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Category: Entertainment

Watching over the sleeping

The night watch at any old Graveyard is going to be a hairy affair. You’re at the Number 1 spot where “something” is going to happen if the veil gets thin at night. You can walk the whole ‘yard in full Daylight and not see the Sun, so Night Watch? It’s the pits.

Every night you walk the lines, the same lines 1,000 Night Watch have walked before, you check every single line, you step in the footsteps of legends, literally. NEVER walk it backwards, never counter-clockwise. You don’t want to unlock that lock! Graves that have given up a sleeper are marked in lit green, it’s never going to stop glowing as long as you and I are still around.

So the Night Watch? They keep the sleepers safe from the world and the world safe from the sleepers. If they wake up, the Night Watch tries to talk them back to bed. They have rites that they repeat all night long, quiet, like a lullaby for the Ancient Dead. “Go to Sleep, Elder God…” you know, but more Glutteral noises and whoops, like a whale makes.

I hear the Watch in the Desert has it easier, because they only really need to watch when it Rains or Floods, So the rest of the time their Watch have regular lives and they do ritual cleansing to “go in” and “get out” it must sound like Luxury to our Watch here, who are not lifers, but they do months long rotations. When they get off, they spend a week or two getting out of the habit of singing to themselves and a bit more in some salt rooms being blessed and cleaned by guys in robes who’ve been doing it so long.

So yeah, Night Watch. It has to be done, it’s the way we keep the bad old days from coming back.

Hidden Geographies

There’s these towns that I dream about over and over, their geography is getting to be familiar to me, to the point that when I see the places that the dreams were inspired by, I get a little confused because I thought I dreamed them.

There’s an intersection that my family passed seemingly 100s of times on family trips here and there through my life, it’s not even a major intersection, but we passed it dutifully so many times that whenever I take a long road trip in a dream, I’m sure to pass by it. It marks the boundary between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the exotic. It’s an almost literal HERE and THERE sign in a dream for me.

There are a series of small towns that I dream of with peculiar hidden geographies, side streets and alleys and shopping bazaars. These always seem to involve a street that splits in two directions, in one direction is a familiar stretch with a post office, a carpet shop, a cinema, a chip shop and a toy shop. I’ve drifted down (or rather up) this stretch so often that I can envision the walk passed easily. Inevitably the dream will lead through some side street to “the other bit” where the mystery place will be, the thing the Dream is “about” will be in this other part of the town, a part you can only approach without going there.

The People of these towns don’t exist for the most part, they aren’t even “Dream people” more like “filling” that’s not true, there are these, I don’t know, characters that end up being around town. There’s a Hotel/Hostel/BnB at the far end of town that vacillates wildly from being a 70s Drama and a Turn of the 20th Century Flop House.

There’s a Massive house at the far end of the main strip, it houses the rich old town founders family, they never live there long, they always sort of wander out, leaving a hollowed out mansion full of empty rooms with no ceilings.

There’s a strip of roads that lead out of town in three directions, 2 south, 1 north. or 1 east west and 2 south.

That’s it, it’s always the same otherwise.

Sometimes there’s a curving road that leads up to a highway of sorts, sometimes the whole affair is perched on a cliff with a modern posh hotel slam in the middle.

There’s a Shopping center that services the whole district, it never changes, it’s perpetually under siege by pop singers.

The Hermit’s Room (Modern)

Necropolis

I removed the proscription on purple glowing stuff and it went CRAZY

Getting Closer to what I’m trying to get to, I’ve been riding the EXACT SAME SEED for 3 days

This last one is CLOSING IN on it.

Remarkably the closest YET to both the aesthetic and setting.

It was at this point, that I realized WHAT I wanted to describe.

So this is pretty much what I wanted, not dark enough in the background.

The Undertaker in Black

Generated in Stable Diffusion with a seed of 2418606849
“line art illustration of Johnny cash dressed as an old-west undertaker, standing amongst crowds of faded ghosts in a moss-covered graveyard, violent storm in sky,detailed, gritty,asymmetrical”

I used a specific model, but I played with this in a few, that seed is magical on a couple of them

Disappointing Fifth-Dimensional Imps

What kind of Imp?

If you’re familiar with Superman, you’re probably familiar with Mister Mxyzptlk in some form. He’s a 5th Dimensional Being who has taken a liking to Superman, and has on occasion been used to establish elseworlds style changes to the world “what if Superman was A Girl?” that kind of thing. So I’m referring to AI Drawing tools, they are really neat, but they are not a replacement for actual skill, there’s a bit of skill in creating prompts that work, but it’s not super science, not yet.

So you don’t really get “what you want” most of the time, you get something close for example

This image was made with this prompt “line art illustration of a Cyborg cowgirl, tall and sleek, walking with purpose along the street in an old-time ghost town,detailed, gritty,asymmetrical” It’s pretty close to what I wanted, the faces aren’t great but this is not the singular subject either, I’m actually looking for androgynous but that comes up inhuman every time.

This is right in the correct place, do I just freeze my seed here and make adjustments, let’s try.

Wow, except the face this is pretty close to what I was looking for. 5th Dimensional Imps, I tell you.

 

I Take it back, with a couple small adjustments, I’ve got myself a new Wellpaper Candidate

Seed: 2418606849