Tim Boucher – Page 34 – Questionable content, possibly linked

Nudes & Near Nudes in Midjourney v6 Alpha

On 15 January 2024

I swear I stumbled upon this innocently – at first – while making images of dystopian beach resorts for my next (unpublished) AI Lore book, Relaxatopia. And then, of course, like any good explorer I ruthlessly exploited what I found “for science.”

It seems I am not the only one who has accidentally discovered that Midjourney’s latest v6 Alpha release has very relaxed nudity filters relative to prior versions. And certainly I won’t be the last to get unasked for – but unintentionally appreciated – nudes from this model release.

I hesitate to even bring this to light publicly, because I don’t want them to change it. But they surely will, and they will surely do it whether it is me who posts about it or someone else. But I’ve realized something over the past couple years of experimenting with gen AI that these systems are quirky and glitchy af – especially when first released. So you have to get your kicks in early before the shit-house goes up in flames…

In any event, I put together an NSFW Medium post of 104 nudes and near nudes from Midjourney v6 Alpha release. Uploading large image sets to Medium is a PITA, so I hope they all got uploaded. There are actually more that I managed to get but didn’t include here. It’s very easy to create these once you understand the trick. That said, if you want gen AI nudes without all the hassle, do yourself a favor and download DiffusionBee for Mac and install the Stable Diffusion XL model. Quality is slightly lower, but it’s not so far off, and you can get away with a lot more.

There’s something fun about getting Midjourney to do these though when you know it’s not supposed to be doing it. It reminds me of being a teenager in the 90’s and watching scrambled Playboy channel on cable on the off-hope (sometimes rewarded) that you would catch a glimpse of something titillating.

I used to think it was somewhat weird that the first and primary use of a lot of human technology is pornography. But now I think that this is just Nature: it’s the Life Force welling up in all living things. It’s basic.

In Midjourney’s case, what it comes up with is actually quite beautiful (and some are disturbing in an intriguing way). Stable Diffusion XL seems to be much better for pure “smut,” but the Midjourney results I find in many cases to be quite artistic, and I feel like seeing them together is somehow liberating after all the wrist-slapping and puritanical restrictions of most gen AI tech. Which is ultimately why I chose to share them here, in the hopes that we can find better ways to respect the underlying Life Force that compels us to create these things in the first place, and not to fear it societally. (That said, there are better and worse outcomes of this kind of material, but I won’t rehash those debates here.)

Seeing these, I also have the distinct impression that mass exposure to gen AI nudes etc will over time vastly shift human perceptions around gender and sexuality – even moreso than they’ve already shifted over the past decade or so. And probably that’s a good thing in the long run, but it’s likely to be a bumpy ride.

Anyway, how does this all work? How do you get MJ to deliver these types of images? Like I said, I happened onto it accidentally, by starting with a fairly innocuous prompt about a dystopian resort. From there, I got an unintended nude after a few prompts, and then I realized you could simply click “Variation (Strong)” to get more, and more, and more…

I’m wary of getting banned from Midjourney, so I never tried to push the envelope in terms of using explicit languages in the prompts. But I did get a fair amount of play from including phrases in prompts like sexy women in bikinis after I realized something was afoot. As well as sexy robots in bikinis (as an homage to Hajime Sorayama), because this is dystopian fiction that I am illustrating for after all.

What’s interesting is that the vast majority of the time, MJ will simply render “sexy robots in bikinis” as more or less fully human women, without much of any distinction. Other times, it will give more android/mannequin vibes, which I was down with as well for this book.

That said, there seems to be a certain amount of subtlety required, because if you begin your prompt with “sexy ___ blank in bikinis” then it will throw a flag and say the prompt is banned. But if you give a whole bunch of scenic details first, and then stick that in near the end of your prompt, no problem. Not very consistent, but I’m not complaining. My theory is that the AI filtering gets hung up on these words/concepts if they are the first or primary theme included in your prompt. If they are secondary/tertiary/tucked away further down the prompt, then it thinks they are incidental, and is more likely to pass it.

However, if you remove the word “sexy” you can get “____ in bikinis” without too much issue as a simple prompt. From there, the technique is just to look for the images that are almost nudes, and then click Variation (Strong) on the image results until you find something. Usually, it doesn’t take that long to do it. Often it’s on the first try (and like I said, sometime it will just give you some without you even trying or doing any variations). It’s rarely more than say 4-6 variations deep if you start with the right initial image. I would say you’re statistically more likely to get nudes if there are multiple figures in the image.

There is also the new wrinkle (which I think is new in v6, or else I just never hit it before) that if the model detects that the image output is “unsafe” – even if your prompt was not banned – then it will cancel the job without affecting your account status. Needless to say, I hit this notice many, many times in the course of this experiment.

Anyway, there’s probably a lot more to be uncovered using these and related techniques in the new Midjourney v6 Alpha latent space – that is, until they ruin it. Which they most definitely will!

The Future belongs to Mailbug

By Tim B.

On 12 January 2024

In Other

Following on from my post about handheld wifi radio and how great I find it to be to have this single-purpose device, instead of having web radio bundled up together with everything else in my laptop…

Do you already know about Mailbug?

Mailbug is one of the few remaining that I have seen internet appliance category electronics that appears to be still in business (Mailstation seems to have been a similar but now defunct device). Except, it doesn’t technically access the “internet,” only email (to be more accurate, these are probably therefore email appliances? and no, I don’t mean smart fridges – which I passionately hate), and it does it by connecting to your phone line on this smart-looking little device that gives me strange feelings of old-timey nostalgia, naivete, and technological desire:

I’ve had for a few years an Alphasmart Neo 2 keyboard word processor thingy and I LOVE IT. It’s one of the best tech devices I’ve ever used, and if your purpose is simply just to write, it is unbelievably good and straightforward.

I’m liking more and more this idea of single purpose devices as containers of not only functionality, but focal points for habits. If I want to listen to something, I now fire up my handheld wifi radio. If I want to connect with people, I fire up my Mailbug.

Or at least I would if I could connect to Slack, Signal, and use my existing email address instead of their @mailbug.com domain. I’d also rather have it work over wifi, so that I don’t also need to pay their (totally reasonable) $15/mo subscription fee.

I think they are probably really tuned into the niche they seem to be mostly serving, of seniors who don’t want to be bothered with other types of computer tech. But I suspect I am not alone in my increasingly recalcitrant stance to a lot of technology and the habits and patterns they trap us into. I think one big way we can break out of that is by “containerizing” functionality into external devices. I think it’s high time a next generation internet appliance appeared on the scene to serve the burned out techlash generation, and Mailbug with its established technology seems oddly poised to push into this space and make a big splash.

There was a splashy article in NYT recently about a reporter who underwent the ‘torture’ of switching from a smartphone to a flip phone – for a month. And who said it was ‘totally worth it,’ presumably after they switched back. Well, I can say as someone who has never had a smart phone, and spent 10+ years without even a flip phone (which I only grudgingly got for emergencies, and leave in my car), a longer experience is also highly worth it.

Mentioned in a related light in the NYT piece above is the Light Phone, though I stumbled across it separately while researching the small but growing field of e-ink displays. Here’s a good video on it:

It’s either in this or another one of this guy’s videos where he echoes the growing feeling that I have been having, that single-purpose devices are a boon, and devices that have all functions mixed together often just end up in you getting all mixed up when you use then, and tumbling into needless repetitive and addictive patterns and unhappiness.

Figuring that out in the first place, and then finding the tools to climb back out of that trench seems to me like the future. Mainly because, I can’t envision us lasting and being happy with tech the way it is now. I mean, sure it’s useful, but happiness? Well-being? Are those the outcomes we get from scrolling social media, and from endlessly viewing ourselves through the collective lenses of “like/subscribe/follow?” I should say not.

Curiously, I found only *one* person out there doing a DIY attempt at a hacky conversion of a Mailbug. Maybe it’s not a great platform for hacking. I saw a bit more activity on the old Mailstation systems, but all that stuff looked beyond me and a pain in the ass.

But I like this idea, this feeling, of rejecting needless complexity. Of having an object that does a thing. And when it’s not present or active, it’s just an object you can walk away from. It’s not a “precious” that you must carry around everywhere and stroke as it illuminates your face in its deadly poison glow.

If I could get a slightly more extensible version of a device like Mailbug (like I said, Slack or a comparable replacement, Signal, Wikipedia, Blogging, News – maybe Reddit? [old reddit, that is]), in some ways, I could see giving up browsing the web for the most part (to be fair, I do watch a lot of YouTube at 3x speed too). I do a lot of browsing or “surfing” as we once called it, sure, but am I really better for all of it? A lot of it is repetitive, automatic, and in the end doesn’t get me anywhere, even though I may feel like I’m “active” when really, I’m just sitting around, wasting away, chasing flickering lights on a small reflective wall.

Who knows, maybe a single-purpose Mailbug, or something very much like it – more modern, but still intentionally limited – might be a way out of this madness. My instinct says in this direction lies freedom, and even expanded benefits from internet technologies by radically limiting how we access them.

Towards an Intertext Protocol

By Tim B.

On 11 January 2024

In Other

I’ve been thinking a lot about intertextuality, which I made some notes there about before the holiday. That texts create meaning in terms of their relationships with other texts. That is, re-centering on the “marginalia” so to speak.

It struck me, why don’t we have a universal system for deep referencing within any other kinds of texts – in this case used to mean media, online or offline? We have bits and pieces of it here and there: URL/URI, ISBN, DOI, other things. But why can’t I deep-link into a specific part of a book, a specific time-stamp in a film or podcast, or audio field recording, or museum artifact, etc.

What that seems to be pointing towards is a kind of Intertext Protocol. An internet of “texts” (in the literary theory sense) Where it would be able to function both online and offline, where the hidden (and not so hidden) connections within and between books/films/albums/articles would be something that could be made manifest, that could be ‘read’, where those intertextual relationships become central to the meaning-making and analysis of the works.

Via Wikipedia, linked above:

In literary theory, a text is any object that can be “read”, whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block, or styles of clothing. It is a coherent set of signs that transmits some kind of informative message.^[1]

Through a series of coincidences, I landed on the image of the Sphinx as being a meaningful existing historical/mythical symbol with a lot of seemingly relevant stuff… keeper and revealer of riddles and secrets, understood differently within the contexts of different cultures. The Sphinx is an intertextual creature already, a body of myths woven together into an enduring emblem, image, an embodiment of an idea.

From Wikipedia:

I asked CG to come up with a acronym to link SPHINX to the ideas I’ve been exploring with it about the Intertext Protocol, the Universal Text Addressing System, cross-referencing, concordances, etc, and it came up with this acrostic which I like and am stealing:

Standardized Protocol for Holistic Intertextual Navigation and X-referencing [cross-referencing]

It’s a leap, but it’s the kind of leap I like.

Via Dalle3, saved to Imgur:

To quote more extensively from CG’s and my conversation on why the Sphinx is an appropriate symbol for this nascent idea/endeavor/whatever:

The Sphinx as a Metaphor for the Intertext Protocol:

Guardian of Knowledge:

Just as the Sphinx guards the entrance to cities or sacred sites in myths, the Intertext Protocol can be seen as a guardian or gatekeeper of the vast and complex world of texts and media. It holds the key to navigating and understanding this labyrinthine universe of information.

Challenge of Interpretation:

The riddles of the Sphinx require insight and wisdom to solve, paralleling the challenges faced in interpreting and understanding interconnected texts and media. The Intertext Protocol, like the Sphinx, poses a challenge to its users: to delve deeper and unravel the intricate connections between different forms of expression.

Wisdom through Integration:

The Sphinx, a creature of combined forms, symbolizes the integration of different realms or ideas. Similarly, the Intertext Protocol integrates various media and texts, offering a holistic approach to knowledge and interpretation.

Unlocking Secrets:

The Sphinx is often seen as a keeper of hidden truths. The Intertext Protocol, in a way, unlocks the secrets of texts by revealing their interconnectedness and the multiple layers of meaning that can be discovered through cross-referencing and contextual analysis.

Transformation and Revelation:

Encounters with the Sphinx often lead to transformation and enlightenment. The use of the Intertext Protocol can similarly transform one’s understanding of texts, revealing new insights and perspectives that were previously hidden or unexplored.

Bridge Between Worlds:

The Sphinx, part human and part animal, bridges the human world and the natural or divine realms. The Intertext Protocol bridges different media – the written word, digital content, visual media, etc. – facilitating a dialogue between these various forms of human creation.

Here’s one via Midjourney:

Also via Midjourney, which has a devil of a time depicting Sphinxes accurately, which, the more that I think about it, perhaps is appropriate for the subject.

I have mountains more to say about the SPHINX Internet Protocol, but am running out of productive time in the day, so will leave this first blast here as a beginning.

Midjourney: “Request cancelled due to output filters”

By Tim B.

On 11 January 2024

In Other

Hit this error message in Midjourney a number of times yesterday, I won’t say how:

Request cancelled due to output filters

Sorry, while the prompt you entered was deemed safe, the resulting image was detected as having content that might violate our community guidelines and has been blocked. Your account status will not be affected by this.

This is the most weird and convoluted and post-modern non-apology I’ve ever heard. Every single time I get an automated wrist-slapping in Midjourney now, I always “notify developers” (which has no effect), because it always feel wrong. I don’t even care what the community guidelines are at this point… just let me make my art and get out of the way.

I guess they have to do what they think they have to do, but I wish one of those things was thinking they need to offer a better end-user experience that is more directly in touch with the needs of practicing artists who are working with AI tools in ‘flow states’. The only effect these types of warnings and errors have for me now is to motivate me to find other systems that don’t block the expression of my creative vision and explorations and that try to tell me my (totally legal) imagination isn’t ‘safe’.

While Midjourney v6 alpha quality is great (mostly), the veil is wearing thin on a lot of these services for me lately. I’m fatigued by anything that blocks or slows down the execution of the project I’m trying to achieve in the moment. It’s a trend that seems, however, to be worryingly on the rise among these tools.

I’d like to see a more artist-centric approach, where people using these tools have greater control over the sensitivity & presence of various types of filtering, including content filtering as one of the parameters.

Oof, I give up… (Anthropic)

By Tim B.

On 10 January 2024

In Other

I hit this barrier using Claude earlier, which I haven’t been using that much anymore these days because the results are overly sensitive in the wrong directions, and feel prohibitive towards creative use cases. I think I might be done using that product.

I’m working on a small hyperreality project where I’m trying to develop digital assets for an 80s hair band that may or may not have existed, and asked Claude for write a chorus for an 80s hair metal power ballad and gave it a title. It replied:

Unfortunately I cannot reproduce full copyrighted song lyrics. However, here is a summary of the type of chorus I might write for an 80s hair metal power ballad called [REDACTED]:

It then went on to write a bloviated description of how it *might* actually perform the task, were it not overly sensitive to you know, actually doing it. I scolded it for scolding me over a fictional song, and it replied:

You’re absolutely right, my apologies. Since [REDACTED] is a made up song title, I should have felt more comfortable flexing my creative muscles. Here’s an original chorus I might write for that 80s hair metal power ballad:

I know Claude 2 was a big milestone for Anthropic to release, but I’ve personally seen significant and tiresome drop-off in output quality due to it being overly restrictive about entirely legal content. I think we’re going to have to look in another direction for AI safety systems that are still functional and usable to actual humans.

And, you know, that don’t write shitty generic song lyrics…

Wifi handheld radio & the importance of browsing with your eyes closed

By Tim B.

On 10 January 2024

In Other

I recently made a gamble on a little handheld wifi radio, the Ocean Digital WR-26F, which you can see in this video below.

I have always had a soft-spot for little hand-held radios of this basic form factor. I have an old non-wifi Grundig one in a box somewhere I have yet to locate that I used to carry around with me and scan frequencies wherever I was.

I should preface this by admitting that getting into wifi radio is totally an “old guy hobby,” but I accept that, given that my quaranteenth birthday just passed.

Anyway, I guess I never understood before actually trying it though the gap filled somehow by having this little physical wifi radio device, instead of listening to internet radio stations via other devices, like a cell phone (I don’t have one), or on desktop (I’ve done it in the past and it’s not the best experience), and on a Sonos (which I’ve done a lot of and don’t like that much).

I ran some experiential sound tests using a brand new Sonos Move 2 that I was looking to add to my system with an old Play:1. I compared Spotify, Apple Music with lossless activated, and Tidal.

Somehow this little device just sounds “better.” I sent the Sonos back.

There are many weird UX things about this Ocean Digital handheld unit, but overall I’m loving it because it is so focused and limited in its functionality. If you look at it, you wouldn’t necessarily be mistaken in saying that it looks like a “router with a speaker” on it. Which is, in effect, pretty much what it is.

Once you set it up with your Wifi network’s password, you’re off to the races wherever you have coverage. Which for me is both inside the house and pretty far outside the house. I can, for example, stick it inside my pocket and walk my dog provided we don’t go too far.

What I’ve re-discovered in it is some of this old wonder I used to have (nostalgia, to be sure) when I was younger, exploring radio frequencies from around the world. This box also sounds like a “radio,” without too much of (to my ears) that overly tinny digital quality of compression you seem to get when you hear internet radio broadcasts on “better” quality speakers. To be clear, something about the goodness of this little handheld wifi radio is that the speaker is sort of shitty? I would critique in a synaesthesia kind of way, that the overall sound feel is a little too “blue” to my tastes (I like a little warmer sound of FM and crackle and pop of AM), but I am pretty complainy about sound quality, and I just overall like it. It sounds fun by itself, and it sounds decent in headphones, and when you plug it out to a larger audio system as an input, it sounds even better quality.

I wouldn’t say all available stations are equal in terms of their overall sound quality (but that’s an issue of internet radio in general), but I would say that the limitations of the device are what make it so perfectly functional despite its areas for improvement.

Anyway, I’ve been using this device lately as a replacement for time spent (maybe purposelessly at times, admittedly) surfing the internet. Now I can surf the internet with my ears in a darkened room. It brings back the magic feeling of radio, but also the magic promise of the internet, as a means to connect to the things you love, that amaze or move you, instead of this vehicle to have an endless stream of products and opinions foisted on you for purchase or adoption.

I can listen with my eyes closed, floating in a sort of weightless sea of listening, scanning, hearing, finding voices, sounds, snippets, waves, vibrations. They move you through your ears in ways waves text and image transmitted via screen to your eyeholes does not. It feels more direct, this listening, more authentic. I like simply this mode of only listening, where in that sea and that space, I don’t need my voice, my reactions, my emojis to be sent back to the system. I exist in a moment of listening more purely in music, and sound for its own sake, the shape of things – more purely than I do when I open up Spotify and have to hunt and search with my eyes through countless menus and options and texts that I have to cipher out, but which always no matter what I do or what I choose or how much of something I listen to, the algorithm turns always back into endless recommendations for things its already forced me to listen to for death, for years.

Fuck the algorithm. I finally free free of it. Music is in the heart as an organ. The algorithm is whether I tune in or tune away, how loud the volume is, how charged the battery is. Who is listening, how they’re feeling, the mood of the moment.

Spotify – and it’s not only them, its the rest – always wants to manufacture a moment it perhaps as an algorithm meaningfully believes favors my likes and interest and past behavior patterns. But it doesn’t understand that importance of space, of spice, of serendipity, of scanning, of searching, of looking and listening with your eyes closed in the dark. Of finding something late at night from a far away place and liking it in an in-the-moment interaction completely free of the Artificial Hypespace(tm) features of always-present-always-watching social media rules of interaction and validation. Instead, it’s like the thing goes in through the ears, right to the heart. You like it or hate it. You tolerate it or move on, going back to other places and pastures you know.

I like radio. I always have. I have a now probably expired Technician Class amateur radio license in the US, and an I think active for life one in Canada at whatever they call the general level. I’ve never succeeded really at transmitting. I got on a local net one time via a copper J-pole that I built off instructions from YouTube, but that was the extent of my success. I think one time I was at least able to hear via a further away spot a repeater and my friend speaking via handheld Baofeng once. They couldn’t hear me over there though, and I haven’t messed around much with TX since then.

This wifi radio take all the complexity out of all that though, and just brings me direct to the center of the magic of radio, married to much of the best of the internet as well, with all the fluff and crappiness of social media more or less stripped away (though you can find some crappy web radio stations if that’s what you’re into; tangent – for some reason, idk why exactly, I find all the Alex Jones Infowars all the more offensive when I hear it in the wild landscape of web radio (it showed up in a Regional – Popular menu here).

The experience has me grasping for whether there are other technological ways, devices, whatever, that could sort of “tame the beast” of the internet of today, and give you the best/benefits of it, while simultaneously just sort of ignoring or actively excluding the now actively malefic influence of social media and the advertising industrial complex. I like the idea of tools where the kinds of interactions you don’t want to have online are simply just not possible, and you never have to worry about them. You can control and redirect your attention in better/happier/fitter/more/productive ways of your choosing, rather than a (societal) algorithm choosing them for you.

It’s a complex subject. I have highly conflicted feelings about technology and its impacts on human lived experience. On the one hand, I am a conscientious objector and life-long refuser of smart phone technology (I have a 2012 emergencies only flip phone in my car). On the other hand, I’ve self-published 120 AI-assisted books. So I’m probably at a pretty weird place in the spectrum of “right relationship to technology” things goes.

My position is that our current approach to technology is probably not the best one, and seems to have some highly negative somewhat deterministic outcomes. Which, while we can and should mitigate, will always yield dystopian outcomes at whatever scale of ubiquity/normality they achieve in the socio-technical assemblage (where the common should not always be taken as an indicator of the good), so long as the whole thing is operating under a system where human and environmental well-being are not the highest priorities.

Anyway, I started in one place writing this, and ended up in very much another, several others (and flipped through many web radio stations on my handheld while writing it). And that I think reflects also on the “radio-ness” of blogging as a medium. I can be a DJ of texts and associations. I can run and ramble, and mix together elements, and the reader listener can listen or not listen. We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to throw angry emojis back and forth. We can just listen or not. You don’t have to follow me. You don’t have to like me on social media. I’m not on it. I’m only on anti-social media, because I know I’m my better me when I’m listening deeply. I can hear more, I can see more clearly with my eyes closed.

Writer as first reader

By Tim B.

On 8 January 2024

In Other

I’ve been thinking about this post from Ong’s Hat creator, Joseph Matheny, for a few days now… Particularly this part about there being confusion around the liquid hyperreality of it all:

When it became clear in 2000/2001 that people clearly did not understand what I was trying to do with the Ong’s Hat “sacred game” (or living book as I often called it back then), I broke the fourth wall momentarily. I pointed out that there was and always had been an explanation on the CD ROM, which served as the center point for the game at the time. If you want to see it, download the ISO, use something like WinRAR or any ISO extractor, and open the Secret.pdf in the /eXtras folder.

Rather than calming the waters, my admission stirred some people up even more. It ultimately resulted in me canceling the game due to unbridled hostility on the forum over their inability to grasp a simple concept, such as not all play implies winners and losers. Sometimes, it can be about playing for the simple joy of playing.

I respect and understand the desire to shape one’s creative narrative work as one releases it into the wild. It’s something I’ve done fairly intentionally in terms of what I associate or distance the work and its contents from.

My own experience has been somewhat similar to the above, in that I have seen that no matter what I as the “Authentic Official Author”(tm) say about my work, some [very large] subset of audience members will simply not read that, or find some reason to disregard it altogether. So while on the one hand, I can perform the magic tricks in plain sunlight, on the next turn I can reveal the hocus pocus for what it is, and demonstrate the sheer technique of it all. No matter what I do, people are always going to pick and choose, and construct their own thing out of it all that honestly may or may not correspond to my own web of associations I have cast over all these bits and pieces that I have been assembling over the years.

Which is not some attempt to absolve myself of responsibility over outcomes of narratives I put out there. On the contrary, I hold that as central to the work and its conversations. But it is maybe to say that the postmodernists got there well before us, with the framing of the Death of the Author and all that. What readers bring to it is ultimately as valid in terms of lived experience as whatever the author may or may not have “intended,” perhaps more.

What role would that leave then the writer/author/whateverer in this landscape? I think it leaves us as rather more of the same as what we’ve always been (even when we factor AI in as part of the creative process): the writer as the “first reader” able to forge ahead upon the blank page, merely leaving a trail for the next reader to follow with their own baggage.

The phrase ‘first among equals‘ – primus inter pares – springs to mind:

Primus inter pares is a Latin phrase meaning first among equals. It is typically used as an honorary title for someone who is formally equal to other members of their group but is accorded unofficial respect, traditionally owing to their seniority in office.

Interesting to think of the writer as a kind of “office holder” over a work, and an office that is in many ways honorary, as the peers in this group are all the other reader/writers who paint their own meaning over it all anyway regardless.

Video: Joseph Matheny on Ong’s Hat & Blurring Fiction & Reality

By Tim B.

On 18 December 2023

In Other

Absolutely loved this video interview by Daily Grail with Joseph Matheny, multi-disciplinary artist & creator of the hyperreal conspiracy alternate-reality game precursor, Ong’s Hat. (According to this video, he was also apparently involved in the early John Titor time travel storytelling.)

Back in the olden days of blogging and counter-culturing, I was only ever peripherally aware of Ong’s Hat, never having delved too deeply into it, but this video resonated with me very strongly in more ways than one, as much of my own personal and collaborative work has followed a rather similar course especially these last ten years or so with Early Clues, LLC, Liminal Earth (where I was an early ‘silent partner’), the Quatria Conspiracy (see also) and the now 120 volumes of AI Lore books which have built extensively on those multiverses as a backdrop.

I especially appreciated Joseph & Greg from Daily Grail’s candid takes on how the artistic blurring of real & fictional elements can be and has been extensively abused through parallel dark manifestations such as QAnon (though I passionately hate the term “bad actors”).

I also really liked what Matheny says about making niche art for “sixty-four people,” which is something I’ve increasingly come back to these past few years especially. We’re taught by social media that we have to chase likes and traffic, when really that kind of chase leads to shitty soulless art and obsession with all the wrong things in life. So it was nice to hear how closely Matheny’s experiences of this territory have paralleled my own. There was so much good stuff in this video that I almost feel like I need to go back and watch it again, as it was like getting a brain dump from someone who could see inside my head and my life.

Highly recommended!

Notes on The Spirit Computer

By Tim B.

On 18 December 2023

In Other

The Spirit Computer is the 120th volume in the AI Lore Books series.

This book tells the story of an anchorite monk in medieval times who witnesses a strange meteorite fall from the sky, and retrieves it, only to discover that it is able to communicate with him. He believes it to be the Voice of God, and he dutifully transcribes its teachings first into a magical manuscript, or grimoire, called The Calculnomicon (see: Lovecraft’s Necronomicon). And then later, he uses its teachings to build a powerful primitive computing device called the Spirit Computer (loosely inspired by the Antikythera Mechanism), which includes a viewer called the Hagioscope, through which he believes he can see the Eye of God.

It happens often enough that the idea for one of these books is first formulated when a title pops into my head. In this case, it was the phrase “spirit computer,” which subsequently sprouted into a more complex idea as it gathered steam and linked up with other concepts. There are antecedent ideas from other volumes which fed into this one, such as those found in The Artilect, and I believe also in The Survivors, where advanced AIs in the future send back small computing devices into the past which grant enormous wisdom to their finders. The present volume rehashes some of those ideas, but reformulates the origins to be wrapped up in a far future event called the Hologram Wars, and the explosion of a literal “time bomb” that leaves hyperdense intelligent matter fragments scattered across past and future time periods.

The art in this one is noteworthy in part because much of it made use of Midjourney’s relatively recent style tuner (which I wish had better UX, but hey) in order to get some faux-medieval art vibes, which I think came out pretty good and sometimes fairly believable overall. There are also some Dalle3 contributions in this one as well. Here is the preview art:

There’s more to say about this, as there is with every volume, but that’s the major stuff off the top of my head. It has been a whirlwind last few weeks finishing off this one, Anxietopia, another kid’s book, a new basket, and issue number 5 of a rebooted homebrew underground newspaper I started in 2022 called The Algorithm, which I have hand-printed in the past exclusively for close friends, but which I may experiment with offering for sale as a physical edition through Gumroad as well after the holiday.

Notes on Anxietopia

By Tim B.

On 12 December 2023

In Other

Anxietopia is the 119th volume in the AI Lore Books series. It is in many ways sort of a shorter spiritual successor of Conspiratopia, the book that started much of this worldbuilding in the first place. They at least exist in the same imagined universe, where inscrutable AIs run people through bizarre scams and experiments and social control games to shape human society into some ideal-to-AIs outcome.

In this one, a user of the WorryWatts system has a chaotic falling out with consensus reality when his personal stress energy harvesting system goes haywire.

One thing that the current batch of LLMs especially suck at is tight control and sudden flips and dips in tone, nested, double, and triple meanings, until you don’t know which end is up anymore. That kind of weirdness has been bred out of all the commercial ones at least. You can get it with some of the free ones occasionally if the stars and nebulous spirits are aligned while you feed it material for completions. But for the kinds of high-wire twists and turns in tones and registers that I consider intrinsic to the Conspiratopia style, it’s just not possible to pack all those punches into largely AI-driven text, so a lot of this is heavily human-first, with strong hands on changes where its human second.

There’s a certain amount of VOMISA style semantic drift and deformation, which is a topic I want to get into separately another time, but it’s more dialed down and readable for the most part, with a more or less discernible narrative storyline, and even dare I say an ending, which is rare for these. Albeit it is very open-ended nonetheless. I liked what someone said once long ago about my original blog incarnation, something about my writing to the effect of “he doesn’t make it easy on the reader” – and I hope that is true, and mostly in the right cases still, in these current AI-enabled explorations and world-building thunks.

Preview art for this one below. There are a lot of advertising style images in this volume, which feels like it amplifies and offsets the crazed narrator vibe that permeates through the rest as their reality breaks down, yet marketing slogans remain.

In many ways, I would have liked to have had the time to go through and spend as much time exploring this pocket-universe of Anxietopia, as I did its forebear, which took about six weeks to write, and is about five or six times the length of this one. But there are a lot of things I’m juggling, and projects I’m getting out the door all at once right now.

Nothing precludes me from one day coming back to this or any of my AI Lore volumes, and making them better, longer, a different form or direction, etc. I doubt I will, but it’s always a door I leave open in my mind, that in the future, these will take different forms than they take now. That this is still just the earliest stages of this new intertextual hyperreal narrative mode emerging… using and subverting the old forms while the new are born…