Tuesday, June 27, 2023

The CRABNOX Tragedy-to-Comedy Converter

We all know that personthe one who shows up with steamed turnips at a cookout, the one who sings "He Stopped Loving Her Today" at a karaoke bar, the one who brings Schindler's List to movie night.  While CRABNOX can't yet help with sad culinary selections or depressing sing-alongs, it is pleased to announce that it can now instantly convert tearjerking films to nonstop laugh riots.

Using a combination of natural and artificial intelligence, CRABNOX mixes canned sound effects with movies' original audio, thereby transforming iconic heartbreakers into comedy gold.  No viewer will leave screenings of these films with knees unslapped or ribs untickled.  

Below, please finds clips of three cinematic tales of woe rendered humorous by CRABNOX's exciting new technology.

Terms of Endearment

Titanic

Thelma & Louise

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

New Yorker Cartoons Remixed

New Yorker cartoons have tickled our funny bones for generations.  The witty compositions have appeared in innumerable digests and page-a-day calendars, graced countless t-shirts and coffee mugs, and more or less become lodged in our collective unconscious.  But eventually, the novelty wears off.  Readers can only view a classic Charles Addams or William Steig offering so many times before its humor dissipates.

In order to breathe new life into old New Yorker cartoons, CRABNOX has applied postmodern techniques of deconstruction and reconstruction to several classic, but no longer amusing, comic panels from the iconic magazine.  Cartoon images were selected at random from the New Yorker's vast database, divorced of their original captions, and paired with new captions randomly harvested from other New Yorker cartoons.

Presented below are just a few of CRABNOX's refunnified creations.  


Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Soporivision™, CRABNOX's New Streaming Service

TV is often turned on as an aid in drifting off to sleep.  But that technique is flawed for several reasons.  Let's take a look at the three types of late-night TV most popularly chosen to render the viewer dormant, and analyze their faults:

1.  Movies:  "good" films engage viewers and hold them spellbound until the credits roll, resulting in a loss of sleeping time; "bad" films fail to interest viewers, creating a restlessness that leads to more channel-surfing or streaming-service-scrolling.

2.  Show marathons/binge-watching:  viewers are powerless to drowse or even change the channel, so invested are they in the shows' characters and story arcs.

3.  Shopping channels/infomercials:  bright colors, spinning displays, markdowns, and breathless announcements instill feelings of desire in viewers, leaving them unable to doze (a phenomenon related to our storied inability to fall asleep on an empty stomach). 

But now, with CRABNOX's new streaming service Soporivision™, falling asleep to the TV is easy.


The narrative structure of most shows and movies follows a time-tested formula:  hook viewers, keep them intrigued with plot movement and character development, and finally climax with one of a variety of emotional manipulations (a big come-from-behind win, the eventual union of lovers previously considered star-crossed, the stunning revelation of the real killer, etc.).

Soporivision™ offerings subvert this classical structure by first ensnaring viewers with powerful, suspenseful, or hilarious opening scenes but then becoming increasingly boring.  Each will enchant viewers long enough for them to become fully engrossed and decide not to change the channel.  However, after this initial baiting phase, the programming becomes so dull that few will be able to watch it without being lulled into a state of deep slumber. 

Soporivision™ features hundreds of exclusive shows and movies that can be streamed on any device at any time, enabling viewers to select exactly how and when the hypnosis will begin.

Unsure where to start?  Here are the top selections in the US this week:




A black ops agent.  A top-secret document worth millions.  A decades-old thirst for revenge.  These are the elements leading to an explosive, pulse-pounding showdown that quickly restores everything to status quo.  As the film continues, reports are written, proofread, and submitted; government furniture damaged in the crossfire is inspected, replaced if necessary, and, in some cases, earmarked for the next surplus property auction; and at last, the hero is taken out of the field and moved to an office-based managerial position where he receives and must finally handle vacation requests from four different employees.  




Dr. Frankenstein’s monster has been locked away in Thistlecleave Asylum for over 20 years.  After the arrival of a new mad scientist leads to a gripping, edge-of-your-seat battle of brains versus braun, the fearsome beast escapes.  Once on his own, the abomination begins shopping for a home, finally settling upon and signing a mortgage agreement for a split-level ranch in suburban Minneapolis.  But now he can't decide on a style in which to decorate his newfound dwelling.  Victorian?  Colonial Revival?  Hollywood Regency?  If you can somehow stay awake through the subsequent 70-minute consignment boutique browsing scene, a single take filmed in slow-motion and set to a repeating reduced-tempo instrumental cover of Neil Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain", the terrifying creature's ultimate choice may not surprise you.



This 4-hour documentary opens with exciting, never-before-seen footage that gives the viewer an intoxicating inside look at some of New York City’s most iconic clubs—Studio 54, Pyramid, Danceteria—during their dazzling, cocaine-fueled heyday.  The thrilling music, the outrageous fashion, the legendary stars—everything's here in its hedonistic ‘70s & ‘80s glory.  But what happens after the party’s over?  A sequence of undramatic reenactments illustrates how, once the patrons leave the disco and the lights go up, the janitorial staff prepares the venue for the next night’s festivities by collecting glasses, picking up cigarette butts, mopping the floor, and wiping down tables.  Famously monotone narrator Ben Stein describes each cleaning act in granular detail and then, for the film’s lengthy conclusion, reads a 96-stanza poem entitled “Ode to a Dustpan”.  Stein’s somnolent recitation of the opus is played over a slideshow of sepia photographs depicting vintage corn husk brooms.  





Monday, June 19, 2023


According to a recent survey, the average person gives 32 gifts per year. If we assume that the median human lifespan is 81 years (as it is in the UK, where the survey was conducted), and that the average person is an active gift-giver during 54 of those years (we made deductions for childhood, college, and a person's final years, stages in which the gift-giving urge may be reduced or dormant), then s/he will have purchased a staggering 1,728 gifts before shuffling off this mortal coil. The act of seeking a gift, perhaps once a heartwarming enterprise, easily turns into an onerous exercise that leaves the bestower (and often the bestowed-upon) in a state of distress and disappointment.

But now, wearied givers, that Sisyphian chore can become a thing of the past with Crabnox's convenient and free-to-use Gift-o-Matic. Simply enter your recipient (spouse, doorman, that lady in HR who's retiring, etc.) and click "FIND GIFT". We'll select the ideal present from our vast array of exclusive products. To demonstrate, we've started by suggesting the perfect gift...for you!






Wednesday, June 14, 2023

The Businessman-a-Day™ Calendar

CRABNOX is pleased to introduce its Businessman-a-Day™ calendar, which depicts those suit-clad office-dwellers en route to commence another round of sales projections and expense reports, another slate of meetings and presentations.

To produce the calendar, wily CRABNOX photographers snapped thousands of unsuspecting executives during their a.m. commutes.  From these images, CRABNOX selected only the finest portraits, each capturing a classic businessman on his morning pilgrimage.

As an added tribute to the corporate world, the calendar runs fiscal-year-style from July 1st to June 30th.  What's more, if placed in a work environment, the calendar can be written off as a business expense.

The critics all agree!

Below, some sample pages from the Businessman-a-Day™ calendar.














Sunday, June 4, 2023

Overthinking It: Google Image Search vs. AI Image Generator

"Here's Johnny!"

For most people, that brief phrase conjures a sole image:  Jack Nicholson's maniacal Jack Torrance furiously hacking through a door to reach his terror-stricken wife.  A Google search of the utterance, with no further context, yields dozens of images of The Shining's most iconic scene before a single shot of the phrase's originator, Ed McMahon, ever appears.  For decades, any reasonably intelligent person has been quickly able to find a photo of the unhinged, ax-wielding Torrance.

But until lately, unless one was a Photoshop ace, it was difficult to obtain images that address more hypothetical topics, images that answer questions such as: "How would Edie Sedgwick look if she were alive today?", "What would the love child of Scarlett Johansson and Bob Hope look like?", and "What if Angela Lansbury had played the lead role in the Rambo series?".  Fortunately, recent developments in AI software have made short work of realistically rendering such subjects.  

Convincing AI-generated images
Left: Princess Diana, were she alive today
Right:  A-lister Will Smith as an ordinary fast food hireling

With this in mind, we decided to approach an AI image generator with a far simpler directive:  just show us film and television classics featuring their original stars.  If AI can spawn surprisingly lifelike visualizations of highly speculative subject matter, then it must certainly be able to churn out rigorously accurate reproductions of images that already exist.  Our first prompt of "The Shining, Jack Nicholson, here’s Johnny" seemed like a no-artificial-brainer; even Jeeves would have been able to help.    

But instead of simply regurgitating easily located stills of our requested subjects, the AI presented a string of bizarre, often disturbing images.  Each contains identifiable elements of what we sought (some to a greater extent than others), but the overall compositions are surreal and unsettling. Certain motifs—diseased eyes, doppelgängers, grotesquely gnarled hands—recur several times, and occasionally the AI seemed to utilize random features from actors other than those we specified (for instance, the AI's purported Jack Nicholson displays a correctly configured left eyebrow but possesses a honker of Harrison Fordian angles and proportions).  We have presented our findings below, each in a side-by-side comparison with the Google-sourced image that inspired our AI prompt. 
  
Jack Nicholson in The Shining

Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.

Sigourney Weaver in
Alien

Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show

Bob Barker on The Price is Right

Pat Sajak on Wheel of Fortune

John Cleese in Fawlty Towers

Mary Tyler Moore in The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss in Seinfeld

Kelsey Grammer in Frasier


EXTENDED FEATURE:  Scenes from The Golden Girls





IN-DEPTH LOOK:  Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy