1000 Words on the Topic of Something That Amuses Me

I’m going to write 1000 words now on something that amuses me.  I came up with the name for this fundraiser while I was in the dentist chair, and told my dentist about it.  She was amused, said, “Well, it’s all about getting attention.”  That it is, but it can also be about yuks.

Inspired by this financial predicament and my funny little idea, I scribbled the banner image in a notebook, right there in the car.  Here’s the drawing, snapped with my cellphone camera later that night:

I snagged the banner from my last fundraiser to get an idea of the proportions I needed to squeak it into, using that as the foundation in photopea.  It was tricky.  First order of business, I had to scale the self-portrait to fit the right end of the banner well, not get cut off too awkwardly.

Next I stretched a copy of the title to fit the space left to it, leaving room above and below for the words I meant to add later with a text tool.  This did not fill the space with my hatchy background texture right, so I used a combo of distorted duplicate layers and the clone tool to fill the area around the words.

You may have noticed the title is blurred subtly toward the left side of the image.  If this was not meant to look like a sketchy pile of shit, I would have taken a new photo of the image to get past that.  However, sketchy style, stuff can look rough.  I copied a layer and did unsharp mask until it looked more legible, which blew out the other end of the pic.  Then I used a quickie layer mask to make only the part I wanted look crisped.

At this point, my boyfriend would be preserving every layer, but I get refrigerator blindness when I see a bazillion layers, so I merged that shit.

Next comes text.  I like something in the ballpark of horror novel cover fonts, circa the early 80s.  So Benguiat -esque.  Photopea’s collection of I-presume-legally-public-domain fonts does not include Benguiat, and this one was kinda sorta close enough.  I did it bold, but it didn’t look bold enough, so I added a one pixel stroke in the same color as the font.  I used outer glow instead of drop shadow, changing it to a dark color and blending style, to make the white font pop from the predominantly white page.

Remember the floating star from the original photo?  I was thinking ahead when I drew that.  I knew I wanted to make it white and splash it around the finished image.  One of my “Great American Satan” bits of iconography is the five point star of the american flag, inverted to resemble the goat pentagram of satanism.  I made a layer of pure white and copy-pasted the star into a layer mask on it.  I adjusted the levels to remove most of the background, then brushed out the rest in a few seconds.  I applied the layer mask, and voilà, little star.

Then I carefully scaled it and put it into parts of the image where it wouldn’t interfere with the composition.  A little dark glow to make them pop, and I really liked the end result.  The scratchy pen strokes have almost a 3d quality to them.

Oh, and one last thing.  The color of the image at this point was a slightly pukey pink-grey-brown.  I made a red white and blue gradient layer, then scrolled through blend styles until I found one I liked, then reduced the opacity a little, to get the subtle americana look of my beauteous masterpiece.

This image amused me a lot.  The idea for the name amused me, and the image turned out great, at least to my eyes.  The drawing aspect isn’t brilliant.  My skills are a bit degraded from lack of use.  No, not because I’ve been doing AI.  Just because I don’t have an ideal space for drawing, and my vision is getting worse, and I’ve been busy with lots of other things – particularly writing.  But the drawing didn’t have to be great.  It’s a scratchy mess in a scratchy mess.

That’s a bit shy of a thousand words, so maybe a bit more about how I’ve done as an artist, throughout my life.  I used to be among the best few artists in my high school of about 2000 students, which gave me a big head.  I came to art school, and I was only in the top 20%, which was a bit humbling.  Then, as part of that education and practice, I started paying closer attention to the artwork I like, and comparing myself to the greats.

That was very humbling.  Enough to make me decide, hey, I don’t even wanna bother competing with that.  There’s this philosophy espoused by the H. Jon Benjamin character Coach McGuirk, on the old cartoon Home Movies, goes something like, “Why bother to do anything if you’re not immediately good at it?  Playing guitar is hard.  Martial arts are hard.”  I was only willing to do what it takes to be skilled at art as long as it wasn’t difficult.  When it came to the big leagues, I was like, eh, minor league is good enough for me.

Maybe this is projection, but I think everybody does this, and the greats of art just had more talent to start with than I did.  For them, it was easy, the same way I had enough talent to coast past a few thousand other kids, once upon a time.  Years of practice helps.  I have no doubt that many of my fellow high schoolies could have spent a decade of discipline getting better than me if they had the time and inclination.  But the discipline to get good at something through effort is a much rarer quality than raw talent itself.

But in the words of ZZ Top, I might be mistaken.

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500 Words on the Topic of Gratitude

One of my donors mentioned their gratitude for my writing, so here’s a little on that:

It’s nice to be acknowledged, that this blog isn’t just a repository for my random thoughts, a standard issue howl into the void of my own eventual demise, whatever.  OK, it’s also that, but it’s also that thing they’re calling “content.”  It’s a service I usually provide for free.  Or is my pay in the moments when somebody shows appreciation in some small way?

So this is my little way of saying I’m grateful for your contributions to the odd fundraiser, but also for whatever participation you show here, such as comments.  I may not agree with everything you say, may not always have time to respond, but I am glad I engaged somebody.  I may have mentioned this before, but your comments are often more thoughtful than my posts, and add value to them.  Also, even when you don’t comment?  If you read you become part of that blip on the traffic statistics, and that’s nice too.

Here I am, Great American Satan, content creator.  Blogginator.  Artist.  High-falutin’ intrallectural.  I falute highly of my own intrallect, for the benefit of ye all.  Oh yeah, and someday, I just might make good on my threats to self-publish a novel.  You’ve been warned.

Actually, I did post a novel here once, and somebody actually read it!  Grateful for that.  It wasn’t short either.  That shit was like 140,000 words.  I cannot believe she read that.  By the way, that was an FtBlogger by the handle of Voyager.  Muchas gracias.  I wonder if WMDKitty ever finished it?

Either way, thanks for showing up.  At my day job, I am routinely confronted with the gulf between human social need in the world and the emotional generosity to fulfill it.  This cuts close to home in other ways.  Sometimes the content of this blog can get kinda dark, and for their own sakes, I don’t share it with the sad people in my own life.  But that means I’m not sharing it with anybody but you.

And even when I’m not writing about something grim, people from my own life tend to not be very interested in what I write on here.  I’m not sure why that is.  Somebody close to me has complained that it’s hard to get anybody they know to read what they write, and I connected these with something I’d heard about Brad Pitt.  Rather, Brad Pitt’s friends and family.

I’ve read that while he’s some kind of Special Fancy Adonis to the masses, to his friends and family, he is unremarkable.  He’s just that guy they know.  Essentially, Art, Ideas, Important Things are the stuff that strangers do, people outside of our own lives.  If somebody you know is doing some kind of creative work, well, it must not be that special or interesting, because you know them.  Make sense?

Which brings me at last to this:  Thanks for not knowing me!

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100 Words on the Topic of ;-)

Hey there.  Howzitgoin’?  Nice, nice.  I haven’t noticed you around here before.  You come here often?  Me?  I’m a regular.  Everybody knows my name.  It’s no big deal.  Let’s talk about you.

What do you do for a living?  Oh, that’s terribly interesting.  I know a guy who does that too, always has the wildest stories.  What’s your sign?  Yeah?  I don’t know if I believe the motions of the celestial bodies control our destinies, but sometimes it seems like there’s somethin’ to it.

Well, now that we know each other a little better, how about you and me?

No?

The Fvcked in the Mouth Fundraiser

Ahhhh shit you know what fucken time it is.  It’s medical fundraiser time…

I maxed out my health care credit card again.  One of those things that doesn’t exist outside of fucked up hellhole countries, I know.  Furthermore, I had to go out of pocket about $700 bucks for this dental care.  I don’t expect my adoring publique to pay thousands of bucks for the card debt, but maybe we could get some chonk of that $700?

This is time sensitive because I don’t get paid for another two weeks and what I have left in the bank won’t cover groceries, the phone bill, the storage bill, two automated payments for previous medical debts that are still running and due to hit before I get paid again…  You get the idea.

Can I raise $700?  Donate and I will write you a blog post on your topic of choice, containing ten words for every dollar you donate.  I know, that’s not a very good rate, but I gotta get these dollas.  If you chip in a few bucks you can get a haiku, right?

Let’s jam…

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I’ll Give You Fish

Hey it just occurred to me, the chorus of this song might involve euphemisms for sex stuff. Wait. No, that doesn’t make sense either. I’m so confused anymore. Anybody out there a 65-year-old fossil from the ’80s alternative scene in Georgia USA?  Know what she’s talking about?

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At a time like this, when all the world is in flames, and our
Paltry funds are spent on fifteen dollar loaves of bread,
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Including entertainment content, crowdfunding and the
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Online and think about how giving to that would keep the
Lights on for your favorite progressive atheist blog network.
Sucker!  You should be spending that money on MREs!

I do these April Fools posts most years, but I might have missed an avril here or there.  But this year I misread Mano’s article title in the sidebar, and I couldn’t resist.  I haven’t responded to comments lately because I’ve been busy IRL, work and home life eating up my emotional bandwidth, as the kids say.  Brief shoutouts to my homies Charly, Marcus, and new commenter Jeff.  Peace, babey!
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to commemorate my vandalism:

Froget’s Thesaurus

I had a dream last night, think the location was a recurring one, where my home is an apartment or condo above a mall.  Moving anxiety lingers in the form of boxes of personal possessions left in public locations, impossible to move in one go, left available for any rando to snag.  I was trying to get those stray items up and moved into our unit, some cell phone salesman was giving me the business low key, and rats had gotten in, were causing mayhem.

My errant stuff had been left in a series of glass display cases along the stairwell, and in harvesting the goods from them, I accidentally disturbed a terrarium setup for frogs.  A little plant was in there with roots plugged into tiny plastic tubes, and I had unmoored the roots from the tubes.  The central experience I took away from this dream was this: trying to fend off a crowd of tiny colorful semi-transparent frogs long enough to plug roots into tubes with one hand, in this terrarium.  The frogs were cute, kinda like Breviceps rain frogs, but this was an annoyance dream.  Good to wake up.

Regarding the title of this post, I like to call frogs “froges,” which sometimes turns into “froget,” pronounced fro-jay, rhyming with the guy what made Roget’s Thesaurus, if I ever read that name right.  And as thesaurus just means treasure, behold a treasury of frogs, first from midjourney version 6.0, then niji version 6…

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Coming to Grips with the Cyberpunk Dystopia

Knee-jerk objection to AI technology has become for the left what objection to vaccines was for the right.  That’s not to say AI and vaccines are at all comparable in terms of benefit to society and in how they affect our lives, but I have witnessed lefties bring up AI completely out of the blue in an unrelated context specifically to ferret out the lefty credentials of other people in the room, reverse McCarthy style.  Stalin style?  Are you now or have you ever been amused by an application of AI technology?  Go thou presently unto hell.

I’m not telling anybody how to be lefty or that they have to love AI, but I am saying this is a losing fight, and tying yourself to cement blocks when you’re out on the water might not be the wisdom.  If any of you imagine for a second this genie can be re-bottled, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.  AI in visual art (the domain I most understand) is much like the invention of photography in almost every respect – nobody could keep that technology from happening, they aren’t going to stop this one either.  AI in all other aspects of technology, it’s like the invention of the wheel.  This is the dawn of an extremely different world.  Unless you plan to go full an-prim, you need to figure out how you’re going to live in that world.

AI is a problem but it is also a solution.  It’s being used for horrible things and for great things.  It will be used for both horrible and great things regardless of what we wish would happen, so we have to stop wishing and start dealing with it.

I saw an article about how AI could run certain chemical tests a thousand times faster than human scientists and some well-meaning lefty said “this is terrible.”  It objectively isn’t.  As long as all appropriate measures are used for quality control on the products of those operations, this could accelerate the development of cures for every human illness in a massive way.  Don’t see the benefit in that?  You must’ve lucked out and not picked up any of the myriad failures the average human body accumulates over time.  But you will join us in Cripland someday, and at that point, I hope no luddites have slowed medicine to save work that sensible scientists don’t even want to be doing.

On the flip, AI is being used to gather intelligence for marketing and manipulation of the masses.  Ooh.  Scary.  Some version of this has been happening for decades, and just because it’s happening faster doesn’t mean the fundamental issues aren’t still exactly the same.  Change government, change society, and you can change how technology is used – for or against the masses.  Hacktivists can absolutely use AI as well, and frankly, they should.  Fuck up the program.  Fight the AI, but if you want to keep up, you are going to have to use AI.

This hit lefties in the feels because it’s going to hurt writing and art jobs, and because we’re still in love with “the human soul” in our secular way.  It’s also going to hurt music jobs, though that hasn’t happened as much yet.  Pretty much every field of human creativity is going to be invaded by AI in some way, and as long as we live under capitalism, as long as we live in a technologically advanced world*, it is going to impact your ability to make money as an artist.  If it hasn’t happened yet, brace for impact, because technology this useful literally cannot be stopped.

What are the plans for stopping it?  Legal action to protect your property rights?  (Slightly amusing that intellectual property has become a leftist concern but I’m not getting into that.)  Anything that involves law is going to favor the moneyed.  There’s no labor victory in that scenario.  The best you can hope for is the ability to protect your future creative content from being used in AI – legally, but of course it will still happen illegally all over the place – or for temporarily expunging AI datasets that use “unethically” harvested content.  All that does is set the tech back a couple of years, and when new datasets emerge with “ethically” obtained data?  What’s your argument then?  What’s your legal recourse?

Like portrait painters when photography was invented, all creatives – including writers like those on this network – have to figure out what our role will be in a world where our labor can be simulated with technology.  We can console ourselves with the weakness of that technology now.  AI art can be samey or deformed, AI writing is basic pabulum and incoherent in long form.  But those weaknesses can be solved with time, training, and tweaking.  What then?

There will still be call for human creators.  Oil painters, marble sculptors, writers, comedians, guitarists, and more.  But their labors will be inherently less valuable as corporate media replaces them all with sufficiently marketable simulacra.  The masses will be into it.  The quirks of AI will inform their artistic sensibilities, and they will start writing like the AIs, kids trying to sing like vocoders.  You will be able to market the fact that you are human, and – for now – you are noticeably superior to AI art.  But will you be able to make a living under capitalism?  Not in art, not anymore than teamsters can make a living as coachmen for horse-drawn buggies.

Personally this doesn’t bother me, because the vast majority of art right now in most fields is nearly as robotic and half-assed as AI art.  The most human art is also just the worst, the stuff where creators are flaunting their prejudices, fetishes, or inadequacies.  If, as an artist, I end up being Wesley Willis on the street corner with a casio keyboard, this is what it was going to be.  If, on the other hand, human artists can overcome the divisions wrought by capitalism, forge a new world of creativity outside of economy, outside of money, maybe something, idk, as cyberpunk as the world we now live in?  Maybe you’ll keep hearing my voice, maybe you’ll see robo-me on corporate internet and think, hey, I’ll go for the real thing instead.  All artists have is the attention of the audience and what they choose to do with it.  If they find the AI preferable, and someday soon they just might, there is fuck-all we can do about it.

If you’ve been able to make a living as a lefty writer (who the hell has?), you’ve been able to make money from selling a revolution that will make your money obsolete.  But is it possible to make revolution happen by doing profitable things – even in some chump change way?  Or will a genuine revolution always be the work of people with nothing left to lose?

Bringing it back to the point, this tech saves labor as much as the wheel, in different ways in different contexts, and as long as humans value anything – even in a post-capitalist context – labor-saving technology will advance and persist.  Rage against that particular machine too hard and for too long, you’re eventually going to look completely ridiculous.  We live in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Figure out how to live in the world you have, or monkey it up with the anarcho-primitivists.  The people with medical technology will be available at the nearest city when you are done.

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*This entire thesis is rendered meaningless if society collapses tomorrow.  As we near the actual end of history, all the theories about how this was going to play out have given way to a clear last two stages – Cyberpunk Dystopia, then Mad Max.  In Mad Max, AI is nobody’s problem.  I hope you’re not looking forward to that.  There is literally one alternate path in this billionaires-choose-everybody-else’s-adventure scenario, which is Solarpunk/Ecopunk Utopia.  Not feelin’ likely.  But if it does happen?  I’d love to have AI there making life easier for everyone.

Say What You Will About Louis Wain

Say what you will about famous cat artist Louis Wain, but…  No, don’t say what you will.  People have the same simplistic narrative they always try to map onto his life and his works, but dude did not draw and paint cats because he was ill.  He drew and painted cats because it was fun.  His most famous images were stylized with psychedelic energy because they were inspired by wallpaper design of the period, not hallucinations.  Anyway, not here to rehash that discussion.

I’m just here to say, Louis Wain’s cats have the power to make things better.  My boyfriend was making images in Midjourney that reflect his soul – melancholic sexy young fellas on the edge of death, from some unknown goth disease.  He added Louis Wain cats as “image prompts” and they cheered up the dying men.  Astonishing.

Without Louis Wain cats:

With Louis Wain cats:

Incidentally, adding any ol’ cat doesn’t work.  These guys are barely aroused from their dire condition, tho perhaps slightly improved with the admixture of inferior cats.

Anyway, add Louis Wain influence to your AI art.  Your guys will be happier for it.

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ps: don’t even say booptysnoop haptyback’s name in the comments or i’ll die.  you don’t want to kill me, do you?