"It resembled nothing so much as a star-shaped blob of transparent jelly that shimmered and changed color like an opal. It appeared to be some lower form of animal, one-celled, not large, only about a foot in circumference when it stretched those feelers out to full length. It oozed along over the sand like a snail, groping its way with those star-points—and it hummed!"
"It was nauseating to watch, and yet beautiful, too, with all those iridescent colors gleaming against that setting of dead-black stone."
"Instead, I took off my flying-helmet and tossed the goggles directly in the path of the creature. It did not pause or turn aside, but merely reached out one of those sickening feelers and brushed the goggles very lightly. “And they turned to stone!"
"It took me about three days to trap the thing, although it gave me no more actual resistance, of course, than a larger snail."
"He had prodded this jelly-like Thing with his automatic, and it had turned (him—and everything in contact with him —into shiny dark stone."
"I saw horror—a jelly-like, opalescent thing like a five-pointed star. It pulsed and quivered for an instant, and the room fairly rocked to the unmuffled sound of that vibrant humming."
Mary Elizabeth Counselman, The Black Stone Statue
Read Scott's essay about The Black Stone Statue here
This was a really fun one. The "opalescent thing" is described as a small jellyish blob with "star points" for locomotion. I chose to make it look like a starfish with a snail's texture. 
While Virgil Finlay's illustration for this story is gorgeous, it is inaccurate. The creature looks more like one of Lovecraft's moon-beasts than the monster in Counselman's story. It has a frog body with a cluster of polyps at the top. She very specifically says "five-pointed" and talks about how it fits in a small box. Finlay also did the cover for this issue Weird Tales.
Clockwise from top left: Mystery Of the Wax Museum, House Of Wax, Waxwork, The Mill Of Stone Women
While the colonial adventurer side of the story is interesting to grapple with, I was interested in the tortured artist aspect. An artist that gains access to a shortcut to make work quickly and slickly. It's an idea that has shown up in The Mill Of Stone Women, Mystery Of the Wax Museum & it's remake House Of Wax are all about real bodies being passed off as waxwork creations. Waxwork is the same basic story but with magic. Even movies like Bucket Of Blood (an artist can't create the perfect shade of red so he uses human blood) & Color Me Blood Red (a murderer covers his victims in clay & sells them to a gallery to hide the evidence) have a similar theme. You could even make the argument that Pickman's Model is a variation on the theme. The artist creates gruesome works only to have it revealed that he's been using models from life, not his imagination. 
Top to bottom: Bucket Of Blood, Color Me Blood Red
In this hellscape that is late-stage American capitalism, artists are pushed to churn out maximum content for minimum pay. This results in artists "photobashing" and bending over backwards to justify their use of AI. Both AI & the opalescent thing are dumb, environmentally destructive tools used to churn out soulless artwork. In Counselman's story the narrator's looking for recognition, in our world people are using AI to undercut other freelancers for half of a paycheck.
Fuck AI. We'll be back with another series of Stories From the Borderland unless we all drown from the excessive heat caused by oligarchs & their toys.
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