would burst through the window, shattering it in its frame, scattering glass shards across the carpet.”
“While snorting fire from his nostrils, my gallant steed would plunge his teeth into that tumorous pest.”
“The blob would split open and splatter into goopy, gummy lumps below Spike’s belly and fetlocks.”
“In a frenzy of white-hot flames, he would gouge out the intruder’s putrid protoplasm, he’d trample on the gloop that flopped onto the carpet.”
“My equine pal would lick his lips and slurp down the puddles of amoebic goo.”
“He’d tumble down the street that slopes from the business park, crushing the carcass of some squashed roadkill, before crashing into a fence.”
“Spike’s body would disintegrate with a silent whoosh as his fur, flesh, blood, viscera, bones and marrow were engulfed by a nimbus of flame.”
“Ash and cinders would remain where a horseman’s corpse once lay.”
“Their brass heads sparkle in the fluorescent light.”
“Safely stowed among paperclips, ballpoints, tissues, breath mints, earbuds and tampons rests Spike’s revolver.”
“I smell the phantoms of gun oil and cordite.”
“I touch the relief of the checkered wood grip, as well as the skull and bones engraved on the frame.”
“I’d love to engrave next to it the portrait of a woman with sunken eyes, emaciated cheeks and dead skin peeling off her face, accompanied by scrawled black letters that would spell ‘A Horseman Never Fails,’ but I lack the artistic skill and patience.” Interesting attempt by the AI to render human language.
The following are the AI’s notion of revolvers. The designs got increasingly demented, although I had pictured a relatively simple Smith & Wesson revolver for the story. It seems that I should dream a little bigger.
Cool design but somewhat impractical.
“A trigger’s click in my brain makes me shudder as a burst of images shoots across my mind.”
“A round must glimmer at the end of that dark tunnel.”
“How many shots can you fit inside your overheated cranium?”
“Squeeze the trigger and rid yourself of your noxious mental parasites.”
“A single bullet would rip through your axons, dendrites and nerve synapses, releasing your ghosts from the crevices within before they could manifest pain.”
“You’d free yourself from the incessant taunting, the obsessions that gnaw at your sanity, the disgust and shame for your body and mind, the self-hatred.”
“A hell-spawned downward spiral ending in dementia senilis.”
“Bury that tumor deep inside yourself.”
“[…] I wouldn’t have suffered for years like some maimed dog in its owner’s backyard, waiting for someone to throw it a scrap of meat.”
“I must obliterate the cosmic pox before it pours its poison into anyone’s holes.”
In this modern world of soulless art that has been digested by a chain of ideologues before it reaches the general public, unbiased neural networks come forth to bring us pure, innocent beauty, as well as raw madness.
I have posted many, many entries that feature AI-generated images. Check them out.
I think often about spelunking down some hole.
Never forget.
The neural network can come up with cool flag designs, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody at this point.
Also shirts that few people would wear.
Imagery related to my dream of becoming the king of Castile. Only owls would be allowed to live in the kingdom.
The prompt for these ones were, “ghostly sloth haunting zoo.” I’m happy.
To render moments of this chapter, I relied on a neural network that churns out mesmerizing masterpieces as long as you pay that artificial intelligence a monthly wage for it (which is fine; great work should be rewarded). A second neural network, one trained on anime and furry shit, also helped.
The following images are related to chapter 80 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many, many entries that feature AI-generated images: check them out.
“I rest my forehead on the windowpane, that barely insulates the office from the cold of this November sunset.”
“Our star is a cream pie on which someone has landed ass-first, splashing its pinkish-orange filling all over the sky.”
Anime AI’s interpretations of the previous prompt. Thank you, that was exactly what I was picturing.
“The fat storm clouds that drift by are dyed the color of dried blood; mixed with the charcoal-black of the clouds themselves, they resemble stains on the clothes of plague victims.”
Somewhat useful reference pics.
“Sound waves pour from the speaker of my cellphone down my ear canal.”
“The forms of the two females, sculpted in obsidian, stand on the carpet of that remote living room, framed against the shapes in relief of the cabinet and the widescreen TV.”
“I’m craving something sweet, warm and moist.”
“The clock is ticking on the evening hours, and I need to progress my programming tasks for this job that sucks the joy and wonder out of my life.”
“Her full lips must be brushing the plasticky surface of her phone, spattering it, blessing it, with microscopic particles of saliva.”
“The Ice Age gifted us an Asian kid tempered in the boreal cold, who survived her skirmishes against an ensemble of Paleolithic megafauna.”
“My voice comes out in a croak, as if a lump was blocking my throat.”
“She must have been cuddling with you all afternoon, so she has likely forgotten that I exist.”
“A porcelain-white vine of lightning, twisted and barbed, has streaked through the thick belly of a storm cloud, burning its image into that gray slug filled with rain.”
“I imagine myself as a critter caught outside during a storm in the tropics: a tree snail clinging onto a mangrove to weather nature’s wrath.”
“Her worried voice sounded like a cat meowing at a screen that shows her missing owner.”
“Help me, Nairu! I’m trapped in this futuristic device!”
“Jacqueline’s laugh comes through like a bell pealing over the hilltops.”
“They would consider you a delicious breakfast buffet, the tastiest and nuttiest prey in their hunting ground.” I worry about what these AIs believe the Ice Age was like.
“Those beasts weren’t monsters, though. Just misunderstood.”
“Those storm clouds resemble an avalanche of dirty snow sliding across the sky in slow motion.”
“Glad you’re keeping her fed and warm in that glass-encased bubble while I risk my life in this forest of cement and metal.”
“I hope you chose one of the classics, instead of the turds they’ve been pushing out since they got gobbled up by that demonic mouse, a slobbering beast that has hijacked children’s imagination.”
“A drifting cloud has unveiled the moon and its silvery haze: a thinning scab on a bruised sky.”
“Poor thing, you must feel like I called from another dimension.”
“I rub my eyes and take a deep breath to scrub from my mind the yearning for another cataclysm, one that would leave this planet exposed to the starlight.”
“My statuesque queen of love and lust.”
“Ah, the classic tale involving a murderous cowboy and a clueless space marine.”
“The 3D humans in that one would traumatize me even now.” Anime AI was disturbingly good at producing cursed 3D characters.
“I wouldn’t have wanted my toys to know what I did in the privacy of my bedroom.”
Triceratops voyeurs.
“When she speaks again, her giggle-like tone warms everything within its reach, like the heat emanating from the belly of a giant furnace.”
“You should have locked up the stuffie, locked him away and kept your shameful secret a secret.”
“Plenty of love is flooding from both of our hearts towards the tiny sweetie that you took out of the ice.”
“I’m picturing her assemblage of dildos and vibrators doddering around in her wardrobe like stoic, limbless soldiers, leaving trails of lubricants with each stump-step.”
“I imagine myself sitting at the edge of mommy’s bed, facing my reflection in the mirrored wardrobe as her dildoes and vibrators knock and knock on the inside of the door, vying for the privilege of joining me in a muggy session of self-worship.”
“Lightning zigzags along the night sky, and as its glare whitens the windowpanes, I’m left with the afterimage of a black blot suspended in the air between the glass and the opposite office building.”
“The blot is accompanied by the blurry images of the long desk, the three chairs and the rectangular glow of my monitor.”
“At the other end of the office, on the lily-white wall, a tar-black stain is growing like ink bleeding into paper, like oil leaking from a deep puncture hole.”
Lightning-lizard!
“Lightning-lizards lurk outside, spreading out their glow into the room while jagged hairline cracks hover in front of me, superposed to the vision of the office and its flickering ceiling-mounted lamps, as if I were encased in scratched glass.”
“The black blob on the wall, engulfing a larger patch of white, pulsates as it swells, bulges out in viscous globs like a toilet backing up, and oozes down in gooey tendrils.”
“Light-snakes from the ceiling-mounted lamps are wriggling on the slimy, visceral mass.” Not at all what I meant, but I won’t complain.
“A glistening murk has gouged a hole in my skull and is crawling through my gray matter like a centipede.”
“I’m bobbing up to my nose in a gelatinous sea that tastes of vinegar and fish guts.”
“I shiver at the flapping sound of fat membranes uncurling, at the feel of viscid tissue-matter sticking to my skin.”
“Lightning bolts illuminate the waves in stroboscopic flashes, making them resemble a seething kelp forest, while I thrash my limbs around to stay afloat against the churning currents.”
“A honeyed voice breaks through, floods my mind and envelops my thoughts like a welcoming womb.”
“I miss the taste of her silky skin, like an ambrosial mixture of rosehip and milk.”
“I picture the inverted triangle of prominent features that make up Jacqueline’s ivory-white visage: her penetrating cobalt-blues at the two upper vertices, and her full lips at the lower vertex.”
“She’s standing in front of me in her peacoat and turtleneck sweater as the November wind tousles her hair.”
“Jacqueline is my sole lighthouse, a beacon amidst the storm of insanity that rages inside and outside of me.”
“A croaking voice pours forth through the speaker embedded in my neck, where the voicebox and throat structure must be housed.”
Goddess of delights, mistress of dreams.
“Overvoltage probably fried the electronics in my brain.”
“A tar-black blob has encroached upon a huge chunk of the wall.”
“A hole that sucks all hope through its bottomless whirlpool.”
Don’t know about Mr. Darger? According to Wikipedia:
Henry Joseph Darger Jr. (April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American writer, novelist and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy novel manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor illustrations for the story.
The guy was likely autistic, was neglected throughout his childhood, and lived the rest of his life in isolation. On and off, he believed that girls have penises.
As it pertains this entry, the serious neural networks that produce images were trained on Darger’s stuff as well. So let’s bring this motherfucker back from the dead, shall we?
Check out the following images while listening to the song that Neutral Milk Hotel made in his honor.
Below are dinosaur-themed images in the man’s style:
What if Darger had lived long enough to discover virtual reality?
The following are depictions of the brutal Glandeco-Angelinian war:
After the triumph in the Glandeco-Angelinian war, the girls turned their attention to more supernatural threats:
Who’s up for some more AI-assisted depravity? Just me?
I’m phasing out the previous iterations of the serious neural network. The newest version is a beast that knows no competitors, except for anime AI’s niche of unrestrained sexuality. This entry features mature content, in case you work somewhere that sucks.
I’m addicted to generating images, so I have posted thirty-five other entries with such content. Check them out.
Slavic cats.
Even more intriguing Slavic cats.
Some more of serious AI’s idea of anime girls.
I specified that the image should be eighties-themed.
The prompt for these two was: “spaceship crashes into patisserie.”
The prompts for these last ones was: “Birthday party for Lovecraftian abomination.”
Even the painting on the wall features a Grim Reaper. Well played, sir.
Some more of anime AI’s contributions to society:
The thought that this image might get me in trouble crossed my mind. #FreeTheNipples.
After a long day at work, haven’t you wished you could spend the whole afternoon in bed with a couple of mouse-girls?
Now here’s a bunch of depictions of the Red Fury herself:
Sometimes I rely on my pet neural networks to render some wild thought that crossed my mind, and other times the images are run-offs from the stuff I generate for whatever chapter I’m working on. In any case, three neural networks were involved in bringing to life the following images (plenty of them cursed).
I have posted dozens of entries with AI-generated images. Check them out.
The prompt for this one was “ebony cloud of insects.”
The longer you stare at this picture, the stupider it gets.
Bees somehow involved with plasma guns.
That’s supposed to be Joanna Newsom doing Joanna Newsom stuff.
Haunting depictions of our guy Brush.
Not sure what’s going on in these pictures, but they look cool enough.
The prompt for these last three pictures was a single word: “anime.”
The true meaning of anime.
Annie Leonhart from a certain manga/anime.
My boy Denji, depicted in this image as a lumberjack with way too many fingers. Ironically he did work as a lumberjack for a while when he was hanging out with Pochita.
Queen tsundere Asuka Langley looking cute as heck. Too bad about those double eyebrows. Asuka was two years older than me when I first got a crush on her, and now she’s forever fourteen. That’s what I love about these anime girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.
Disturbing(ly hot) depictions of Mikasa Ackerman from the Ackerman show. Even the best neural network so far hasn’t figured out proper form, nor that metal bars shouldn’t go through people’s necks during weightlifting.
I asked for slipping and floating in slime and goo, and the latest neural network turned it into a horror show. It was supposed to be a party!
Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata.
For the last few months I’ve been playing around with a couple of neural networks, one of them a serious artist and the other a pervert trained exclusively on anime. I had already rendered about three-fifths of the images I would have included in this entry, when a beast of a new neural network rolled out, one that plays in a different ballpark. You will notice the difference in abilities, particularly because its products will come after the other AIs’ attempts.
Anyway, the images below were inspired (and plenty served as references) by chapter 79 of my ongoing tale We’re Fucked.
I have posted thirty-three other entries with AI-generated images. Check them out.
Approximation of Leire that I asked the previous generation of the serious AI to render, mainly to compare the result with the stuff I included in this entry.
Just Jacqueline.
The Paleolithic child named Nairu that Jacqueline and Leire have known for less than a day, but that if anything bad were to happen to the child, both of them would murder everybody in the room and then themselves.
My initial attempts at getting some references for how the sky looked that night.
“A child’s vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations.”
“Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head?”
“Behold, the glowing flower of a child’s face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf.” Both AIs appreciated the fact that lemonade was involved.
“Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows.”
“In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles.”
“Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.”
“A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes.”
“She seeks my input, although I’m the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.” The serious AI won’t accept prompts with the word “naked” (as well as plenty of other words). Anime AI did accept that word, but failed to produce nakedness. Oh well.
Leire’s dream to see a UFO.
“They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system.”
“Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they’ll waste their wages at some alien brothel.”
“Is she trying to warn us that it’s over, that the end has come?”
“This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse.”
“Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age?”
“The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet.”
Amoeba-shaped nebulas.
“I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones.”
“Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.”
“Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever.”
“The celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors.”
“When humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness.”
“The dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.”
“Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities.”
“Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.”
“Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering?”
“[…] that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts.”
“I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats.”
“I peer into the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater.”
“I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle’s flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight.”
“I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils.”
“Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.”
“Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons?”
“I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons.”
“Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown.”
“I will hallucinate that I’m a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.”
“The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I’m hurtling towards the black ocean above.”
“My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut.”
“I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts.”
“My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor.”
“Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond.”
“This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out.”
“Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we’re safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode.”
“In this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive.”
“In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.”
“Let’s bathe in the cosmic ocean, let’s float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe.”
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.