MLK Jr. Day…anger and change…studying art styles using Midjourney…belly dancing move or what?
Adventures du jour!
I should be writing. I know this. But my brain is too full right now. If I break off without finishing the thought in this post, just know that I got inspired and hit “post” here without thinking.
Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I have found myself angry all day, unable to settle or find peace in anything. My chest hurts, muscles and lungs. I feel like being angry today is a good thing (shouldn’t I be angry?), but it’s also scary. I have a difficult relationship with anger: too little, and I settle for “safe” only to put myself in danger; too much, and I make myself sick.
I’ve been thinking about it. The other day I had the insight that I tend to be a person who thinks better on my feet than I do in the abstract. I’m not the fearless hero type; I don’t end up inside burning buildings or facing down people with guns on a regular basis. But I can moderate a panel or decide whether to catch a falling knife or not (and not get hurt) or tell someone why their argument that I need to get a Costco card solely in order to save money on gas is a bad idea.
And *thinking* about how shitty the world is right now is the opposite of thinking on my feet. It’s having to sit down and wallow.
I’m not sure what I want to do about it yet. Maybe learn how to live with anger before I do anything else. Writing helps, because I’m writing in opposition to the current way the world works, but not enough.
This makes twice this week I’ve felt at least somewhat consumed by a type of anger. Earlier this week I had a *very* nasty patch of it. The questioning I’d been doing about some fundamental assumptions I had, got compounded by a Kris & Dean class I’m taking: more fundamental assumptions overturned, not just in the class material but in the assignment.
As I started the assignment, I said, “Oh, this will be fun!” and it was. I kept pushing it until I hit a moment of realizing how much I hadn’t been doing the elements in the exercise. From there, it was a short journey to “I’m a terrible writer.” And then there was another personal thing that came up, very disappointing, and I handled it badly.
I went out for a walk, going, “I am in a shit mood.” Only when I got safely away from the apartment did I let myself know how angry I was.
I was angry enough that I wanted to take a break from the world. It wasn’t suicidal ideation; I wanted the world to end so I didn’t have to deal with it. I hate it when I do that. I decided to roll with it anyway; I’m trying to be less scared of myself.
It felt like walking straight into a blind spot. (Like walking a new Pattern, if you know Zelazny.) I stopped and talked about it to my phone, recording it so I could see what it looked like to feel that way, from the outside.
My face and voice seemed normal, within acceptable parameters for social behavior. I got socialized not to feel anger or to show it; it probably also matters that I was talking to my phone, imagining talking to people who hadn’t done anything to anger me and not someone I was angry at. Nevertheless I was glad to be alone.
Venting helped. (It helped today, too.) Dancing to stompy music helped both days, too. I also had to take a couple of breaks doing something lighter both days, turning off the emotion for a while so I could take a break from it. (It is so very easy for me to do this; it’s a learned survival skill around my mom, if nothing else.)
But then I turned it back on.
I got sick the other day; dunno if I’ll get sick tomorrow. We’ll see.
The thing that didn’t happen that surprised me is that I didn’t hit a patch where I “reset,” feeling like there was a minor break between the old me and a new me, as if I were a video game character restarting on a new life after getting ganked. This happens sometimes when I end up being wrong about some fundamental assumption. It feels like I go to sleep and wake up as someone slightly different. It’s creepy but I live with it.
And…it didn’t happen the other day. I got sick but I didn’t feel discontinuitous. I was disappointed in myself over part of the personal stuff. I wasn’t consumed with regret over spending an hour or so wishing the world would end. I don’t know if I internalized what I learned for the writing class; I can feel the characters tugging to do new things but I’m not conscious of WHAT they’re doing. I can’t figure it out. It doesn’t seem startlingly different, but it isn’t exactly the same. I don’t know. The characters are always doing things I don’t understand consciously but that prove to work out just fine later. I’m really lucky to be writing the story I’m writing right now, I think. It’s *really* accommodating to me changing gears at the drop of a hat.–Or realizing consciously that the story will seem to change gears but my subconscious has been in control the whole time. Or some of both.
Goth Girl scene up next. If the Goob is sympathetic to what it feels like to have out-of-control anger; and Mr. Assassin keeps an eye on me, knowing that I’ll be all the more useful for riding it out; and Three-Pointer would just like to egg me on; then Goth Girl is like, “Oh. Anger? And feeling violent and useless at the same time.?Let’s DO have a scene about that. Or several.”
I had a couple of ideas about what to do for her scene. Tossed em. Hope it works out.
AI news:
I ran some prompts on Midjourney to study how style gets done, that is, how I could get Midjourney to replicate a style of art without naming the work or artist. A lot of the rolls that I see are stuff like “blah blah blah meets blah blah blah, in the style of blah blah blah.” (One I saw today was Gustav Klimt, but with llamas.)
Cute stuff? But essentially boring to me at this point.
Anyway, I started pulling apart the art style from the video game Hades, because it’s distinctive but of a style that I could sort of understand.
I didn’t hit the style perfectly, let alone get close enough to roll perfect replicas of the existing characters, but I did get close enough to roll not-terrible characters in that universe. It took a bunch of researching art styles, reading up on the history of animation and comics, and connecting the dots.
It was very satisfying.
Useful? Probably not, other than being able to describe what I want to an actual artist. But I did think about the art style in terms of what I was learning from that difficult class, too, and made some character choices in light of the new learning. I’m thinking about other ways I can work with the new learning in future prompts, too.
A bunch of new stuff has happened in AI world, including a lawsuit against several AI companies in the interests of artists whose work is showing up in results without their permission. The lawsuit looks almost like it’s designed to fail; it gets an important technical point wrong, includes a group that wasn’t really at root fault (DeviantArt) and leaves out one of the worst offenders (Open AI’s DALL E).
And then singer/songwriter Nick Cave called ChatGPT’s songwriting abilities a travesty, not because they were bad (although they were and he said that, too) but because the AI didn’t suffer to write them. Nnnnn.
I had a complex reaction to his response. While suffering may be essential to the understanding of the human condition, does it really drive something like the Goldberg Variations by Bach? Or our appreciation of it? Wouldn’t it be just as accurate to say that AI can’t make art because it can’t experience joy? Or both? Can the tunes be AI-driven but not the words?
Or is it just ChatGPT that’s the problem, programmed to sound authoritative at any cost? Would an AI programmed to give sources and indicate levels of reliability in its findings make better poetry and song lyrics? Like, “I can tell you that the top sources think X, but it also sounds like they’re all basing their findings on each other’s papers with no underlying basis for their assumptions”?
Would doubt suffice to make effective art?
I’m still finding ChatGPT frustrating to use for more than a few minutes. Midjourney still feels like it’s working with me, or me with her. “Let’s try X and see what happens; it probably will be a mess but maybe we’ll get some good ideas out of it.” Where ChatGPT feels like it’s some dude mansplaining me about my area of expertise.
Other stuff:
While doing yoga, I’ve been adding more upper-body stuff. Not much, but it doesn’t take much to do more than what I had been doing. And I’ve been stopping at playgrounds while out on walks, just dangling from the bars and letting my spine stretch out, pulling and pushing myself around to see what kind of movement I still have. I’m sore but not too bad.
But I think it helped me figure out a new thing to do with my torso today, after spending most of the last few days either not dancing or dancing to stompy music. I put on a couple of lighter or slower songs to try to break the stompy streak, and the body said, “Hey! If you’re not gonna stomp, try this!!!”
It’s like the bottom half of a belly dance roll? Putting my thumbs on the muscles between the area between belly button and hips, anyway, and just being aware of that space, I ended up moving quite a bit differently.
Ray just walked in and I showed her. She went, “That looks like a belly dancing thing and I can already tell you’re going to be sore tomorrow.”
She’s probably right. I thought about getting belly dancer’s coin belt thingy the other day to help practice shimmying, but I used to have one a while ago and never used it because a) I didn’t have the muscles, and b) the constant noise annoyed the piss out of me.
But the new movement is fuuuuun. So I’ll whine tomorrow but I won’t be too mad about it.
Okay. My mind is feeling more sorted. I’m going to put myself in Goth Girl’s hands and try to get some writing done.
…
I put up the YouTube video of me in that terrible mood the other day, talking about how I planned to roll with it for the sake of creative work.
Here’s my roll of a version of the Goddess Eris, in the style of the video game Hades.
The full prompt is as follows:
graphic novel short female bisexual character, high contrast, thin line, angular shape, skin made of gray stone, white draped greek robe tied with cloth, gold armbands, a struggle against fate, mischievous and bloodthirsty and revolutionary, lighthearted, golden apple, black wings, red hair
—I am SOOOO proud of that!
Me and my attitude problem this morning.