#botober2023

[crplpunkklavier]

“A LOVED ONE WANTS YOU TO PREPARE FOR THEIR DEATH!”

The envelope is screaming at you, all bright and happy colors. You’ve never held one of these in your own hands, you only saw pictures of them on the internet. You’d kind of thought those images had to have been manipulated, that the colors couldn’t possibly be that. It’s a non-serif font. Not for the first time, you wonder if death just stops being sad in the future.

People started getting mail from the future a year or so ago. Nobody believed them at first of course, and many people still don’t. You were on the fence until today. A lot of it looked real, but you knew how well people can fake things these days, too. Right now, the postman is still in your living room, one foot on your floor, the other foot in his portal, a mesmerizing swirl of nothingness, of a hole in the world, that just opened up in your home for him to deliver your mail. It’s only ever this company. People have figured out since that they just have a monopoly on time-travel mail, this funeral home. The story is that so many people couldn’t afford their loved ones’ funeral costs that, instead of making funerals cheaper, this future conglomerate of funeral homes invested in time-travel technology to send messages to the past. Now people know, if their loved ones want them to, when those loved ones will die, and they can start saving up. Inside the envelope is the dying person’s name, their time of death, their ideal funeral date, and an estimate for how much it will cost.

That’s the theory.

“What,” you croak, the open envelope quaking in your hands. “Wait. What does this mean?”

The postman that only half exists in your living room and half exists several decades in the future, gives you the look of a minimum wage employee who has a lot of other stops yet to make today. You can see something you assume to be an electric cigarette or something similar in one of his hands, the one that’s already back through the portal. You really hate to keep him. “Kinda what it says in the letter,” he says.

“But,” you say. “But this doesn’t make sense, she’s already—”

“Listen,” says the postman. “I’m just the postman.”

He steps through, and with a loud pop, the portal closes behind him, leaving you alone in your home with the letter as the only proof any of this happened.

You call your brother. He’s the only one out of the three of you who still lives in your hometown. “Hey, what’s up?” he says. Does that mean only you got the envelope? Does it mean a portal opened in his mailbox instead while he’s at work, and he hasn’t gotten to check it yet?

“Hey,” you say back. “Have you been to mom’s grave recently?”

He makes a pensive noise. “Not super recently, why?”

“Can you go today?” Dread seeps like tar into your lungs. “I need to know she’s still in there.”

*

happy halloween month! :) i saw @aiweirdness' botober prompts this morning and decided to do a little thing. i don't really draw much, but i can rarely walk past a good prompt list without leaving a few words. i have ideas for more prompts, but who knows if i'll keep it up! for now enjoy this one, for the prompt "time-traveling postman." it's been on my mind all day.

[pandakong]

Botober day 14 - A kraken… but tiny

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 16: "A cryptid in your cupboard"

[crewnerd]

Custom Botober Day 2: Disrespecting the Ancient Elder Tea

"Yeah, mom? Just checking, tea doesn't go bad right? Didn't have lipton so I tried steeping some of Granma's old stuff instead."

I like how the tea tin came out. Tried using Krita's newer (I think?) brush engine for color blending in a few spots...I'll figure it out.

[ajcrwl]

Drawing again no matter how scrungly these will look. I need to stretch my art muscles.

Picked botober prompt lists again.

1. Bread sky.

2. Knitting volcano.

[aiweirdness]

2023 Botober drawing prompts

Here they are!

I continued my tradition of using the year's state-of-the-art models to generate the prompts which means my methods were:

Ask GPT-4 to make its drawing prompts really weird, in the style of AI Weirdness Botober. Then sift through all the cutesy alliteration for the reasonably interesting stuff.

Ask GPT-4 to list Botober prompts from previous years. Instead of actually recalling them, it just claimed to do so and then produced other stuff.

Ask GPT-4 to list Botober prompts from previous years, then turn up the temperature (chaos) on the model until it allllllmost breaks.

Here are examples of some of the longer responses I got with GPT-4 and chaos setting 1.2. They wouldn't fit in the grid, but please feel free to substitute any of these for any of the prompts above.

Immortal Turnips disrespecting celery. OWL PHANTOM AND CABBAGE-O-LANTERN (LIGHT) Final parsnips in particular Before memory, an ancient tool waits to be discovered The Candle That Leapt over the Lake at dusk does a pirouette dussewe wind at earth bubb submission velvet little hurricane breakfast blown in be putty and goodness vodka… gaselocity scoct slices vold cave with When humans item. And those humans aren’t ordinary. See through your balloon eyes The matibrush comes tomorrow in shorts Retired Pirate Chooses Invisible Beard Open the Happy Bones The Cursed Flavor Fiend Slurps your Essence. Glance of the lavender popcorn mussel Eureka! Solar system pancakes Pause to contemplate radishes Apple mystery solution—the crypt underneath The totally real crown of all Barnacles

I also tried Bard and Bing, but their responses were repetitive and generic and I didn't have a chaos slider to play with.

(more at aiweirdness.com)

If you draw any of these, tag them with #botober or #botober2023 so I can find them!

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 28: "A haunted bowl of soup"

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 11: "Bat Hobby"

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 2: "Knitting Volcano"

[pandakong]

Botober Day 26 - Upside-down Lake

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 1: "Bread sky"

oh yeah we are so back baby

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 8: "Holographic Hermit Crab"

[pandakong]

Botober day 23 - Vampire cabbages

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 31: "An absolutely massive bat"

[evelyn-d-art]

botober day 27: "Disco triceratops incident"

[pandakong]

Botober day 15 - Octopus finds a ukulele in a haunted house