Tag: midjourney

Pepperland

IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY

Yet another thing MidJourney is not great at is capturing iconic but sort of vague phrases or song lyrics. Granted, this one is pretty nebulous and that’s reflected in the weirdly specific non-specificity of the resulting images, but come on: you know what I mean.

(Parenthetically, earwormed by that lyric in the run up to this moment, I’ve been listening to a bunch of Beatles stuff lately — inspiring this p5.js doodle, inter alia. This is music I grew up with — I am almost exactly the same age as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — and given its extreme familiarity it’s easy to lose sight of how brilliant and strange and also very very silly it is. Musos can argue back and forth about who was over- or under-rated and which bands revolutionised what, but fucking hell, what a body of work.)

Anyway, 20 years is a really long time — in real life and especially on the internet. WT has certainly had its ups and downs over those two decades, but haven’t we all?

I’m not going to attempt some kind of valedictory address — I sort of did that at the 5 year mark, tying off the original blog, and look where that got us. I can’t see any point in spawning WT5 now, it’s not as if it would change anything. Let’s just acknowledge and move on.

Still, as I said then and so many times before and since: it’s been a slice.

TV Guide

the revolution will not be televised

the revolution will not be televised as a prime time soap opera starring Joan collins
the revolution will not be televised during shark week on the discovery channel
the revolution will not be televised as a game show hosted by Bruce Forsyth
the revolution will not be televised on the muppet show
the revolution will not be televised as a gritty cop drama by Lynda la plante
the revolution will not be televised on CBeebies

Marking the Occasion

In general MidJourney is extremely bad at likenesses. It’s not bad at mapping names to approximate types, but tends to completely miss all the subtle identity cues that humans are so optimised to recognise, producing images that look like people, but very much not the people requested. Occasionally, though, someone can be such an absolutely fucking relentless self-publicist that photos of them from every conceivable angle in almost every conceivable setting seem to have managed to infest the training set, such that the model is actually pretty good at deepfaking them.

So it is with our ex-PM, now also ex-MP, may he rot in Hell for all eternity.

For work reasons not worth describing I recently had occasion to confect a bunch of fake Borises. Most of the following I didn’t wind up using, on account being a bit too silly — so, lucky reader, you get the pleasure instead.

Boris Johnson’s dungeons and dragons group suffer a catastrophic defeat in the lost caverns of Tsojcanth, skit by Spike Milligan for Q7 1978
Boris Johnson joins a motorcycle gang
Boris Johnson selling nutritional supplements on cable television
Boris Johnson refusing questions from reporters outside the old Bailey
Boris Johnson appearing on strictly come dancing after leaving politics in disgrace
Boris Johnson performing the mad scene from Lucia di lammermoor
Boris Johnson in his dressing gown standing outside Tesco with a bottle of gin in one hand

(That’s enough Boris — Ed.)

Gruffalo Stance

As mentioned in the previous post, MidJourney’s imposture of genre and style is pretty hit and miss, but sometimes it absolutely nails it.

The Gruffalo illustrated by Ralph Steadman
The Gruffalo illustrated by Edward Hopper
The Gruffalo illustrated by Tamara de Lempicka
The Gruffalo illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz
The Gruffalo illustrated by Edward Gorey

But in terms of sheer hilarity, I think this one is really la crème de la résistance:

The Gruffalo illustrated by Tom of Finland

There are a bunch more of these, mostly a bit less successful, at my MJ page, along with assorted fodder for future posts.

Obviously, as a man of a certain age and background, I also had no choice but to try this:

The Gruffalo black and white fashion photography styled by Ray Petri for The Face magazine 1983