The Missive #62
Take a risk, take a chance, make a change. The rise and rise of ADHD. Everything I know about love. DALLE-E + GPT-3. 🏳️🌈
Online
The past few months have been quietly momentous for the melding of technology and art. OpenAI, a technology lab, released v2 of DALL-E (think Salvador Dali), a tool which uses AI to generate images based on text prompts. The quality is astounding.
If you’d like to play around with a free mini version of DALL-E, you can do it at this website. I’m waitlisted for the beta of v2, but here are some images I’ve generated with the mini:
OpenAI is also responsible for GPT-3 — the text equivalent of DALL-E. The comedy writer Ben Jenkins has been using it as a writing partner of sorts, and the results are pretty impressive.
Reading
“He's starting to recognise faces and look more at people, and I can tell when he's focusing on me. When I'm holding him, I can tell he's looking at me by the way he breathes — he breathes directly into my face. Sometimes he'll stop waving his hands and that's when I'll know he's focusing on me."
— Nas Campanella, who is vision-impaired, talking about her five-month-old son
“These Honda hybrids are very popular in our neighborhood, so lately we hear choirs passing by often. At first I thought it was music playing on car stereos, muffled by their closed windows… until I realized there was no way all these drivers were listening to Vangelis.
The sound of the Honda hybrid is synthetic, created to replace the engine noise of a traditional car. Which means someone had to make that sound – artists, in other words.”
— Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst wrote music to fill the space left by the absence of mechanical car noise in Honda hybrid cars.
More reading
Tiktok trends or the pandemic — what’s behind the rise in ADHD diagnoses?
Why did Covid disappear from our collective consciousness so quickly?1
A good Twitter thread on how you’d explain to someone that they’re experiencing a complex problem
Nightclubs are on the decline, and honestly, I’m not surprised
Pride Month Soapbox Moment
When I first realised I was bis*xual2 in my early 20s, I used to joke I wished I could “pick a side”. I think I said it because I wanted to feel like I belonged somewhere — back then the prevailing narrative from straight and gay people was that bis*xuality a) wasn’t real b) was a phase c) was an excuse for untrustworthy people to cheat. I no longer wish I could pick a side. I’m really grateful for the experiences I’ve had along the way. I do find the erasure annoying — my relationships with my ex-boyfriends were as real and fulfilling as my current one with a woman — but also, straight-presenting queer white women are hardly a persecuted group.
So, I loved Julia Shaw’s new book Bi: The hidden culture, history and science of bisexuality. Did you know that bi people are the biggest single group under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella yet are the least likely to feel like they’re part of it? It’s a great rundown of the history of bis*xuality and how it’s been covered in medical research and culture at large.
Listening
Avril Lavigne was a formative influence on me. I’ve been boring people for years with the fact that she wrote Breakaway for her debut album Let Go, but the label cut it because the album already had too many ballads about being from a small town3. The song went to Kelly Clarkson, who made it a huge hit. Let Go has just turned 20, and the Avril version of Breakaway is out in the world to celebrate. I always loved Kelly’s version and really identified with the lyrics4, but I think Avril’s reclamation is perfect.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are back and in fine form.
For those who appreciate the heavier side of my music taste, this song by French metal/djent band LANDMVRKS is the biggest-sounding thing I’ve heard in a while.
I’m also pleasantly surprised that British shoegazey metal band Loathe are playing in a random pub in Newy next week — their 2020 album was fantastic.
Watching
I came back to Melbourne last weekend for the wedding of two good friends. The bride and I lived together in a share house that was one of the happiest times of my life. She and the groom started dating around the time she moved in, and he became a beloved almost-housemate as their relationship deepened.
A few nights earlier, I went out to dinner with most of my old friend group. We piled into the tram like we used to, but instead of us being the annoying kids three vodka sodas deep on our way from a bar to dinner to a gig, people stepped aside to give a seat to our visibly pregnant friend.
The past two years have taken the regular passage of time from us. It’s like one night we were bright young things living together in inner-city share houses ready to make our mark on the world, and then then the universe clicked its fingers and we became wives, mothers, bosses; living in nice city apartments or suburban homes.
If you too lived your 20s in fun and messy share houses with your friends, you’ll love Everything I Know About Love on Stan. It’s set in 2012 and follows the lives of four 24-year-old women who’ve just moved to London and set up a share house together. There were moments where I went “oh, that was me!” with joy, and also moments where I went “oh god, that was me”, covering my face with my hands. What I loved best about it was how it captured the “grubby, golden phase of life that is so short-lived” that was my 20s, and its central idea that female friendships are just as important and powerful as romantic relationships. I’ve had so many friendship breakups that hurt just as badly as my romantic ones — I really loved seeing this depicted in popular culture, finally.5
Oh, I don’t know — maybe because it saturated our media coverage and every waking moment for two years and we simply can’t take it anymore?
Censored for prudish email clients. I take it to mean being attracted to people the same gender as me, and other genders.
I love Let Go, but there really are a lot of ballads on there for someone who was supposed to be “punk”.
I kept this to myself because Kelly Clarkson was at odds with the cool alt music fan personality I was cultivating as a teen. I felt really sentimental listening back to this Avril version, I felt really sentimental that I did “break away” from the day-to-day life of my country Queensland home town, “felt the rush of the ocean” “traveled on a jet plane” and ended up working in “buildings with a hundred floors, swinging ‘round revolving doors”.
No spoilers but I cried so much in the final episode! Took me back to all my worst friendship breakups. I’m over every single romantic breakup I’ve had, but there are some friendship ones that haunt me.