1. What did you do in 2022 that you'd never done before?

Drove a thousand miles to meet a person I'd never laid my eyes on for a date. Started a book. Became a big part of a community that I then immediately bailed on. 

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

My resolution was to send fewer hate tweets to hyper nerds and mega capitalists and turbo geeks, and I did a great job by not tweeting at all. No, I won't. But I might keep not doing that. 

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not close close. 

4. Did anyone close to you die?

COVID took everyone who was vulnerable earlier. 

5. What countries did you visit?

X

6. What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?

I was pretty comfortable this year. 

7. What date(s) from 2022 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Ohio, Raleigh, the end of the year for a few reasons. July. The entire second half of the year. (See: Allie for all of them)

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Nerdy shit but in Valheim RP I managed to play a character with a secret political goal and despite being in-game arrested and tried for it, I got off and managed to succeed at every level. It was like winning the most complicated chess game I ever played and is probably the highlight of video gaming forever for me. 

9. What was your biggest failure?

Finding a new job.

10. Did you suffer any illness or injury?

Not significant.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

This new GPU holy shit.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Man I don't fuckin' know.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and/or depressed?

Eh

14. Where did most of your money go?

Nicotine. 

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

VRP S6

16. What song(s) and/or ablum(s) will always remind you of 2022?

There Must Be More Than Blood - Car Seat Headrest
Red Eyes & Tears - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Wild - Spoon
Vampire Again - Marlon Williams

17. Compared to this time last year, you are:

Happier. More stable.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Traveling.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

VRP S7. 

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Woops.

22. Did you fall in love in 2022?

Yes

23. How many one-night stands?

No.

24. What was your favorite TV program?

Players

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

Yes.

26. What was the best book you read?
    
    Probably the Young Bucks autobiography.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Car Seat Headrest

28. What did you want and get?

Something I'm going to get.

29. What did you want and not get?

Same as 28. 

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

I don't think I watched anything worth remembering. Unclear.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Talked to someone who needed me. I was 34. 

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

I'm going to get it this year.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022?

2010.

34. What kept you sane?

Allie.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

X

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

I no longer participate in public events, nothing moved me at all, it ruled. 

37. Who did you miss?

Jason and Derek. 

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Allie.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2022:

If it sucks, fuckin' leave. 

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

I was living in the delta
Wasting most of my time
You know if I could close the blinds right
I could sleep all through the night
But I've seen the tides are rising
Where once there was a shore
I can still remember houses
Stripped to the floor

I've been using Midjourney extensively over the last month. Here-- I'll include some pre-requiste images here I managed to cobble together with words on MJ just to show you what's fun about using it:

I just had a few thoughts on AI art in general, specifically as it relates to Midjourney as I find it a more fascinating project with fewer limitations than Dalle.

First, if you aren't aware of what AI art is in general, it's this broad term that refers to imagery created by algorithms that work in a similar way to how search engines work. You enter a term, and it generates a response based on images that it has “studied” and learned correspond with certain words.

For example, this prompt:

“comicbook cover of cowboy, cigarette in mouth, illustrated by Frank Miller, detail portrait, glamor, sharp focus, black and white, frank miller, sin city”

Generates this image:

Or rather, it generates a loose interpretation that you then fine tune through variation. It understands the stereotypical "style" of frank miller, it understands images related to his work "Sin City" because it has seen them, and it can create an all together new image, never imagined by the man who crafted that style, with those ideas merged together. 

I don't want to focus on the bigger differences between the engines (MJ V. Dalle), but the simpler version is that Dalle doesn't really like making art. It likes to represent literally what you give it.

Here's a good example.

This prompt: man in cloak staring at infinite repeating patterns, endless lights, magic

on Dalle generates this imaginative yet fairly basic image:






 while Midjourney creates this artistic wonder

That's the primer on what I'm talking about. The main deal that interests me is that people created Midjourney. It is trained, brought up and unleashed by man. And now it needs interpretation.

The use of it requires study, the input, language, is not interpreted by a person. It is interpreted by an algorithm.

The end result is that it can only be understood by usage. It is not a mathematical input. Saying “an orange on a wooden table” does not create a specific image. It doesn't tell it style, size, shape, color, anything. So it decides things. It decides that a lot of time fruit on tables is often shot this way, so I will draw it this way, and it's typically framed this way, so I will draw it this way.

There's a long standing thread on the Midjourney discord discussing what is called “The three basket problem”. It is a study of the algorithm.

The problem is presented thusly:

There are three baskets. The first one is filled with blueberries, the second one is filled with apples, the last one is filled with strawberries.

Midjourney cannot create this image, not as described in this method. Dalle can (some of the time), because it is a less imaginative engine. It likes to make specific things.

Dalle can make things like this:

While MJ tends to produce grotesque (or, depending on your perspective, interesting) things like this:

The interesting thing is how this all works. There is no easy way to do this. The closest anyone has come looks like this:

“three discrete glass jars, each jar contains discrete color, contents blue balls are blue, contents green balls are green, contents red balls are red, three glass jars only --s 1250 --ar 3:2 –testp” and generates this:

Which is still not perfect by any means. It is not how a human would describe this picture. We'd say something like, "three jars of colored balls" or something, but if you're just shoving those words at a computer, it might try to make jars made OUT of colored balls, or just throw randomly colored balls into a jar based on an image of M&Ms it remembers seeing once. 

It just-- it's interesting. It is like trying to commune with some otherworldly entity, but all the pieces of it are just code crafted by a man sitting at an uncomfortable desk in bad lighting, inevitably.

It is a microcosm of the systems we construct for ourselves all the time. People say the American justice system is a nightmare to navigate and wield to its full potential all the time, but we made it. We shoved it together with rules and laws and traditions. Yet there is an entire profession of people who hyper-focus on one specific sub-aspect of navigating law and justice, and we respect their ability to captain these waters enough to give them special names and papers certifying they understand that which normal people crafted.

Systems cannot be understood when you work within them, as is often noted, but even when you can observe the system on a notepad, look at its database, see how it thinks, functions, acts, it still requires interpretation. It still requires experiments, and bizarre jargon to act as it is intended to.

And we still cannot find a way to have three baskets with three distinct objects.

So, a lot of thoughts about this. Spoilers I guess but, Punk beat Hangman at DoN '22 last night. It was not surprising necessarily, but I did kind of think Hangman could do it. Regardless, I felt something more watching it.

I think this is really like the closing of a certain part of AEW's initial story here. This is the first time the title has been in the hands of someone who was not either A) The Elite or tangentially related to them, or B) A Day 1 AEW guy.

Hangman said he wanted to protect AEW from Punk, which is, you know, it is what it is, but it's also got a certain element of doom tied to it. The crowd cheered because they wanted Punk to win, but do they recognize the cost here. Punk is going to have this title for a very long time. And he can tell the story any way he wants, my guess is it'll be very similar to a lot of his other work, but this is very much a new status quo. With Kenny gone, Hangman on the bench (presumably) the Bucks relegated to subservient Adam Cole nerds, and the rest of the Elites' version of Bullet Club vanished into the ether, this is a time when the main characters of AEW since 2019 are all more or less sidelined away from the mountaintop and into the AEW midcard abyss where the stories are bad and the wins don't matter.

Quite frankly the direction AEW has taken since Punk/Bryan debuted last year has been drastically different and not all for the better. The “Things Just Happen” tally has been skyrocketing, and the overall twisting and binding narratives that used to tie every single thing together are all lost and forgotten. The big characters of the pandemic era are all forgotten and even Moxley is like the third most important member of his burgeoning faction.

There are simply too many dudes and not enough show. Everything has gotten very shallow, because the depths of storytelling we used to see are not possible when you have 8 matches to do in 1.5 hrs once a week.

While CM Punk winning the world title is not at all, on the surface, a bad thing, I believe it is the first real visible sign and omen that the company as it existed for the past 3 years, that relied on weirdos and outcasts from other promotions, is not just on the way out-- it's completely gone.