AI Weekly briefly surveys and links the new leading-edge technical papers on generative AI each week. Its next art/cover challenge is ‘Weird’. Weirder images than generative AI usually produces, I guess. Unlike most arty challenges, there’s $50 in it for you.

Talking of ‘weird’ AI, Google has a new alphabet-generator called GenType. Give it a prompt, and out pops an A-Z alphabet of snazzy type. I suggested a font based on the idea of “Cosmic tentacle-beings from the mind of H.P. Lovecraft”, but that was refused as too weird. Thus I never got to see GenType produce any type. But you may want to give it a go.

Also, in AI Weekly one learns that it’s now just-about “possible to train diffusion models using mixed-resolution image datasets”. Which brings hope for a ‘face of H.P. Lovecraft’ plug-in for Stable Diffusion. Since many of the training images would necessarily be low-res. Stable Diffusion already knows what Lovecraft looks like, more or less, though often adds in Nick Cage (starred in the Colour movie, and thus gets tagged as ‘Lovecraft’), Buster Keaton (1920s film star, somewhat similar face), etc. We still need a LORA plug-in that guides the AI back to Lovecraft’s face and head shapes.

John Carpenter’s well-known movie The Thing (1982), had a single-player horror-shooter videogame sequel in 2002. Antarctica. Expeditions. Horrid Alien Life. Paranoia. All very familiar to Lovecraft readers. The game was popular and sold over a million copies.

Now it’s “soon” to be The Thing: Remastered (not to be confused with the remastered movie), offering an overhaul of that glorious olde Millennium-Vision look, and what sounds like some UI and other enhancements. Undated as yet, but it now has a page and trailer on GoG.

I found a detailed “Making of” interview with the makers, about the original 2002 game…

‘Thing’ creatures often have random eyeballs in strange places; that almost plant-like opening-up of structures and there being tentacles inside it; the spindly-leg stuff that pops out of things and parts of the body being able to tear away from other parts of the body and spawn more creatures […] ‘Thing’ creatures rarely look demonic [in the clichéd way].

A new “anniversary production” of the one-man theatre show of Lovecraft’s The Temple, at the Buxton Fringe festival in July 2024. Buxton is a spa town on the far western edge of the Peak District National Park, England, with a large upmarket cultural festival centering on its Opera House. The local newspaper has more details of the show.

Meanwhile, online… a generative video AI for the introduction of “The Shadow Out of Time”. Not an adaptation, just a filmic AI experiment to accompany narration. But an impressive showcase.

A table-top RPG that ‘Lovecraft the Roman’ might have enjoyed, Cohors Cthulhu: Tabletop Roleplaying Game. “A 2d20 RPG adventure of mighty Roman warriors and their barbarian rivals fighting the forces of the Mythos”. Funded with a cool £221,000 and shipped in late 2023, and now with a new follow-on expansion-set Kickstarter.

Although be warned that it seems to be as much about pagan forests as Roman army life…

Far from the Eternal City, deep in the forests of a hostile frontier, unravel the mystery of a village overcome by nightmares its people are forced to re-enact on the waking world. Without the support of a Roman column, cast into a strange land, will you survive with your sanity intact?

Far from nicely tiled Roman hot-baths and libraries, I’d suspect. Though that is also what Lovecraft himself hazily envisaged, and I’m fairly sure he would have tried his hand — had he lived — at an ‘Ancient Romans on the African frontier’ tale. Though in this game it appears that the pagan northern forests are the setting.

A graphic novel of “Entombed with the Pharaohs”, the story Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Houdini, now newly funded on Kickstarter.

New on YouTube, The Shadow Over Innsmouth as a 20-minute iClone movie. Very early iClone, by the look of it. So possibly made a while back, and only just released? My guess. I can’t find any trace of it elsewhere.

iClone being the first dedicated mass-market animation maker, based on a game engine and thus requiring low-poly figures and faces. It’s been greatly improved since the early days.

An eBay listing sent me in search of a 1980s poetry chapbook, being sold there…

I found something better and far larger. The author’s Poems from Providence (20th Anniversary Edition). Under Creative Commons, free on Archive.org, and seemingly posted there by the author himself.

a huge compendium of all the poems American poet Brett Rutherford created during his first years in Providence, Rhode Island (1985-88)

These poems near the end appear to be the most Lovecraft -focused, judging by the titles…