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I love kintsugi. It's a title of Chapter 5 of Paradox and a great metaphore for realizing that “Not everyone is as careful with precious things as we’d like. Yet not everything broken is lost.”

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Yeah I kind of dig the philosphy behind it - embracing imperfections instead of hiding them, and turning them into something new and even better.

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In a couple weeks I've got an essay out on the topic.

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These are neat! It occurs to me that I tend to look through these as more of a way to think about prompts than for specific ideas, and I hope some of your readers are doing the same thing. Sure, you can make super cool images with these prompts, but I'm so fascinated with how this all works, and how you have constantly modified your own approach to get the right response as the tech has continued to improve.

It's neat to see a sort of "human and AI evolving together" thing going on.

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I wouldn't say my approach has changed much over the years. I've always been a proponent of focusing less on advanced prompts but of simply knowing some strong modifiers and using those in combination with detailed scene descriptions. So these monthly posts aren't as much geared toward giving people a complete prompt but inspiring some styles and visual effects to play around with for their own prompts.

So yeah, like you said, it's definitely an inspiration for people to conisder new descriptors to use!

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I like it. Even my shenanigan comments have a place here!

But also: I appreciate the insight. I tend to get lots of ideas from a very short investment of time, and I really enjoy trading ideas here. I feel like that's one key way we both get a little smarter over time, although I'm sure I can often have the illusory effect of making everything seem silly... but even that is a way of engaging with creative minds, right?

Right?

Justify this. Make it make sense!

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"Silliness is the mother of progress," as smart people say.

I am smart.

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