Rick's b.log - 2022/10/31
It is the 19th of May 2024 You are 18.226.82.163, pleased to meet you!

Samhain

Actually, I won't have any children knocking at my door. Not only do I live a gazillion footsteps away from anybody, it's also absolutely chucking it down outside. There's some sort of storm passing through.

Obligatory: It was a dark and stormy night...

No pumpkin this year. I didn't see one that I liked, so decided I'd rather do without than spend several euros on a subpar object.

So, instead, let's ask Dall-E!

Dall-E's halloween goodness

First up, given it's me, how about a pumpkin blowing up?

Kaboom?

Or how about this. This is kaboom, right?

There'll be a shockwave...

Now, how about some ghost children dancing around a giant pumpkin in a forest at night? You know, your standard Halloween fare.

Oooh 'eck, that's a bit creepy.

This one? Check out the 'tache on the "girl" in the white dress. This is, clearly, the end result of letting children pick their gender rather than telling them to simply look between their legs.

It's The Crying Game.

So how about some teenagers in a forest with flaming torches? Night, obviously.

Camp group.

Nah, those girls are kind of sweet. They're out camping before exams begin and life gets way too real. Speaking of which, they're about to be terrorised by <insert boringly predictable horror movie trope here>.

Let's try that again.

The local coven.

There we go. I knew the local coven would make an appearance sooner or later.

But this next lot. They're so damned powerful that they can sprout extra arms to carry their flaming torches.

Need a hand with that?

Let's now do some witches on broomsticks. I mean, what's Samhain without a girl in a pointy hat?

Formation flying.

Well, if Studio Ghibli did Harry Potter, that's possibly how it might end up looking. Do not ask me what the other flying object is. It's like a bird smashed into a plane and the resultant mutated object is still flying.

Okay, now this looks more like a witch. She must have some serious magic to be able to keep airborne with a broken broom.

Shock absorber fitted as standard.

This was supposed to be a giant pumpkin exploding in the middle of a busy highway.

Two out of three ain't bad.

That's not going to work, so how about a blonde in a blue dress holding a pumpkin. It's a dark and stormy night, like tonight really is.

So... what's she holding?

Of course, you can see Dall-E still screwing up the faces. But there's enough here that 'shopping in bits of a face from something found on-line (not the entire face, for obvious reasons) ought to go a long way towards fixing this.

Here's a younger version. Stroppy little brat is not going to carry a pumpkin as large as her torso. Quit whining, girl, and fix your face!

It probably weighs more than she does, too.

So I then asked for a pumpkin with a human face and a tuft of orange hair on top. You know what I'm aiming at, right? Well, Dall-E gave me three crappy drawings and then, just to show that the AI perfectly understood what I was hinting at, it delivered.

POTUS45.

I'll bet you recognised it without looking up what the acronym meant. ☺

I can't take that any further, Dall-E aced it. And the face that it's a chiseled face rather than an actual face makes it all the better.

So, instead, let's have a pumpkin on a Harley on fire tearing through a field of wheat. Like, Halloween meets Ghost Rider, right?

Nicolas Cage in one of his more out there moments...?

Now let's try a girl in a brown dress with a red ribbon in her hair reaching towards the camera.

What's with that expression?

Not quite what I had in mind, but it's not a bad picture. The ribbon ended up on the dress instead, but it looks okay like that.
The face is even almost correct, if you skip over the fact that she looks either really pissed off, desperately needs the toilet, or she's concentrating on destroying the world using telekinesis.

This next one put the red ribbon in her hair, as was asked. But...

SIEG HEIL!

Yeah, okay, moving switfly on... let's keep the basic idea but give the girl a pumpkin. I mean, Halloween not Hitler, FFS!

Yah, god!

That face. Oh my. Gotta be a serious contender for the scariest picture of the night.

This was another offering.

Almost got the face right.

And a variation of the above was...

More nightmare fuel.

Oh my flamin' god. That face. I mean, just cue up Tubular Bells and sit in the corner sobbing.

Finally, I gave Dall-E one word. "Cthulhu".

This was God before there was a concept of God.

Well, that's it for tonight. I'm going to go brew some linguine. So, Blessed Be if that's your proclivity. If not, then go hide under the duvet. It'll all be over in just a few more spooky haunted hours.

Your comments:

Anon, 1st November 2022, 12:52

Well thanks. Those pictures will give me nightmares for the next two weeks... :-)

Rick, 1st November 2022, 14:48

Yup. Burned through all my free credits there, but got to admit, Dall-E gets faces appropriately wrong for Halloween imagery, t'was almost better than blowing up a hapless pumpkin...