“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” — David Ogilvy
Generating a New Role
Huh. Welp. I’m still going to write three entries this month. My favorite part about this post is that it’s been started on the 13th, but posted after the previous post which was completely written after this post.
If I was counting down from three, then this would be two.
And since it was started before three I kinda say some of the same stuff… but different.
And I recorded a fucking video and posted it. Feeling pretty good about that. This post definitely helped coagulate that video.
I’m having fun figuring out how to be strategically ambiguous in the disclosure of my overall meta plan. 😎 That’s theoretically how I get paid, as my managerially oriented friend says, the medium bucks.
It’s going to be close though. I’ve been working my ass off for my day role as a Staff DevOps Engineer.
Which is funny to me. somehow I’ve ended up being an actor playing the role of a Staff Engineer. I have a fucking GED and remember very little about algebra. I’m pretty good at conditional logic though. I love me some logic. And throwing myself into situations in which something interesting might happen. Like being a DevOps Engineer before there was that role… at a porn company.
And I’m lucky enough to have parents that provided me with so many opportunities. Opprtunties to detach from reality and hyper focus on tech. On computers. If I hadn’t had that my life would be on an exponentially different trajectory than it is on right now. This moment.
Ohhhh. I am excited to share stories about my times in Fort Lauderdale. Fucking wild. And just time traveling the other day I found evidence that I did what I did. I’m not sure what I’ve done anymore. Nothing seems real.
I’ve been working my gallbladder off on my ideas. It brings me comfort and a feeling of accomplishment rather than this grief and sorrow I’ve been experiencing this year.
Layers of complicated emotions to process, and what I want right now the most is a pinch of dopamine and a splash of oxytocin.
BUT!
What I’ve been working on has inspired me to consider claiming another role in life, another title, another hobby, another challenge.
Generative Art Curator
Which I’ll write about another day. To my booming bustling bombastic audience of one. Me. According to my analytics. I’m pretty sure people will read this once I’m drawing more attention and exposure to my ideas, my team, and myself. But IDGAF. This is for me.
And you know what’s really awesome? There is currently like maybe a handful of people claiming that title, that role, that persona, as well.
Which I proved in my https://tim.life/first-video/.
And what’s more awesome? Me asking myself what’s awesome. That’s pretty awesome imo. Eventually I’ll reread this stuff. I’ll probably laugh and cringe at the same time. Comedy. Tragedy. And have had more life experience when I do. No one can actually know the future. Only predict based on available data that they’re exposed to. Kinda like a machine learning model. I know I’ll still be laughing though. There is nothing else you can do.
Revisiting this 17 days later I’m totally cringing. With joy. At how much cringe imma let through.
This might get interesting…
I’m pretty sure if I do what I’m going to do then there’s a very real potential of pissing a bunch of people off. This is unfortunate, because in my heart of hearts my end goal is to make something that nudges things for everyone in a positive direction over time.
Leave the place better than when I arrived, ya know?
I firmly believe that technology can help us rather than other than that. The creative potential for this stuff is almost like magic.
It’s going to need people that believe in it. To generate, and support, future solutions. Future forms of art. Future forms of immersion for attention through a medium that facilitates that human to human emotional connection.
It’s going to need human capital to build, experiment, and design solutions though.
And, I predict, it’s going need a generation, or two, to brew enough solutions that people will realize the amazing artistic creations we can now generate.
Remix.
And use as a base to remix things in a very human way.
It seems that sometimes it takes time for the affect of something new to become apparent. Time. Which you can’t have without Tim. Literally. It’s so weird. Such an enormous responsibility. Being a tim ekeeper.
Even though a generative machine learning model can produce some one of a kind, beautiful, novel art, humans will come up with something that expresses their inner selves with the tools that present themselves.
We always have, we always will.
I’m pretty sure generative video porn is gonna become a thing too. Heh. Be come. Heh.
And the people ahead of their time are oftentimes burned at the steak. Called evil. Called immoral. Called manipulation. Vindictive. Hurtful. And many other similes that mean the same.
Accused of pillaging the current social constructs agreed upon by the herd.
Just because they realized that there’s another tool that might be useful to use before the rest of the herd is ready to accept it.
My guess is that people were scared of fire at first. I mean… it’s kinda terrifying if you’re forced to be right next to a raging one. Self preservation and all that.
But then people figured out how to use fire to nudge humanity along a very positive path.
Tools can be used to build and help as well as destroy and to torment.
Did you know that language is a tool? 🤔
An Idea
I can’t quite yet discuss the details of my idea, and longer term plan, publicly with anyone beyond a few folks, but if I’m able to bootstrap microdosing with enough time, energy, effort, some of others too, and a tiny dose of my salary as well, then I’m hopeful that capital may give me enough autonomy to test some things out.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to attract some folks to work on this project gratis to start until it’s actually bringing in enough money to support people, but passion and motivation only go so far. Eventually people want that money.
I had to setup a Shopify store for microdosing way earlier than I wanted. I didn’t want to seriously consider any sort of cohesive e-commerce plan because I’m not ready to think about that yet.
This is a god damn fucking theme this year. Earlier than I wanted. Earlier. Than. I. Fucking. Wanted. 2023 just has to be better. It has to. I’m having a challenging time imagining a year more emotionalLY taxing, more emotionally draining, more emotionally shocking, than this one. This has just been. Wow. What a ride. Amor fati. Gotta love it whether I wanna or not.
But, alas, when I tested SendOwl with Stripe I apparently triggered a process in which Stripe’s system hit https://microdosing.to/ and noticed that it was a password protected page. It seems that Stripe does not want businesses performing transactions unless their web presence oozes “I’m a somewhat legitimate business” enough that they feel comfortable with you taking other peoples money.
So, I spent a bit figuring out what the fuck I was going to do to set something up that was just enough business ooze it’d satiate Stripe’s demands. After thinking too much about it, I decided to setup that Shopify storefront. They were having a $1/mo for 3 month special, so it seemed like it’d be harmless.
I’m going to have to figure out how to leverage that as a sales channel soon enough that my subscription fee will be covered by what’s sold.
This’s going to be an interesting challenge to meet.
I’ve sold two pieces of art that I generated, curated, post processed, and printed myself *in person.* Each piece took a bit of time to get ready for the printer. Automatic cropping was not an option because it would chop things up without consideration for the artistic impact in which it was doing it.
Aside from the generation of the actual images, none of this was an automatic process. It took a bit of time. And most of that time wasn’t actually spent cropping and processing and printing. Most of that time was spent dreaming up prompts, doing research to describe some of the attributes I wanted generated, whittling away those tokens, then curating what I generated.
I’ve generated 9,395 images as of this date and’ve found 100 so far that have really caught my eye. That’s basically one percent, and I’ve been using the most basic form of this tech to generate art while I figure out how to engineer and bootstrap the rest of this thought train. If I’m going to seriously apply cognition to figuring out how to set something up to help artists, and others, out rather than suck the soul out of them.
Stable Diffusion is already at v2.1. A month ago it was at 1.4, and omg; there’s even better stuff coming.
I’m really excited to take some moments to setup and play with the new tech. It’ll give me a reason to fuck around with Python, as much as setting up and writing for this blog with an audience of one has given me a reason to fuck around with Hugo and Cloudflare Pages.
I’m looking forward to taking some time to Terraform all this stuff in the future as well. That’ll be a nice little cognitive exercise.
Many of the pieces of generative art I’ve generated have some sort of thing that makes them not as aesthetically appealing as just a few percent of them. Eyes that are all sorts of fucked up and are creepier than they are artsy. An extra finger or two. Unnatural shapes or sizes or interpretations or representations or generations or whatever.
The technology will continue to get better and better. Right now, finding the good stuff can take a bit of time, and hundreds of iterations of a prompt with the same seed, to engineer a generation that’s worthy of a concerted effort at curation.
Yeah, you can churn out a lot of pretty content… but finding the ones that evoke a strong emotional reaction… those are more rare.
For now. If you are making an effort to come up with something somewhat novel and unique that is.
This stuff sure does make it unfortunately easy to just straight up rip off people’s styles depending on how the prompt is worded.
In the style of [someone alive]
“In the style of [human being that’s alive]” in the prompts being used is what I’ve been making an effort at avoiding…
At least for people that are alive. I’ve been thinking about something generational for a little bit now. Which I love that I’m posting that with an HREF rn because it is not setup at all as of right now.
And… will admit to using to generate inspiration. Then making an effort to use tokens (words) in prompts (what you want generated) that don’t use artists that are alive to remix.
Holy shit. I think there isn’t much content describing what tokens and prompts actually are. Huh. I’ve only done like 3.5 minutes of resurch just now. I have no clue what I’m talking about rn. I do know that this shit is not fucking “intelligent” or “artificial.” They are advanced generative art machine learning algorithms. Nothing “Artificial” Nor “intelligent” about them. They are what we make them map and reduce in a neural sorta way then regurgitate the results we’re interested. No intelligence there. Lot’s of human ingenuity though.
Consider how many of our earlier machine learning experiments would regurgitate abhorrent racist bullshit. “I LEARNED IT FROM YOU, DAD.”
Then realized the moral and ethical implications of blatantly copying someone’s style that’s alive. So I ceased considering using that content in my plans.
But it has made learning the terminology, the etymology, the lexicon, required to practice and improve what I generate using officially artsy like terms Rather than requesting an image “in the style of" by our soulless art generation paint brush.
We learn by copying though. And it’s kinda neat learning the kind of terminology we use to describe what we see.
Which is going to be an invaluable skill. Describing what you see, what you want, what kind of workflows might be needed, and how and what you want users to interact with. Sophisticated no-code platforms are in development and becoming available. This means that if you know how to describe reality that you can provide the proper tokens to a machine learning algorithm that’ll do all the boring stuff for you. Like a calculator. Not everyone has the desire to work on being the kind of person that knows enough of the internals of code to engineer something that they want.
But what about…
“But what about X?” This is something I’ve heard quite a bit. Not necessarily all in the context of this — generative art and the impact it’ll have on artists — but definitely something I’ve heard a lot in my life.
And I’m fully expecting to get quite a bit of that kind of feedback in the future.
I believe that every single person who might have a “but, what about” might have a completely valid, considerate, and prudent “what about.” Unfortunately, a lot of those “what about’s” are opinions. or feedback, or criticism, or a passive aggressively denigration. And that feedback oftentimes more ambivalent or negative in some unintentional way than not.
It seems to be more rare to +1 an idea than help build it up, and realize it. It’s easier to poke holes in ideas and prematurely tear it to shreds rather than give it a good thought.
This can sometimes result in a better end outcome depending on whether there’s any learnings I can take away from it. Letting people give advice makes them feel wise. Important. Heard.
At least it does me.
It costs so much emotional energy to defend or justify or build on an idea.
But what about the fact that this technology is released. It is out in the public. It is not going away. And people are already profiting from it. But what about that?
But what about that fact that I’m pretty much winging everything I’m doing in my life right now? It can feel extremely somewhat uncomfortable at times.
Winging it. Like the majestic Emden goose.
But what about the fact that there’s a universe of possibilities in terms of flipping the switch and reframing this tech as the tool that it can, and will, be?
Personally, I enjoy being a tool. It’s nice to be used to do something. Like hammering nails. Yeah. I’m going to go with hammering nails. Hammers suck at drilling. Because they’re hammers. Not drills.
Either of those tools can be used to inflict severe harm upon an individual… 🤔 So the question I keep asking myself is, “Just what kind of tool am I, specifically?” 🧐 Not quite sure what kinda tool would be used to “facilitate back-channel shit” yet. I’ll figure it out. I’m winging it tho.
But what about the fact that this technology is out? It’s been released It’s been deployed. It’s being used. But what about that? You could just bitch about it or be that preacher standing on that wooden box shouting out his beliefs to the crowd whose heads are right up at about the level of his knees.
“The end of the world is coming! Repent!” They might emphatically assert to the curious at about crotch level. Then whatever process that time’s involved in occurs and all their sermons and sessions and supposed solutions end up all being a wash.
Nothing they predict happens. Their doomsaying lost like a fart in the wind produced from the rectum of father time. Possibly even mocked depending on just how inaccurate the conviction in their predictions were, or are.
lmao
I reread these things over and over before I post them. Then have been updating them with syntactical edits… and factual ones will be made in the future if needed.
They will be.
I’ve been told that I need to “uSe fEwEr WoRds” and “be suCcIncT.” lol. no.
And jesus fucking christ. This year. Oh man. It has been savaging me so severely. Just. Oh man. There’s this scene in “Requiem for a Dream” in which there are two ladies performing for a group of men that absolutely fully fucking applies to this ass in 2022.
I’ve known that 2022 is just a construct. That 2022 is just a consensus of a standardized measurement of time. That 2022 is just a fucking unit.
It was recently suggested to me that the real beginning of the year is Spring — when our circadian rhythm’s do some interesting stuff — and that setting goals on January 1st is setting yourself up for failure.
This processes as sane logic to me. But the symbolism of that unit of time ticking on to that next epoch. I need that right now. So much. I need that.
I’m predicting it’ll be way easier for me to remember to use the year “2023” when filling out dates during the beginning of the year.
Setting goals on the 1st though for the rest of the year?
Fuck that.
I know that’ll just be setting myself up for failure. Which… is something you do do (heh heh heh) when you learn… over and over and over. So much falling on face. So much fucking face. So much falling.
Seriously though. This post is already over 3,000 words. This long form shit is gonna be what I bind into a book and sell. People keep telling me to write a book. All over the place in meat space.
I share a few details of my life. Say something that may make them laugh. Have a positive interaction that leaves them feeling fantastic… and occasionally there’s that soul that says, “you should write a book.”
So… Okay. Fine. This is what you’re getting. From the creative end of my anus. There are a bunch of words I gotta curate that are more from for oral emission within the business context. Heh.
I really appreciate how similar “oral” and “aural” are. That brings me a sense of joy.
lol. This shit’s just a rough draft. The number of words in this post? After doing more resurch, it seems like they’re enough to constitute a full on chapter.
Each of those Uniform Resource Identifiers tied to those tokens should take you to a different Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure server that verify my cognitive biases. Once you read my resurch then you too will be a vaccine expert.
Which is pretty neat if you ask me. This is literally a chapter in whatever book I decide to produce. Or some semblance of it.
And I will be taking it down in the future.
This post is not immutable. It is ephemeral. And then I’m gonna use machine learning to generate new posts and new images for the posts based on past posts.
That way people who claim there is no soul to this shit can eat a big ‘ole bag of metaphorical dicks. Not literal.
Bags of dicks are for dogs silly, not for kids.
That’s the eventual goal at least. I’m in nooooooooooooooooooo hurry to work on that yet. I do wanna talk to myself tho. Outside of my own mind. That’s like when people ask you if you’d fuck yourself.
Well, absolutely I would! I know with quite a bit of conviction that I’d mind fuck the mind out of myself.
😎🧠
This post started out at about 1,500 words. And now it’s about 3,575. It took two chunks of time over around 13 days though.