I create a lot of images and stories with AI just for fun, most of which I've never bothered to share anywhere. If you drive a car, you do much, much, much more damage to the environment than I do, so get all the way off my back about that. I'm sharing these because I'm not concerned about undermining the Legend of Zelda fan art industry, and they're a fascinating illustration (pun intended) of how generative AI can still be so incredible and so stupid at the same time. I gave Gemini a simple two-word prompt:

Princess Zelda

I think this looks gorgeous. Of course, you don't have to look long to find some apparent errors. A castle stands in the distance, even though Zelda is already in one in the foreground. But so what if our princess is in another castle? There's precedent for that. She has on the back of her hand the Hylian crest instead of the Triforce symbol, but oh well, it looks cool anyway. She's holding the Master Sword that usually belongs to Link, but I could not possibly be less bothered because it looks badass. Her hair is shorter than usual, which is an interesting choice that doesn't matter either way. I gave it another prompt:

Link

Gemini made the interesting choice to keep the same setting and keep Zelda in it, but to shift the perspective and bring in Link. Also, a giant compass is on the ground as if he's just presented it to Zelda as a gift, unaware that it can only be used in the dungeon where he found it. Derp. It looks like he has a copy of the Master Sword, but he hasn't put it in his scabbard.

​Impa

This time, Gemini didn't move the scene around, but there's Impa. Very nice. No notes. I'm most familiar with and interested in the Ocarina of Time era, and these are clearly not the Ocarina of Time versions of these characters, which is fine. I wondered if Gemini would have any issues integrating characters specific to that game into the scene. Oh, and Link put his sword away and lost his shield and compass.

​Nabooru

Link seems slightly alarmed by Nabooru's arrival... or maybe he's just staring at her boobs.

Princess Ruto

Not bad. Gemini missed the distinctive shape of her head, but the coral crown is a nice touch. If your eyes are sharp, you may have already noticed the quality of the scene beginning to deteriorate, which happens when AI repeats an image over and over. I didn't let that dissuade me. I was no longer trying to create a beautiful piece of artwork, I was just curious how it would interpret each character and how many I could fit.

Darunia

This is the worst one so far. He looks too human with that nose and those ears, and his hair should stick up a lot more. Oh well.

Navi​

Gemini certainly has enough training data to be aware that Navi appears in the game as a ball of light with wings, but that was obviously due to graphics limitations, so I'm inclined to see this as an "intentional" design choice rather than incompetence. If she looked like this in the game, would players be more patient with her? And hey, she seems to have reminded Link to stop staring at Nabooru's boobs.

​Happy Mask Salesman

I really liked this one. The masks look great, and the salesman looks appropriately happy and insane. Now I'm imagining a crossover where Majora's mask turns him into the Joker.

Malon

Nice braids. Never saw her wearing braids before. The background is really starting to look like crap now, and the mask salesman is leering creepily at Malon while she blocks the view of most of his merchandise. Although its efforts hadn't been flawless up to now, this was the point where I felt like Gemini became stupid. It was not using the available space as wisely as it could have.

Talon

Oh hey, he's holding his daughter's hand. What a cute touch. Now the Happy Mask salesman is obscured altogether, but for some reason, a few masks that aren't the same masks he had before are now visible. Hello, Gemini? Big empty space on the left, next to the column that's starting to look like a watercolor left in the rain?

Ingo

Or you could just remove all of Malon except her arm to make room for Ingo. Even though that's clearly not Ingo. Looks more like Flynn Ryder's cousin or something. Don't get me wrong, he looks cool, but this is the worst attempt yet at replicating an established character, and why did it have to put him right there?

Epona

Possibly because I sent this prompt the next day, possibly because Epona is a horse, or possibly by coincidence, Gemini realized it had some space available on the left and put it to use. The characters who have been here longest are really showing their age now.

Tingle

What scene would be complete without the Zelda equivalent of Jar Jar Binks?

Saria

I skipped Saria when I did the other Sages from Ocarina of Time because I just didn't feel like a child fit the mood I was going for, but I realized that was dumb and let her in. She stood right in front of Tingle, who, it just occurred to me, is right in front of Link. Did Gemini match the colors on purpose? It's not easy being green. Oh, but I missed one more Sage.

Kaepora Gaebora

The game never reveals that Kaepora Gaebora is the corporeal form of the Sage Rauru, but he is, and I decided I'd rather have an owl than a bald old man. Gemini made only its second change to the scenery since this sequence started, giving the owl a ledge with some form of Hylian script that probably translates to gibberish. And at this point, the image was so muddy and pixelated that I decided to give it a rest. I opened a new chat and started over.

Live-action Princess Zelda

Oh wow. Oh wow wow wow... wow. No notes.

​If you want a masterclass in what actually makes the United States great, you didn't need to look any further than Washington Square last weekend. The Living Traditions Festival took over Salt Lake City for three days, and while it was a phenomenal party on the surface, underneath the surface, it felt like something much more radical. That wasn't the organizers' intention when they started it forty years ago, but it's the current reality.
​
In a political climate where a loud, panicked contingent is trying to engineer a monochrome, white Christian ethnostate, Living Traditions felt like a giant, vibrant middle finger to that entire ideology. What we are witnessing across the US right now is the extinction burst of racists and xenophobes who are terrified of becoming a minority and being treated the way they treat minorities.

Frankly, those people must lead miserable, restricted lives. Imagine moving through the world genuinely believing that other cultures are inherently inferior, or at a minimum, that they should be confined to their countries of origin. To lock yourself out of the world's wealth like that is a self-inflicted punishment. Getting to openly dive into, celebrate, and enjoy these cultures brings a level of pure human joy that those driven by fear will simply never experience.

I leaned into that joy entirely, clocking in for all 22 hours of the festival across its three-day run. With live music and dance performances running concurrently across three different stages, it was physically impossible to catch everything. I had to accept that FOMO, surrender to the rhythm of the weekend, and just do my best to take in what I could. (I also had to accept that overpriced food was just part of the experience, like at any event. At least it was diverse food.)

The magic of that setup hit me hardest when I watched a powerful Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba performance, followed immediately by a Celtic music set. Standing there, it clicked: each of these cultures, as beautiful as they are, is incomplete on its own. My own life would be empty if I were restricted to only Bomba or only Celtic melodies. I'm glad I live in an age with easy access to both.

Cultures aren't meant to exist in sterile isolation; they are meant to collide, interweave, and enrich one another. That is the true superpower of the era we live in, and Living Traditions was proof that despite the loudest voices of division, diversity isn't just our reality — it's our greatest joy. Even within acts, we could see this mixing. Many of the children from the Hawaiian dance school were white. The Japanese taiko drumming couple were white and Latino (but they learned from a Japanese teacher). The Celtic group's singer was black.

Also, despite Mormonism's attempts to make itself the center of the universe, all of these cultures have done just fine without it.

I'm against the escalating war in the Middle East for the same reasons as most Americans, except for rising gas prices, which I'd be lying if I said I give much of a crap about. Surprisingly, my very conservative mother said years ago that gas prices weren't high enough to reflect the environmental damage it causes, and she wasn't wrong. Anyway, I'm still glad the Ayatollah and several members of his evil regime are dead. My position on that hasn't changed and won't change. I'm allowed to acknowledge the positives of illegal and destructive wars that I can't stop.

I went to a protest against the war yesterday, but I hung back noncommitally until I was sure the speakers wouldn't defend the evil regime. Of course, they didn't mention how it treats women and queer people or that it recently killed far more of its own citizens than American and Israeli bombs have, but they didn't say anything stupid about its sovereignty or right to exist either, so that's a win. They just said stuff I agree with about how war ruins people's lives and makes weapons manufacturers fabulously wealthy while we can't afford healthcare. There was a verbal altercation between a brown woman in a Ukraine flag and a loud, insufferable-looking white guy, after which the woman left, and I think that had something to do with why the organizer of the protest, a young Iranian-American, got up at the end and asked us to remember the people we're fighting for, and to respect Iranian-Americans who have a different perspective, and that this was for them, not us. She got some tepid applause, and she said she was relieved to not get booed off the stage. But yeah, I happen to know that some Iranians, including those actually in Iran at the present moment, are thrilled about this war. They hate the regime that much. They'd rather take their chances with the bombs than keep living under constant oppression with no end in sight.

Many of us then marched from the Federal Building up to the Capitol to joing a protest for women's rights, and I saw a Mormon sister missionary across the street filming us as we chanted anti-Trump slogans, so I assume she either agreed with us or just wanted to affirm her testimony of the wickedness of the last days. This second protest was almost over when I left because the speaker said something stupid about the former president of Venezuela. First of all, I thought it was a hell of a stretch to bring him up in the first place, as the speaker used the kidnapping of him and the First Lady as an example of Trump's disdain for women. But the part that made me leave was the speaker's false claim that Nicolas Maduro was "democratically elected." If that were true, it wouldn't make him less of a brutal dictator, but it's not true. He was an incumbent president who lost re-election by a significant margin and refused to leave office - you know, just like Trump tried to do, but he got away with it because Venezuela's highest court is even more corrupt than the USA's. I hope the speaker was just laughably ignorant, not lying out of a compulsion to shield socialist governments from criticism, but it pissed me off a little either way.

Someone at this protest gave me a handout for an activist study group hosted by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization to "discuss how we can build the socialisty movement with Marxism-Leninism!" I would be interested in attending with an open mind, except that I'd probably find every single person there insufferable. Mind you, I'll still stand with them against fascists any day of the week. It's just so refreshing to have the integrity and clarity to criticize both sides, even though one side is clearly much, much worse.

A friend sent me this music video the other day. The music and the video were both made with AI in 32 hours, and they're very much the opposite of "slop" (though I readily acknowledge that most of what's called "AI slop" is, in fact, slop). Great tune, great lyrics, great shots. I'm blown away. My childhood dream of turning my daydreams into movies is closer than my more sensible adult self ever imagined. Of course,  it's also legitimately scary how good this video is. Soon it will be impossible to tell the difference between AI and reality, and I have no idea how or if society is going to adapt to that. The legal system already has safeguards in place against fabricated photographic or video evidence, but the average American who already believes everything they see in social media is about to get mind-screwed. There are also potential legal concerns about using actors' likenesses. I don't know much about that, but I know that Giselle from "Enchanted" isn't an official Disney Princess because Disney would have to pay Amy Adams every time they used her likeness, even in illustrated form, so it seems inevitable that sooner or later, someone is going to sue over their likeness appearing in an unauthorized music video. Hopefully not a really badass one like this, though.

Going back through the videos, I could see how much they've improved in only a year. A Pirates of the Caribbean music video from a year ago, "Dead Men Tell No Tales," is still good but looks and sounds more artificial. Unfortunately, going back through the videos is also how I discovered one about DOGE. I read the transcript instead of listening/watching, and it's Elon Musk bragging about how he'll root out all the corruption and waste in the government and send the perpetrators "Straight to Jail." I would have been happier not knowing that the guy behind these videos is MAGA. I couldn't resist trying to make him feel embarrassed for thinking that the richest man in the world would root out corruption and waste out of the goodness of his heart. I commented, "This aged like milk." Mic drop. Even MAGA, with its famous disdain for basic logic and objective reality, can't argue that point... can it?

This guy simply responded, "ikr." (On the remote chance that anyone for whom English is a second language is reading this, that means, "I know, right?") I actually respect that. So fine, okay, I'll separate the artist from the art. Yes, even though it may be controversial, I am calling him an "artist" because he puts a lot of work into these songs and videos, several of them are very, very good, and I don't know what else to call him. The world is better because these songs and videos are in it. The world is worse because of his politics, but his individual influence in that regard is probably negligible anyway. Just like mine. Heavy sigh.

For Valentine's Day, I attended a rally against the Epstein files coverup, then helped give out clothes to homeless people at Pioneer Park. Today, I've been busy with a higher-than-average-paying work project. The downside of working whenever I want is that I have to decide when to take a break and when to make more money. It's absolutely worth it, though. As a result, however, right now I just want to watch cartoons and not write a blog post. So here's something cool I watched yesterday: an interview with the man I used to believe was the Antichrist. (Blame my parents.) Okay, maybe he still is a war criminal, but so are most US presidents. I wonder how differently I'd feel about him if I lived through his administration again. He had more class, more intelligence, and more basic decency in the dirt under his fingernails than his successor could manifest in a hundred years. He wasn't best friends with a child sex trafficker, either. But if he had done one one-hundredth of the things his successor has done, my parents who don't care about anything his successor has done would have had fatal brain aneurysms. Anyway, it was great to hear him spreading hope. Rebellions are built on hope. Hell, it was great just to hear from a leader who can speak in coherent sentences and answer questions without calling the interviewer names.

I spent New Year's Eve with some friends and ate a pot brownie for the first time. I assumed it would be essentially the same as my beloved Kush Kubes, and I didn't inquire about the dosage or anything. Oops. It was much more intense than a Kush Kube, and it was, at first, fun and frightening at the same time. Even as I felt unconditional love from the people around me, engaged in deep spiritual conversations, and laughed at silly things, I felt anxious about the non-zero chance that a SWAT team with the wrong address would break down the door. So much of our lives is entirely out of our control, and sometimes I find that unbearable to think about. I also experienced some degree of ego death and felt like I might fall asleep and never wake up.

By five in the morning, I hadn't slept at all, wasn't having fun anymore, and worried that my brain was beyond repair. My roommate was up, so I asked him to take me to the emergency room. This, incidentally, is the roommate who kept eating my food and using my stuff without asking, but I recently told him to stop after I went to fix my dry hands, found my lotion empty, and snapped a little. I didn't handle it perfectly, but I stood up for myself and kept my anger reasonably controlled, and he bought me more lotion, and I let it go. After he took me to the emergency room, I had more positive feelings toward him. Isn't that beautiful? I also felt love from the emergency room staff who gave up their holiday for me. It was a far more positive experience than my last trip to the emergency room, when Hayden Nelson of the Logan City Police Department made me go after he verbally abused me, and the staff treated me like an assembly line product they wanted to finish as fast as possible. This experience gave me some healing and closure. I obviously made a dumb mistake, but it was worth it, and I'm not sorry for doing drugs.

One of the lasting side effects of Kush Kubes is that I laugh and smile more often. Maybe the pot brownie was the reason that I laughed for a full minute at the ending to the Firefly episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" last night and continue to laugh every time I think of it. Why did it take me so long to watch Firefly?

My latest ebook, Lights Over Logan, is out. I have mixed feelings about the text I forced myself to write, but at least I love the cover. Okay, so, I paid an artist to draw the cover. I generously picked this random guy who reached out to me on Discord over a year earlier to offer his services and said he was "super duper cheap." Indeed, when I broached the topic, he said he would work for any price I named because he hadn't gotten a commission in years. Maybe now I know why. First of all, I was rather disappointed in the artwork itself. I asked if he could draw realistically, giving him the character concept art I made in ChatGPT and an example of what I had in mind, the cover art for My Teacher is an Alien.

He said, "Yes I can." That was a lie. What he gave me was not only not realistic, it looked like it was made in Microsoft Paint, albeit by someone more skilled than me. But whatever, someday the sun will run out of fuel and my hopes and dreams won't matter, so I would just deal with it and pretend this was a stylistic choice I made. And the lighting was pretty, so I would just accept it even though I told him multiple times that this scene was during a new moon, meaning maximum darkness.

I will say that at first, he worked very fast, and I would take a day or two to give him feedback because I needed time to think. But he produced this draft in late November, asked if I wanted any changes, and then ghosted me with no warning at all after I asked him for a change.

So, to recap in case the text is too small, I asked him nicely to fix the shape of the trees that don't look like trees, at least not from Earth. After eight days (rounding down) of no response, I followed up. Two days later, he said he was busy with school, which he had never told me would be an issue. After eight more days (rounding down) of no response, I said he hadn't warned me he was going to do this. That was the nicest way I could think of to say, "What the fuck, man?" He said he was seeing his family and didn't have his drawing equipment. That is to say, he hadn't brought his drawing equipment with him even though I was paying him to draw something for me and had told him I needed it by the end of the year. Still keeping my temper, I asked him why not. And then he had the nerve to get snippy with me and say he didn't have a deadline (not true), so I stopped keeping my temper. I later edited "an asshole" to "rude," but he blocked me anyway.

So this is where I learn a valuable lesson that artists' asses are made of gold and I must defer to their narcissistic whims with infinite patience, right? Maybe he hopes so, but no. Having already paid for "real" art and both received and been treated like crap, I felt not an ounce of guilt about enlisting ChatGPT to fix the crap. I did put it off until the last minute because I was afraid that ChatGPT would also crush my hopes and dreams by making a stupid mistake and repeatedly failing to fix it. But I had a little discussion with it about the changes I wanted (and had to explain that this scene was in Logan Canyon, not on an alien planet), and it threw together a prompt and gave me this on the first try:

Now, respectfully, if you try to tell me this cover is inferior to the original just because you know it was made by a machine, we'll both know you're full of shit. It's light-years closer to what I wanted, and any imperfections are probably attributable to the source material. I poured out effusive praise on ChatGPT. Then, at the risk of ruining a good thing, I asked for a couple more modifications. Mary should have had a backpack because the book mentions her using one, and the alien still didn't look as realistic as I'd prefer. So I got this:

In case you think the alien's backpack is an error, it's not. That was in the concept art. ChatGPT made the scene a touch lighter (unwanted, but not a big deal) and moved the alien much too close (kind of a big deal). But no need to panic yet. Picking my battles, I disregarded the lighting and asked it to "Make the alien stand further away, like in the original picture."

As you can see, ChatGPT failed to follow my instruction and moved the alien considerably further away than in the original picture. But you know what? I can live with that. It's probably better this way. More mysterious. Anyway, I decided to stop pushing my luck while I was still pleased. Now I'm working up the courage to try to fix the cover art for my first book, Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal, which was supposed to look like 50s-60s sci-fi cover art but instead looks like PlayStation 1 graphics because the artist didn't paint over his computer models like he said he would. Some of these people deserve to be replaced by machines. Career-wise, I mean. I'm not wishing harm on them.

Lights Over Logan is out now as an ebook on various platforms.