Midjourney v6

Once more into the AI, breech, dear friends!

I stopped using Midjourney with v4, when the generative AI platform began to look commercially viable. 

Most of the images I rendered back in 2022 needed to be fixed up, edited by hand in ProCreate to remove glitches, fix hands, and other The Thing style horrors. 

The fixes were relatively minor, overall. But they needed the finishing touches. 

Now? 

Midjourney v6, from what I've seen, have solved glitches and hands. The software has vastly improved, and at an incredible pace. 

I've seen illustrations in online magazines rendered by AI. They're all over stock sites, even though they aren't supposed to be (or so I'd been led to understand... how do you sell something that can be shared freely?). 

The strange artificial 'plastic' feel is still there, although less extreme. Creative prompt crafting can diminish it further. 

I still have quite a stack of imagery rendered back in 2022, and I've fixed up a number in ProCreate. They look pretty cool. 

But I don't think I'll be posting any more (not that anyone is looking anyway). 

The impact of these AI renderers (and AI writers) is increasing. How the law will eventually deal with them, I have no idea. If they keep improving, companies focused on the bottom line will use them more and more. That will impact all the creative arts: why get into a field where you can be replaced by the click of a button?

Generative AI is amazing in so many ways, and it's a ton of fun to play around with. I can see why some people have become practically addicted to it. But the potential human cost, to arts and culture, is incalculable.

Day of the Zombie Franchise

Franchises weren't really a thing (well, baring ancient, medieval and religious myths) until the Penny Dreadfuls of Victorian London. Cheap, 1 cent pamphlets filled with lurid tales of mayhem, murder, adventure and lascivious escapades. Sherlock Holmes was born out of that swamp. and Solomon Kane came soon after. Edgar Rice Burrough burst onto the franchise scene with John Carter and Tarzan, who were soon followed by a flood of others, from Flash Gordon to Zorro. 

Film franchises started to take off in the late sixties, with James Bond and Planet of the Apes. Star Wars put the franchise phenomena into overdrive, and blockbuster sequel cinema arrived every summer. After the flick you could go to a fast food franchise, like McDonalds. 

Star Trek came back from the dead thanks to legions of die hard fans (coupled with the success of Star Wars, which had dollar signs floating before the eyes of studio execs). Batman and Superman brought us two long running franchises; more recently, we've been doused in MCU. 

Franchises are sucking up all the air, and then some. 

I'm so old now I've seen franchises rebooted not once, not twice, but three times. And still the suits in Hollywood will not stop. Not while there is a buck to be made! 

Inevitably franchises outlive their creator. Whatever message or meaning they imbued the property with is lost, and it lumbers on, soulless, consuming money like some kind of ravenous undead memetic monster. 

Zombie franchises exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: to make money. That's it. It IS a business. But most creative people don't get into it just for the money; they want something more. They want to say SOMETHING. Beyond 'Give me your money,' that is.

The Combine cares first and foremost about the bottom line. That's why we have been inundated with lame remakes and reboots composed of pureed narrative mush for decades. Thankfully, miraculously, there are gems of sheer brilliance to be found in the chaff, brought into existence by force of will, creative genius, and selfless cooperation. 

But the mush? They'll keep making that until we stop watching. 

It's the only way to really kill Jason, Freddy, Wayne or Parker.

Samurai Patrol

A sumaurai runner bot out on patrol in the Midwest. Farming communities repurposed all manner of robots to protect their homesteads from threats.

Lion Guardian

A Kansan Lion guardian robot on the plains, hunting for raider incursions to dismember. Technicians retrofitted robotic lion heads from amusement parks onto loader bots refitted with massive rending claws and a few fusion blasters to make for a truly formidable apex predator of the plains. 

Troglodyte monuments

These are monuments to the great troglodytes, one shortly after moving underground, and the other millennia later.

Break time

Sadly, they are out of Coffee Crisps

Materialist leader Tensohl takes a break in a surface level station while Bespoke Monks and his lieutenant, Seldar, watch on. Tunnel mall dives could last for weeks, given their extent, and often resulted in heavy casualties. But they were holy expeditions for materialists, who likened them to crusades.

Escape pod before haunted city

Astronaut Miles Vachon stands atop his escape pod after his Z-88 SolarExplorer was destroyed by a space jelly swarm emerging out of Jupiter’s asteroid belt. He landed before the spectacular remains of a long dead alien city, estimated to be over a million years old. 

He set up a distress be on and then set about exploring the ruins. As he approached, he felt increasing pressure on his skull; forward movement became increasingly difficult and a kaleidoscope of lights appeared in his vision. 

The android rescue team found him collapsed on the dust plain. He was removed to a medical facility on Io, where he remained in a coma for two weeks. 

The ruins were later found to be the locus of a powerful memetic field. Remotes, used to enter the interior of the structure, determined it was built over a vast series of interconnected cylindrical caverns, lined with small hexagonal pods. 

All of these proved empty, save for one, which was sealed by an opaque membrane gel. Whenever attempts were made to penetrate the pod, contact with the remote unit would be lost and a wave of feedback would short out the command unit.