Post 535 - Well, When Two Favorite Comedians Merge ... That's a Thing!

Buster Keaton, appearing as a cop in Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's "Coney Island," does Groucho before Groucho ever did Groucho...1917

Post 480 - Discord and Midjourney - AI but not so much I

     Oh those wacky beta-test sites.  Midjourney is an AI-driven image generator, coordinated by California-based Discord.
    Once you have logged into Discord, you must seek the Midjourney icon on the upper left of the screen (a sailboat), and then you have to navigate downward in the sliding column to the left once you’ve been put into Midjourney.  
    You look for a “newbie” site, click on it, and a long, long trail of generated images will appear in the newsfeed - these are the images already created by other “newbies.”  
    At the bottom of the screen is a prompt to “talk” to a newbie bot, where you type in “/imagine”, press a space, and the word “prompt” appears in a rectangle.  
    Type in anything you can imagine.  
    Anything.  
    Look at some of the already generated images to get an idea of the general discourse.  Lots of body parts, clowns, and grimoire. It’s often a goth paradise.
    In 60 seconds, you’ll be notified that your quartet of images is ready.  Scroll up until you find yours.  It will be highlighted with a bar on the left.
    You may choose to enhance/upscale one of the four, U1 - U4, or create variations on a particular favorite, V1 - V4.  Wait another 60 seconds and it, too, will appear in the feed.
    You have to do a bit of scrolling, and heaven help you if it’s a busy feed, or you waited too long.  It goes from a “bit” to a “lot” of scrolling very, very fast.
    The other thing that goes very fast is your limit of free samples: 25.  It’s a lifetime limit, so to get more for free, you will likely have to get additional log-on identities.  
    The monthly fee for 200 images/month is $10, and for unlimited use it is $20.  It is an interesting starting point to generate some ideas.  

Navigating the Beta-based Seas of Discord:
https://discord.gg/hh642PT5 will get you to the Discord page created by Orrin Scott, our resident animation bibliographer.  From there you will likely get an invitation to join and download a desktop application.  Discord will be an additional site for the ASIFA Central gang of high-fallutin’, rootin’ tootin’ animator chatsters.

Examples from yr hmbl typst are below.  No, I didn’t have a stroke.

Imagine - Art Deco Radio station, in Technicolor, 1930s era:

Enhance the clock and make some variations:

Woodcut, forest at dusk, unicorns:

Groucho Marx and Marilyn Monroe in a DeSoto convertible:

Groucho Marx and Vampirella in an Art Deco DeSoto:

Fields of wheat at dusk, Model T on a freeway:

I think the AI conveniently "forgot" about the Model T.
 

Follow Up - because of the repeating "outreaching" of the Discord software into the internet, including system slow-downs wherever it is "seeking for updates," especially when I turn off the WiFi to reduce distractions during work, I have removed the Discord software.  Nevertheless, it behaves like some of Microsoft products by never "really going away" (I can't rid the desktop of its icon link, for example, without serious mucking around, which is an added annoyance one can do without).

Everyone Blogs But Father - A Tribute to a Vaudeville Staple, ca 1905

In "An Evening With Groucho," the aged Mr. Marx performed a few songs from his earliest days in vaudeville.  One was "Everyone Works but Father," by Jean Havez.  He performed a German version as well to prove its popularity.

So among the archives I found four examples based on the tune, which even had a sequel in 1906.  Since mp3s are not something the folks at Blogger allow, they are presented here in the most boring mp4 format I could muster - plainly titled with just the songs.  Here they are!

The Original Hit from 1905

The composer, Jean Havez, later went on to work with Buster Keaton on "Our Hospitality" and "Seven Chances" before dying in 1925 at the age of 52.  His widow married Edward Sedgwick, who later directed Keaton at MGM.

It Inspired Variations on a Theme - a "Humoresque" from 1905

....and a sequel, "Uncle Quit Work Too," in 1906

...and was common enough to use as bumper music and parody...

"They're everyone's jokes but father's"

Edison's "At the Minstrel Show #5" from 1906