The Sloppy Life of Pixels

The SLOP

2026-07-20T00:00:00Z

As a child, I spent a few years living in Tampa, Florida. We had season passes to Busch Gardens, a place I adored. One of my most vivid memories from there was riding with small groups of other children on the back of an elephant. When I was an adult and learned how bad that was for the elephants, that their bodies were not built for carrying loads upon their backs like horses or mules, I felt terrible.

Another thing we did as kids was, of course, feed bread to ducks. It never even crossed our minds that it wasn't good for them. They seemed happy enough to eat it. I feel bad for that, too, but not as bad as the elephants. Sorry, ducks. But when I learned why it was bad for ducks, it sounded an awful lot like what many humans do to themselves.

This was a pretty easy image to get created. The only real difficulty I had was actually the fisherman in the background. Almost every version of it was too sloppy or too small. I mostly mention it so I can briefly talk about Easter eggs. With each comic, I try to identify if there's any extra jokes I can add to the background or within the setting. I grew up obsessed with The Simpsons I would rewatch those episodes many times over, and whenever I spotted a new gag I was filled with glee. While I'm obviously not as clever as those writers were, I still hope to offer a similar opportunity to my readers.

The SLOP

2026-07-17T00:00:00Z

I drive a car with a manual transmission. When people ask me why, I explain it like this: With a manual, I tell the car what to do. With an automatic, I make a request of the car, it considers it, and then it responds as best it can. However, the way it responds may not be what I want. For example, if I want to accelerate, maybe I want to drop to a lower gear first because I know that I need the extra burst. A car with an automatic transmission will generally assume I want to go faster in my current gear until it sees no, I really mean business.

Using a computer to generate these images is similar. Since I'm communicating in English, I can be more clear about what I want, but the machine may misinterpret at best, or refuse at worst. In this case, the machine refused. I'm not thrilled about how this comic turned out, because it's not showing what I want. The baby is supposed to be attempting to breastfeed on the tablet, not just putting its face close to the screen. Hopefully you understood that without my needing to be explicit. The title probably helped, also.

In order to even get what's here, I had to attempt a few different prompts with ChatGPT before I could get a baby and an tablet in the crib. Then I had to use a different model (Grok) to move the baby closer. ChatGPT knew what I was trying to do and wouldn't let me. Grok was a little more ok with it, but it still wouldn't remove or even reduce the amount of clothing on the display. What you see here is the best I could do.

I do not like the future where tools that are becoming more and more necessary impose limits on what we're allowed to do with them. I fear a consequence where people limit their thoughts in order to be able to simply function in the world. If that is the endgame, then the PC Police have won. I hope for a future where computing power is such that the margin between proprietary and open-source models is marginal, and we are liberated once again.

The SLOP

2026-07-15T00:00:00Z

It shouldn't come as a surprise that I love dark humor. And given that The SLOP is kinda sorta about technology and futurism, I often wonder what death will look like as we delegate more and more humanity to our creations. In some ways, it'll get better. People will live longer and more capably. Pain will be lessened. Incurable diseases will be cured. But the process of death itself I can only imagine will get lonelier. Machines will do a lot of things better than we can, but I don't believe they'll ever be as capable at providing comfort.

The SLOP

2026-07-13T00:00:00Z

I had this idea over the weekend, so I pushed it to the front of the queue. While the White House ballroom won't be completed for months, I thought it was time-sensitive in order to be first-to-market. I asked Grok if anyone had made this joke yet, and it couldn't find anything, so I'm claiming it as an original. This comic is more about the humor than the politics, but I don't think it's too controversial to say that the whole ballroom project is a boondoggle. I also don't think it's ridiculous to say that I would greatly prefer the "ball room" from the comic than what we're getting, considering the cost of the thing. Despite that, the anti-Trump people are probably going to be mad because he's portrayed as happy.

The only tricky part of generating this one was getting it to split the two halves correctly. Other than that, it was a simple matter. I'll use this opportunity to explain how and when I use speech bubbles. If a single person is speaking, and it's obvious who that is, I'll use a caption.. However, if multiple people are speaking, or it's not obvious who is speaking, or there are multiple scenes as in this one, I'll likely use speech bubbles. This is generally how single-panel comics work, and it's even more useful for machine-generated images since I can't guarantee it'll put the speech bubbles in the right place, and it allows me to make spot modifications without having to regenerate the whole image. This relates to my iteration process that I'll go into more detail on at some point in the future.

The SLOP

2026-07-10T00:00:00Z

One of my hobbies is overanalyzing fantastical fiction, and in the case of Pinocchio, the shameless defiance of the conservation of matter rubs me the wrong way. If such a thing were possible, why wouldn't an enterprising individual take advantage? You know who agrees with me? Jiminy and the Blue Fairy, that's who. Hence their treachery. It's too bad that his nose loses its magical properties when he turns into a real boy. Otherwise, we'd have universal access to nose transplants.

The process of creating this image involved my favorite interaction that I've had with the image model thus far. It rejected the initial prompt because it said that it couldn't generate an image depicting violence against children. My response was, "There are no children in this image." (A true statement, I must point out!) Then it created the image without further obstruction, and it's almost exactly what you see here. I had to make one small edit to add Jiminy's cigar and the Blue Fairy's laugh in order to make their complicity obvious.

The SLOP

2026-07-08T00:00:00Z

There was a meme going around about how all men think about the Roman Empire on a daily basis. For me, I have a few Roman Empires. Back to the Future is one of them.

And so I'll let you in on a little secret. As of this writing, I have created 45 comics (most are still unpublished). Of those, this is my favorite. I really just love it. The idea that Doc would erase Marty's entire existence just for a chance to get with Lorraine tickles me so much. And it works, too. Doc knows what a hottie young Lorraine is because he witnessed it himself. We also know that Marty would have told Doc all about his adventure when he got back to the future, including how he replaced George as the object of Lorrain's affection. Of course Doc would consider it. You're considering it right now. Hell, I'd do it.

This was also by far one of the easiest images to generate. I knew exactly what I wanted, so the prompt was pretty thorough. I only had to make one revision in order to adjust the picture a bit and change Doc's clothes. Technically the picture shouldn't be framed on Lorraine's nightstand, but what would this comic be if not for a little slop, at least?

The SLOP

2026-07-06T00:00:00Z

You don't realize just how many teeth children lose to the tooth fairy until you have your own. It's a lot. Like, a whole mouthful. So there's a lot of opportunities to contemplate the nature of such an entity. Normally, mom handles the Indiana Jones style sneak and swap. Recently, she went on a trip and left me with the kids. At the time, my son had a loose tooth, and there was a decent chance that I would have to pull of the tooth fairy deception myself. Which, of course, worried me. And in that worry I brainstormed excuses. And of those excuses, most involved the tragic end of Ms. Fairy.

Despite the somewhat graphic nature of the image, the model didn't push back much on it. I mostly had to deal with normal sloppiness. For example, I had to do several iterations before it would remove the original hands from the sign, and so the person looked normal and there was simply an extra pair at their sides. I don't mind slop until it creates confusion, and at that point, it's gotta go.

The SLOP

2026-07-03T00:00:00Z

Shortly after I finished this comic, I realized that I kinda sorta copied the Detective Pikachu movie. But, you know what they say. Good artists borrow, terrible artists steal.

I was born a little too late for Pokemon, I think. I tried playing Red and Blue when I was a teenager, and it just felt like kiddie's first JRPG. The mechanics are simplistic and the collection stuff didn't appeal to me. But now I have kids and they love Pokemon so I have become a lot more familiar with the franchise. That's how I know that Machamp would beat the life out of cute little Pikachu. It's also what got me thinking about what Pokemon would be like in the real world. Of course there would be fight clubs.

My original vision of this comic was even darker. The people at the fight club were supposed to all be children of similar age to the pokemon trainers in the television shows (Ash, et al.), but the image generation model wouldn't comply. There was also supposed to be more gore, but again, I brushed up against guardrails. It was also a struggle getting it to generate Pokemon, and I'm honestly a little surprised it did it considering Nintendo's litigous nature. So until they force me to take this down, enjoy!

The SLOP

2026-07-01T00:00:00Z

Some time ago my son became very interested in snakes (a development made especially humorous by the fact that his mom is has a major phobia of them (I checked. It's called ophidiophobia)). Naturally, as he learned about different species, he developed an ordered list of his favorites. And, as children are wont to do, he insisted that we all hear the list. The caption is an exact quote that was uttered by him at the dinner table while I was in the midst of another conversation. Thus, all I had to do was modify the circumstances a bit and out came today's comic.

It took a lot more iterations to get to a workable image than I would have expected. The model gets antsy when you combine children and weapons, so I had to convince it that the kid was going to be ok. Then it kept putting him in the front seat rather than the back. Even in this final version, all it did was shift his seat a little. There is no front seat. Talk about sloppy. It also wanted the kid to be looking at the cops and reacting to them because it didn't understand that he needed to be oblivious to the whole thing. I repeatedly tried to make it so the kid was looking at his dad, but I couldn't get it right. It also kept putting the police in unrealistic positions where they were clipping into the car or pointing their guns at each other.

Another fun story about this one: I do not include mentions of race, sex, or most physical characteristics in the prompt unless it's important. (The latter two sometimes are; I've not had to mention race as of yet). Despite that, the image generation model always defaults to white people and nearly always assumes male. The only times it ever has used non-whites are:

When generating unrelated groups of people
This comic The father and son were black in nearly all of the early versions that I didn't use. I'll leave any conclusions to be drawn about this up to you readers.

Oh, I almost forgot. The answer is King Cobra.

The SLOP

2026-06-29T00:00:00Z

The idea for this one came from playing The Frozen Game with my niece at her brother's T-Ball game. She froze me, but forgot about it. Me, being the awesome uncle I am, remained frozen for at least fifteen minutes before my wife rescued me by calling my niece over to unfreeze me. It was fine, though, because I was frozen while watching the game, so it mostly just meant continuing to watch. I wasn't sure if the joke here would be obvious to everyone, but The Frozen Game is fairly universal, so I expect that anyone who has interacted with kids as adults will get it.

The image generation was very straightforward and what you see is basically the first cut. The only thing I had to tinker with was the text on the signs in the background. I also changed the original fairy wand to an ice wand to help visually explain the joke. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy!