in the mid 1800s the shakers (no sex having american fringe christians) started having so many visions they called it the ‘era of manifestations’
some people started drawing them, which was wild and extravagant by their normally humble standards
theyre called the gift drawings:
some of the aesthetic is pretty unique.
this one is called:
A Sacred Sheet Sent from Holy Mother Wisdom by Her Angel of Many Signs (1843)
i became of aware of these years ago. i knew an artist who told me about them - but he had the wrong name and misremembered the story, so i didnt find them until around a decade later
cant find a large version of this one but you can see the aesthetic. very ‘mystical americana’:
does not having sex cause you to make bizarre centrally oriented mandala-esque visionary images with basic colors? fascinating theory from twitter user Thousands. lets check in on hildegard von bingen
@Race__Realist @SLightening101 @pearly_sinner only explaining you on the off chance you have never considered this. where is ‘the school’ that always makes people more intelligent? that can guarantee you will leave with a high IQ or that always makes geniuses? it does not exist anywhere and never has because its not possible
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drank too much coffee at like 3pm today so heres a story that changed my life that i dont think i really told anyone.
youre me. its a few years ago.
you just drove three days to be in a mountain city with your wife, for her birthday.
its not going to go the way you planned.
i became christian a few years before this. since then i have invested the maximum amount of time a person could reasonably be expected to into figuring that out. piles of books every day. talks while walking my dog, doing chores, figuring out what church to go to, all of it.
one day i literally sat in my car for like ten hours and listened to these talks about the old testament all the way through. that was just a random day. so, im the maximum level of invested in understanding things and have cobbled some basic understanding together.
now that the dust has settled a tiny bit and we've seen how the popular conversation has gone about AI art, and how its developing - terms, themes, arguments, all that, i'd like to take a stab at clarifying things.
we'll be using these images:
i posted these the other day. i didn't say it at the time, but what really struck me about these, going back to them, is that they look like AI. i think that, at this time, i could tell someone these were AI, for sure.
but they're not. they're from 2013. artist is kris kuksi.
however, if i saw these now, i would have to wonder if they were AI.
actually, this happens to me all the time now. i'm pretty "schooled" in two dimensional art techniques, and i constantly find myself wondering if illustrations i see on here are AI. probably happens once a day
alright this thread kind of took off. very fun and cool, thanks.
normally i never get into the comments but i got some... enjoyable attempted refutations of this one so lets just quickly go through them in the comments here for fun
gotta enjoy the attitude on this one. ill take the bait - (i actually advise not using drugs - but especially not as part of a spiritual path) - ive done LSA personally. it doesn't do anything like whats described here or anything that would explain this
its pretty rare to encounter and usually comes in a harmful form, so, i would assume the people that are suggesting that havent done it. just totally off base imo. but theyve only read about it so they dont know, and then other people repeat it (imo).
people write entire books about the salem witch trials without explaining why someone would point blank tell people they were a witch traveling to black sabbaths and hanging with demons
men confessed to being werewolves. they literally were like “i am actually a werewolf”.
reflection: many cultures have some form of what we call shamanism wherein people use psychoactive plants to interact with spirits and do what they call magic, and such things
question: what was this in western culture?
the answer when i return from reading a book to a tiny man
after several years of dovetailing my brain with the internet (i love it thanks), ive noticed an artistic principle that, i suspect, was much more difficult to pick up on before electric air instant free mass communication
[...]
it is almost a law to me at this point. it at least holds up 90% of the time. things that i think will do very well - that i hold up to myself and say "wow, this is really it", just do okay.
things i contemplated trashing do well. very well. things i almost discarded entirely.
there are some exceptions. sometimes you're anticipating a good shot, and you take it, and you were correct.
but theres way more cases where i contemplated not sending a tweet, or wondered if something was even good enough to post, and people still circulate it years later.
crazy aspect of modern internet worldview is that each person’s “lived experience” is a hermetically sealed reality that can never be fully understood by someone else, while also expecting no one to ever express shock or surprise at something theyre unfamiliar with.
all the comments say “dude its DC its fine”. if thats true, how would she know that? a girl saying “i know what this city is like because i saw it on TV once” would also be viewed negatively.
its a double bind. cant win.
its like that bodega guy. if he made a post saying “i know what NY is like, ive never been there though” - thats bad. but to go and then be surprised at how it is - thats also bad. so you have to say nothing as an individual, and just participate in the game as a group member.