botober 2025
partook in botober at last! i've been meaning to draw something since 2021. laymen like me hardly thought about generative AI before chatGPT's release, so doing this year's challenge made me feel nostalgic in more ways than one.
20. 1 smorbs: Our biscoff pudding powder is the star of treat that would look no less natural next to Paris's finest after-dinner delights. Lined with ladyfingers and topped with whipped cream and an oozing smore, this is the dessert that keeps your guests wondering how you made it.
21. Cucumteragus: Cucumteragus is the solution to the age-old problem of children who don't eat their greens. Chop a rich selection of vegetables into a our real cucumber concentrate gelatin powder, then set and forget in a mould.
22. Spoonfur pie: Fluffy as a cloud and oh-so-delicious. Your traditional fruit pie topped with a generous layer of cotton candy formed from our instant cherry cream powder. The combined mouthfeel makes it an absolute delight to experience.
23. Rub the bog: Butter curry blocks formulated for soldiers who need nourishment on the field. Just add boiling water for meals that are quick, hot, and convenient.
24. Leanwhile: Sick of weight loss drinks that taste like surrender? Leanwhile is good for your appetite and your body. Delivering an authentically sweet boysenberry taste, you can trust it to slim.
米 When consumed with a balanced diet of at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables per day and regular physical activity. POWDER-E does not guarantee any measurable weight loss upon the continuous consumption of Leanwhile.
concept
this year's botober prompts were trained on user-submitted vintage jelly recipes. i've listed the prompts in red, as well as the corresponding dates and numbers.
i went for a powdered food theme, creating a concept around the fictional enterprise POWDER-E.
formed in 1960s and backed by one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of its state, POWDER-E was able to experiment with a smorgasbord of product lines, even producing MRE tablets for some time. by the 1980s, it had joined the weight lost product trend—its only truly successful venture until the 2010s, when it became locally well known for its protein powder. in the early 2020s, it was financially backed by a private equity firm, enabling it to rapidly expand beyond its state to become one of america's premier health food companies.1
before drawing this, i had watched a solar sands video on the horror of food waste that resonated with me so much! waste is truly something that makes me feel disgusted yet fascinated, so i wanted to create a company concept that would bring forth the same feeling with powdered food.
the horror is not to do with POWDER-E's ingredients or processes, but simply that completely dry, packaged sugar can last near forever given there are no pests or moisture. so in some situation where while the moist food around it slowly rots to waste, the powdered giant POWDER-E eventually becomes the world's sole source of sustenance...
incidentally, my mother created powdered food for a living so i have a constant supply of free protein powder. YAY!
art
it's been a good few months since i drew for myself and literal years since i drew a complete work of art daily—not since highschool, i bet.
i had a lot of fun interpreting the prompts, researching vintage meals, and designing and drawing the food. still life isn't something i focus on often, so it's been enjoyable to explore subject matter i'm less familiar with. even though i only drew for five days, i improved a lot in that time and i was especially proud of rendering the glass and metallic wrapping.
as usual, i stored my references on pureref. i've also started using hydrus network, which acts as a personal booru-style database. so wonderful for collecting references i want to keep long-term! you can sort files by average color and all kinds of other ways so it's just fun to look through too.
i've found that many of my inspirations are artists from the late 1800s. i'm a victorian gentleman.
it was a lot of fun to complete parts of this challenge, though i don't have nearly enough time to draw daily and my sleep deteriorated as a result. however, i definitely want to try botober again next year and continue making original art!
copywriting
i really am so grateful to work as a copywriter IRL and my appreciation for writing has only grown in spite of writing mindless SEO content for a living—or rather, because of it.
we can talk all day about marketing slop in the age of AI, but even before that, SEO was known to have decimated traditionally interesting writing. so much SEO content only focuses on keywords and following conventional outlines without capturing the fundamental point of marketing—understanding what your audience wants and how you can give it to them.
i find the effect of SEO on writing beautiful and tragic. i want to be useful! i want to interest you! clickbait without clear intention versus a clear title that doesn't sell interest—yet we need that clarity—the secret trick doctors don't want you to know—in the title because it helps it appear on google so that more people can read it and more people can benefit from its use. a structure that helps people in its straightforwardness yet reduces everything down to the banality of an instructional manual. SEOs make things so overcomplicated most of the time but google just wants to show good, useful content in the end. and i love that simplicity at the end of SEO—just help others find what they want.
so basically i'm crazy.2
i adore old advertisements that were neither constrained by keyword stuffing nor driven by casual online gushing. i love how the text flows, how they describe the benefits of the product and why it's simply perfect. copywritten descriptions were so long back then; did people really read so much?
at the same time i'm fascinated by copywriters like shigesato itoi, who built his career off of snappy one-liners—equally something i can't do in my job as an SEO content writer.
what i wrote on the graphic was just a 5 minute copy, but i still think it sounds too much like what i'd write today. i want to study the creativity of 20th century writers armed with a single image and their words.3
artificial intelligence
doing botober ignited a real sense of nostalgia for the late 2010s when the public had only the inkling of generative AI. back then i read gigazine.net daily and was greatly intrigued at the article on thispersondoesnotexist.com and a similar site for anime girls. peculiar websites but nothing more than an interesting technological novelty.
how the times have changed!
we all know the impact of AI on the current day and while i am all for technological improvements, LLM chatbots are the digital pandora's box.
botober brought me back to simpler times, when generative artificial intelligence was interesting but didn't threaten whole livelihoods and environments.
the prompts are created by janelle shane, a scientist who writes about artificial intelligence. she generated the prompts on the language model char-rnn ("the tiniest one i've ever worked with"), using training data of 800~ user-submitted vintage jello recipes.
considering the immense scale of current AI models, it's refreshing to see the output of a small neural network run solely on manually input data.
i'll leave my thoughts on AI and writing for another day, but the technology has had a huge impact on my love of art. i've realized that no matter how good AI is it doesn't replace the fun of actually creating art myself and the output, honestly, can never be as good either. 4
writing makes me so happy and drawing finally makes me just as happy too. that's the one thing i can thank artificial intelligence for.
i'm a financebro in the body of an artist so i wanted to create a concept that involved a private equity firm.↩
this is how i feel about professional wrestling and christianity as well. i love beautiful and painful things so badly.↩
no video, no interactable 3D models. go back further and you don't have photos, even further back and you're without color. how can you portray how delicious food is or how comfortable some clothes? it's too wonderful that words can translate to images in your mind.↩
i may have this opinion because i primarily draw myself and my favorite character kissing and holding hands.↩