College Hill, looking toward the Capitol

This week in ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, a glimpse of Lovecraft’s beloved College Hill looking toward the Capitol building (aka State House). Said to be Benefit Street, possibly early 1960s.

The picture appeared in a magazine and the seller of the pages cropped the preview picture. Thus the top part is missing. But we can still see the down-slope view that Lovecraft would have known. I’ve here colourised and contrast-adjusted it.

The article reveals that… “in the 1950s urban renewal threatened the whole area [of College Hill] with demolition and redevelopment”.

Monstrously big in Japan

New in the Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, an academic article offering “An Exploration of the Appeal of the Cosmic Horror Series of Gamebooks for Call of Cthulhu TRPG | RPG”. This considers, partly via online surveys, some of the reasons for the sustained popularity of the Call of Cthulhu RPGs in Japan.

The Call of Cthulhu series is said to be bigger than D&D in Japan, and synonymous with ‘tabletop RPG’. The success is apparently aided by the relatively simple rules, adaptability to different time-frames and sub-genres, and a strong player base among female fans (meaning male fans can ‘play with my waifu’).

More AI freebies

More looking through CivitAI, which is the main repository for free generative AI image models and plugins. There’s a lot there, and it can take a lot of digging to find stuff.

There’s some obvious Cthulhu / Giger / pulp etc stuff. But here are some other interesting non-obvious items, which seem to have Lovecraftian and RPG potential, and which you would never find via search.

These two might be combined in interesting ways… SAMO bones carving (intricate ivory carving) and Occult Geometry.

You would be able to use negative prompting to steer the Bone Carving away from an Anime / Chinese look, and more toward Giger / Lovecraft.

And for RPGs and illustrations involving museums, explorers etc…

KnollingCase (puts X inside an old fashioned specimen case for museums).

Antixdisplay (puts X inside a modern museum display case).

And for Victorian / Edwardian explorers, Muttonchops / Sideburns (Realistic) (for men) and DrawingSD1.5 (19th century pen and wash pictures) for the explorer’s old books of field-notes.

How far AI image generation has come, in just a year. What will another year bring?

The Cthulthu Palimpsest

The venerable British writer and ‘early SF’ scholar Brian Stableford has a new book due early in the new year. The Cthulthu Palimpsest is set for release on 5th January 2024, and its 300+ pages complete a series…

Written to complete and conclude a series of metaphysical fantasies featuring Auguste Dupin, a character invented by Edgar Poe, which involve him with characters and entities invented by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as actual historical figures and occasional devices appropriated from other works of weird fiction.

Also noted, looking back through his recent books, his Weird Fiction in France: A Showcase Anthology of its Origins and Development (December 2020).

A Dream of 1955

This is what The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath would have looked like, had it arrived on your shelves in 1955. Up for sale at Honest Abe’s site, “Published by Shroud, 1955” in an edition of 1,500 copies.

Though a little research elsewhere reveals this picture to be of the boards, minus the dustjacket.

The door to the cellar…

I’ve found an old postcard of Weybosset Street, showing what must be the entrance door for Lovecraft’s favourite Providence second-hand bookseller (see my long article on ‘Uncle Eddy’ in the Lovecraft Annual). Sadly it’s only a small 600px CardCow picture, with no larger available unless one buys the physical card.

The distinctive dome-roof building on the corner gives the orientation. It can still be seen on Google StreetView.

However, even a basic AI-powered enlargement (Topaz GigaPixel AI) makes it clear the entrance door that would have led down to the cellar bookshop, said to have been the largest ‘open shelves’ store in Providence. The Dana’s store was perhaps larger in stock by the time of Lovecraft’s death, but their two-floor storerooms were not open to public browsers.

Here I’ve subtly highlighted the entrance door…

Moebius emulation via Stable Diffusion 1.5: a survey

More delving into the options for ‘add-ons’ that can steer the Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image generator toward certain styles or objects in its images. The community’s work on SD 1.5 add-ons now has an excellent range and depth (things move fast in AI-land), and also a healthy dash of ‘quirky’. The ethos is ‘free’, and there’s no payment involved so long as you run the image generation on your own PC. Image generation can be helped along by ‘guide poses’ created from 3D-figure desktop software such as DAZ Studio and Poser.

For the style of the French comics artist Moebius with SD 1.5 I found the following, after a thorough search:

* Moebius Color Style – v1.0 is a LORA that tries to emulate the later ‘colour Moebius’ style. Said to work best as an add-on for the large Xenogasm checkpoint model for SD 1.5, which seems to have been specially trained for the sort of subject matter you might find in old 1980s copies of comics magazines such as Heavy Metal, 1984, Epic, etc and similar. Perhaps also Zona 84, Ere Comprimee etc, at a guess. The 1970s-style Xenogasm model is NSWF in the eyes of the 2020s, as you might expect. Apparently Xenogasm 2.1 is the last before it started being heavily re-worked for more realism, so you may want to try that first.

* WASMoebius V1, which is an Textual Inversion ‘Embedding’ add-on for SD 1.5 rather than a LORA add-on.

* For a more old-school ‘B&W Moebius’ one might try the Centerflex – v2.8 checkpoint model. Its main promo images are photoreal and it is a “photorealistic-first” model. But delve into the description and note that this is a dual model. Switch it to its illustration mode and it is said to specialise in the ‘clear ligne’ line-art of the French and Belgian BD comics and Moebius in particular.

Artist styles that this model was explicitly trained to on include Roy Krenkel, Jean-Pierre Gibrat, Milo Manara, Willy Vendersteen, Francois Schuiten, Edgar P Jacobs, Herge, Jacques Tardi, and Moebius. […] This model contains a general activation keyword phrase to evoke a certain hybrid comic book style and composition. This phrase is “ligne claire” meaning “clear line” after the Franco-Belgian comic book [line-art] tradition.

* Possibly also worth a look, in complete SD checkpoint models, is the Protogen Infinity checkpoint model. Trained on comics, isometric art, science-fiction. As well as Protogen, ReV Animated (aka ReVAnimated) is a model name that pops up for use with the more comics-oriented LORAs. There are also SD 1.5 models trained on modern western superhero art, such as iCoMix.

* Metal Hurlant Comics – Moebius, Bilal, Druillet is a LORA trained on a range of the classic 1970s/80s French comics artists. Though it appears to work best with the more grungy Druillet style. An ‘alpha release’, and not likely to be updated to a 1.0 release.

Another Damn Art Model (ADAM) was partly trained on Moebius, along with other Heavy Metal and 1970s artists.

* There’s also a relatively refined attempt at Enki Billal – v3.0, a Bilal style which might combine well with one or two of the above. Update: And another attempt, Enki Bilal Style – v1.0.

Some people combine checkpoint models and LORAs and ’embeddings’. So for instance one might combine the big Centerflex model with the smaller Moebius Color Style LORA as an add-on.

I don’t see anything that can do the distinctive ‘dash shading’ of Moebius. Although I’m not sure an AI could do this, unless it could be trained to follow the shading on a depth-map from a 3D figure / scene…

Ok, that’s what I found. Now all I need is the 12Gb graphics card for the PC, to be able to try them out. 🙂

Recognition reviewed

At the SFRA, a new review of S.T. Joshi’s book The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft

Joshi does not hesitate in calling out cynical personalities who profited from Lovecraft’s legacy only to trample on his reputation later. [But] controversy has had little effect on the sales of his fiction around the world. The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft is ultimately a testament to the power of the stories, which have proved resistant to many different crises, and will certainly survive many more.

Necronomicon Pages AI generator

Necronomicon Pages – v1.0. This is only a LORA, something perhaps best thought of as a small plug-in for a large generative AI base model. The pages were made using this LORA with the EIDOMODE Stable Diffusion 1.5 Checkpoint model.

Here the indecipherable-ness of AI text is turned to advantage.

Also spotted, a new LORA for Hannes Bok – Golden Age Pulp Style – v1.0, for use with the SD 1.5 base model. May work well with Metropolis 1927 style.

And since this is also Kittee Tuesday, yes… there’s also a LORA for High Quality Cats – v1.0 and the more meme-friendly CuteCat – v1.0. Even a cosmic Space Cat generator. Though the LORA for the 200+ feline cat expressions they can make has yet to arrive. Still, these are perhaps useful for making “H.P. Lovecat” images.