Actually, I barely celebrate any holiday, since I was a kid and noticed that capitalism has basically ruined them. I wear red for labor day, though, and nobody gets it.

At the big box construction materials store, they have decided to throw caution to the winds and have Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas crap on display. At the same time. If a space alien landed and decided to learn about human culture by walking around that part of the store, they’d nudge an asteroid our way most immediately.

Sometimes, though, I think it’d be fun to express something about how I feel about various holidays. So, this happened:

For whatever reason, I asked it for a photo by Erwin Olaf, of &c.

I am amazed at these probabalistic regurgitations of reality – I guess Stable Diffusion’s various training sets include a lot of kitchens. Note the correct placement of the microwave, rational cabinet layout, correct positioning of cabinet handles. Still has trouble with hands, but it’s great with cabinetry. Look, there’s even a sticker on the fridge!

In case anyone cares, here’s the prompt:

2 kids, 1 troll, cute human kids are putting on a costumes for halloween. there is a scary troll.
–
(masterpiece, best quality) concept art in the style of erwin olaf, greg rutkowski, artgerm, kitchen scene, cinematic lighting, drama. cool color tones. (perfect hands)
–
(dynamic view), (dynamic pose)

When I’m assembling a prompt from scratch, I use a sort of narrative form (it doesn’t matter) where I start with what I want the scene to be about, then a dash, then stuff about the background and technicals like lighting and inspiration, and end with pose or layout. It’s not really parsing the information, it’s just that those words in that order bump the probabilities of certain outputs.

I tried another version, inspired by the strip poker playing goblins in the D&D tavern, where I tried to have it generate a tavern full of terrified orcs running in panic from a human kid in a cheap halloween costume. I have always felt, it seems, that there isn’t much that wouldn’t be scared of a human child. Dragons flee when they see human children. The kids aren’t particularly scary, it’s the parents – nothing is more deadly protective than a human adult – they’ll wipe out your species and build a parking lot where your biome used to be. And they usually won’t even be angry when they do it, they’ll just shrug, “it’s capitalism.”