🧵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.
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
🧵My wife told me about a debate she saw over modesty. Some guy was complaining about how much skin women are showing, some leftie with an audience decided to shame him, saying it was his problem & nobody else's. Pile on ensued.
But it got me thinking about consent.
Take religious morality off the table and just look at biology. It's a known fact that men and women have different triggers for sexual arousal. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's an article from Nature:
Think about this: young men experience "strong genital responses to visual sexual stimuli, which are usually accompanied by a craving for sexual expression or masturbation." That's just biology 101. Any red-blooded man can tell you what an agonizingly overpowering thing it is.
In a discussion about papal infallibility, someone mentions the relatio of Vatican I's "Pastor Aeternus" (PA) as the official explainer.
“An explanation of a dogma is not infallible,” someone replies.
So we have a definition of infallibility, but not an infallible 1/
explanation of infallibility, so we have no way of knowing what infallibility really means, at least not infallibly.
Nor, it should be noted, do we have an exhaustive list of infallible papal statements. And if we had such a list, it, too, would not be infallible, by nature. 2/
While PA seems to indicate that papal infallibility only applies in the matter of solemn/extraordinary exercises of papal magisterium -- aka "ex cathedra" -- we know there are other such exercises, like JPII's "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" on the male-only priesthood. 3/
I used to be the floor manager for Franciscan University Presents on EWTN. Back in the 1990s. I remember when she came on to discuss promulgation of the so-called "Fifth Marian Dogma" -- namely, that Mary is mediatrix of all grace & co-redemptrix.
I don't recall it being because she disagreed with the theology behind the push, but because the Church was facing so many other problems. I recall her saying that when people don't even believe in the Eucharist, it's not time to push new controversial dogmas on them. 2/
What impressed me at the time, and what I struggle with more now, is after making an articulate, determined case for her position, she said, "But if the pope declared it tomorrow I would fall to my knees and say 'credo!'"
3/
An online friend sent some images from a book he's reading in the hopes it would be helpful to me as I navigate the agita of this interminable existential crisis. This image sort of stopped me in my tracks: 1/
So much of this mirrors my own constant thoughts, and the battle going on inside me.
And that raises an interesting set of questions. 2/
I feel as though concluding that these kinds of thoughts represents listening to "the voice of the accuser" is an obvious coping mechanism. It's the thing you have to tell yourself if you're desperate to keep believing.