"The Future"

When I was a kid in the 60s I would've believed it wholeheartedly.

5 decades later, older and infinitely more jaded, all I can say is, "Not in this timeline."

AI Variations on a Theme

I don't think we need to worry about robot overlords just yet, but I may have to revise that assessment in a decade or so.

I uploaded this photo of Myrtle Snow (played by the fabulous Frances Conroy) from AHS: Coven into the DALL・E 2 AI System website and asked it to generate variations.

These are what it came up with:

And here's my default wallpaper image:

And the variations DALL・E 2 came up with:

You can also type in descriptions of what you'd like to see and it will generate an image.

A photo of a blue fish riding a yellow bicycle against an orange background digital art:

A stegosaurus crossing the Atlantic:

It's fun. It requires registration, but it's totally free to use.

Resonance

The Erechtheion (or Erechtheum) is an ancient Greek temple constructed on the acropolis of Athens between 421 and 406 BCE in the Golden Age of the city in order to house the ancient wooden cult statue of Athena and generally glorify the great city at the height of its power and influence. The Erechtheion has suffered a troubled history of misuse and neglect, but with its prominent position above the city and porch of six Caryatids, it remains one of the most distinctive buildings from antiquity.

Much like temples of  Ramesses II at Abu Simbel in Egypt, the Erechtheion has resonated with me from the moment I first saw pictures of it in sixth grade.

Abu Simbel

When I stumbled across an article documenting the modern day relocation of the Abu Simbel temples in an issue of National Geographic in the late sixties, I repeatedly asked my mom when we'd been there. Of course, she replied that we'd never been to Egypt, yet I distinctly remembered having been in that place at some point.

I have no such "I've been there" feeling regarding the Erechtheion, but I am in absolute awe of the beauty of the building, and like I wrote, it just resonates.

Proof of past lives? Maybe, but probably not, because the one thing I do believe is that if reincarnation is real, considering the vastness of the universe and the billions of undoubtedly inhabited worlds out there, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to be forced to live out multiple lives on this single rock we currently call home. That would imply there's something inherently special about this planet—and human beings themselves—that I feel entirely unwarranted as it puts us back as the medieval "center of the universe" thing.

I Had This…

…or some variation thereof, on my bedroom wall all through grade school. I took to drawing my own version of the planets—no doubt as fanciful as these representations, never dreaming that during the course of my life we'd actually see each one up close via robotic probes!