intrusion into your space time continuum 2

More generative ai image synthesis animation visualizations of the 'space time continuum intrusion' subplot section of chapter 51 of The Corona Virus Saga'.

intrusion into your space time continuum

A generative ai image synthesis animation visualization of the 'space time continuum intrusion' subplot section of chapter 51 of The Corona Virus Saga'.

sterno, the hobo's friend - SD 50's americana remix

 

Another stable diffusion generative image synthesis retelling of the classic tale 'Sterno, the Hobo's Friend', as recounted in chapter 51 of The Corona Virus Saga'.

sterno, the hobo's friend -SD banksy remix

 

Stable diffusion generative image synthesis retelling of the classic tale 'Sterno, the Hobo's Friend', as recounted in chapter 51 of The Corona Virus Saga'.

T.S. Elliot -SD remix

A friend of mine suggested using a T.S. Elliot poem as the storyline for a generative ai animation.  This series of tests is using the first paragraph of the T.S Elliot poem titled 'The Wasteland".  Each line of that paragraph from the much longer poem is used as a story keyframe, along with an additional fixed style prompt.

Recursive feedback of a warped previous frame above, interpolating the text embeddings below.

Of course when you see things like paint brushes and cans of paint in the generative output, you wonder how much of that as well as things like the tonality, the lighting, the actual subject matter, etc are actually a product of the style text prompting rather than the actual text of the poem.  So the runs below get rid of all of the styling prompts and only use the literal text from the poem.

Recursive feedback of a warped previous frame above, interpolating the text embeddings below.

Getting rid of the style prompting gives the generated output a more drab documentary visual look.

Now i've mentioned before how the recursive feedback animation approaches require the use of a color coherence adjustment that maps every successive frame back to the coloring associated with the first frame, which is far from ideal for many reasons, and you can see it in the recursive feedback animation examples above. 

There is a trick you can use to try and overcome that, which involves adding an extra prompt at frame 0 only that forces a more vibrant coloring for that start frame.  So you can see that below using the same story line (just poem text except for frame 0 only which adds 'vibrant color') as the 2 animations directly above.  This brings more color into the entire animation even though the modified prompt was only used at frame 0.

For the experiment below i totally changed the prompting text for frame 0 only to not include the poem text at all, and instead use a totally different prompt to start off the animation.  The poem text jumps in at frame 1 and then the rest of the keyframes.

For the final experiment below i turn the styling on again with a different styling prompt, which i have to be honest seems to give the resulting animation a more poetic feel than is you just use the poem text.

AI Illustrates the Story 23

This week in 'AI Illustrates the Story', we read chapter 45 of 'The Corona Virus Saga'.  Illustrations are by CLIP Guided Diffusion.

You can learn a lot about an AI by how it illustrates a story.

The Corona Virus Saga - chapter 45

No one knew how to build the StarGate.

So for all of the monkey display behavior associated with dissing other countries attempts at creating a StarGate, no one had actually done it. We just pissed on each other as someone else made a feeble attempt to try.

No one knew how to do it.

Except perhaps for Jon Frum. Maybe the star man knew how to build a StarGate.

Or summon one. By perhaps nefarious means.

But if he did he wasn’t talking.

Jon Frum was a man of few words.

He prefered to listen. To what you had to say.

And boy did you have a lot to say. At least that was his experience.

Jon Frum was like Santa Claus. And all of the little monkeys inhabiting the earth sat on poor Jon’s lap and told him what they wanted for their inner most desires.

And he assured them that it was coming. In the form of cargo. Interstellar cargo. Cargo from somewhere else. So it just had to be better, right.

That was just how things worked.

Jon Frum was a man of few words. But he did have a steely gaze. Golden, or were the green, or maybe opal, everyone forgot as soon as they looked away.

But Jon Frum was your friend. Of that you could be assured. He told you straight up that was a fact. And of course you believed him. How could you not. He was Jon Frum. Star Man. Overseer of the universe, no wait, traveler of the universe, no wait, inter-stellar gadafly- no wait,

No good son of a …..

Hey, stop that.

Just channeling the energy of the room son. Just channeling the energy of the room. That you are in. That we all are in. This room called planet earth. A small dot in the middle of nowhere at the extreme edge of ‘no one cared’, so definitely far out, no where near the galactic core and it’s hip elite inner core attitude.

Yeah, Jon Frum knew how to conjure up a StarGate. But damned if he was telling.

You just had to have faith.

In cargo.

We'll be right back, for more of our weekly series 'Fun Stories', where our famous guest you never heard of reads excerpts from 'Fun Stories'. But first, a commercial that definitely isn't a commercial.

Bill stopped listening to the car radio, and stared intently out the window. They were starting to enter the edges of the heartland, which was like a hinterland to the center, and things were starting to get weird. Well, weirder then they already were, and that was pretty damn weird.

It seems our fine fellows in that dusty old Tauras had been driving by all kinds of strange stuff on their road trip. And there seemed to be a big heap load more of it just ahead. Off the highway. So they took the next exit, with it's 'scenic loop' sign luring any and all into the delights that awaited them on that special loop exit that took you off the beaten path, off the interstate, into the heartland.

And what delights they were, once you got there. Strange lights in the night. From scaffolding apparently. Like a carnival had come to town and setup up a wide assortment of different garishly lighted carnival rides for the town folk to spend their good hard earned money on. Bring the rubes in for the kill. Soften them up before the prize.

But then everyone working there must of gone on strike, or more likely skipped town before the sheriff found them and dragged them into lockup for some hoped up charge based on old parking tickets or moving violations. At least it looked like that. Like they started something, got distracted, and then moved on, leaving that half constructed something to the elements.

Carny folk, thought our 2 Boogs. Unreliable. Still, they might be good for recruitment. They might have the right attitude. Be ready to do something unreasonable.

But the people were no where to be seen. No carnies. No rubes. No construction workers either. There was actually a lot of activity going on all over the place if you looked closely, but it seemed that slow moving robots were doing the vast majority of it.

Wait, said Bill. I think i hear something. Over there.

They looked to a flat paved area that might have been a used car lot at one time. But now had been transformed into an outdoor ballroom. Filled with people and glowing lights.

Star people were joined up in small clusters, joined together dancing up a storm. Kind of like a 'hug everyone close up' kind of square dancing. Or maybe they were playing twister, it has hard to tell. They seemed busy. We didn’t want to bother them. Also, our heads started to hurt whenever we got too close. Not worth the effort. We had bigger fish to fry.

They stood there, watched the star people dance up a storm, while strange lights floated in a glowing mist above their heads. Like an energy was being generated and then emitted from all of them together in communion. Jumping quantum energy gaps and sending out a photon or two when it happened.

They work like a team, thought Bill. They must be wearing bluetooth sets to communicate, these dance moves sure are intricate. They must spend a lot of time practicing. I wonder if they have a club that meets twice weekly? I wonder if i could join?

Bill became entranced himself, standing there watching them dance. He started to shuffle his feet a little bit, loosen them up. He felt a calling inside of his brain, in a place where it was all soft and warm, plush upholstery, the best couch money could buy.

And a beautiful woman was sitting on that couch. and she said, Bill, come join us. Come join us in the dance.

And Bill tipped his hat and said, "why i do believe i will."

A sudden breeze brought him back to the surface. Back to where they were in the universe. Their mission, this tiny part of it. But still, what harm was there in dancing.

"Hey boss, maybe we should do some dancing ourselves. Get into the mood. Make some friends. "

"No time. We're got fish to fry. Into the pan, Bill. Into the pan. "

"Whatever you say boss. Whatever you say."

And they climbed back into their fine american vehicle, reved her up, and headed out onto the road into the night.

AI Illustrates the Story 22

This week in 'AI Illustrates the Story', we read part 1 of chapter 44 of 'The Corona Virus Saga'.  Illustrations are by CLIP Guided Diffusion.

You can learn a lot about an AI by how it illustrates a story.

The Corona Virus Saga - chapter 44 - part1

Back to Nature, the 'get back to nature while paying us for the privilege of doing so' cult, was doing a booming business ever since the troubles began.

Everyone wanted to get back to where they once belonged. In nature. With their bare asses in the air. Feeling the breeze.

Back to Nature was convinced that the current troubles were caused by 5G technology. Like their leader Big Jim said, "5 G’s is too many man. It disrupts the fabric of time and space. Allows portals of entry to our space-time continuum by all sorts of nefarious folks. With dubious intentions."



As any good 5G salesman will tell you,

"When have we left anything like the collapse of the fabric of time and space prevent us from pushing forwards the boundaries of knowledge, to reap the hardware benefits of greater communication technology, why with 5G direct to brain interconnect you’ll never be out of the picture. You’ll be in the direct feed. All of the time. Getting the really good stuff. Oh so sweet. Oh so fine.

Quality imagery in the feed. An 'all the news you’ll ever want to read' kind of event.

Even more. So much more. So much you’ll be needing some filtering ad ons.

And the firewall for downloads from the future. You definitely want that add on. It will cost you extra. But in the end it will cost you so much less. Trust me on this one."


To get rid of 5G technology, Back to Nature wanted to destroy civilization. As their Big Jim said, "once you sit and think about it, things just all begin to make sense."

"We need a clean beginning. Force everyone to get back to nature whether they want to or not. Especially those 'or not' people. They are like flies in the ointment. Got to clean them out. Convert em or kill em, don’t make much difference in the end. Everybody's doing their part. Helping things along. We all have a place in this. Rest assured. No one was forgotten."

No one was forgotten, but no one really paid any attention to the 2 fine fellows leaving the Back to Nature meeting out the side entrance right before the meeting was over. Both fine fellows wearing Hawaiian shirts with patches sewed onto them. No kool-aid and cookies for these 2, they had to get back to work.

So into the Ford Taurus they put themselves, and then down the road they headed. Got to stay inconspicuous, got to not draw attention. Blasting Peabo Bryson on the crappy car stereo (a cassette player no less), not to be confused with Peabo Johnson, the employee at the McDonalds where the incident happened, while he was working the grill station on the night shift.

Let's use our fly eye spy camera from the future to join in on their conversation as they hurtled down the highway, headed for the state line.

"I tell you, Jon Frum is a Boogaloo.

I heard it myself from the self appointed leader of our Boogaloo movement, Roy G Biv.

He said we heard Jon Frum say he had 'become unreasonable'. That’s when we knew.

Why he was here. To help us. And our movement. It just made sense."

"Wow." Holds out meat stick. "Slim Jim?"

"No thanks. Got to watch my weight.

So Roy G Biv, he laid it all out at the last meeting. Before the acid kicked in and he started speaking in tongues. Do you realize there's a whole language hidden in there, in the speaking of tongues. All kinds of messages just waiting for you to figure them out.

Anyway, Roy said how important it was that we all get to the center. The entity was very specific about that. We have to gather all of the clan, all of the Boogs, and head towards the center. And bring lots of guns too. That was very important."

"No worries there, Padre. We got enough firepower to take out anything in our way. And then some."


Chews on the Slim Jim. Boy they're good.

After all, what could be more ‘being unreasonable’ then burning that whole StarGate fucker up in flames. Burn it up, turn it into smoke and cinder, cinders floating up into the air, headed into space, headed towards the stars. That's where we're going. To turn everything into cinders. Motherfucker. Damn these Slim Jims are tasty."

His fine friend continued.

"And not only that, we’re teaming up with Back to Nature. That's why we snuck into their meeting. Because we have the same ultimate goal. Total Destruction. By any and all means possible. By any means necessary"

Bill chews and chews on that Slim Jim. Which was starting to look like one of those leather dog chew sticks that had been chewed on a little bit too much. All white and pulpy.

"But aren’t they all almond milk latte sippers, freshly scrubbed white folk from the suburbs, or that Williamsburg place in Brooklyn..." I mean they all looked the same to the Boogaloos. "Why would we want to hang with them? Break bread? Share a joint?"

"Because they’re paying us Bill, because they’re paying us."

"Well why the fuck didn’t you say so in the first place. Cash on the barrel. Now we’re talking business."


More Slim Jims he thought to himself. More Slim Jims. They were so good.

They ejected that sweet Peabo tape, and turned on the radio. PBS was devoting a whole hour episode to the crisis. Along with little musical interludes that were usually the intro to some rocking song they cut off before things got happening. The anchors and guests were weighing in on the recent troubling events.

"And we need to get business going again. Get on the ‘gangplank to great stuff’."

 


That was the new government slogan. We’re all walking together, walking together on the ‘gangplank to great stuff’. Why just reach out and grab some. Be careful there, you don’t want to slip. It’s a long, long way down. All the way down to punch cards and paper tape. Giant metal teletype terminals banging out whatever at a quarter page a minute. Top speed, that metal was getting hot from all that metal clanging together. And boy were they loud. I mean, we’re talking RTL logic people. Maybe even vacuum tubes. You do not want to go back there, trust me.

So we need to hang together as we gingerly make our way across the 'gangplank to great stuff'.


We all need to get to the other side.
To get to the big luau.