LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 5 No. 6
Nick’s LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 5 No. 6
DALL-E 2's render of an astronaut playing basketsball with cats in space, done in a watercolor style
THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION
Hello again everyone. It's been a few months. Months filled with summer relaxation, social obligations (welcomed and unwelcomed) and living the LINEN LIFESTYLE with our new linen duvet cover on a bed of linen sheets while wearing my linen clothing. MY BEST LIFE. Since summer is the time of renewing those shallow relationships with brief encounters, there are a lot of bullet points. BUCKLE UP, BUDDY!
This summer is plagued with FAKE NEWS. It’s 10 PM. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is? and Polish institute classifies cats as alien invasive species. Everyone knows domestic cats are the most perfect animal and real scientists know they are the most innocent creature in existence.
Melonie made a t-shirt this summer. AND IT FITS MOSTLY. Snaps all around for this amazing woman. I'm trying to push her to apply to be on The Great British Sewing Bee.
CALENDAR ALERT. Non-exclusive news: LIFESTYLE AWARD WINNING AUTHOR MINDY MEJIA's new book: TO CATCH A STORM comes out Aug 2023.
A lot of people love Bill Murray and his post-90's nomadic life of showing up at random weddings. For my money, though, I'm a Tony Hawk guy. His Twitter is generally stories from him about places in public where people tell him that he looks like Tony Hawk. Two facts that amaze me: 1) There is not 1, but 2 bands that do entirely covers of songs featured in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games. This one is The 900's (named after Tony's signature trick). 2) Of course, Tony randomly shows up to sing with the band.
This amazing website, Movemap.io, lets you but in some variables and it tells you where you should live. Following is my URL so you can see what i picked and somehow, I'M IN THE PERFECT PLACE. Only 60 counties in the US met my criteria: https://www.movemap.io/explore/us?utm_campaign=Recomendo&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue+newsletter&politics=very-progressive%7C%7Csomewhat-progressive&avoid_earthquake=yes&avoid_hurricanes=yes&avoid_wildfires=yes&density=very_dense&airport=yes&pctAdultsBA=0.34---
Great quote I discovered by reading an essay by Mitt Romney (?!?!?): “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken
I wish I could send an award to the writer of this marketing copy, found on an adult website. I love this description so much. I laughed for a good 5 minutes. (censoring so this doesn't get caught by a spam filter...):
“You’ve been chasing criminal mastermind Carmen Sandiego for a long time. Like a mouse and cat. Or pussy? Now she is in front of you, with handcuffs, powerless and all yours. She has always been a bad girl, but you have control now, so she’ll be your good girl. You would like that detective, won’t you? Having Carmen on her knees, taking your xxxx deep in her xxxxx. Guess who is inside Carmen Sandiego? Yes, it’s you. Grab your Quest 2, Vive, or Valve Index, and xxxx April Olsen as Carmen Sandiego in our new 180-degree stereoscopic cosplay parody only on xxxxxx.”
After the success of Woofest last year, this summer our film festival is "Yeoh MTV Raps" and here is the poster I made:
THIS IS THE END OF THE INTRODUCTION.
3 THINGS THIS WEEK.
ITEM THE FIRST:
...AND THE WINNER IS POOPFINGER33427583:
This summer I've been heavily following the movement in AI art (something we've discussed in Vol. 1 No. 10, Vol. 2 No. 1, Vol. 3 No. 6). It is amazing to see how fast it is progressing. This summer the headlines seem to be going toward physical art (as opposed to video or audio deepfakes).
Here is a good primer on it and some of the issues if you haven't been following along:
(video, click to watch)
Here are some other various things to get you to a top-level understanding:
For me, the most interesting questions are the replacement of labor and the copyright issues. Personally, I think quality rarely wins, especially in a culture so driven by profit and cost-reduction.
At work, they outsourced our in-house design group about 10 years ago at my company to save a few bucks. I think the temptation to use this technology to replace hiring artists will be too much and this will be another job that is consolidated or replaced very quickly over the next 10 years.
Illustrations like this, will simply be generated by the AI:
That looks like an illustration I would see in The Atlantic, but nope, it is generated by an AI called Stable Diffusion.
This is the same AI using this prompt: "trump romantic kiss obama, award winning, photograph, realistic"
Give this two more years and it will be perfect.
The copyright issues are interesting to me in two regards. One, most of the AI programs can do "prompt in the style of xxx" so the AI is generating new art done in the style of an established artist and holy shit can it be good. I'm sure since the Warhol estate was fine having an AI do Andy's voice overs for Netflix's Andy Warhol Diaries series that an AI generating that distinct style will be ok too...
The other one is a new feature DALL-E 2 just launched call "Outpainting". This is where you can feed the AI a picture and some prompts to "extend" the canvas.
This is an example posted in a City Pop group. On the right side is an album cover that was extended using the prompt "painting of a street by the beach with 1950’s cars parked along it"
A lot of City Pop album covers are by a guy named Hiroshi Nagai and he has a distinct style, but is not that well known. In the above, you can clearly see the AI work, but again, this was just launched. Give it two years.
So who owns the copyright on this? When something is done in the style of xxx, in my mind that is more clear it's like a cover song, but on something extended like this I think it becomes a more interesting problem. The AI was trained using a lot of copyrighted images too. SO MANY QUESTIONS. I'm sure everyone will be reasonable and solve this outside the court system. /s
I know we have several creative professionals that are FRIENDS OF THE LIFESTYLE and I would be interested in your thoughts.
ITEM THE SECOND:
THE SURREAL LIFE:
I'm sure several of you have read about, heard about or watched "The Rehearsal." If not, get on that. Holy shit it was amazing, funny and uncomfortable in so many ways. I've been a fan of Nathan Fielder since "Nathan For You" and the uncomfortable cringe comedy he creates is my type of humor. The Rehearsal takes his formula and blows it up with a giant HBO budget and pushes some very uncomfortable boundaries, but I think at the end it maintains a heart and made me ponder life more than most shows I have ever seen. That last episode...holy shit.
Longtime friends and readers will know my love of absurdity in comedy (see above) and one of my favorite shows of all time is "American Vandal." It is a parody of unsolved crime shows and only has 2 seasons, but they are both incredible. Trailer for Season 2 as evidence (this may be my favorite 2 mins in trailers):
video, click to view
Anyways, the team behind the show created a new one, Gamers, which is a parody of those multi-part legacy of a sports team documentaries, but focuses on a eSports team that is playing League of Legends. Melonie knows nothing about LoL, but I think even at the end she was cheering for Nut Milk and questioning why Spaghetti was not in the bot lane.
This one did not get a ton of traction, but is just as good as American Vandal. Check out the summer of surreal comedy!
ITEM THE THIRD:
HEY. MUST BE A DEVIL BETWEEN US:
Well, my love affair with Hey.com's email service has come to a sudden end. (Discussed as Item the Third in Vol. 5 No. 4). Everything was going great until Melonie asked me a question that I knew I had an email on. I pulled out my phone and the Hey app and did a search, no results. I went to my trash and scrolled and it only had 2 days of history. That's weird. I went to the website on my laptop and everything was there. Checked my iPad and it was missing data too. From what I can tell, they can't maintain a full sync of data on the iOS devices versus their servers and that is a HARD PASS FOR ME BUDDY.
So, for the first time ever in the history of my dumb newsletter, I'm officially UNRECOMMENDING Hey.com.
Even more so, since I had to pay for a full year of service, I'm sending Very Nice, Very Evil FRIEND OF THE LIFESTYLE, Danhausen, to CURSE them.
It has all ended well. I have purchased the high in demand domain, Lavely.org and host my email using Fastmail, which has been pretty good and even retains email! They allow unlimited aliases, so I can create practical and dumb addresses like hotfudgebutts@lavely.org. They also support really robust rules so I can duplicate about 90% of Hey's email sorting that I liked so much, so CURSES to you Hey!
Anyways, if you wouldn't mind doing me a solid and updating your records YET AGAIN to my new email address, nick@lavely.org. Not very original, I know.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (please mark "ok to print"):
None
GRATITUDES:
I recently had the chance to take the The Shockmaster on a road trip to visit FRIEND OF THE LIFESTYLE, Adrianne. It was the longest trip I've done in the EV and boy is it a wasteland of not charging from Rochester to western Wisconsin. I made it though and stopped by a L3 charger on the way home to fuel up, spending $8 in 24 mins on "gas."
Anyways, Adrianne is an amazing friend of mine for almost 30 years now. She has meant so much to me for a lot of my life from my awkward adolescent crush on her through my awkward young adult crush on her and to our current day awkward platonic adult friendship. (Awkward because I am me, no other reason).
We are wired very differently. She is full of fun and adventure and I sometimes look at her like an alien, but as I've gotten older I have appreciated aspect of her more. She has lived so many different places and had her mind set on so many different things. She was my confidant for many, many years and treated me with compassion, respect and love in ways I will never be able to return.
Anyways, after many years and her many sacrifices I was able to live stream her dissertation and watch the moments that led up to her getting her FREAKING DOCTORATE. I was blown away watching this amazing woman I have grown up with getting to the summit of that mountain. She just landed an adjunct faculty position in Wisconsin and is teaching classes as I type this.
If you had told me when we were 18 that she would have a doctorate and I would live in a pool of sad dad energy, I would think you were insane, but here we are. We have so many amazing people in this readership with so many talents that it just blows me away how fortunate I am to have you (YES, YOU) in my life.
Thankfully, not all readers have had to endure weird techno songs about you and a tattoo on my neck that references you, but for the one that has, I salute you. Congratulations, thank you for your friendship and continue to amaze me.
FAVORITE THING TO GO IN MY EYEHOLES THIS WEEK:
I do try to keep my love of Pro Wrestling out of this newsletter because I value your friendship, but last weekend was AEW's All Out show which will be a legendary event in wrestling history for a lot of bad reasons, but when the show was going on, one of my favorite tag teams, The Acclaimed, had a banger of a match.
Unfortunately, here is some back story to explain the below image.
So...The Acclaimed have been on a quest to normalize scissoring over the past year. Like friends do. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Over the year they partnered with and rivaled with a tag team called the Gunn Club, whose dad, Billy Gunn, was a wrestler in the 90's. Now, Billy Gunn's nickname was "The Bad Ass" Billy Gunn. Printed on his tights back then was "Mr. Ass." ALSO IMPORTANT.
Danhausen (the wrestler doing the curse above in Item the Third) would always refer to the Gunn Club as "The Ass Boys" because their dad was Bill Ass, since "Mr. Ass" was printed on his tights. ALSO IMPORTANT.
The Acclaimed started calling him "Daddy" and when The Gunn Club turned on the Acclaimed, he sided with the Acclaimed. One of the members of The Acclaimed does a rap during his entrance and it culminates in the other hyping up the crowd and shouting "SCISSOR ME DADDY ASS" and they all hand scissor in the ring. YES, THIS IS A GLORIOUS SPORT OF MEN.
(fan video - click to watch)
Still with me? Good. Now, during the match the crowd was chanting and singing about scissoring which is great, but my favorite thing to go in my eyeholes this week is this amazing shirt:
THIS IS THE END OF THE NEWSLETTER
NOW THAT SCISSORING IS NORMALIZED BETWEEN TWO MEN WE SHOULD FOCUS ON MAKING THE WORLD LESS TERRIBLE.
BUT MAYBE BY NORMALIZING IT WE HAVE.
LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER...THE ACCLAIMED HAVE ARRIVED. SCISSOR ME DADDY ASS.
THAT IS ALL.