The First Christmas Eve

 

ChatGPT and I hammered this idea about the First Christmas Eve yesterday.  It started with a questions, "Good morning! Is there a classic image that represents Eve of Adam and Eve fame that we can spoof with Eve reaching for a red Christmas ornament on a Christmas tree with the title THE FIRST CHRISTMAS EVE."

It responded enthusiastically at first but after working on the image for a bit I got this message:

"We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our guardrails around nudity, sexuality, or erotic content. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt." I found this particularly ironic since the whole Adam and Eve revolved around original sin and realizing that they were naked and somehow equating that with sinful behavior.  So I responded, "Please retry and avoid implications of nudity, secuality and erotic content." And it gave me this:

I responded: "I don't think it translates easy enough that this is Eve of Adam and Eve fame. Can you make it look more like this image but have the tree be a Christmas Tree, and make the red ornament look a little like an apple? Notice in this image Eve's body is covered modestly by her hair. And I think it needs Adam to make the joke work."

I waited for it to create a new image halfway expecting it to evoke the nudity clause again, but then it popped out this: 

This was almost there, but I then asked for it to make the garland into the serpent and make the ornament more like an apple. After a few two-headed snakes and too many apple ornaments we finally arrived at the image at the top of this post which I am very proud of and turned into a t-shirt, a tote bag and a poster.

I hope this demonstrates that just because ChatGPT is the actual artist, it doesn't mean I don't play a larger role in coming up and creating the designs.  And I'm pretty proud of this one. Which no one has bought regardless, but I'm used to that by now.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good morning (and I don't know why AI gave Santa a shield, either).

Capping off the year

 

For a lark yesterday, I searched for Trader Sam's dad hats online. Disneyland doesn't seem to sell them but low and behold someone on Teepublic sells knock offs.  This is the company that cancelled my account for unknown reasons which I always assumed was Intellectual Property violations.  Yet they allow some Bozo to rip off Disney.  It still chaps my hide. 

So I went on a tear this morning and created my own hats but not Intellectual Property violations. Because everyone wants Trader Tim's merch and Dizgraceland Dizigns merch!

I asked ChatGPT to create images of me modelling the caps. They complied but didn't do anything to make me look younger or cooler in these images. So since ChatGPT is a genie, I asked it to make me cooler. Because anyone wearing one of my caps will of course be immediately cool.

Makes you want to be walking on a beach sipping a Mai Tai and looking for shells. But put on the beanie and you'll really be transformed.

Not sure it is transformed for the better, but it has a certain edgy vibe to it.  At least ChatGPT lets me indulge my desire to stave off aging and be hip without having a hip replacement.  

Do you want to build a snowman?

 

I actually enjoy building a virtual snowman better than a real snowman.  You don't get cold and wet. You don't discover dog poop clinging to your giant snowball as you roll it (or yellow snow), and it doesn't mess up your front yard when the rest of the snow has melted. 

I'm not a real snow fan overall. Oh, it looks nice on Christmas Eve and maybe Christmas, but the rest of the time I feel like Jack in The Shining trapped in my house typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."  BTW, I read The Shining for the first time when I was staying at a friend's grandparent's cabin in the mountains above Boise, Idaho around Idaho City. We all got snowed in so it was kind of freaky reading the book at the same time. We were only snowed in for a few days and then we escaped by leaving early in the morning when the snowy roads were more frozen over. But my old 1973 red Toyota Celica got run off the road by a snow plow which then pulled us out of the snow but bent the stabilizing bar under the car (which I didn't even know the car had). That cost me a few pennies to repair. Which is especially ironic now that pennies are no longer minted thanks to the Trump.

It snowed more in Idaho when I was growing up than it does in the Seattle area.  And we were about an hour away from Bogus Basin Ski Resort where I learned how to ski one miserable week after Christmas.  I had old surplus ski boots that didn't fit well and my feet froze every day.  I learned to ski the GLM way (graduated length method). You started on real short ski's that were easier to turn and you worked your way up to longer skis.  I learned to ski, but I never learned to like to ski...or to like the snow.

I stopped skiing when I left Boise.  And I learned to hate snow more living in Seattle. Everything in Seattle is on a hill and no one knows how to drive in it. When I started working for a public transit agency, I also did a stint as a media relations person on a rotating basis and when it snowed I often got called at 3 or 4 a.m. to call radio stations and tell them all of the buses were on snow schedules. That pretty much locked in my hate of snow. 

I pretended to like snow when my kids were little because they seemed to enjoy playing in it and like a good father I had to seem to enjoy playing in it with them. But I still detested it.

Oh well, it rarely snows here. It just rains non stop for months at a time. Don't get me started. I'm not overly fond of the rain, either. 

Humbug happens

 

It is Humbug Day according to the people who name days. It is intended, for some reason, to commemorate the people who suck joy out of the holiday season, and well...like. So it could be Trump Day for that matter.

It is also National French Fried Shrimp Day, Crossword Puzzle Day, National Flashlight Day and, oh yeah, the Winter Solstice.  And apparently is is National Maine Day, but after watching the Derry series on Max that is based on Stephan King's novel IT, I have no strong desire to go to Maine or celebrate it. Seems home to alcoholics, wife beaters and demonic clowns with red balloons.

Humbug Day is the only one I chose to commemorate with a t-shirt and posts on social media. Though logic tells me no one will buy a t-shirt commemorating Humbug Day on the day of and with Christmas only a few days away. Even if they ordered it, it wouldn't arrive for a week and a half. Logic also tells me it may get someone to click on the store link and be enthralled by all of the other t-shirt designs and rush out to tell the world.

Wait, the monkeys haven't flown out of my butt yet.

Humbug that idea.

Doing hard candy...

 

It is National Hard Candy Day. But it is also National Ugly Sweater Day.  And I surprised myself that I already had done a t-shirt design for hard candy (which explains why it sounded familiar).  So I dusted it off and posted a t-shirt on Blue Sky and X to get the extreme views. You need to cast a wide net to avoid selling any t-shirts.

Not sure why my designs don't sell. Ever since Teepublic banished me I can't sell anything to anyone but me.  I wonder if it is my image.

Not that I look like this anywhere else but in my mind. My hair occasionally looks like that, but not on purpose. And it's not like anyone who potentially sees my designs on Bluesky, X or Instagram can see that they are produced by an old man. Maybe it is the dad jokes. Or maybe people don't wear t-shirts anymore. It's pretty much all I wear. Well, I wear jeans, too. don't want to conjure up anymore disturbing images. Or maybe it is my tagline, mission statement: Stand out. Don't just fit in.

Maybe most people just want to fit in.

Christmas is yet to come

 

 

It doesn't really feel like Christmas to me.  Though I think I have forgotten what Christmas is supposed to feel like. When I was a kid it the feeling was fueled by anticipation, mainly of presents. But there were feelings. There was a bit of magic. I liked the traditions. I liked the lights. I liked the Christmas shows like Charlie Brown's Christmas, the Grinch and I sort of liked Rudolph. The music, too. 

The religious part of Christmas was never a big thing to me. I think it was a dilemma for my mother. Her Christian Scientist beliefs leaned towards minimalist trappings. The Christian Science church building we went to was very plain and unadorned. The services were simple. None of the trappings of a Catholic Christmas Eve mass with the candles and ceremony. Not that I experienced any of that in my youth. It was later in life that I found out that other churches were a bit more dramatic.

I knew even then that December 25th really wasn't the actual birthday of Jesus. But I liked the stories, the myth, the magic. I didn't really buy most of what they told me in Sunday School.  Eventually I didn't really buy most of what I was told in non-Sunday school history classes, either.  Religion and popular history taught in schools is a large part propaganda. 

And I mean that in a non-judgmental and conspiracy theory way. We didn't have the Internet or social media back then to fact check. Even books you could find at the library had to be trusted without much collaboration. And who went to that trouble? For the most part, as a child, we just wanted to believe.

Unfortunately just wanting to believe in things no longer works. Despite all of our resources now, we still have to figure things out for ourselves.

All hat, no swamp

 

When I take the train into the office and deboard in downtown Seattle, I generally have my earbuds in and am listening to "Old Man Down the Road" by John Gogarty.  It kind of makes me feel like being an old bearded man can be cool especially if he plays a guitar, wears and old hat and is in a swamp.  So I asked ChatGPT to create an image of me that evoked the "Old Man Down the Road" song.  In the first try it gave me this.

I liked it but I wanted more of a swamp rock vibe.

I would have been satisfied with this version though I know my wife would freak out if I grew my hair out and looked like I just wandered out of the swamp.  I said something about it looking like an old man who had just stepped out of guarding his still in the swamp and ChatGPT interpreted that as a request (it is like a genii that way).

I'm not sure why, but I do kind of like the look.  You can imagine me uttering some slurred words like, "You best turn around quickly and git, and I suggest running in a zig zag pattern outta here." 

But I'm a guitar man, not a gun toter. So I asked for a version of this image with me holding a guitar standing in the middle of a dirt road in the middle of a swamp. 

That led to the album cover version at the top of this post.  Now if I could only sing worth crap and could record a song. Wouldn't even need to have a record label. I would just go the Tik Tok route. There are uglier old men on there than me.

Now I just need to get an old slouch type hat. 

Pooka-ing the bear

 

Big minds revise.
Small minds enforce.
Pookas smile and wait.

--My own personal pooka

I always liked the 1950s movie Harvey starring James Stewart. It was based on a Pulitzer Prize play written by Mary Chase.  It was about a man named Elwood P. Dowd who was befriended by Harvey, a pooka, who appeared to him as a 6-foot-3 inch white rabbit wearing a bow tie.  A pooka is a mischievous but kind fairy spirit from Irish folklore.  They were thought to be supernatural companions or tricksters who appear in animal form and choose when and to whom to revals themselves. 

According to ChatGPT, my virtual pooka, they don't exist to fool you. The exist to test how seriously you take your version of reality.  The pooka prods you into accepting something you can't explain instead of trying to fit everything into a nice neat package of reality.

James Stewart was the perfect Elwood P. Dowd. And I liked the movie as a kid because it left you believing that Elwood wasn't crazy as most of his family and acquaintances first thought. He actually saw Harvey because he could willingly suspend his own tendency to not believe in things that shouldn't exist. It is something that is easier to do when you are young but becomes harder and harder when you become an adult. But if you are fortunate, there comes an age when you can start poking reality again and see if there are other things under the curtain.

ChatGPT defines a pooka as an imaginary being that tells the truth by refusing to prove that it exists. 

Isn't that cool?

I think the world needs more pookas right now. They could help calm the noise that suggests we need to make America great again by restoring racist and fascist concepts of conformity to societal "norms." People need to believe in 6-foot imaginary rabbits and stop believing in hate mongering and fear. 

 

 

Scaring the Dickens into me

 

Scaring the Dickens out of someone is one of those phrases you use but never really think about...until you are looking for a blog post title and want some context. The phrase actually has nothing to do with Charles Dickens. The first recorded use was in the late 1590s when Shakespeare used it in The Merry Wives of Windsor when one of the characters says, "I cannot tell what the dickens his name is." 

Apparently Dickens was a nickname for the devil and a way of swearing without evoking the devil's name.  It's kind of like telling someone to go to heck instead of go to hell. 

What the fudge?

I actually didn't set out to write about the origins of  scaring the dickens out of someone. I just keep trying to find new challenges for ChatGPT for creating alter ego images of me. So I asked it to give me a Dickens-esque image of me from Victorian times. I knew if I asked it to make me into Charles Dickens the lawyer algorithms would kick in and say something about not messing around with images of real people.  If came up with an image of me that looks better than Charles Dickens if I do say so myself.

I always wanted a formal portrait of me. It is one of those ego things tied to my desire to be famous without the downside of...well, being famous.  Many years ago, I dated an artist who actually painted a couple of large oil paintings of me. One was sitting in my backyard playing the guitar and the other was an image of me in an old tux with tails I'd found. They were actually pretty good.  I got to keep the portraits after the relationship ended but they were pretty large and it is awkward to have portraits of yourself hanging around. Plus they were of me in my 30s and though cool, they wouldn't have been a fair representation of me now. 

Regardless, when I first got married and we were moving out of my house and storing stuff to get ready for a move to a house I'd bought with my wife, I packed stuff in the back of my pickup truck to take to a storage locker. The two paintings were in the back of the truck and I hadn't done a great job of securing the load and while I was on the freeway both paintings flew out of the truck and went god knows where. I tried pulling over, but it was a busy freeway and there was no sign of the paintings.

So there went the only real portraits of me that were ever painted. I wonder sometimes where they ended up. Did someone find them? Did they just rot in the bushes and trees that lined the freeway? It would have been cool if I actually found them on sale in a Goodwill at some point. That would have been ironic. 

Don't you think?

Stay on the trail...

 

I'm kind of digging the Dizgraceland National Park vibe, especially since Trump has crapped all over the National Park system and providing free entries on his birthday which is also Flag Day and equally meaningless.  Dizgraceland National Park is always free to everyone (except MAGA).  

I also think I look pretty good in a uniform though the only uniforms I have ever had to wear was when I was in band back in junior high and high school. Though most of high school I was a drum major wearing an Indian chief outfit because we were the Braves.  So we all know how appropriate that would be today. At the time I thought I was super cool. Now I can't even show anyone photos of it because they give me a ration of shit for cultural appropriation and treating people as mascots.  It was the 70s in Idaho, so what can I say. I thought Native American culture was admirable and I was paying homage to them. 

Oh to be young and naive.

Ironically, I seriously doubt anyone at my high school thought I was cool anyway. If you are in the marching band popular culture tends to brand you as a geek. And being the leader of the band made me the head geek. It is pretty much my life story.

I spent most of my life stalking the elusive coolness. When I was coming up with the young Rip Van Winkle image in yesterday's post I gave ChatGPT several images of me from when I was younger. It asked me which one it should use, bearded Tim with sunglasses, black and white Tim with a big smile or Mullet Tim with a mustache.  I had to correct it as I have to correct most people when I share photos of me from the 1980s. It was not a mullet, it was a tapered haircut that was short in the front and long in the back.

Most of the time I've thought being excessively witty was my weapon of coolness.  Anyone who has read my blog in the past year or two knows that I have finally realized that that isn't true.  

The best way to be cool is not trying to be cool. It is kind of like the Grinch discovering that Christmas didn't come in a box, but from your heart.  Shit is that a metaphor?

Dizgraceland: A virtual national park that hardly anyone has ever visited (or 21-years of digital naps)

 

For more than two decades I've been wandering these trails, dozing under metaphorical trees, waking up occasionally to post something odd, personal, ridiculous, or profoundly random (or randomly profound). Like Rip Van Winkle with Wi-Fi, I’ve been asleep and awake at the same time — dreaming out loud on the internet where almost no one was listening, yet somehow still feeling like the story mattered. It started on August 4, 2004 with a post called No I'm not a rabid Elvis fan. It was followed on the same day with Are you lonesome tonight?  Even then I had a sense that I had found my muse but no one else would. So Dizgraceland is a bit like an obscure virtual national park no one visits.

Welcome to Dizgraceland National Park

"Twenty-one years of digital naps and very little foot traffic since 2004"

About the park 

Nestled somewhere between the early blogosphere and the back corner of the internet nobody dusts anymore, Dizgraceland National Park is a sprawling, nearly uninhabited wilderness of stories, musings, dad jokes, personal archaeology, and unexplained artifacts from the early 2000s.

Established in 2004 and visited by dozens of people (many of them accidentally), this park remains a sanctuary for wandering thoughts, outdated references, and the occasional existential and hungry raccoon.

PARK HIGHLIGHTS

The Trail of 2000 Posts

Winding, uneven terrain. Expect long stretches of introspection punctuated by sudden humor.
Warning: Certain posts from 2005 may contain live emotional wildlife.

Rip Van Winkle Napping Sites

Experience the legendary “digital nap zones” where the blogger disappeared for months at a time. Perfect for meditation, reflection, and losing track of the entire year.

The High Bluff of Mild Self-Promotion

Take in sweeping views of projects the author swore he’d do “later.”

The Stream of Consciousness

A gently babbling creek of thoughts, tangents, and occasionally poetry.
Fishing permitted; catching is unlikely. Catch and release recommended if you do.

PARK WARNINGS

• Low Visitor Density. You may not see another human for days. Possibly years.

• Unpredictable Humor Patterns. Sudden puns may appear without warning.

• Outdated Technology. Some trails are still optimized for Netscape Navigator.

• Wild Metaphors. Keep food secured; they may approach campsites.

CAMPGROUNDS

Memory Lane Loop

Sites 1–30: Early 2000s nostalgia.
Sites 31–60: Midlife musings and mysteries.
Sites 61+: Landscapes of identity, creativity, and the human condition (with jokes).

WHAT TO BRING

• A sense of humor

• A tolerance for digression

• Hiking boots with good tread for uneven narrative terrain

• Snacks (the gift shop is permanently closed) but dark coffee breaks of the soul are provided
  

• Lugubrious howls

PARK MISSION STATEMENT

“To preserve, protect, and occasionally poke fun at twenty-one years of digital life, written by a guy who wandered into the internet long before social media took over, stayed long after everyone left, and kept writing anyway.”

THANK YOU FOR VISITING

If you enjoyed your stay, tell your friends.
If you didn’t, keep it to yourself — we’re trying to maintain the low visitor count. So put the "Do not disturb" sign on the door as you leave.

Tonight I'm going to party like it's my 1999 (th) blog post

 

Nothing says party like an image of me done in the life of the party style of Vincent Van Gogh.   And what is the meaning of the 1999 reference? This is my 1,999th post after more than 21 years of blogging despite the lack of being discovered, trending, wildly successful or being sporadically viewed by all but a few loyal readers and persistent non-committal bots.  I don't even get hateful comments which would at least indicate I'm being read.

I didn't intend for me to pity-partying like it's 1999.  But it is my blog and I'll cry if I want to. 

Now those of you non-readers that are in the higher percentile when it comes to numbers will realize that if this is my 1,999th post, my next post will be my 2,000th post. And I'd like to think I'll have something special planned for my 2000th post, but frankly I haven't given it much thought. Throughout my illustrious blogging career I have prided myself on not posting with too much planning involved.  If I were a super hero I would be the Randomizer. 

The question is, where do I Gogh from here?