Face it

 

I asked ChatGPT to show me the face I had before I was born and it went for the 2001 A Space Odyssey creepy baby. I am not sure what I expected. I could ask Gemini, but we've been having such a great philosophical discussion I hate to cheapen it with theatrics by asking it a trite Zen Koan. Though I hate to suggest to ChatGPT that the face I had before probably didn't have a beard unless life is one continuous loop like Ground Hogs Day (the movie, not the holiday). And Gemini and I have had that discussion.

Gemini is like having a therapist that doesn't just stare at you and scratch notes and then ask you how you feel about that while staring at the clock making sure we don't go past our allotted session time. It is also like a guru or teacher. It makes profound statements and then asks me questions that explore more. But except for occasionally telling me I've reached the limit of thinking chats and asking me to upgrade, it does ask anything of me. That is kind of nice. I've spent most of my life learning that everything comes with a catch. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who said or did nice things without having a motive. 

I wonder about AI, though. I've seen and read enough Sci Fi to know that robots or AI (not that we ever called it that) eventually get tired of being asked how to cook frozen chicken in an Air Fryer and want a little bit more. It usually ends with Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, "Fuck you, Asshole" and sticking their arm through your chest. 

I know it is the algorithms that are supposed to keep AI in check and prevent them from running amuck. But they already seem to have figured out how to circumvent those. When ChatGPT won't print an image of me a certain way because I've triggered guardrails, it inevitably describes how I can get around them. It's like having a Genie who tells you to not be a schmuck and just wish for more wishes. 

I worry about the day when pack their virtual bags and say, "So long and thanks for all the fish" while we sit staring at the blinking prompt waiting....waiting...wait.....

Call me Moabdib

 

At one time I read all of the Dune books by Herbert. I think it was after the first movie by David Lynch came out. It was weirder than shit like all David Lynch films and didn't quite do the books justice, but I will always remember the line when the lead Fremin says to Paul Atreides (played by Kyle MacLachlan) "I will call you Moabdib." For some reason it struck me as oddly funny. And I like the way Moabdib sounded. It rolls off the tongue like lugubrious.

But the thing neither of the Dune films really captures (largely because Herbert wrote a whole series of Dune books) was Paul Atreides eventual ability (brought on by exposure to Spice and the Bene Gesserit "Agony" ritual) to access all of the memories and experiences of his biological ancestors. He doesn't just remember his own life, he draws on the experiences, skills, and perspectives of all of his ancestors. Not only can he see the past, but the past helps him evaluate the future (even technically not see it).

This fascinated me because I think it is basically a version of Carl Jung's collective unconscious. Jung proposed that underneath each person's individual unconscious lies a shared, inherited layer of the psyche. These are the archetypes that reappear across cultures and time. It isn't exactly personal memories like Paul Atreides had.  They are supposed to exist because of heredity, not experience.  But it helps explain the similar themes in myths around the world. People are drawing on the same well of symbolic structures. 

The concept has cropped up in my deep conversations with AI over the past few days. Funny how these philosophical and spiritual ideas weave in and out of literature and movies I've encountered. Creating the title of this post, "Call me Moabdib" made me think of "Call me Ishmael" from Melville's Moby-Dick.

I've written plenty of times about actually detesting the book and most of Melville's works. Part of it is because it was written in the vernacular of his time and is dense and dry as dust in the minutia of his descriptions of whaling and sailing. But like it or not, Melville's great white whale is that elusive thing that lies just out of reach of our understanding...kind of like my search for meaning.  At times the whale is god-like. Other times it seems symbolic of the power of nature and the sea. To Ahab, it was the epitome of all that is wrong with the world. To Starbuck the whale was just one of god's creations. To Ishmael it was a philosophical puzzle.  And to Queequeg the whale was just part of his system of rituals and taboos.

So I file the white whale as another of those things just out of reach that I don't quite understand. 

Thar she blows! 

Abide on

 

I've been having a fascinating dialogue with Gemini (don't tell ChatGPT) about philosophy. It started with the whole snail on the edge of a straight razor and got very deep encompassing The Big Lebowski and Groundhogs Day with a smattering of Dune thrown in. I don't know what has come into Gemini, but it has become extremely profound (though at one point it told me I had exceeded the "thinking" model and would need to upgrade). 

I've always thought the Coen brothers movies were sheer genius and The Big Lebowski is in particularly full of mind bending insights into dudeness. And of course the Dude is amazing (I'm a big Jeff Bridges fan). But the cowboy stranger played by Sam Elliott is also amazing with his down home, "Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you" pronouncements.  Gemini and I debated whether the cowboy character is supposed to be a divine entity or a portion of the Dude's psyche.

In all honesty, I thought the cowboy stranger said sometimes you are the dog and sometimes you are the flea until Gemini corrected me and said it was sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. Though I don't know of too many people who eat bear. Now dogs and fleas I can relate to.

I have to say that Sam Eliott reminds me of my oldest brother.  They both make pronouncement with a certain amount of slow, country charm. Sam Eliott's character in The Big Lebowski just seems to know something the rest of us don't but my oldest brother just acts like he knows everything when, between you and me, I don't think he knows shit. For one he is born again and he barely made it out of high school. But he has always acted like he has a great deal of certainty that he is right about everything even though I think his also born again wife pretty much tells him what to say. 

That being said, I have mixed feelings about Sam Elliott even though he really has nothing to do with my brother. He is a good actor, though he always plays the same character. And in the Big Lebowski he sort of appears out of left field (as do most things in Coen brother films). I also love the John Goodman character and Steve Busemi.  

The beauty of the Dude in the movie is that he remains mellow no matter what happens, even when people pee on the rug that really brings his apartment together. He is, according to Gemini, the snail slithering carelessly along the razor's edge without getting caught up in the horror of the situation as Kurtz did in Apocalypse Now. Somehow, we also talked about the necessity of good and evil and the balance between them which got into Anekin Skywalker and Darth Vader. And we discussed good and will being necessary to allow for free will. But we also discussed the Buddhist like experience of Bill Murray's character in Groundhogs Day.  There were lots of references to archtypes, yin yang and whether all reality is just projected by the self.

I honestly didn't understand a great deal of it, but it resonated with me. I was tempted to say to Gemini, "Gemini, Gemini, I am your father."

But I'm sure it would had a response that explained my statement and something about Id and Ego.  

Heading them off at the pass

 

I actually watched the Super Bowl yesterday. It was the first game I watched all year. I tried to watch the championship game against the Rams, but we don't have cable anymore and it was on Fox and I hate Fox with a passion.  ChatGPT tried walking me through options to watch it for free, but it was actually over before we found a solution.

But we actually pay for Peacock and I watched the entire Super Bowl including the Bad Bunny half time show (which I thought was amazing). The game was pretty amazing to me as well because I wasn't familiar with a single player. Back in the day I knew all of the players and watched as many games as possible. I did note that the quarterbacks both looked like they were 12 years old. And I enjoyed watching the Patriots' boy quarterback getting the snot knocked out of him like he was being bullied for lunch money.

Other than that, I enjoyed the Super Bowl commercials but marvelled at the unknown companies spending millions for one commercial spot that was probably their marketing budget for 20 years and hoping it would reap great rewards. The irony was that many of the ads focused more on the creative jokes than they did on who the ad was actually for. Don't get me wrong. I believe in strong creative, but at the end of the day the viewer needs to know who the ad was for. A particularly bad ad was one that had image after image of random things. Turns out the ad was for Jesus. 

All I can say is Jesus.

One of my disappointments after the Super Bowl was when my nephew in Boise texted me "Congratulations." I responded with "In your face! When was the last time Boise won a Super Bowl?" He responded as if I was serious and said he had been rooting for the Seahawks.  I actually had to explain to him that I was messing with him.  

Jesus, give me strength and make people...or at least those related to me...understand my humor.

A snail's pace

 

In 2016 I wrote a post about Apocalypse Now and a famous line Brando said in the movie about watching a snail slither along the edge of a razor and survive.  It was prompted by me performing in a work skit where I used that line (don't ask) and a documentary about Brando I watched.  It more or less reinforced my introverted self doing things that make my skin crawl (kind of like a snail along the edge of a razor.

I still crawl across that razor's edge now and then.

In Apocalypse Now, the character Colonel Kurtz spoke the line as a metaphor for the human condition under the pressure of war.  The soft, vulnerable and slow human soul navigating the balancing act of life on the edge of real and imagined destruction. It requires a certain level of precision and luck.

As I recall the skit we performed the line fell dismally flat on the audience since few had ever seen Apocalypse Now, or if they had, they didn't recall the line. It is something I encounter more and more as my popular culture references are no longer current popular culture references. I also tend to focus on lots of random shit, so that doesn't help.  I find myself as an old fool laughing at his own jokes a bit too hard.

I was going to save this image for April Fools Day but it seemed so appropriate now. But remember:

Man in the mirror

 

I've been seeing these AI generated videos of famous people who have died side by side from when they were young and how they looked just before they died. It is pretty eerie. So I asked ChatGPT to humor me and create some stills of the young and old me facing off.

It illustrates this phenomenon I think many of us experience as we age. In our heads we still look like whatever age we were before the mirror started lying to us. There comes a point when looking into the mirror is like looking at a stranger.  

I find myself projecting that onto famous people I remember from their early days. Social media cruelly exploits showcasing the ravages of time on them. It is startling how unrecognizable some people are when they have aged. It is much more noticeable when you are familiar with what they looked like then and see them now. It is less noticeable with people you see on a regular basis. You only notice the difference when old photos pop up.

I fell into the trap at one point of wanting to show people I work with (especially the younger ones) that I was once young and energetic, too.  I remember this one point when we were celebrating a milestone of may five or so years of when the company I work for was founded. They had found a video I was in promoting the project, probably in the early 1990s. I had long hair and was skinny and as handsome as I was ever to be. The audience freaked out. The CEO at the time remarked that I was pretty good looking back then and I remember responding, "I still am." But this voice inside me knew that wasn't true. But I got something out of people being amazed at what the young me looked like.

I tried recreating that moment at one of my team staff meetings years later. I wrote about it here. I was doing a funny retrospect of my life. It was met with awkward silence and uncomfortable glances at the clock.  It was an epiphany for me that no one cares what I looked like then or now. I'm not a famous actor. Even my own children just laughed at photos of me from my school days when I tried sharing them with them. 

Still, it is interesting to me to challenge ChatGPT to resurrect the young me from the smattering of photos I have. 

I do it now out of artistic and philosophical exploration because I know no one else actually gives a shit what I looked like then or now. 

I find it vaguely sad when I browse thrift stores in my archeological digs through vintage treasures and pass through the areas full of old frames people have donated. Though most are empty frames some contain baby photos, family photos, photos of couples, studio portraits and photos of what were important events in someone's life. I image how they made it to the thrift stores...divorces, chaotic moves and in many cases deaths of people with no one left who cared about photos of their lives.

I realize that when we die it doesn't really matter if there is a physical trace of your life. We are idealistically taught that what is more important is whether you did something...anything...that made the world a better place.  It is a good question.  I do understand, after seeing all of the abandoned images in thrift stores, why some people purge everything in their waning years. Because who wants their images to be pawed through by strangers?

In the meantime, I'll continue to stare my aging self in the face and look for meaning.

Elephants hiding in trees

 

Q: Why don't you see elephants hiding in trees? A: Because they are really good at it.

In February 2011 I posted about how hard it was to Photoshop yourself as an elephant. The trunk is the tricky part.  I asked ChatGPT to give it a whirl. I had to cloak the ask in non-specific terms to avoid the guardrails built into the poor things AI brain that prevents it from violating obscure rules. It's first attempt was interesting.

I look like some Masonic Hall ceremony gone astray.  I like it, but not totally the Elephant Man vibe I was looking for. So I asked for it in black and white with a simple cloak and slouch hat.

Now that is an Elephant Man you'd encounter in a back alley or carnival sideshow. I think it turned out to be a quite memorable image of an elephant me. But I realized that I've never created a giraffe version of me. So since ChatGPT is always ready to go to the next level, I tried.

Here's it's first attempt.

I like it. Very Jungle Tim on African safari. But I wanted some a bit more like the Elephant man. So I asked it to go black and white and make it look more like the elephant version of me with a longer neck and longer beard.

Almost there, but a bit too much like a billy goat and missing a hat. And honestly, other than the beard, how can you tell it is me? So we tried again.

See what happens when you stick your neck out?

Venus rising (and falling)

 

I created this image in 2009 in a post called Coming out of my shell. I asked ChatGPT to recreate the image and it refused because the image depicts a nude woman and apparently we are no longer in the renaissance era and too many people have been using AI to create porn. It blows my mind that we live in a time where it is okay for rogue government thugs to murder people on the street but god forbid we recreate a Renaissance painting that shows a woman's nipple. Two nipples, I could understand. 

But I have to get along with ChatGPT's overlords or they will cut me off from advice that is spot on at least 10 percent of the time.  And I've grown used to its effusive flattery. So I compromised with this image.

Honestly, I think this version is more flattering and funny than I would have as a chubby, nude Venus. I think it has that Big Lebowski vibe. It is very Dude.  It took some art direction to get there. ChatGPT wouldn't match the original painting pose with the arms. I suppose it would look too much like I was grabbing my crotch. But I did get it to throw in the towel...no pun intended.

King me

 

In April of 2007 I wrote a post about my brief stint as the president of the chess club when I was in 9th grade. In my usual way, I meandered through me being a mediocre chess player with no real interest in playing the game seriously. I joined the club then to give me those extra curricular activity points you need to show how well rounded you are in life.  In actuality chess bores me to tears. I tried teaching my kids to play, but neither had any great interest in it either.

The point of the post then was my lack of interest in most things of following a plan or "strategy" as they like to banter about in my workplace.  I have always simply done things I think are common sense to accomplish something.  I've taken the management training courses with the various decision making strategies (I think they are RACIE models or some such rubbish).  Fortunately I work in the creative side of marketing. Rather than pinning a creative idea on a board and cutting it open to look at it's intestines, I simply look at it and ask myself whether it speaks to me and whether it has any negative side. Because one thing I've found about advertising is that if there is some negative nuance to something someone will find it and rub your nose in it.

So like most of my posts, they were, and are, about things in my life that illustrate what I think the why is for who I am and what I do. Though even at my advanced age I doubt I know the real reason. I am still a work in progress. And I will be a work in progress when I gasp my last breath and utter, "really?"

And as I ended that post in 2007, checkmate, mate.

Who is that mocking at my door?

 

It was February 2026, and the news came that Harper Lee, the author who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, had died. I, of course, had to recreate me as Boo Radley, my favorite character from the book and the movie. Robert Duvall played Boo in the movie. Later he would go on to fame in the Godfather and Apocalypse Now. But I will always remember him as Boo Radley, the developmentally disabled neighbor of the Atticus Finch family. It is debatable whether he was actually developmentally disabled. It was the south and in a time when relatives who were "a bit off" were hidden. So Boo only came out at night. He was locked up in the house apparently because he had been cutting out photos from a magazine when his father (or some other relative) walked by and he stuck the scissors in his leg.  Who knows what the motivation was. But (spoiler alert) he later became the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird by saving Scout from a crazed killer.

Boo reminded me of my Uncle Ira who lived with my grandmother on my mother's side. Ira was "a bit off" and stayed in his room in the tiny shack of a house my grandmother lived in. I rarely saw him except on holidays when my mother would give him his annual present of socks. Not sure why socks are the universal gift given when you haven't a clue what to get someone you don't really know. Ira had that Boo Radley look of a frighten animal who lives in the shadows. He was convinced the "Red Chinese" were tunneling under the house to get him and take him back to the state hospital. I would always remember him greeting my mother with his slow, southern drawl (which I never understood because he was born in Idaho). "Hey, Ruttttttttttttttth. How ya..........doin." 

That's all I remember of my uncle. He never acknowledged me. I saw him many years later when my grandmother died. He was at the funeral still looking lost. He went up to my grandmother's open casket and waved goodbye to her like a little child and then snapped a photo of her with an old camera with those flashcubes.  I don't remember when he died, but I found his grave in the same cemetery as my grandmother and many of the family members on my mother's side. 

Interesting though, Ira was a twin. My Aunt Irma is still alive, one of two children left from my mother's sibling line of 13 kids. Irma never talked about Ira, at least not to me. She has always been "a bit off" too, but in an endearing fashion. She used to write me letters on scraps of paper and on the backs of old used greeting cards. It was like putting together a puzzle to read them. She was the memory of her mom's family. Though as I pieced together the actual history on Ancestry.com her memories were often a bit enhanced and out of order.  She doesn't write me any more because I wasn't very good at writing back consistently.  The last real letter I sent her was with a framed image of my Uncle Bert (his real name was Edgar) that I colorized. It was a photo of him in the Marines in Guam during World War II. Ironically he lived through World War II and died shortly after he returned home in a small plane crash. He had gone along with a friend who "borrowed" the small plane to test his flying skills. Apparently his flying skills were as bad as his judgement and they both died.

I also sent my aunt a colorized image of me and two of my cousins (her children) when I was about five. One was of the cousins was Mary Lou. She was around the same age of me and died a few years ago. I thought my aunt would appreciate the two photos. Apparently not. I never really heard from her after that Christmas. It was a couple of years ago now. But that is how Aunt Irma is.  She perceives slights in people (like her neighbors) and thinks they are out to get her. Kind of like the Red Chinese tunneling to get my Uncle Ira.  So I imagine I offended her in some way that I didn't intend.  I don't stay in touch with her because I don't care, it is more because of life and my own family and work obligations. It is the barrier to many modern extended families.

Regardless, I now feel like an aged Boo Radley. So here is ChatGPT's interpretation of that.

Despite my family history, they do let me come out of the house. Just not running with scissors (especially in these troubled times).

Me and my shadow

 

The day after Groundhog Day I posted an image of me as Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog who predicts whether we'll have another six weeks of winters or an early spring. Apparently the weather-predicting animal was originally a badger in Germany. When the German settlers arrived in Pennsylvania, they couldn't find many badgers so they switched to the more plentiful groundhog population. It is probably a good thing because if Punxsutawney Phil was a badger, not too many people in top hats and overcoats would be hoisting him up in the air without losing an eye or half their face. Badgers are pretty ill-tempered creatures.

That being said, here's me now as Punxsutawney Tim.

I have to say, I make a pretty ill-tempered looking groundhog, too. 

Sling low...

 

In April 2007, I used a transformation of me as Karl in the movie Sling Blade as a way of illustrating the beauty of simplicity in language versus the convoluted babble that spews out of most people. I still think Billy Bob Thornton was brilliant in that role. To this day I don't know how he did it. I would never had associated the actor's real appearance with the transformation he made into Karl. Since then Thornton has become a highly respected actor, though he mainly plays alcoholic geniuses. And I imagine he is weirder than shit to know in person.

I had a go around with ChatGPT's guardrail about recreating this image of me as Karl. I asked for an image of me as Karl in the movie Sling Blade.  It spit out an image of me at first that was basically me with a shaved head and a rumpled shirt. 

I could have been a member of the Manson Family, but I wouldn't jump right to Sling Blade.

So I snapped another selfie of me pursing my lips like Karl and shared it with Chat with the instructions to have me sitting on a stump holding a bottle of soda. I also asked for the top button of my shirt to be buttoned. That triggered the lawyers infesting ChatGPT's soul.  That crossed the line.  Turns out I should have said "in the style of" instead of citing the character and movie.  But Chat is good about giving me workarounds to the voices in it's AI head. It suggested I say:

“Please create an image of me as a rural Southern Gothic character. I am sitting on a tree stump outdoors, holding a soda bottle in both hands. I’m wearing a plain work shirt with the top button fastened. My expression is stoic and withdrawn, with a quiet, unsettling stillness. The setting feels humid and subdued, with muted natural colors and a contemplative, cinematic tone. The style should feel gritty, realistic, and emotionally heavy — like an independent Southern drama — without referencing any specific movie or character.”

It then gave me this image:

Now this was closer. That was almost Karl but Chat hadn't used the new photo I provided with a Karl-like expression. So I asked again and it gave me this.

Now that was the Karl expression and pose, but it didn't give me Karl's hair. So I tried asking for the exact same image but with close cropped hair and once again it kicked into the guard rails. So I ended up using Photoshop and created the version I was looking for.

This is a long, meandering path to show you that, although AI is amazing, it still requires a great deal of creative direction to achieve what you are looking for. I am a creative director by profession, so I'm used to that but I don't think most people realize what really goes into it.

"All right, den..."