Week of July 18, 2022
Overheard
College student explains office work: If you like the people you work with it’s fine to get paid to just fuck around with them all day and go out to lunch and drink mohitos, but did I tell you about the guy who rocked up to my office with a romance novel and was like “you are a girl, you like romances, right?”
Listening
Stephen Francoeur had this on his best of 2021 list.
Artificial intelligence art
You have probably seen the works by the AI known as Dall-E posted in the usual social media spaces. I’m still waiting for my invitation so I can try Dall-E, but there’s a less sophisticated AI artist out there called Craiyon and I went a little nuts on Twitter this week posting all the fun mashup ideas I could think of in this thread. My favorite has to be “illuminated manuscript of a corvette,” though “lucha libre tea party” is very fun.
I teased a few artists I know by saying “visual art is over,” but of course I don’t believe that. Currently this is an art toy, where you put in some words and see how uncanny the result is. Most of the fun of using the AI is coming up with surreal juxtapositions where the results will feel surprising yet inevitable. But I guess I can see where commercial artists who make, say, illustrations for websites and magazines that are already pretty generic (in-flight magazines?) might be reading the writing on the wall at this point.
This also reminds me of when Luke was a preschooler and we would search for images and videos of whatever he was interested in. I remember him asking me to search for photos of scorpions, and there we go, Google Images scorpions. Then he was like “now see a picture of a scorpion on a person’s face!” and I was like “well, I don’t know if we are going to be able to find… ah well, what do you know. There you go, a whole bunch of photos of a scorpion on a person’s face.”
Then there’s this:
Reading
I mentioned Circe and Mists of Avalon last time, so perhaps it’s inevitable that I have moved on to reading about real witches. My tolerance for woo is usually quite limited, and I tend not to actually believe in much of anything, but Myriamam Gurba tweeted out something I was already thinking:
I appreciate that witches still feel like they have agency, that there’s still power in words and actions. One of the first books on witchcraft I picked up and skimmed, Urban Magick: A Guide for the City Witch, uses examples of actual practical things you can do to engage in your urban environment and help your neighbors as the bases for spells and rituals. I’m sure there’s a danger of only doing spells and not actually engaging with the real world, but I get the impression that many people draw power from witchcraft in order to better face reality.
As I started reading Margot Adler’s classic Drawing Down the Moon, I realized the other main reason I was attracted to the idea of witchcraft, even if I couldn’t “believe” it: witches are anarchists, or at least there are many witches with wide anti-authoritarian streaks who gather in affinity groups, I mean covens, to get shit done.
I don’t know where this is going, but I’m also finding inspiration in the reddit group /r/SASSWitches (for “Skeptical, Agnostic, Atheist, and generally Science-Seeking”) and especially that group’s Discord server.