Wandering Through the Shifting City: A Tale of a Free-floating Skull

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The skull drifted down the city street, its eerie glow illuminating the shadows cast by the flickering streetlights. It had been many years since it had been separated from its body, but the skull had long ago accepted its fate and learned to revel in its new, ghostly form.

As it floated through the twisting alleyways, the skull noticed that the buildings around it seemed to be shifting and changing, their shapes warping and twisting in ways that defied explanation. In one moment, the skull would find itself drifting through a narrow tunnel lined with ancient, crumbling bricks, and in the next it would emerge into a vast, open plaza dominated by a towering statue of a monstrous creature that seemed to shift and writhe in the flickering light.

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Despite the strangeness of its surroundings, the skull felt a sense of freedom and exhilaration that it had never experienced in life. For the first time, it was truly free to explore the world without the constraints of a physical body, and it relished the feeling of the wind rushing past its empty eye sockets as it soared through the city.

As the night wore on, the skull found itself drawn towards a tower that rose up in the distance, its spire reaching towards the moonlit sky. With a sense of purpose that it could not fully explain, the skull set off towards the tower, its eerie light casting strange, twisting shadows across the ground as it went.

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At last, the skull arrived at the base of the tower, and it began to rise towards the top, soaring through the twisting passages and spiral staircases that led upwards. And as it rose higher and higher, the world around it seemed to fade away, leaving only the endless darkness of the night sky.

At last, the skull reached the top of the tower, and it looked out upon the endless expanse of the universe, feeling a sense of wonder and awe that it could not fully express. For a moment, the skull forgot all its worries and fears, and simply reveled in the strange and wondrous world that it had discovered.

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Hey, Braden here!

The actual human who is bad at spelling and needs the computers help to write anything. I did not ask ChatGPT to write this for me although I did have it write the previous short story with the prompt.” can you write me a weird short story about a sentient floating skull moving through a strange city street”. This is the story as written although I took a quick editing pass and took out a few superfluous words. I also asked ChatGPT for the title of this story, the first of which was “The Sentient Floating Skull’s Strange Nighttime Adventure” and I asked it again for something a little bit more abstract.

I also heard ChatGPT can write code, I asked it to write me a Jekyll image carousel to add to my blog and it very confidently wrote me some code that required another plugin in addition to jQuery. It didn’t work but I can’t say it was less useful than just dropping in code snippets from Stack Overflow!

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The Images are also generated using Stable Diffusion that I got running on my machine the other night. I think there are a ton of issues around how this data was collected and the artists whose work was put in the dataset without their consent. That being said Napster changed the music industry for ever I don’t think you can put this form of generative art back in the bag. The stuff this tool creates is usually ugly but has a quality I enjoy, I also think if you want to be an artist understanding the power and limits of things like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney will be critical to your success. I think image generation will be another tool in the pocket of many artists just like Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, collage, mood boards and more.

TLDR summary by ChatGPT: I’m Braden, a bad speller who relies on computers to write. ChatGPT wrote a story for me and I edited it. It also wrote code for a Jekyll image carousel that didn’t work, but I still found it useful. I used Stable Diffusion to generate images, but there are issues with how the data was collected. Despite this, generative art is here to stay and can be a useful tool for artists alongside programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.

I still have a list of my favorite media from last year, maybe I’ll post it before the end of 2023 ;)

I’ll also recommend another anime next time I am sure.

thx,

-braebrae