Tag Archives: Andrew

Andrew, Maggie, Photo

Widji 2025

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I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve chaperoned our annual seventh grade trip to Camp Widjiwagan in northern Minnesota. This year was special, however, because it was Maggie’s turn to join the adventure. She’s heard about the trip for years, so she was greatly looking forward to it.

Camp Widjiwagan is on the north shore of Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota. It’s about four and a half hours from the Twin Cities. This is far enough that it is noticeably colder and snowier than the central part of the state. We left early on Monday morning and returned on Friday afternoon, spending four nights in rustic cabins in the woods.

Camp Widjiwagan is just south of the Canadian border in northern Minnesota.
This gives you a sense of the way the lakes are laid out in this region.

The only downside to the trip was that Maggie caught a stomach bug on her final day, keeping her up for much of the night. A thousand thanks to my colleagues, Cat and Mackenzie, who took good care of her in her cabin. They brought her over to the impromptu infirmary in one of the admin buildings where I was able to be with her for the rest of the night. By morning, she was over it, though I did sit with her on the bus home to try and reduce the spread of any germs to her friends. (The final pic in the gallery below is our selfie on the bus… we don’t look as sleep-deprived as we were.)

Most of the following pictures were taken by the ever-talented Bobak Razavi.

Andrew, Maggie, Oliver, Photo, Piper, Sarah

Cabin Time

We made it up to the cabin for a long weekend. The weather is perfect: highs near 70 and lows just below 50. It’s dog heaven for Piper. The kids are engaged in a construction project. We saw the comet from the dock last night. A jigsaw puzzle is underway and we played a shockingly close game of Farkle. Not a bad way to recharge in the midst of a very busy autumn.

Note that while “GO MOM HQ” sounds like a worthy homage to Sarah, it actually stands for “Griffin, Oliver, Maggie, Olive, and Murray.” (Olive and Murray are two of the kids’ best friends who regularly come up to the cabin with us.)

Andrew

AI Assistant

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New AI Assistant Sidebar

As I was prepping Maggie’s graduation posts for publication, I noticed a new WordPress sidebar called the “AI Assistant.” (It actually comes with Jetpack, a set of add-on tools that help optimize WordPress. Basic tools are free; more advanced usage comes with subscription fees.)

It looks like I initially got 20 “requests” for free. Improving the title or getting feedback on the post take one request each. Generating a featured image costs 10 requests. The feedback is pretty basic, but not entirely useless. It’s a bit like an advanced Grammarly analysis where it checks spelling and grammar but also gives tips on tone and style.

The featured image tool seems like it will be a direct threat to stock art companies. I ran it on my previous post about Maggie’s graduation slideshow. I thought it might create a collage or something from the gallery of images on the page. Nope. Instead, it appears to have generated an image based on an analysis of the title and text. Here’s what it came up with:

AI-generated image for one of the posts about Maggie’s graduation.

Definitely not going to use it. Far too corporate for my style. But I could see someone else using it and could easily see it as a generic graphic on an article about graduation in a print magazine or on-line zine. I can’t imagine how this sort of thing won’t cost real people their jobs.

Andrew, Griffin, Photo

The State of AI Art

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AI art is controversial. Some would say the phrase is an oxymoron. Or it’s more like AI Art Theft. I follow these discussions with interest and think that there is a lot to be concerned about. With that said, I also have a MidJourney account that I’ve been using for the past six months to play with the technology. I mostly use it for role-playing game material, particularly for illustrations of the fictional characters that inhabit the milieu.

While preparing for a birthday game session for Griffin and some of his friends, I needed to whip up a bunch of modern-day characters for the adventure (wherein a mundane plane flight would go horribly awry). Here’s the cast, giving you a sense of what MidJourney can produce these days.

Carlos Quintana, helicopter tour pilot
Cindi Bankemper, physics teacher
Duke Remington, police detective
Greg Stamour, paramedic
Tesha Janusz,
circus coach
Whiskey Sour,
drag queen

Note that for each image, I gave a very simple prompt. Whiskey Sour’s prompt, for example, was “middle-aged drag queen.” I never specified an art style, so it’s interesting that four of them are photo-realistic while Cindi and Duke are stylized. (Ms. Bankemper’s prompt was “science teacher middle-aged red-head glasses.”)

In a comical turn, on my first attempt at Greg Stamour, I typed in this prompt, “hot surfer dude paramedic.” MidJourney always produces four possibilities for each prompt. You can then choose one, add variations, or modify your prompt. One of the first four pics for Greg was this one:

hot surfer dude paramedic

Note the three pairs of sunglasses! Apparently MidJourney’s algorithm associates copious sunglasses with hot surfer dudes. If you zoom in, you can also see that the logo on his shirt is nonsense squiggles. Text-like artifacts are a common issue with generative AI.

I don’t know how all the ethical considerations will shake out in the coming years, but from a tech-geek standpoint, it is fun technology to play with.

Andrew, Photo

Cabin Retreat

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In 2020, on the cusp of the pandemic, some of my gaming group joined me at the cabin for a wonderful retreat (pictured in this post). We’ve been wanting to repeat the trip ever since, but scheduling is difficult. This year, miraculously, we were able to make a second go of it in the midst of spring break.

This time we weren’t receiving apocalyptic text messages as the state shut down in the face of Covid, but it was a bit surreal arriving to the cabin in March with no snow and just a thin layer of ice on the lake. (It wasn’t nearly strong enough to walk on.) On our second day, however, temperatures dropped and we had a bit of snow.

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to get out into the woods to relax and hang out with friends. We played through J.C. Connors’ ice age horror adventure, Canyon of the Snow Cairns. This involved a mammoth hunt, mysterious disappearances, survival in a forbidding wilderness, cultists, and confrontations with things that man-was-not-meant-to-know. In other words: fun.