Necronomicon

It’s been a while since there has been a post here, but that’s because of the feature film, now completed, more about which later. Feature films take a long time to make.

Now that there has been a break, I found myself wandering through various second-hand stores and junk shops. What do I happen to find? This curious little book, marked “Necronomicon” on its spine. I wonder if it is worth something?

Nah, I’m just fooling. I made this, with some help from the AI art generator Midjourney and a generous free coupon from Saal Digital to make the book. The build quality on the book is quite good, with a solid acrylic cover (unusual, but looks great) and “leatherette” cover. I included a shot of the layout and binding to show that the book lays flat and that pages are thick and sturdy. Definitely a one-of-a-kind project!

The finished project is definitely a thing of evil, and I am scared to leave to out on a table lest some careless person start reciting from it. That’s all I need after spending so much time cleaning the house, to have a smelly demon from the infernal depths rise to the surface of earth and cover everything with soot and sulfur. I do sometimes worry about my eternal soul, but not nearly as much as getting the stench and stain out of the carpets.

Technical Details: Midjourney is an AI art program that takes words or phrases and generates the pictures that supposedly go to them. Amongst all the AI art generators I chose Midjourney for its ability to make a kind of vague “impressionist” picture of something. Expecting a proper, anatomically correct skull in my picture, for example, would be disappointing, as MJ would undoubtedly get it somehow wrong. But when the word “skull” is just a suggestion for the many-holed, alien, snaggle-tooth monstrosities that only a clueless computer can generate? Well, the algorithm seems to be channeling pure Lovecraft from the depths of hell.

The Midjourney output is somewhat low-res, considering there is a rack of GPUs cranking this stuff out for me and every other customer in the world. Most output was 1024 x 1280. That’s not enough resolution to print! At that size, every single picture would be a mass of jaggy pixels – hardly convincing for the denizens of the underworld.

Enter Topaz Gigapixel! It’s also AI fueled! Topaz is made to create detail between the pixels and allow you to uprez photos at incredible sizes. Certainly with AI generated artwork there would be question that Topaz could do the trick – so what if it interpolated things wrong? who cares, so long as the result looks sufficiently cool and has a skull in it somewhere?

I put Topaz to work, uprezzing every Midjourney output up to 6 times the size for pictures that were 6144 x 7680. Now I can print! Coincidentally, Saal Digital was offering early respondents a coupon for a generous trial of their upscale book printing services. In no time at all the innocent couriers of the US Postal Service were unknowingly delivering the most powerful sorcerer’s time to the one man in the world most unfit to use it!