Stable Diffusion released in a Web version

25 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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The open-source AI-powered art-generator ‘Stable Diffusion’ is now available on the Web, as DreamStudio. Not to be confused with the existing Dream by WOMBO.

Working and tested. Log in, generate pictures by typing text with a couple of names or descriptive concepts. You get about 100 goes, before the paywall come up. Then it’s $12 for 1,000 prompts.

H.P. Lovecraft views a fiery sunset in the city of Providence…

The new DreamStudio AI also gave me this, among many mis-fires. Too much of a “Buster Keaton blend”, but not bad all the same. It would probably fool those who had no idea who Buster Keaton was.

Such AI’s tend to have great problems with human hands, feet, and to an extent hair. Often one leg or arm is missing or far longer than the other. Eyes often don’t match. As you can see above, one eye is bulging more than the other. There’s also often a general tell-tale “gloopiness”, and circles are often distorted.

Serials and cereals

25 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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The Silver Key blog feels “A bookish nostalgia”…

Life was moving slowly, but it was great.

A blog post well worth reading, I’d say.

I’d only add that there was a lot more piffle back then which we’ve forgotten, dire pre-Internet stuff that you took or watched because you couldn’t get anything better in that line. Some of it still has a certain charm and wobbly interest, but much of it was just… commercial piffle (see any issue of SFX for the re-treads). Now, search skills + speed-of-access + watching-the-right people means we can vector onto the good stuff with relative ease. The excitement and anticipation for it is perhaps less, admittedly. By the time we discover it, the item tends to be already available. And available in quantity. So there’s a further personal discipline that’s then needed for focus, both in “what worthy stuff do I spend time on” and “how do I make the time needed for it”. Since the quantity is also often increased, e.g. omnibus doorstop editions of Savage Sword of Conan etc, massive TV series, long videogames. Then there’s the question of attention span, with The Silver Key finding…

sustained reading is much harder today than it used to be

Might be a good idea to do it over and just after breakfast? That gives you at least an hour a day of sustained book reading from paper. Audiobooks + wireless wi-fi headphones (not the infernal bluetooth type, proper wi-fi) can also help cover the ground on books and stories, at other times.

Audiobook: The Last Galley

24 Wednesday Aug 2022

Posted by in Doyle, Podcasts etc.

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New on Librivox, Conan Doyle’s book The Last Galley, Impressions and Tales (1911). This is from before Doyle’s marked turn to spiritualism.

Doyle writes in his introduction…

The first half is made up of a series of pictures of the past … there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give…

The Academy remarked, in a review of the book on publication in 1911, that the evocations of the first section would make an excellent accompaniment to a tiresome journey…

The classical section, consisting of some 124 pages, is extremely well done and transports us into the atmosphere of the period in which the tales are told.

In the Librivox reading this historical section runs for three and a half hours.

In the eight stories that then make up the second half of the book, we end with “The Terror of Blue John Gap”. This is a upland monster-horror set in and beneath the Peak District of England, where the Midlands rises to meet the rocky North. The specific location it was based on would likely be Treak Cliff Cavern near Castleton, a Peak mine since Ancient Roman times and a source for ‘Blue John’ rock which the story title alludes to. The cave played a key role in the discovery of the principle of evolution by Erasmus Darwin.

New book: The Illustrated History of Warren Comics

23 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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Illustrators Quarterly Special #14: The Illustrated History of Warren Comics. 144 pages.

A searcher for “Illustrators Quarterly” special would get results indicating that Amazon UK doesn’t carry the “Special” versions, other than #1. But it is there, awkwardly titled as “The Illustrated History of Warren Magazines: illustrators Special 14″. On Amazon the Specials go under the title of “illustrators Special” for some reason.

What a wonder a Euro companion volume might be: The Illustrated History of the Toutain Magazines, though obviously far more difficult to research.

Meshbox HPL makover

21 Sunday Aug 2022

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This is about as good as I can get the Meshbox 3D HPL for Poser, with some SSS on the skin and quite a bit of Photoshop. I’m not a skin expert in such matters. I’ve gone for the paler skin look, rather than shrimp-pink n’ healthy. The skin shader is my tweak of the generic Ghostship SSS, rather than EZskin 3 which lacks a profile. Rendered in Poser’s SuperFly (aka Blender’s Cycles, same thing).

After some retro-i-fication…

Early 132nd Birthday news

20 Saturday Aug 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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It’s only noon over in the USA, and I guess many are only just emerging in search of breakfast. But a quick tickle of the search tools at 6pm in the UK brings some early 132nd Birthday news…

* Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, “Bad Medicine” compilation. Containing their olde time radio version of “Cool Air” and others. Free to download for HPL’s birthday. Also “Dark Adventure Radio Theatre episode downloads on a buy-one-get-one-free” basis.

* Some podcast activity already detectable via search. A lecture on “Lovecraft & the Occult – historical & literary influences on the Cthulhu mythos”. No idea what it’s like, but I like the look of the presenter and studio. He makes an effort. Nerds RPG Variety Cast did a podcast to celebrate H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday by discussing Lovecraftian films. Some story readings on YouTube, several in Spanish, some still to be broadcast later today.

* A curious coffin-shaped magazine posted on eBay. Not sure if it’s a birthday thing. Apparently only 10 have been made.

New book: Letters of E. Hoffmann Price to H. P. Lovecraft

20 Saturday Aug 2022

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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Happy 132nd Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft.

For 2022 my birthday present is a readable edition of the previously uncollected letters of E. Hoffmann Price to H.P. Lovecraft. This 350-page book complements the recently-published edited volume of the letters from Lovecraft to Price.

Download: Get the .PDF free on Gumroad. For the most stable download I’ve put it on Gumroad, which may also help you send it over to your 10″ Kindle.

These letters and many postcards were sent by veteran pulpster Price between 1932 and 1937. Brown has some 15Gb of scans of these… but they needed to be collected as single magazine-sized .PDF ebook. Don’t worry, the scans have been crunched down to just 65Mb total for the book. Please note that my assemblage is intended for convenient reading from a 10″ digital tablet, rather than as a scholarly edited edition.

To discover the archival scan number of a letter or card, download and then extract the PDF with the Windows freeware PDF Image Extractor. The images should still have their filenames, and these will give you the required scan numbers at the Brown Repository. By this same method you can also determine what new pictures I’ve added, as these have no Brown repository numbers. A few layout gaps, caused by the many two-to-the-page postcards, have been occasionally filled by me with new vintage pictures.

My thanks to all those who have been involved in preserving these and making the scans freely available.

Those with the cash to do so could use a service (Lulu, MagCloud, etc) to print-on-demand at a 12″ magazine size, then mark the good bits at leisure in an armchair, and then pass the result to a transcriber to create a less repetitive and more enjoyable “Extracts from…” text book.

Cabinet of Curiosities

16 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Guillermo del Toro’s forthcoming TV show Cabinet of Curiosities has revealed the episode titles. Sadly we do not get a diesel-punkish “Cool Air” adaptation, as I had surmised we might might due to the relative ease and cheapness of filming it. They seem to be going more for monsters, thus “Dreams in the Witch House” and “Pickman’s Model” are the actual Lovecraft items on the slate. This is according to the TV trade-press.