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NEWS AND VIEWS - APRIL 2023
WRITING NEWS I finished the ninth Signalverse novel, Galatea and the Dupe, this month. It's a short book, about 40,000 words, and pretty dark, actually, for a Signalverse novel: the protagonist, Chance, is a selfish jerk with a unique metahuman ability, who only begins to change his ways after he's taken prisoner by a gang of supervillains. The events of this novel lead almost directly into the big, 100,000-word Signalverse crossover I'm planning to write next year, which will bring back several characters from the previous books: Jack and Miracle Girl, Ally and Danny from Champions Weekly, and Alan and Raye from Sneak and the Shadow of Darkplanet, among others. The tentative title for that one is City of Strange Gods. Not sure when I'll be releasing Galatea. Maybe this summer, maybe later. Next up is the second book in the Sam Fortune series, Sam Fortune and the Hazards of the Game. I don't think anyone is really clamoring for this sequel (in fact my own brother told me he didn't like the first book), but I've been wanting to write it for a while. * * * * * * * * MY (LACK OF A) RETRO LIFE My friend Ant keeps trying to get me to watch this "My Retro Life" channel on YouTube. It's basically a video game nostalgia channel which includes a lot of home video footage -- Tyler, the guy behind the channel, was really into games as a kid, and his dad apparently loved to film him opening Christmas presents and birthday presents and stuff. I couldn't get into it. Watching videos of this kid opening up NES game after NES game on Christmas morning, for example, just made me insanely jealous (I'm reminded of this scene from The Simpsons). He says he wasn't rich, and maybe he wasn't, but growing up I never heard of anyone getting those kinds of hauls for Christmas or for their birthday. I mean, back then, ten NES games would've cost about $500, or over $1,000 in today's money. My dad, an electrician, was lucky to make that in a month. Even if they had been wealthy, though, my parents never would've spent that kind of money on me, on video games. Tyler seems to have been unique in that his whole family and his whole extended family supported his gaming habit and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was the opposite for me. My parents were suspicious of video games from the start, regarding them as complete wastes of time and blaming them for any bad behavior on my part. When my math grades started to slip in the sixth grade, they forbade me from playing them on the weekdays, insisting that I spend my time after school studying instead (it didn't do me any good; I'm still an idiot when it comes to math). They did eventually mellow out, and I usually did get at least one game for Christmas, but from 1990 to 1996 I only ever managed to get my grubby hands on about a dozen games. And I spent practically all of my money on games, because I was into that scene hardcore. As for the consoles, my parents did reluctantly agree to buy me an NES for my birthday in 1990, but only if I paid for half of it! Which I did. I then went on to spend an entire summer mowing lawns, pulling weeds, picking rocks, and trapping gophers for local farmers to get the $200 I needed to buy a SNES. Same thing with the Genesis a year or two later. So not only did I have to scrimp and save and suffer for every one of those games and consoles, I was constantly fighting against my family's anti-game prejudices as well. So watching this guy Tyler getting showered with video games in these old home movies, getting more games on one Christmas morning than I managed to collect in six years, is not really entertaining for me. It just makes me grouchy. * * * * * * * * BAND NAMES Apropros of nothing, here's a collection of band names I've been saving up for the last decade or so, in case I ever decide to start a band (a rather remote possibility, considering I have no musical talent, but hey, you never know). Some of these are phrases from books, some of them came to me in dreams, some I got from friends, some are pop culture references, and some are just jammed-together words that I thought were amusing. Feel free to steal any of these. The Peeping Perverts Strawberry Piss Ultimate Grandpa The Soulful Sounds of Genghis Khan The Great Heaving Wretches Male Whale Viola Swamp Liquid Satan Homemade Ninja Baby Darkafter Hypno Juggernaut Fugitive Fantastic Typical Cricket Radical Dermatologist The Bootleg Sugar Daddies Stubborn Belly Phat Freezer Burn Biomechanical Hot Dog The Unreckoned Cosmos Praetorius Yukon Cornelius Supertumor Crack Pipe King Mustache Presto Pizazz Angry Red Acne Jackylman The Deadly Girlfriends Waves of Laughter Wave Function Collapse Proton Spin Crisis A Frog In The Mechanism Boy Gets Slugged Killer Nanny Ulcers In Executive Monkeys The Porn Archeologists Prisoners In The House of Mystery Fiendish Ingenuity Crumb Crisp Coating Infinite Gangbang Nightmare Cannibal Boom Raspberry Multiverse Inexcusable Ruckus * * * * * * * * AI ART I started playing around with Stable Diffusion a few months ago (I used it to make the cover for Playground Noir, because my usual artist, Tom, was too busy to take the job). This technology has a lot of potential, but it's still very limited in some ways. If you want to make images of big-boobed anime girls, familiar characters like Batman or Mickey Mouse, pictures of Emma Watson in a figure-hugging spacesuit, or weird, exotic scenery, it works great, but trying to use it to create unique character art is an exercise in frustration, as I found out when I tried to use it to make images of some of my own characters from the Signalverse. I started out trying to make an image of Texie Wallop, a supervillain who plays a large role in Galatea and the Dupe. Texie's costume is pretty straightforward -- she wears a black catsuit with pink boots and pink gloves, has green eyes and long red hair, and carries an enormous steel hammer. This seems like a pretty simple design to me, but I must have generated at least two hundred images without getting a single one that I was satisfied with. 
Sometimes her gloves wouldn't be pink. Sometimes her boots wouldn't be pink. Sometimes she was posed too sexually. Sometimes she was wearing a weird expression. Sometimes she had extra limbs, extra hands, extra fingers, messed-up eyes, or a boot where her hand ought to have been. Sometimes her boobs were outrageously big (even after I told the AI to tone it down). And most frustrating of all, the AI just could not seem to generate a hammer, or anything that looked like one. The AI also has a lot of trouble creating superhero-style domino masks, which is a problem, because probably about half of the superheroes in the Signalverse wears these kinds of masks. 
On the other hand, after a great deal of trial and error I did eventually manage to generate a couple images I was more or less happy with. Here's Shieldmaiden and Ally from Champions Weekly: 
And here's Overclocked and the time-traveling villain Aeon the Immortal: 
These are acceptable to me, and I could see using them in a future edition of The Complete Guide to the Signalverse. What do you think? |