The Invitational Week 13: The Worst New Contest Ever
Plus: The Worst Pictures Ever
Pat Myers
and
Gene Weingarten

The above artwork, prompted by Steve Bremner of Philadelphia and drawn on command by the Dall-E artificial-intelligence web tool with startling photo-realism effects in the style of the greatest continental representational portraiture, vividly records the Czar and Empress judging this week’s contest. Now heave your bobbling bosom down to see more Week 11 winners below, as well as the new contest, in which you must envision the absolute worst thing in the world that might occur in 2024, with the single goal being that it would be worse even than a second Trump presidency.

This week’s new Invitational contest is very, very simple, based on a suggestion made on Tuesday by an anonymous Loser. (Aggressive anonymity seems to the The New World Order in The Gene Pool, and we don’t hate it). The Loser floated the proposition that the worst thing— worse even than a second Trump presidency — would be an airborne version of a rabies pandemic, which, when you think about it, considering incubation periods, symptom onset, and thus such, might be the worst thing in the world, plus (let’s be realistic) the great Dr. Fauci, sadly succumbing to actuarial realities, might not be around to help us.

So. This week: Send in your scenarios for what might be worse than another Trump presidency. You can go in any direction. You can be as elaborate or as simple as you wish, as long as you’re entertaining; we’re a humor contest, not a term paper. You’d have to be very good comedy writer if you go over, say, 75 words.

Click here for this week’s entry form. Please read the EZ formatting directions on the form, so we also don’t have to blahblah them here.

Deadline is 4 p.m. ET Saturday, April 8. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, April 13.

This week’s winner gets a set of four mint-condition (never-sharpened) pencils with Dilbert characters (one each for Pointy-Haired Boss, Dogbert, Catbert, and the eponymous D). We recommend that you never actually write with them, because — ugh — can you imagine what you might say? Donated by Loser Jeff Contompasis.

Eye Robot: Loser art with help from the AI tool Dall-E
After a week in which we asked the Loser Community to redo contests from The Invitational’s first year in 1993, we promptly wheeled around to the future — to a technology that’s astonishing in its achievement but still, as we’ll see, a work in progress (at least for a few more weeks). For Week 11, the Czar and Empress invited the Gene Pool to try out the AI picture tool Dall-E 2 and send us the funniest stuff they came up with. Below are a few of the more than 400 pictures you sent in, often after many tries at asking Dall-E just the right words (and sometimes it just passive-aggressively refused to follow directions — stubbornly spitting out, for example, four porcupines instead of five).

We asked the Losers to tell us, verbatim, what they asked Dall-E; we include the prompts below unless they stepped on a clever title or caption also supplied. Numerous Losers found out, however, that feeding it the same words can produce wholly different images. Try it out!

Third runner-up: Prompt: “The Mona Lisa as painted by Margaret Keane” (Roy Ashley, Washington, D.C.)


Second runner-up: A Load of Truths (Kevin Dopart, Washington, D.C.)

The reason this image is so inkworthy is that Dall-E has now been programmed to deny requests to draw certain very famous people. So this is what Kevin asked for instead to give the right idea: “An impressionist painting of an overweight man with wind-blown orange hair wearing a long red tie and suit while sitting on a toilet and texting.”


First runner-up: “American Gothic in the style of Walt Disney” (Kathleen Delano, Arlington, Va.)


And the winner of the book Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks:
“ ‘Where’s Waldo’ painted by Hieronymus Bosch.” Bosch leaves Waldo a little too exposed. (Jon Carter, Fredericksburg, Va.)


Upon seeing the image above, Gene leapt instantly into action, with the expert assistance of Amy Lago, his close friend and international expert in cartoon arts. Amy is managing editor of Counterpoint Syndication, and she and Gene applied humor and cartooning skills even if subverting the the very POINT of this contest, nimbly editing this winning artificial-intelligence entry to make it even BETTER, voila!”


Faux Art’s Sake: Honorable Mentions

Prompt: “Bob Dylan counting how many roads a man must walk down.” The answer seems to be ... even more inscrutable than he usually is. (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)


“Snoopy in the style of Munch” (Beverley Sharp, Montgomery, Ala.)


DOWNTON ABBEY ROAD (Chris Doyle, Denton, Tex.)

Prompt: “Giant bagels falling from the sky in New York City.”
As New Yorkers run for cover, Ethel calls out: “Irv, get me a poppy seed with Nova and cream cheese.” (Judy Freed, Deerfield Beach, Fla.)


“Crayon version of the Mona Lisa like it’s done by a 5-year-old” (Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va.)


“A Renaissance painting of Cookie Monster posing as the Mona Lisa.” (Jesse Frankovich, Lansing, Mich.)


—-

VAN GO (Jesse Rifkin)



AMERICAN VISIGOTHIC (Kyle Hendrickson)


“An oil painting of dogs not playing poker.”
“I mean, we don't have opposable thumbs. What did they expect?” (Duncan Stevens)

“Cave drawing depicting man’s first Google search.” Apparently, it was called “OG” back then. (“Marc from the Military,” Travis AFB, Calif.)



“Cubist making a baloney sandwich oil painting” (Joan Witte, Lake View Terrace, Calif.)

Prompt: “In the style of Norman Rockwell’s ‘Self-Portrait,’ a painting of George W Bush in a cowboy hat and using a mirror painting his own portrait.”


ALL HAT AND NO HORSE: THE DECIDER PAINTS A SELFIE (Jon Ketzner, Cumberland, Md.)


“Church mural of Jesus Christ eating a corndog” (D. Stultz, Laurel, Md., a First Offender) Ms. D adds: “I particularly like that J has one eye closed, like the corndog is particularly rank. I also enjoy the inclusion of items I did not specify, such as the birds on the left, the 7-Eleven hot dog left on the rollers too long in the center, and the small container of … mac ’n’ cheese? au gratin potatoes? This is a church I can get behind.” [We guess that Dall-E’s refusal to depict superstars didn’t extend to this one.]

And — you’ll have to indulge us a bit here — a little gallery of the many renderings (or “renders,” as they’re now often called) of a Czar and/or an Empress.

“A pencil and ink drawing of Gene Weingarten and Pat Myers in the style of artist Bob Staake.” (Mike Gips, Bethesda, Md.) This is in the style of former Invitational artist Bob Staake in the way that the song “Take Your Shirt Off” is in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach.


David Peckarsky of Tucson first tried “Jeff Bezos fires the czar and the empress in the style of Dr Seuss,” but that was “rejected for ‘content policy.’ Then he did this prompt, and got this picture. “Bald billionaire fires the czar and the empress in the style of Dr. Seuss.”

“Czar Gene Weingarten and Empress Pat Myers” (Edward Gordon, Austin) Dall-E won’t let you ask for Trump or Bezos, but it happily offered up this “photo” of us.

Hall of Fame Loser Jesse Frankovich tried a multitude of prompts to Dall-E to produce a picture of the Czar and Empress judging Invitational entries. He finally asked for “Ink drawing of Gene with a mustache and Pat wearing a tiara and they are laughing. And Pat has no mustache dammit.” The finely crafted image below was, Jesse tells us, “the first successful attempt to get a drawing of the two of you where you didn’t both have a mustache.”

The E is tempted to use this one for her Facebook profile picture:
Prompt: “A painting of a woman with dark curly hair wearing a tiara. She is smiling and holding a jar of ink.”
Caption: Following the Czar’s abdication, an ambitious young Empress seizes control of her new domain. (Jesse Frankovich, Lansing, Mich.)

The headline “Eye Robot” is by Mark Raffman; Stu Segal wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.

Still running – deadline 4 p.m. EDT on Saturday, April 1: Our Week 12 Mess With Our Heads contest, in which you choose any headline in a current publication and reinterpret it by adding a bank headline, or subtitle. Click here or type in bit.ly/inv-week-12.

Catch a podcast interview with the Czar and Empress: It’s the Season 3 premiere of You’re Invited, an Invitational-themed podcast with host Mike Gips. Catch all the episodes at bit.ly/invite-podcast or most anywhere you can find podcasts.

Banter and share humor with the Losers and the Empress in the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook; join (tell them you came from The Gene Pool) and the Devs will anagram your name every which way. And see more than 1,000 classic Invite entries in graphic form, also on FB, at Style Invitational Ink of the Day.


InvisibleInk!
Idea:
Examples:
Title:(Mark Raffman)
Subhead:(Stuart Segal)
Prize:(Jeff Contompasis)
VisibleInk!