Subject: Some Advice
Giving advice is one of the most satisfying pastimes imaginable.
For example, if you were to tell me that you were creatively blocked or in a rut or didn’t know what to draw or write about, I would have no end of wise words to impart. I would, of course, remind you of that experiment where some ceramics students were separated into two groups. One group was instructed to spend the week making just one ceramic pot, the best they could possibly make. The other group was instructed to make as many pots as possible during that week. Curiously, the group that was supposed to focus solely on being prolific also ended up producing the highest quality pots as opposed to the group that was focused on making one perfect pot. It’s one of those neat little parables that can illustrate just about any sort of warmly encouraging and mildly condescending point that I am trying to make.
It is so easy for me to tell you that practice and failure are the two greatest teachers, or that one terrible first draft is the best way to get to a stunningly beautiful second draft.
Giving advice is wonderful in two respects. One, I can feel helpful, as I have done the hard work of learning these lessons and now I can pass them on to you and spare you the trouble. Two, no one ever actually takes advice: you will continue to do whatever it was you were going to do, and I will get to smugly imagine that everything would have worked out perfectly if only you had listened to me. Since you will not take my advice, I will never have to face the reality that perhaps it was not that good of advice. My advice will never be proven wrong, because it will never be proven at all.
Which reminds me. Some faithful readers may have noticed that it has been almost a year since my last newsletter. I must be quick to assure you that it is not because I am creatively blocked or in a rut, since if I were, I would almost certainly be the first to take my own high quality advice. My advice is always perfect and actionable; thus, it stands to reason that I would have no problem taking it if that were my problem.
No, indeed, I have been much too busy to write a newsletter. For one, my farm in Stardew Valley requires a certain amount of monastic devotion. I have many chickens there, and I’ve still never even seen Alex’s 10-heart cutscene because Complete Breakfast is no easy feat for the novice farmer to achieve. It’s fine if none of these words mean anything to you, because language is a poor substitute for meaning anyway.
For another, I have a kitten. She stares at me like this basically all of the time:
Tell me, how is one to write under such conditions?.
But also, I have hobbies. Hobbies that are absolutely not just a way for me to procrastinate on doing the things I care about. One of my most recent hobbies is making beautiful AI music.
Many of you likely know that I have a complicated and tormented relationship with generative AI. On the one hand, I feel like it is an electricity-guzzling tool of the business classes to further devalue creative work. On the other hand, it makes me go ha ha and I can’t stop myself. Truly one of the great moral dilemmas of all time. (I wrote an article about AI art a couple years ago which still stands up in many ways, although damnnnnn has the technology changed so much since then.)
Just a year ago, AI-generated music wasn’t much to speak of. It could make 30 second clips in a specific genre, and they sounded kinda cool, but they would require a lot of human manipulation to actually turn into a song. When I started hearing more and more AI music in memes and social media, I assumed that was still the case: sure, AI was a big part of it, but people still had to put a lot of work into making the finished product.
But nay, dear reader.
AI music generation is beyond anything I had imagined. It fills me with fear, yes, but also, as the musically-ungifted child of a musician, I have been unable to plug my ears to its siren song.
Which is what led me to making this for you all. The words are from an “Am I the asshole” post on Reddit. Creating the song took about 10 tries using Suno. Mostly, I experimented with different genre tags and adding musical instruction to the lyrics (e.g. adding a [Drop] instruction). This song is “Musical, Broadway, Female Vocalist, Dramatic, Piano, experimental hip hop, tango”, which, as we all know, is such a very popular musical style. Nearly all of the images and video clips are AI-generated, which I did at least have the decency to edit together myself like a real human.
If you have any favorite Internet posts that you would like to see me turn into a song, please send them to me!!
🦎 Ask a Gecko 🦎
Dear Gecko,
Am I the asshole for eating too many cucumbers?
u/deleted
For as long as he can remember, the gecko has had this quirk. He never snacks on anything but mealworms. He shouldn’t say never since technically he’s eaten some dubia roaches and even a few crickets when he was younger. He’s absolutely a picky eater and at this point his snack of choice is always mealworms. He’s even eaten 12-13 on very extreme days.
Want to ask some creature in my vicinity for advice? 🙏🏼 Have an exciting link you want to share with the world my 16 23 other subscribers? 👉Send a letter to the editor: nome@nome.land