Shitpost Jubilee
I have started & stopped Midjourney text 5 times now, because the contours of the stupid thing keep changing. There is Midjourney, yes, but they keep updating the algorithm. There is DALL·E, but now there is DALL·E 2, and I guess a few free options like Craiyon that let you shitpost more easily. Stable Diffusion came out, and it feels cursed enough to gently note once again that the only rules are the ones we make between each other. I am certain that another algorithm will exist by the time you read this.
But now I have inspiration to write about this, and it is in the form of my pal Henry. He is among the funniest people I have ever known, and we were in a pod together during the Bad Times®. Most of his jokes center around cursed internet stuff, making goofs on Zazzle mugs or editing the Weather Channel’s home page to say stupid stuff.
Midjourney, DALL·E, and Stable Diffusion take text prompts and turn them into images. They are trained with hundreds of millions of existing, actual images, and then tasked with drawing everything painstakingly themselves. The amount of computational power that goes into all of this is absurd, but some of the final work is truly beautiful and always fun to think about.
Midjourney has broken Henry’s brain and replaced it with one that only knows how to channel Midjourney. Henry speaks Midjourney now. I feel like there was a moment when he would wake up, make Dracula-themed images on Midjourney for 16 hours, and then go to bed. And he now has a Discord server for a few close friends, where anyone can post their Midjourney work – but in another, more accurate sense, we all just watch Henry do Henry stuff.
Name a famous person and Henry has made it into a Funko pop. Name a Norman Rockwell painting and Henry has turned it into an album cover where Elvis is barfing on it. Name a bad inspirational quote and it’s been turned into a WPA poster. I’m pretty sure there was a solid day where someone with a pumpkin for a head was baking apple pies for some unstated reason.
And then the queen of England died, thus beginning what my friends have collectively come to know as the shitposting jubilee. I found out the queen of England died when I went into Henry’s Midjourney room and found dozens of recent image prompts of the queen playing basketball with Kobe Bryant in heaven. At one point, she was turned into an Amiibo, finger guns to the heavens. Corgis were depicted crying in front of Parliament. She led a first line in New Orleans. She delivered pizzas to a hungover Boris Johnson. She headlined Coachella. There was an eight-hour break for him to sleep, presumably, and then the shitposting jubilee began again.
I haven’t had a whole lot of reason to laugh lately, but the 72 hours following the queen’s death have been, bar none, the funniest of the past five years of my life. I know this is ghoulish. The queen exists in that weird liminal space where I aggressively don’t care about the monarchy, but I also don’t like it very much when people die or a national psyche is rent asunder.
It must be so weird to be a member of that family. She is, despite everything, someone’s mom, grandmother, etc. And yet there is the queen as a real, flesh-and-blood person who died, and the queen as an image, as an idea, as a brand. Look past the person and there is really only artifice, being camera-ready as a full-time job.
Midjourney knows Queen Elizabeth II, because we do. It is extremely easy to say “queen elizabeth ii” in any Midjourney prompt and have one of the most famous people of the past 200 years instantly conjured, in high resolution, with the gloves and corgis and crown and celeste-green suit and everything, onstage at Coachella. Is this a way of remembering her, of celebrating? You can’t type “Nick Disabato playing basketball with Kobe Bryant in heaven” and watch me get dunked on in the clouds. Who wishes to live the sort of life where we can conquer an AI so comprehensively?