chuckledresignation

[chuckledresignation]

A nuanced (but direct and clear-eyed) read that is utterly worth your time.

Ok, I’m going to write one last thing about AI Art. This time, with no trolling or sassy memes. So I hope y’all can read it with an open mind.

So there was considerable pushback to my previous post and there were some very valid POVs. To the people who said stuff like “AI is being used unethically and I don’t want to f_ck with it,” Yes! You are right to feel this way and I respect that position. It’s equally valid to say “AI is being used unethically, so I want to explore the limits of this technology and how it affects the world we live in.” and it’s also equally valid to say “AI allows me to concept and source visuals that I can then process into my own artworks.”

But here’s the thing. There is more than one kind of visual art practice and many of them are not existentially threatened by generative image AIs. If anything, the artists who are threatened by this tech are the ones who make a living off of making representational imagery for a number of cultural industries. This in itself is a privileged position that isn’t afforded to most visual artists. Many artists who exhibit and publish around the world don’t get the opportunity to live off of their work, they have to teach or work in adjacent industries to survive. This is especially true for new media artists like myself.

That said. It’s obvious that these generative image AIs are quite adept at simulating visual data. But anyone who has used Midjourney or Dalle2 can attest, there’s so much that these AIs can’t and won’t do. Visual art is not just the mechanical simulation of visual style.

Here’s what generative image AIs can’t do, it can’t create images with a sense of:

Concept

Materiality (Physical or Digital)

Criticality 

Yes, it also can’t create hands and it’s not that great at drawing Black people either. But more importantly, AI can’t imagine what it means to work with materials, whether it’s the scratched up photos of Adrian Piper, or the glitch artifacts of a specific image format. Generative image AIs can’t create conceptual art and it can’t look at or arrange images in a critical way. What I’ve noticed is that many artists (not all ofc) who work on these levels of meaning are not threatened by AI, many of them see it as an interesting tool that they may or may not use. Working with these layers of meaning is what keeps artists ahead of the curve in terms of how these automated technologies are developed.

There were similar hysterics with the advent of photography, and it took many decades for photography to be accepted as an art form. “You just have to push a button,” they’d say. “Photography is going to kill the fine art of painting.” yada yada. Photography certainly didn’t kill painting, if anything, painting was freed from the burden of representation. We wouldn’t have cubism, or suprematism, or abstract expressionism, or pop art without the development of photography. It’s true that many portrait artists lost their gigs with photography, but overall humanity’s creative drive survived and flourished.

(Side note: Generative image AIs are going to eff up photography in many ways, some scary, and I think as a post-photography artist, it’s important to interrogate these dynamics rather than disavow it. But that’s my imperative. Stock photogs and some fashion photogs are going to get screwed, but not photojournalists or documentary photogs as much.)

So yes. Generative image AIs are basically appropriation machines and, as far as appropriation machines go, its like the equivalent of a visual art sausage maker. It averages all the images scraped from the internet into a kind of fast-food aesthetics.

But here’s the rub. Generative image AIs can’t imagine what doesn’t already exist. Every output is the result of averages from existing visual data . AI will never replace an unfettered imagination. This is another reason why the whole NO AI ART movement doesn’t speak for all artists, because many of us are striving create images that haven’t been created before.

But I get it, this is Tumblr, and since the great purge of 2018 the dominant aesthetic has been fandom-based art, which relies on borrowed aesthetics much in the same way that AI does. I think the reality is that many artists who work in this niche are going to get royally f_cked and my heart goes out to them. It won’t be the AIs that do the f_cking, but the IP owners like DisneyMarvel, Sony, Epic Games, Nintendo, etc . They will be the first to use generative image AIs so that they can save money by not hiring artists. This will be especially tragic for the privileged few who went to art school to land industry jobs.

These existential threats to artists are ultimately a question of labor rights as opposed to technology.(UNIONIZE!) Appropriation is literally the engine that drives all art from the beginning of time. Every artistic tradition has grown because of appropriation. Whether it’s blues or classical music, Shakespearean tragedy, renaissance paintings, pop art, conceptual art, hip-hop, you name it, there has been appropriation. The question about whether appropriation is good or not, is a question of where capital is flowing to. Like Rock n Roll is crap because it channeled capital from a Black musical tradition to the hands of white musicians. But hip-hop was great because sampling (a real art form, like AI art) reversed that trend in that you could repurpose white people music into a new urban Black musical tradition. Ofc this is a simplistic summary, look at how long it took Biz Markie to get royalties, etc 

So yes, Generative Image AI Services are appropriating art works in ways that are harmful to some artists and these artists should get royalties every time their name is conjured up in a text prompt. But I’m sorry, this doesn’t mean that “artworks are being stolen.” Nothing has been stolen.

What people don’t realize was that many of these image models were created years ago. Data was scraped from the internet on a mass scale and this was all legally sanctioned because of Fair Use Laws that protect researchers who want to scrape data. These datasets, like LAION-5B which itself is based off the Common Crawler dataset, are open source and freely available. They were created for research purposes within research settings and that is totally legitimate. Fair Use Laws are essential to artists and data scraping is one of those things that can be used for good or evil. But the way these AI models were trained was completely legal. What is ethically dubious and f_cked up is how corporations used these legal mechanisms designed to help artists and researchers to create a privatized service product. Again, this is why I say, “you don’t hate AI Art, you hate capitalism”

The reality is that an artist can copyright an image, but not a general style. This idea that every artist on ArtStation has some inalienable originality and uniqueness to their work is the result of a hyper-individualistic capitalist ideology that is utterly out of touch with how art has been historically produced. Since the advent of mechanical reproduction, the magical aura of the art work has long been dead. Authenticity and originality are marketing buzzwords and not facts.

These “AI stole my art” arguments are crouched in a deeply regressive view of copyright and intellectual property, because very few artists, if any, would be able to prove in court that an AI plagiarized their works. AIs are sophisticated averaging machines, so the more an artist’s work appears to be copied, the more datapoints of their works and similar works exist in the training model. Proving that AI “steals art works” would also mean dismantling Fair Use Laws, which actually protect artists from predatory corporate IPs. 

Digital remix culture, fan art, hentai, all the things you dearly love and breathe on this Tumblr site would evaporate without Fair Use and it’s hella naive to think that if one of these illustrators actually proves that AI “stole their work,” that Disney and Studio Ghibli and Nintendo won’t come around and say that illustrators are in turn stealing their precious IPs. Copyright laws exist to protect the ruling class. There’s a reason why all us lefty new media artists release works as CC. (Side note: Still waiting to see an artist from the Global South make a “AI steals my arts” argument, so far i’ve only seen US and EU-based artists fret.)

And there is a sad irony in all of this. None of my works were used to train AI even though Tumblr was among the sites that were scraped. (I never used ArtStation or Deviant Art bc they don’t eff with experimental media artists) The reason is that there’s a preference for images that are algorithmically legible. The effed up reality of internet platforms is that algorithms judge your images before distributing them. Glitch art and experimental media arts are usually judged to be low quality content by the instagrams and tumblrs of the world. I had like 200 abstract images flagged during the great purge of 2018 that I appealed and won, because these algorithms don’t have a clue about what is art and what isn’t. Everything on ArtStation, stock image websites, are easily legible by nature, and as such, easy to algorithmically appropriate. Artists who know how to create works that are algorithmically illegible will thrive in the post-AI era.

And this leads me to my final point. Many artists, like myself, are drawn to AI for what I call “Liminal Aesthetics.” It’s not about how good the AI can approximate an image, but how bad it is. Many of us are interested in these mal-nourished images. The weird faces and hands, the lack of proportions, the weird shapes, and unexpected textures. The thing though, is that as these generative image AIs get more advanced, the liminal aesthetics are lost. The more these AIs get better at parsing natural language, the more basic and unaesthetic the outputs. So for many artists, this AI moment is temporary. As DALLE2 and MidJourney will ultimately turn into a fancy clip art generator that will replace stock image and stock graphics sites, from iStock to Sketchfab. That’s why I think it’s important to embrace this shit now, because these gorgeous liminalities will soon be a historical artifact.

To conclude, I will say this, and this is very important. The trad art world and their system of values is dying. In the post-digital world of infinite images that aren’t bound by physical scarcity, the rarest and most valuable images are the ones that are remembered, shared, and viralized. If your art is being copied or replicated, even by an AI or a bot, that means that your art is surviving this new era. There are worse fates than having your art copied.

That worst fate is censorship and forgetting.

The image at the top is [ILLUSTRATION #4j2492D] by jonCates, he describes ths AI work as “The Artificially Illustrated Glitch Western Primer for Machine Learnerrs,” and it’s part of a much broader project of creating the first “Glitch Western” based on historical narratives of Black and Chinese people in the West. Most of this project isn’t AI-based imagery, but lovingly crafted video and game art.

Some may not know this, but jonCates was big on Tumblr before the purge of 2018. He’s an og glitch artist and his “Dirty New Media” tumblr was a veritable museum of lewd glitch arts. I remember being so proud when my boo’s glitched bootie ended up on that page. The site was a treasure. Sadly though, Tumblr deleted all record of the Dirty New Media blog as well as jonCates’ tumblr of personal work. All f_cking gone forever. This is the real tragedy of censorship and forgetting. A whole culture lost. 

So why cling to this destructive dynamic because you read a hot take about AI by a privileged artist working in gatekeeping industries? What is copied and appropriated can still live on and we all can do better and fight the power where it resides instead of vilifying other artists. Cheers, shout out to everyone who read all this <3

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Saturday 5/5/18, 7p I’m bringing you that real real about The Truman Show @ Improv Boston. I have seen this movie 43 times.

TIX: https://ibthetrumanshow.eventbrite.com

[chuckledresignation]

My *Personal* Recommendations for Extreme Beginners in Investing

Below is a copypasta of an email I sent to a friend last summer who reached out to me seeking some beginner's investor advice. I AM BY NO MEANS AN EXPERT, but I consider myself ever so slightly more savvy than average now and a few years ago I knew nothing, so if you're feeling overwhelmed at this point I think the resources below may be a good starting point.

My buddy was of course in his own particular situation so I'd say your first two goals should be 1.) learning the extreme basics of investing (i.e. what's a stock vs a bond? what is a tax advantaged account? What are those advantages? what's an index fund, etc.) and 2.) If available, get into your company offered 401k IMMEDIATELY if you are not already. I have no idea what your comfort levels/knowledge are so if you're not even quite sure what a 401k is don't panic...but learn quick. You will feel so much better and have a lot of peace of mind once you've gotten even a basic  handle on this and it won't take long!

AGAIN: I can’t stress enough how much I’m NOT an expert in this field. I’m not offering anything more here than some resources that helped me personally. I’m sure there are more knowledgeable people than me who would steer you otherwise and if you feel that you like what they say more, then by all means follow that advice. What I can tell you is that I wish I had been exposed to everything here years earlier than I was.

I have no idea what your current familiarity is with investing and investing basics. My mom made me sign up for my old job's 401k as soon as I was eligible (thank god) but at age 30 I could not have told you what the difference between a stock and a bond was, or what a mutual fund was, or anything like that. However after taking in the resources below I def feel pretty comfortable making moves in the very tiny area of finance that I need to know about in order to handle my own stuff. Hopefully these will help you too. Books: I Will Teach You To Be Rich - Nothing in this book is particularly groundbreaking and if you had a parent who was a financial planner you would probably know all of it before entering college but it is without doubt the book that righted my financial ship. Hugely important for me. Before I read it I kind of struggled with money. Half of that was because my old job paid peanuts and I was at it for too long but partly because I lacked a lot of the basic knowledge this provided. I read it at 30 and it changed things for me but I wish I'd gotten it at 20. It covers all the main bases including budgeting, how to set up a largely automated personal finance chain so that all of your saving/investing/bill paying gets done on a schedule that you barely look at, buying a car and house, and some great investing basics. You're a homeowner and I have no doubt your financial acumen is way better than mine was 3.5 years ago but I recommend this to anybody. While not specifically devoted to investing the section on it provides some crucial fundamentals like: make sure you do it, period. Even if you do it in the most minimal hands off way possible, the importance of going with low cost index funds vs individual stocks or actively traded funds, how to determine which ones are good, how to read a fund prospectus, etc. The author also actively maintains a blog and mailing list which I read regularly but it's more focused on starting up your own business than investing specifically. Can't recommend the book enough.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - Ask most any expert and I'm fairly sure that this will consistently be in their top 5 investing/money books all time. It's written by the guy who was Warren Buffet's financial hero. It's pretty short and to the point and hammers home the principal message that for 90% of investors out there the way to go is low cost index funds. You simply do not need to be out there messing around with specific stocks, high cost mutual funds, or exotic offerings. Find a cheap fund that tracks the the s&p 500 and stick with it. What's great about this aside from being very readable is that he offers consistent examples about what's likely to happen if you do what he adivses verses not and backs it up with numbers. The Millionaire Next Door - This isn't directly about investing but it has been extremely helpful in my financial turnaround and has helped me think of how I'll one day teach my kids about money. The basic premise is that Americans have a stock image of what a millionaire looks, thinks, acts, & spends like -  and it often involves nice cars, big houses, spoiled kids, etc. Instead these 2 guys just sat down and interviewed a bunch of actual millionaires and found out how they got there, how they live now, and how they approach spending and investing and teaching their kids. It's not what the vast majority of people would expect and this book is definite motivation to help the reader bring their practices in line with those of people who have actually had a lot of financial success.

If You Can - If you want to jump in and don't have a lot of time this is a 99 cent ebook that you can read in like 3-4 toilet sessions. The quick and the dirty. This is a great resource if you're on the track of "I think I should be investing but don't know how how or even really why". It's def worth that dollar.

Investing Made Simple - Another great quickie. A bit more robust than If You Can but still under 100 pages. If you read the items above there's not much new here but I like this guy's style and he writes the financial newsletter than I read the most often (below).

Blogs/Sites I don't check up on these sorts of things as often as I used to because honestly once you internalize the fundamentals detailed in the above resources and then set up the automations to make them happen you really don't need to be looking at any of it more than once a month (or even just 4 times a year). But they're great resources to have:

Investopedia - Basically what it sounds like. This is the wikipedia of investing. If you run across a term that you don't know search for it here, you will get an extremely detailed answer. They have a beginning investor online course which is really cool and informative and they also have a daily mailing list. I get it and it's good but to be honest 80% of the emails are covering topics way more in-depth and esoteric than the average investor like us will ever need. They also have cool general financial interest articles. The Oblivious Investor - This by Mike Piper who Wrote Investing Made Simple (above). Get the newsletter. It comes twice a week and in each one he answers a reader questions and provides links to the best financial articles he's come across recently good stuff.

Nerd Wallet - This is like Cnet reviews, but for financial products and services like checking accounts, credit cards, brokerages, etc. Really great comparison tools for when you're, for example, searching for the best brokerage...which it sounds like you will be soon (FYI: I use Fidelity for my retirement accounts and TD Ameritrade for my medium term "I might try and buy a house one day" investing. I use RobinHood (which offers free trades) for my "this is my entertainment play money and I'm going to try and pretend to be the wolf of wall street on my lunch break and buy some individual stocks" investing....AKA gambling. Hope this info is helpful!

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As you may remember from my last newsletter I recently passed the Jeopardy! online test and had the opportunity to do a live audition in Boston. While they give you no feedback of any kind at the audition I think it well. Now I just wait up to 18 months for a call that may never come. And while I have *no indication whatsoever* that I will ever actually make it onto the show I have decided to prep like I'm going to be by putting in a little bit of studying & tape review everyday. Here's a game I watched recently which I LOVE.

It's from 7/24/15 and is the fifth game of then reigning champion Scott Lord (who'd racked up an impressive $93,402 in his previous 4 games). I found this one randomly on YouTube and had not seen any of Scott's previous matches. This was an important game for Scott because aside from any additional $$$ a win would bring it would also mean he'd pretty much lock in a spot in the Tournament of Champions later in the season for a chance to win even more. Scott, a later-middle-aged construction attorney, is a very good Jeopardy! player but right out of the gate he and the contestant at the second lectern (Tracy) were getting absolutely smoked by the new challenger in the 3 spot, Sam.

Sam had one of the most dominant opening rounds I've seen in a minute. At the first commercial break (after 15 questions) he was sitting on $6,200. Scott had ZERO and Tracy was in the red at -$400. By the end of the Jeopardy! round Tracy had admirably climbed her way back to $2,400 which was just behind Scott who'd made it to $2,600 but Sam was way ahead at $8,000. Things did not look great for our returning champion.

Time out:  I occasionally instruct one-off standup comedy workshops for newbies (generally people who’ve been at it for 6 months or less). I'm not necessarily certain you can teach someone to be funny so I instead focus on basics like stagecraft, etiquette, how to approach an open mic, the importance of learning how to host, etc etc. But one of my core lessons is the importance of just performing A LOT and watching people who have performed way more than you so that you can learn from them. I always say that invariably you will one day be at a show that is not going well. The audience is unenthusiastic, the energy is low (or hostile), and none of the young comics are getting laughs. And then a veteran comic will take the stage and will somehow turn it COMPLETELY around and they’ll bring the audience to life, they’ll get huge laughs and applause breaks, they’ll do effortless crowdwork, and you’ll sit there amazed asking…how??? And the answer (aside from them probably just having better and more polished material than you) will largely be because THEY’VE BEEN THERE BEFORE. At some point in their careers (probably at several points) they were the relative novice who just bombed but saw the person after them crush and they internalized some part of that and drew on it when it was needed. They've been in that room before, they've looked at that crowd before. Veterans don’t get rattled, they’ve seen it all and they focus on getting the job done. This applies to most performing arts and competitive sports. Raw talent, ambition, work ethic, good teaching/coaching, etc are all ridiculously important - but experience (and the calm it brings under pressure) will get you through on the days when you feel weak, when your competition is especially fearsome, when the general vibe of the situation is just poor…and when you’re getting your ass kicked on national television by some upstart youngster. 

Entering Double Jeopardy! Scott reached deep down into the well of poise and self-confidence afforded to him by virtue of his previous 4 wins and his 30 year life-experience edge on Sam (a postdoctoral researcher) and proceeded to take back what was his in such an amazing display of comeback magic that I ended up shouting at the screen. Do you understand me? I sat alone in a dark room eating scrambled eggs for dinner and applauded the conclusion of a 2 year old game show episode in unbridled admiration. I mean the dude was just not rattled. Tracy too was no slouch and also fought a great fight on her end in the second round. In fact she was leading Scott by $200 going into final jeopardy. But still Sam, who had been visibly off his game once he wasn't in such a stark lead had the edge over both of them with $14,400. But they don't name champions until the game is totally over and after final Jeopardy! (a clue I did not get correct myself) Scott was the only contestant with correct answer leading to a wild victory with $14,600 for him, zero for Tracy, and the young upstart with just $400. If you're a general fan of Jeopardy! Or of comebacks in general trust me when I recommend watching this episode to you.

Lessons:

--It ain’t over till it’s over

--If at first you don’t succeed dust yourself and try again

--No matter how bleak the situation seems: Never. Stop. Competing.

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So if you don't know, I'll tell you: I. Love. Trivia. 

I was an officer in our Quiz Bowl club in college, I've acted as both an assistant and Quiz Master for The Big Quiz Thing for more than 5 years, a loss in the National Geography Bee qualifier against my best friend in 8th grade is one of the great tragedies of my life, I've spent untold hours deep diving into random wikipedia articles over the last decade in order to try and prevent something like that from happening again, and...of course...I watch a lot of Jeopardy!

Back in the 7th grade I used to face a daily existential dilemma when 7:30p rolled around because I had to choose whether to keep watching my favorite scripted show Highlander (which ran 7-8p) or else switch over to Trebek and get my quiz fix. The days before DVR were dark indeed. I even auditioned for the Teen Tournament back in 8th grade but while I did well enough to make it through the written test round I got absolutely murdered in the mock game (outbuzzed, wrong answers, forgetting to put things in the form of a question, etc...just a complete collapse).

As such I was absolutely thrilled to get an email back in October telling me that I'd passed the online test that I took a few months ago and that I was invited to come in for a live audition on 11/15. I spent the month watching tape, cramming trivia, practicing my buzzer speed, learning the nuances of Alex's voice, and polishing fun lil anecdotes about myself. All I'll say about the audition is that I was very happy with how it went and it was a really cool experience.

What happens now? Well I just wait by the phone for 18 months for a call that might not ever come. They don't tell you anything about how you did at the audition but barring something unexpected I just sit on their contestant rolls for a year and a half and if they can use me they'll call. If not I audition again in 18 months. In the meantime I'm continuing to study as if I'll be on and I keep happily enjoying the day dream. I'll let you know if anything develops.

FYI: I now watch this video every day.

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The Truman Tell

I’ve watched "The Truman Show" more than anyone you know & I keep coming back to the scene early in the film where Truman visits the newsstand to pick up a paper for himself & a few glamor mags that are ostensibly for his wife but which we soon learn are really just collage materials for his tragic stalker/reminiscence project aimed at recreating the face of the one person who ever made him feel an authentic emotion.

I can now honestly say this is one of the most chilling (yet subdued) frames I've seen in cinema. It’s pretty much a perfect depiction of the tightened noose of late capitalism around all of our necks.

As we know, nearly everything seen on the "Truman Show" TV program (cars, clothes, packaged goods, etc) is for sale. The products that are placed for display within the global broadcast are as essential to its success and longevity as Truman himself. This is true for the mags at the stand. Those which Truman can see are there both to sell subscriptions to the worldwide audience AND to subtly induce Truman to certain behaviors (ex. The multiple copies of "Child" meant to subtly supplement his wife's urges to have a baby...for the inevitable ratings bonanza and product diversification which that plot development would bring).

The excessively creepy part is that there are publications placed *outside* of Truman's view, above & to the side of the vendor. These can *only* be placed in frame for the "benefit" of the TV viewer (really for the benefit of the sponsors). We see Dog Fancy (copies of which are also in Truman’s view) getting the full cover treatment on the left, featuring a cover photo of a Dalmatian ...the very breed that terrorizes Truman daily as he leaves his house. But we also see a copy of ADVENTURE WEST, a travel & adventure magazine focusing on the joys of frontiers and borderlands. This is a publication that the show producers would NEVER allow Truman to read in their constant efforts to shut down any inclination he may ever have to leave his "idyllic" & isolated home town and explore the world. This is the moment when we must reckon with the fact that the producers wouldn't let something as trivial as a product being ABSOLUTELY ANTITHETICAL TO THE ENTIRE MISSION OF THE SHOW get in the way of making a fortune by allowing it some of the most valuable ad real estate in the history of humankind. Yes, the Truman Show program may be the most engrossing entertainment/social experimentation ever devised but not one inch of it (even something its main character will never see or think about) is allowed to exist outside of the most cynical commercialism.

I will be giving a 90 min lecture/comedy/poetry performance on "The Truman Show" at Arisia in Boston on Saturday 1/13/18, 5:30pm.

www.weshazard.com

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Whenever I imagine the day (a decade+ from now) that I finish paying off student loans.

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So you say you love pandas? OK, but like how much? I recently sweat buckets & helped a chill crowd find an answer to that question during a launch show for my new humor book Questions for Terrible People which is currently available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble locations nationally! Everybody has a line they won’t cross: this book will help you find yours.

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The struggle is real. True, I’d much rather this than be murdered in the street or swallowed by the always hungry incarceration industry in this country but just goes to show that this issue is everywhere, everyday, in every strata of society.

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Fantastic essay by Donald Hall. Thoughtful, revealing, sorrowful but not “sad”.

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"After I spend 5 hours and 40 quarters playing Popeye,' 'Q*bert,' and 'Pole Position' in the arcades, I split for home. And not to watch some dork show on TV, either. I play more games." [sic] Dave Jackson, Expert Gamesman (The Legion of Super-Heroes #309 March 1984) > This kid looks like an extra from Crocodile Dundee 2 > I certainly would have been impressed with this as a child >The photograph is boss > This is an ad for board games based on video games. At no point are you allowed to dismiss some other pastime on the grounds that it's dorky or that dorks are into it. > "...Parker Brothers' Arcade Series board games. Nothing is more totally awesome." is missing the requisite three exclamation points. > Can't tell if this copy is a chill stepdad trying too hard or an actual kid not believing he's getting paid for this. > This looks like Kyle Reese dressing up as The Terminator in a mirror

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#mdw #film #damn

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One year ago @kennethwreid changed my life by blessing me with this incredible Miami Vice jacket. I wear it with pride. Shoutout to Crockett & Tubbs, nobody did it like you guys.

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I know this to be true.

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#tbt AND #WorldIBDday 2010, the last time I was in the hospital for Crohn's Disease (knock on wood). 9 days in if I recall. My 3rd small bowl resection, they took about 16 inches that time. I had already had the surgery at this time and was only a few days from being discharged. That look on my face was resignation in the face of humanity's impending demise. You see, though I was 26 at the time I still went to Boston Children's Hospital and I'd just had my lunch delivered by a robot. (OK, well a self-driving cafeteria cart, but still a bit surreal to see for the first time ever). It was a weird week, but they patched me up and here I am living life. Don't let your intestines get you down folks! Wishing you the best. #crohns #crohnsdisease #ulcerativecolitis #ibd #ibs #chronicillness #guts #robots #hospital #medicine #illness #riseabove #bathroom #prednisone #bodies #flesh

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How many milligrams of Benzedrine, ballpark, do you think she's on? No one gets this excited about sweeping and broom bristles unless they're tweaking (under doctor's care of course). - Life Magazine 10/17/49 #40s #advertising #retro #vintage #printculture #marketing #madmen #cleaning #housekeeping #motherslittlehelper #speed #amphetamine #springcleaning #suburbs #ad #energy

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"Ohhhhhhh, it's a tobacco." -Me finally getting that ancient "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?" joke that every old cartoon I watched back in the day used to reference. Thank you Life Magazine 10/17/49 #cigarette #branding #gag #vaudeville #looneytunes #tv #television #marketing #advertising #smoking #royalty #publishing #printculture