(Very heavy on gay content, with a number of raunchy allusions, so not to everyone’s taste.)
I’m well aware that Christmas was over two months ago, but this is a complex posting and my life’s been full of, um, challenges. In any case, I’m finally finishing up Dean Allemang’s series of AI-generated Christmas-card designs for the 12 days as in the carol, all of them sent as titillating presents for me. The early ones had one hot hunk, an object of gay sexual desire (Dino and I share a sexual orientation, and in fact a sexual history), as a central figure, with multiples of the gift of the day (birds or those golden rings) as accompaniments; but from there on it’s multiple men: for days 6 and 7, in my 1/11 posting “Hot Days of Christmas: geese and swans”, the dudes are figurative birds; for days 8 (maids a-milking) and 9 (ladies dancing), Dino just switched sexes (milkmen, laddies dancing); the last three days have male gifts in the carol (10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping, 12 drummers drumming), but Dino has found fresh, jokey, interpretations for all three.
(Note: once things shifted to multiple hunks, Dino’s prompts for suitable images tended to turn up clone-like variants of the same basic guy, just differently posed and dressed. So we’ll be seeing a few of these studs again and again; some people find this effect creepy, some find it really hot, I toggle back and forth between the two reactions.)
Now: for background, a look back at the turning point in this carnival of images, the geese a-laying (day 6) and swans a-swimming (day 7). With some comments from Dino about the craft of prompting for suitable images (which can then be further massaged with image-processing software); there’s a lot of art in all of this.
The day the studs took over. The geese are feathered guys (though I also saw some word play on the lay of geese a-laying — they’re displaying themselves as hot lays — that Dino hadn’t intended):
(#1) Day 6: geese a-laying
And then the swans.
(#2) Day 7: swans a-swimming
My take, in the posting:
presumably a swimming team, though clad not in swim suits but in very tight-fitting long johns that make their protruding penises, their figurative swan necks, the center of the composition
Once again, not Dino’s intention at all. From his 1/13 comment on my blog:
those are intended to be the supporting dance corps from a production (all-male, perhaps) of Swan Lake. Ballet Corps outfits are quite easy to supply with appropriate packages; the AI’s seem to expect it. What the AI’s weren’t so good about was rendering the standard ballet positions.
And then from Dino in e-mail:
The image AI’s are pretty bad at counting; the Seven Swans were the result of several tries with different numbers (I think the successful one was five) until by chance the right number showed up.
Maids and ladies no more. Now to the new stuff. For milkmaids we get milkmen; we can tell they’re milkmen by the milk bottles:
(#3) Day 8: maids a-milking (the central, extraordinarily hunky, milkman has had his penis fuzzed out for WordPress modesty)
Whoa, you cry out, where is the 8-ness? Five milkmen, some large number of milk bottles. In e-mail, Dino confessed that he had just abandoned exact numbers in favor of a rough stab at 8-ness, a general sense of numerosity; on the number of milk things (and later, the number of pipes for day 11),
I figured at this point, I was taking poetic license with numbers.
Well, his image AI isn’t at all good at counting, so what the hell. (In his defense, he had only a few days to get this images created and printed out on cards for me, to arrive close to the appropriate day of Christmas.)
Also from Dino in e-mail:
I was going to try for eight milked men, and even tried for some very elaborate milking machines. Some very entertaining pics came from that, but nothing printworthy.
Well, there are such machines on the market. In my 4/30/16 posting “The masturbation sleeve”, there’s a section on penis milking devices, created by connecting a masturbation sleeve to an electrically operated sucking pump. Eek.
(I had intended to work a tasteless joke on milk and semen into my comments on #3, and that would have fit with milking machines, but with the model’s genitals conspicuously missing, I didn’t think such a thing would fly.)
On to the ladies > laddies, but still dancing:
(#4) Day 9: ladies dancing; totally my favorite of the 12 days
Dino in e-mail:
As for the dancing laddies prompt, … the AI ignored my request for nine men, and only gave me one at a time. I made variations of this to get variety in the arm positions and costumes (e.g,, castanets was an attempt to get the arms over the head; it didn’t work, but it gave a few of the images a hot, mediterranean feel which I quite liked)
The prompt:
<ti:epiCRealism> (nine men:1.6), (dressed in harem pants), dancing, (drag queens:1.3), full body, (arms over head:1.3), (wearing a silk halter top:1.5), (playing Castanets:1.3), , 30 years old,, smiling, (joyful expression), (view from side), , ((handsome, friendly)), (stocky build),((handsome:1.4)), (((muscular))) body,(hairy chest:1.1), detailed face, short beard, (full body shot: 1.2), bare feet, (global soft lighting, background light, 50mm, f/5.6, Canon EOS 5D), photorealistic:1.4, hires:1.4, 8k:1.4, highly detailed:1.4
Leaping, piping, and drumming to the finish. Finally, the days that actually have male gifts in the carol. First up:
(#4) Day 10: lords a-leaping
These guys are leaping athletically, and they’re fun to look at, but they lack the outrageousness of the lads of the previous day.
And then a surprise:
(#5) Day 11: pipers piping (as a bonus, the central figure seems to have his left hand in position for self-pleasuring
Well, yes, a huge pun: you were expecting pipes the musical instruments, but Dino gives you pipes the plumbing fixtures (and, as I noted above, not exactly 11 of them, but some fairly large, hard-to-determine number). It could have been pipes the implements for smoking tobacco — or even pipes the slangy penises (as in the raunchy sense of laying pipe).
And finally, the climactic pun, also a gay in-joke:
(#5) Day 12: drummers drumming: leathermen on the hoof
Crucial information from Wikipedia:
Drummer is an American magazine which focuses on “leathersex, leatherwear, leather and rubber gear, S&M, bondage and discipline, erotic styles and techniques.” The magazine was launched in 1975 and ceased publication in April 1999 with issue 214, but was relaunched 20 years later [in October 2019] by new publisher Jack MacCullum with editor Mike Miksche.
If you don’t know about Drummer, you won’t get this one at all. But, as Dino observed in e-mail, with eyebrow figuratively raised, his AI seemed to be familiar with the magazine, and easily produced 12 Drummer men. All ready for Epiphany, which is what comes after the 12th day of Christmas.