The importance of good gear

This is a post regarding musical equipment, but it could easily apply to any artistic or creative domain. Despite my already over-full guitar arsenal, I got another one recently (a gift for my 40th birthday, technically): the legendary Parker Fly. This one is a “pre-refined” version from 1997, and it’s really something special. It’s probably the best electric guitar I own now, and that’s saying something since my standards are very high and I own a lot of guitars. It brought back to my mind a topic that’s worth talking about, which I mention in my book Keys to Prolific…

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The Weird and the Horrible

Despite being called the father of horror, very few modern authors imitate H.P. Lovecraft. When they do, they tend to steal elements of his “world-building,” that is, they use the Cthulu Mythos or other elements of the stories and write in a totally different style from Lovecraft. This tends to miss what makes Lovecraft’s work compelling; it’s not the mythos itself, but how it is revealed that makes such an impact. Lovecraft is really Weird Fiction, not so much “Horror,” which as a literary genre solidified itself later in the 20th century. The feelings evoked are not merely fear, but…

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Syncretism

Those who study ancient history might be familiar with “Syncretism,” which the Romans practiced, where foreign gods are linked with the home culture’s gods and viewed as similar expressions of the same deity or various aspects of the many gods and spirits that governed the world. For the Romans, this was a practical exercise. The key to Rome’s success (to the Romans) was piety and maintaining the Pax Deorum, or “Peace of the Gods.” Having the favor of the gods, along with the ancestors (who gave the Romans the Mos Maiorum, or “way of the ancestors”), gave the armies victory…

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Why World of Warcraft’s Writing is So Bad

“Because the writers suck.” That’s the simplest answer. It’s a correct answer, in my opinion, but even a great writer would have a hard time working within the framework of modern WoW to produce a good story, much less good dialogue, quest text, etc. World of Warcraft was never known for having exceptional writing, but the past versions of the game were quite sharp and effective, producing long-lasting memories of characters, places, and events, while newer expansions have produced a grey blur of forgettable babble from interchangeable blobs of characters. But why? The emphasis on how the game is played,…

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Metaverse Sucks… and you will use it

Meta has ascended to memehood, and the Metaverse officially sucks, but not for the obvious reasons. And the reality is far more dystopian than you might think. What once was Facebook, now oddly rebranded to a word that describes nothing in particular, wants you to get online and get social, but this time… VIRTUAL. They even stripped the once cool-sounding “Oculus” of its name. I haven’t “explored” the metaverse as of yet (no meta headset and no extra 1,500 dollars to buy one, and if I did have the money, there are better things), but early reports are that it…

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Materialist Inversions of Solipsism

Well, we’ve come full circle from gnostics believing the material world is an illusion to materialists believing that consciousness is an illusion. People are often unaware of the materialist assumptions they hold and how they affect their view of reality, even when they lead to absurd, contradictory conclusions. Even an intelligent person like Scott Adams can end up in a silly place because of such assumptions—the primary one being that the material world is all that exists. Having read his view on free will in one of his books, he was almost at a compatibilist belief regarding free will (his…

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Politics and the Alternate Utility of Time

Next time you turn on the news, click to open an article, or read a long post/Twitter thread on politics, consider what else you could be doing during that time. Time, after all, is the one resource you can’t get more of. Unlike economies of trade, it is a zero-sum game. The concept of alternate utility in economics deals with how resources are best used. For instance, a piece of land could be used to grow 100 units of corn or 80 units of rice. Another plot could produce 30 units of corn or 50 units of rice. If corn…

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Materialism and Gnosticism

Check out a great thread by author (and attorney) Alexander Palacio: It’s odd that the extremes of materialism (in the philosophical sense, the belief that only the material is real and of consequence) end up in the same place as Gnostic heresy in denying the importance and reality of the body. According to the materialist, you ARE your body, there is metaphysically no separate spiritual “soul” that ascends to heaven or goes anywhere else. Thus one would think that the body is, therefore, the only thing that can be sacred because it is all humans are. However, the disregard for…

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Overcoming AI limitations in design.

In my first articles and videos on using AI art for book covers, I pointed out some of the real limitations of the current AI, which many laymen are going to miss: They are bad at composition, that is, mixing forms, scenery, etc. at different planes in one image They are bad at certain details, specifically hands, eyes, and noses. So, how can we overcome these issues? Well, if you are willing to do a little extra work, it’s easy. Instead of trying to fit every element you want in a picture into the AI prompt, you can make several…

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Using AI images for book covers

Today on my weekly Livestream, I designed a cover for an upcoming book using an image generated by “AI”—Midjourney, to be specific. The first hour has the cover design: There are several of these programs around with the idea that they can render images based on word prompts. Here are a few examples I made with the prompt “elven fantasy white castle towers on fire with apocalyptic purple sky and stormy ocean“ Here are the “final 2” images I came up with after upscaling and redrawing them: And here is the cover (note: in the video you will find out…

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