Author: Don

Hmm …

Ted Gioia:

After three decades of total connectivity, here’s where we stand:

  • Four movie studios still control Hollywood.
  • Four subscription platforms account for two-thirds of home movie streaming.
  • Three major record labels own most of the hit songs.
  • Five publishers account for 80% of the US book market.
  • Just one company controls 60% plus of the US audiobook business.
  • Etc. etc.

It may not be a coincidence that I don’t watch recent movies either in theatres or online, don’t stream music or listen to radio, seldom read recent books, or listen to audiobooks. If Gioia’s schoolbus plunges off a cliff, it would be a net gain for civilization.1

Beauty and Catholicism

Point:

Because of Catholicism’s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music; these weren’t decorations applied to worship but constituted worship itself. Beauty was the form truth took when it entered the world.

Counterpoint:

Many of the characters in Converts, like Graham Greene, explicitly characterized their Catholicism as intellectually rather than emotionally motivated. Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that “The ritual, although I had always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree”; Maurice Baring was “less interested in the aesthetic aspects of the faith . . . than in the rational arguments” and declared that “candles and incense never did . . . affect me”; Evelyn Waugh, according to his friend Christopher Sykes, had a “rational” approach to his faith, “remarkable for a lack of emotion”; similarly, Muriel Spark insisted that her faith was “dogmatic rather than emotional.”

Further fun with the art machine

Feather tigers

Working with AI image generators is both addictive and frustrating. You can get pretty pictures, but it takes persistence. It’s like working with an idiot savant, emphasis on “idiot.” If a model can misinterpret your prompt, it will. It generally takes between six and twelve tries to get a satisfactory image, and the final result is always a compromise.

Precious one

I mostly play at NightCafé. Sometimes I take part in the “challenges,” in which participants submit pictures they “made” and vote on the entrants. Consequently, I need to quickly evaluate a lot of pictures, too many of which look exactly like other pictures. I’ve developed some criteria for scoring:

Catches my attention: +1
Holds my attention: +2
Is a generic headshot: -1
Includes a kitten: -1
Includes a fox: -1
Includes a dragon: -1
Includes fairies: -1
Includes pointy ears: -1
Includes angels: -1
Includes Batman: -1
Includes Wonder Woman: -1
Includes Catwoman: +1
Is a generic landscape: -1
Is a generic cityscape: -1
Is a generic dystopian cityscape: -10
Features a knight in armor standing on a precipice looking out over a vast wilderness under a dramatic sky: -1
Includes islands floating in the sky: -1
Includes women in boob-plate armor: -1
Is imitation Klimt: -1
Is imitation Art Nouveau: -1
Is imitation Thomas Kinkade: -10
Relies on vulgar humor: -10
Is intentionally grotesque: -10
Includes Donald Trump: -10
Has a message: -10
Has a political message: -100

The astute will notice that many of my own pictures would be down-voted by these criteria. Don’t ever accuse me of consistency.

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