Rebuild Your Life Month
Rebuild Your Life Month
No. 15: Pointing your way: an AI art generator, why grading is a scam, the Notorious B.I.G.'s creative process and more
June in the U.S. is Rebuild Your Life Month. Started by Dr. Donald Etkes, it was created “for adults who were neglected and/or abused as children to celebrate their self-worth and discover their inner power. Additionally, it was meant to encourage them to learn to heal their lives and pain by lending a helping hand to others going through the same thing.”
My life has felt like it’s been on hold since mid-2019, a feeling exacerbated by the pandemic. This year, for me, has been all about rebuilding my life, learning to confidently use my voice and creating a path that I want to walk down.
Part of that reconstruction is finding better processes for my time management and my writing. The aim is, of course, to increase my output. That’s where my focus will be over the coming weeks. Hopefully, I’ll have something more substantial to share by the next issue.
So, I’m skipping the writing report this time and moving straight to…
👉 POINTING YOUR WAY
A list of things I wanted to share:
📚 I recently finished Sum by David Eagleman — a great little book with 40 different visions of the afterlife. Light, fun and thought-provoking. I’ve also started Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex. I’ve not even reached the end of the second chapter yet, but it’s already proven an eye-opening read.
▶️ I’ve watched quite a fair a bit of Zoe Bee’s channel recently. Her video essay on why realism is bad and her guide on writing better poems are excellent. But what I’d love more people to see is her video on why grading is a scam (and motivation is a myth). It explores in great depth (and with citations) what I’ve felt about education (and employment) for some time: it’s a broken system and better alternatives are available.
🎥 My brother and I adored Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s a multiverse movie that surprises with every scene and uses its premise to deliver a refreshing take on intergenerational trauma. It made me laugh, it made me cry and it made me want to tell weirder and more emotionally powerful stories of my own.
📝 Lincoln Michel explains why novelists have nothing to fear from AI writers for now. It was also in Michel’s newsletter that I was first introduced to the AI art generator DALL•E 2. I’m absolutely fascinated by the unique, realistic images it can create, from astronauts riding a horse in space to teddy bears working on new AI research.
🐦 I also stumbled across the Weird Dall-E Generations Twitter account. Images shared so far include a PS1 Hagrid at McDonald’s, Margaret Thatcher meeting Satan and a courtroom sketch of a Clone Trooper on trial for Order 66 crimes defended by Will Smith.
📝 This excerpt from It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him by Justin Tinsley took me back to my teenage days as a hip-hop head. Taking us behind the scenes of Ready To Die — the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album — we get an inside look into Biggie Smalls’ creative process. I particularly love this section:
Watching Big record was both sublime and, if you weren’t prepared for just how vulgar he could be, cringeworthy. Take Big in the booth recording the song “Ready to Die”—the very first song they laid on wax for the forthcoming album at the Soundtrack recording studio circa 1993. The process was what it always came to be for [producer] Mo Bee. The beat was on loop, and Big went through his usual routine of mumbling, smoking weed, zoning out, and looking like he was under hypnosis of some kind. And when he was ready, he hopped in the booth and spit the verses off the top of his head. Oftentimes in one take, too.
[…]
Not only was [Big] lyrical, but if you closed your eyes, the images he was creating played more like the gangsta flicks and hood classics. A rapper and an actor all at once. He was sharp, witty, and hilarious, and, just when Mo Bee thought he knew what to expect, Big was there with a verbal uppercut that’d stop him in his tracks.
📜🖋 See also: twenty-four haikus for each year Big lived by Chinaka Hodge.
🧵 Finishing up the list: a good Twitter thread from Republic on why the claim about the profitable monarchy is nonsense.
👀 ICYMI
My previous issue, “To make good stuff, you need to make bad stuff”, has been my most viewed issue so far. It also had the most link clicks. The most popular link was Kaitlyn Tiffany’s article for The Atlantic: “What Do Female Incels Really Want?”
I also emailed out a bonus issue of this newsletter last week: 10 newsletters I recommend.
🐦 TWITTER THOUGHTS
🤷♂️ STRAY LINKS
Thank you so much for reading! If you were sent this newsletter or stumbled across it by some other means, you can get future newsletters like this in your inbox every fortnight by subscribing below. And if you think someone else would enjoy this content, I’d love it if you could share it with them.
That’s all from me for now. I look forward to speaking to you again in two weeks’ time.
If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them. You can do so by leaving a comment below, or by emailing me directly at jwstammers@substack.com.
Until next time!
John Wesley Stammers
P.S. ← Click that hyperlink for a tweet, which shows that “Never Gonna Give You Up” sped up makes the perfect anime theme. (Thanks again, Ryan Broderick.)