🧵I'm using the new #midjourneyAi update (version 4) to re-run old prompts I did when I first started using an earlier version last summer. What a difference. (Prompt: "alfons mucha cyberpunk geisha assassin")
For all coparisons, Left image = old version, right = new:
Prompt: "pope francis is a demon"
"a useless robot who nobody loves"
"Bouguereau cyberpunk geisha ninja"
Sometimes the old version gave a better result. When you want more impressionistic versions, anyway.
"a giant alien swarm preparing to eat the earth red mist"
"Peach McGee" (a nickname for someone I know)
"astronaut lost in space dead skull inside helmet mouth open beautiful nebula reflecting in the glass of his visor"
"agony"
Again, the creepier the result you want, the more the raw, early version of midjourney seems to give you something nightmarish.
"skeletons of old dead robots covered in rust lying about in a crowded junk yard with one humanoid robot smelling a flower"
(Old version is better)
"norman rockwell cyberpunk"
"the monster under the bed hd 8k"
I want to play more but I have other things to do. Perhaps later.
I think it's fair to say that most of us struggle with selfishness.
But I'd like to tell you the story of one young man whose selfishness nearly cost him his life, and what he learned from that experience. 🧵👇
Seth Adam Smith is an introvert. But his dislike and avoidance of other people very nearly killed him. "I thought only about myself," he writes. "My wants, my feelings, & my problems. My selfishness was a downward spiral that led to a veritable prison of isolation and despair."
He couldn't find a way out of the dark. He was depressed and miserable, and one day, he finally decided to end the pain and take his own life.
People ask why I sometimes refer to Catholicism as a “cult of masochism”. It’s because Catholics have a tendency to not just resign themselves to the idea that God desires suffering, but often proclaim that they deserve it.
A friend was telling me, “Fr. Ripperger had a talk on hell on his website that goes into graphic detail about all the different physical, mental, and spiritual torments the damned have to face. It’s almost literal torture porn. And then he concludes by saying, ‘And even after a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
My boys were asking me again night why we’re punished for sins we didn’t commit (original sin) and there’s literally no logical answer to that. It’s just “God did it so it must be fair.”
Odd to refer to this phenomenon as "adolescent atheism." Forcing a teen to act as though they believe something they don't is not a productive course of action.
In fact, it demonstrates complete disregard for their intelligence, judgment, and nascent autonomy.
My mom was once complaining to me about my youngest sister not being willing to participate enough in devotional activities - stations of the cross, daily Mass, etc.
At the time, I was very religious myself, but I asked my mom, "She's a teenager, mom, what do you expect?"
"I expect holiness." Came the curt reply.
"If you keep that up, you're going to drive her right out of the Church," I said.
Christianity tells you that you're a miserable sinner who deserves hell for merely being conceived in original sin; it claims you can never do anything good without God holding your hand & mostly doing it for you. You'll never be sinless, never be truly virtuous, always live...
...in wretchedness, needing a redeemer. It tells you that YOU can't change you, only God can. And if you take that to heart, you absolutely won't. You'll believe it, right down to your core, and you'll pray & plead & beg to become better, to overcome this sin, that vice, but...
...always find yourself backsliding, because YOU didn't change YOU. You were brainwashed into codependence on an invisible force that may not even exist; you were gaslit into believing that God is all loving & omnibenevolent & that you should feel terrible for your offensiveness.
Not an endorsement of her entire oeuvre - she's way more aggressive about this stuff than I care to be. But this resonated. I hear people all the time try to downplay the strong psychological ramifications of growing up in a devout religious milieu with its attendant beliefs. 1/
Or else they say, "My experience of religion isn't like that." That one's funny, because as a Catholic, I have spent much of my life pointing out that the majority of the religion has become a joke. The Church doesn't take its own core teachings seriously anymore. 2/
But when you dig into basic ideas like "You'd better love & worship God & follow his commandments or you'll burn forever" or the proliferation of unfalsfiable beliefs or harmful mindsets that frame your worldview within devout communities there's really something there. 3/
Honestly, I think Pa Ingalls is the role model with this. Definitely a man doing man things, taking on the danger & hardest work. But he had no problem teaching his girls & pitching in @ home. And Ma was a hard worker right alongside him. A better model than any I’ve seen.
A lot of us guys these days were never really taught how to do man things. At most our dads modeled going to work every day no matter what, but many saw providers who sort of turned into Archie Bunker are home. Traditional gender roles are weird, bc there’s really no “tradition”.
Before the industrial revolution, for example, husbands and wives worked alongside each other in the family enterprises. Factory work took people out of the home, creating the “go to work” phenomenon. You wind up at the weird 50s where hubby comes home to wife in apron w/cocktail