Equestria 1939 - Weird World War (the Blog Post) · 12:44pm Sep 6th, 2024
First, I want to thank Airy Words for putting together the cover art. It is somehow appropriate that a mad scientist with an intelligent computer make the art for a story about a mad scientist's daughter and the ghost in her machine. Let me get that stuck into this blog...
Welcome to the prequel to Equestria:1940, where the small island nation of Equestria, about the size of Ohio, sits a little north-east of Bermuda and remains mostly to itself, except for tourism. Although they remained neutral during the Great War, that neutrality is about to be shattered as the Great Powers go to war, and the tiny nation has few assets to protect itself from the modern weapons created by humans.
Unless one stubborn young unicorn researcher and a disfunctional spy can somehow sweep back the curtain of secrecy over the German war machine and allow Equestria to stay one step ahead of the oncoming destruction. Ten chapters from now, or eleven depending on quantum uncertainty, we all will find out.
In short, this is a story about a ship during World War II.
A submarine is a kind of ship after all.
Well, two submarines.
Although it is not really about a submarine, but more about what is inside.
And not what is inside a submarine, but what is inside the ponies who want what is inside the submarine, guided by the words of a mare who has been dead for several years.
Confused?
So are they, so you’re in good company.
So come on inside (the story, not the submarine) and find out what can take a perfectly rational mare who is on the hereditary road to becoming a mad scientist and wind up with saving her world from a Germany gone insane.
Don’t worry.
It won’t sink.
At least very far.
And you can swim, right?
For those who are curious, here's some background on how the cover art came to be.
The title of the story immediately brought to mind the 1970s DC comic Weird War Tales, which was one of my favorites and apparently a fave of Georg as well. That gave me the idea to create a throwback-style cover for the story. Based on the title of the first chapter "Celestia's Gambit," I envisioned a scene of Celestia in the foreground battling German WWII fighter planes in the background.
Performing a search for "Wierd War Rales cover gallery" located this collection of the artwork of the legendary Joe Kubert. This archive and some editing provided the comic text portions of the final art.
His art style is interpreted for AI artwork as Detailed, Fine lines, Comics, Characters, Fantasy, which I added to the prompt below for https://perchance.org/furry-ai
Fine tuning the description prompt and much repetition produced an image with great potential. The resulting raw image and final result are shown side-by-side here.
While perchance.org/furry-ai makes great ponies, the planes look like collections of angular sticks. Not its strength to say the least. They all had to be removed with content aware fill in Photopea. Similarly, Celestia's left wing needed a trim, her green and white party hat (no clue) had to go away along with a host of other small edits. The result was a .psd file with 10 layers and the end result very close to what I imagined from the original generated artwork.
5802613 I'm constantly baffled and thrilled by the way 'art people' can get beautiful pictures out of software that I struggle with in order to make the occasional stick figure (or attempt to link as a photo above). Very fine work, my good man. Bravo.
This is basically the plot line to U-571, board a German U-Boat to steal the Engima Machine and turn the tide of the war on the seas. Curious how you played it out~
That artwork is amazing and I am amazed by it. That's some quality work. Now I gotta go read the story.
Never mind the story, I just want that cover in a suitably large size for a wall. Out-fucking-standing!
Well, I had work I was supposed to be doing today, but I can't argue with Equestria 1939 and Substitute Librarian chapters
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You are both very kind!
Thank you!
Fabulous cover art! Great use of "AI" pastiche software to make something that parodies something familiar without passing for a forgery.
Bravo!
What does "BC" stand for in the logo? Maybe "EC" would make for a good horse-pun version of DC? I'm tempted to type in the UPC into DuckDuckGo to see what pops up, but my bandwidth reserve is scraping bottom. (Bell Canada sucks.)
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You'll have to hear from Georg where the idea for "BC" came from beyond, "not published by DC."
I can say why he didn't choose "EC". Because that publisher's name was already taken!
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A glorious image! I love it!
5802838 5802849 BC comes from...um...Never ask a woman her age. However, if you make the mistake of asking if she's found Jesus, she'll respond, "Such a nice young man. I have an end table he made before he left home to become a physician and a philosopher. So many years, and it still looks just as good as the day he made it. Excellent worksmanship."
Celestia --
--Is one of two living beings on the planet who can pronounce ancient Egyptian correctly.
--is able to tell just exactly what variety of pear was grown on the Tree of Knowledge.
--was once carbon dated, but nobody ever tells what the result was.
--fought a tyrannosaurus who was going for the last slice of cake. She won. Tyrannosaurs are now extinct.
--Owned a sword at one time and did not have a sheath, so she stuck it in a rock. She blames herself for the British monarchy.
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Alley Oop, Princess! Ride that dino-saw-er!
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Discussions with the early church must have been a hoot
The virgin gnostic
-Life is a prison!
-Existence is evil!
-We are just here to suffer!
VS
Chadlestia
-Im a pone!
-Blep.
-there's beauty in the world
-live life to the fullest!
Very impressive cover art. Will have to check out the story.
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Fantastic!
That art is so good, I don't even have to read the story!