Figuring out identity

Fans of Athwart! Thank you for baring with me as I figure out what this newsletter is supposed to be.

I'm a marketing professional in conservatism, so my first thought is that it should be some sort of political newsletter. And while that's interesting during a speaker of the house vote. I find it dull when the talk is about banning gas stoves.

For the record, I love gas stoves. I just think it's a distraction that's never going to happen.

so perhaps I just turn this newsletter into the musings of a madman. Mad Men are interesting, and I'm certainly a mad man in more ways than one.

So here's what I've been looking at for the last week.

WARNING: It's very AI and esoteric-heavy. But I think very interesting.

AI image creation

I bought a subscription to the AI platform MidJourney. And I've been having a blast generating images and posting them on my Twitter. If you want to learn more about MidJourney and how to use it, I'm happy to write up a tutorial on how to get started. Please reply to this email if you'd be interested.

I genuinely think that creating AI Images will become a skill in the future. Getting stock images is incredibly expensive in terms of money and time spent looking for one. If I can type in a prompt and get exactly what I want, huge time saver.

In fact, I've already done that. The image below was generated using MidJourney and is going out in my organization's newsletter on Thursday. In two minutes I had the exact image I wanted for $7 a month.

Here is what I typed in to get that image:

Kansas farm in the summer, americana, warm, colored pencil sketch, pencil sketch, ar 3:2

It's goofy right? Like I said, it'll become a skill.

A Twitter thread that I enjoyed

Owen is an anonymous Twitter personality, so take what he says with a grain of salt. And I'll warn you now, this thread is the longest thread I've ever seen on Twitter.

It's an interesting story about how he used to use psychedelic drugs and how it all seems to tie in to mythology and psychology.

The Joe Rogan types of the world are spreading the word on these types of drugs, and they have no idea what they do to the body or society.

Widespread psychedelic use is coming into vogue. We need to be careful. These are powerful substances with a strong spiritual component.

This thread is a decent place to start:

I built an AI tool

I built a gimmicky little AI product. It's called, Personal Greek Philosopher AI

Essentially for $15 a month, you can have a text conversation with Socrates. It's NOT a fully fleshed-out product. So if you were to buy a subscription, know there will likely be bugs.

It's more just an experiment on my part. I wanted to build an AI product using the Python language, the openAI API, Replit, & Twilio. I'll eventually do a write up on it showing how I built it.

It was fun and didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. I guess I'm becoming a better coder, OR AI is getting easier to use.

Thank you for scrolling far this down. And thank you for being a subscriber. I know this may not have been what you originally signed up for. If you want to unsubscribe, I completely understand. But I think you should stick around. I'm not your run of the mill conservative, and I have unique opinions and observations you're not going to get anywhere else

Thank you,

Jon