What have I been doing today...

...instead of anything I should be doing? (In other words, I have emails from several of you that I need to answer. If I don't reply by Wednesday, nudge me!)

If you haven't heard of Artbreeder, it's an AI-driven way of creating images by combining images and tweaking various things. It's sophisticated enough to use for character development and can be a hell of a lot of fun.

So I ended up seeing if I could produce Calli and Burn from Deadfall and Deadwater. I haven't gotten Calli yet, but I'm working on her. I've gotten very very close to Burn. He's still a little too good-looking but after I used Photoshop to scar him up and put a lot of sun damage on his face, I decided that I was fine with Hollywood-ugly instead of actually ugly and left it at that.

( Burn lurks behind this cut. Are you ready? )

I love the artlike look of it. I haven't been able to get Calli to be a more arty and less realistic version without it going really weird. So far I've gotten this:

( And now Calli-but-not-quite )

And now for some fun with Artbreeder's weird-ass random genes! Most especially, one very important gene called "Hat."

HAT.

( What does Burn look like with MORE HAT and with LESS HAT? )

So I now see why the humans of the past all wore hats almost all the time: hats prevent the Great Cosmic Horror from leaking through into our reality.

In conclusion: MOAR HAT