I’ve mostly been using Midjourney to generate images, but recently I started playing with other models more – mostly because I wanted to eliminate a bunch of extraneous subscriptions so I could reallocate those funds.

I’ve been playing a lot with Leonardo.ai, but for some reason Leonardo and I weren’t communicating well tonight. I tried a new one, Playground AI, and this particular entity heard me immediately.

For synesthesians, generative AI is such a love/hate relationship. I’m not an artist, but I can write things into being in a variety of ways, and it’s an utter rabbit hole when I get in there.

I like generating these images for blog posts, and also for album covers whenever I upload a new mix. This latest one was a departure from the stuff I’ve been spinning, and it kind of looked like this.

The problem is, it was really hard for me to pick one after Playground dropped these on me.

If this isn’t your thing, keep going, but if it is, tell me which one you like the best via slide number and the comments.

I live in a state that’s getting redder by the second. Simultaneously, a city just to my east, once renowned only for being the home of a Southern Ivy and otherwise a lot of crime and poverty has now become the San Francisco of the east, full of expensive luxury high rise apartments, tech bros, and Google. These are the types of people who, if nothing else, are a bit more libertarian when it comes to the government getting in their way.

And somehow a law that caused Pornhub, and other sites like it, to shut off access, managed to pass here. I can’t imagine tech bros voting against online porn.

I’m not here to talk about porn though. That’s actually another topic entirely and a rabbit hole full of contradictory feminist arguments that people can take to Reddit or something. It’s been done to death. What I’m here to talk about is that this points to yet another stupid contradiction in the whole “family values” against the world” argument that seems to motivate the whole “family values” scene, who seem to think picking and choosing what freedoms everyone else gets to have is their responsibility (this is what happens when you only teach one little piece of history, though – you miss out on things like how the U.S. government designed the nuclear family as an economic tool).

ANYWAY…

Sites like Pornhub can now be sued if someone’s children in this state access the site. The alternative was for Pornhub to set up a system of privacy infringement, so Pornhub just axed their access here.

How did this actually make sense to the folks that supported this? Since the political and community leaders who supported this have made their public statements for the world to say, I can verify that these are the same “moms for their idea of liberty” that ban books and have pushed harmful policies for gay and trans kids who, until recently, could count on school, if nowhere else, as a safe space to be themselves before going home to hide again.

These are the same people destroying public education in the name of what they call parents’ rights. These are, as mentioned, people who have ideas about what “liberty,” and “freedom” entail, and yell about the 2nd amendment any time white men (and it’s always white men) shoot kids at schools (which leads me to ask if anyone yelling about that has ever looked up the word “amendment” in the dictionary, or had any honest history lessons about how the Constitution was constructed, and why? It was made to adapt to progressive thinking and change. At least as far as I know, anyway, as an American Studies scholar).

Anyway, here’s the deal:

Your kids are smarter than you think these days, no matter how hard you work to keep them stupid, isolated, and afraid of the world (and again, I’m not supporting the freedom of children to look at porn – please keep reading). And there are probably more pedophiles in your church than anywhere else in your near vicinity.

Literally every 12-year-old I’ve asked (and there have been several, since I have one) knows what a VPN is and how easy it is to get one. Most of them have already looked at porn on the internet anyway. If you think you’re “protecting” your kids from anything anymore, good luck with that unless you live in a cave. You’re completely fooled if you think the Amish, or any ultra-Orthodox religious communities, for that matter, are comprised of nothing more than entirely innocent and/or devout people.

Instead of barking at everyone about how “sex is between a man and a womern married bafore God,” it might be a good idea to talk to your kids about safe sex practices. Or at least let them attend sex ed at school for this. In lieu of that, make sure you have good health insurance in case your kid picks up an STD from the back seat of someone’s car, and definitely make sure they’ve got a lid on childrearing since you’ve also made abortion harder to come by. And if you’re poor, you should probably also teach them how to navigate government assistance programs in case your church doesn’t want to provide everything for a teen mom with a child born out of wedlock.

If you don’t want your kids to access stuff on the internet, you, as a parent, can actually ensure this far better than statewide laws that infringe on peoples’ privacy, which is what the most recent law in North Carolina does. You, yourself, can set up parental controls on any device your child has. Hell, you can even set up parental controls on your home network. Guarantee this is going to have far more success than just trying to tell everyone else what to do. They’ll still find a way to hide in a treehouse with someone’s phone though, at least if you allow them the freedom to actually go outside and play. Children are naturally curious beings.

Unfortunately, those of us who’ve been pushing back against your nightmarish and contradictory ways have been doing so in a fairly disorganized vacuum, which is one of the many reasons you and your religiously right nationalistic notions have been able to cement themselves so easily. We over here on “the left,” if you will (another misnomer) are so disorganized because we don’t believe in a set way of going about things, and we argue a lot (it’s called the Socratic method). Change is a constant. Progressive thought embraces change.

And also, you’ve crossed a line for certain people now that you’ve stepped on the particular freedom of getting off in your own home. Maybe this, in the end, will be the thing that encourages more us (I’m talking to you, tech bros) to vote these idiots out of office so this state is actually somewhere that’s truly safe to live. For everyone.

Our state population grows by the second, and as much as I have never had a whole lot of faith in ballots, I have faith in money, and so does North Carolina. People are literally flocking here. Trust me, it’s not because is excited about Gilead, but because it’s still affordable, and because a lower business tax incentive and less legally-enforced responsibility to their workers has attracted “jobs” (if you’re not fortunate enough to have tech bro knowledge though, you’ll likely be working in a giant, windowless box, though – much of the Piedmont region has started to look like Idiocracy).

Regardless of whether you share my lack of faith in the political system, if you haven’t yet lost your right to vote, do it anyway. It only takes a second to fill out a ballot, but you might have better luck voting with your wallet. I dunno. Do something.