Time to Get a Little Slimy

I was wandering around one of the local parks when I came across this warning sign advising you to watch out for banana slugs, which we all know and love around here. I stopped to take a picture, and then I had an idea, why not use xAI's Imagine app to see what it creates with the shot. This was the result.

You can see the slug moving, as well as the swaying tree branches in the background. It's a simple animation that has a je-ne-sais-quoi about it. I don't know how to describe it, so I'll use a 90s term, ubercool. This terms refers to something that is super cool, but it has a bit of added artsy Germanic pizzazz. Then again, this very simplicity is like a yūgen (幽玄) sensation- a deep and profound aesthetic feeling that arises from the subtle beauty of the natural world, according to the Japanese. Anyway, I'm getting all tied up in semantics, so I'll move on.

I was planning on dazzling you with a full resolution animation that showed the beauty of the scene, along with the sounds of nature, but as it turned out, Imagine only outputs MP4 videos, so I had to use a MS ClipChamp to turn the generated animation into a GIF, and then shrinkage happened, so the video is smaller than the original and has no sound. 😭

Here's another fun image that seems Imagine ready, so I uploaded it to the app and let it work its magic.

It's a bit jerky like claymation but not bad. It doesn't quite capture the smooth organic feel of the slug's real movement, but perhaps this is something that can be smoothed out with more 'redos' or custom prompts.

Fortunately, the folks at Capilano park also had the real thing in the exhibit, so I took a few photographs of the slow moving action.

A slug on a mission

Yikes!

are awesome in many ways. They have many teeth (27,000), they taste bad and numb your mouth if eaten, they're slow moving and could take years to cross a long bridge, and apparently they eat dead crickets, as from the looks of it, that's what the slimy fellow was aiming for, as you can see in this image.

Now I know what you're all thinking, so say no more.

As you can see, the video is an Eldritch horror, though to Imagine's credit, there is a lot of slime there.

I recreated the image with the following prompt, 'a banana slug slowly eating a cricket'.

Oof! I don't know what that slug is doing to that cricket. The app was having trouble with the dimensions of this slug, which can grow up to 26 centimeters. The rendered animation is likely not anatomically correct, but it's getting there and perhaps a better prompt jockey would have obtained more scientifically accurate results.

Me, I've had enough slimy fun for the day. Thank you for visiting. And I will leave you with this to ponder.

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Images by @litguru and animated with artificial intelligence