We had just sat down for our meal of large bread in basket and apples when mother and father brought out the books.
They did not read from the books every time we ate, but enough to make every meal a source of tension. Growing hunger became a source of dread, of physical illness, as my body learned that the approach of the family meal could mean the reading of the book.
They said it was to praise and thank something greater than ourselves, but I always wondered why it was that our praise was never earned, but always demanded.
Our mother and father were true followers, I needed only to see their untarnished bodies to know their holiness, if it could be called that.
We sang the hymns and, as I had learned I must do, I forced myself to feel joy, to turn myself into something like a machine. I was sitting to my father's left, he did not know the tricks I leveraged and thought I was true and kept me close to him.
My brother had always struggled with the hymns, I had worried for him as time after time it seemed he slipped further. This time I heard a quaver in his voice, and broke my own note to glance at him. His hands were melting into themselves, a blending of flesh like wax that he struggled to ignore, even as the pain took his focus. I felt another finger grow from my own hand, and knew that offering him help would be my own undoing.
I closed my eyes and put my hand on my fathers thigh, and sang all the louder. By the end of our song I no longer had a brother, but the flesh that could still flinch was taken outside and buried.
Do conservatives actually have a weird obsession with AI art, or is it just that it gets shared a lot here?
I could understand these people using it all the time, because it is art without the art, without the deeper meaning, it is just "pretty pictures" and conservatives hate the idea of anything having deeper meaning, everything must be a surface level analysis to them.
I think conservatives tend to have less artists. Its not like the current order treats most artists with much respect. This results in less art, but also less respect for paying artists (who are often seen as bohemian hippy types, however true that is). So AI art is a happy outcome for conservatives.
I think it's less about making art in any sense than it is a way of visualizing ideology. The aesthetic issues and overall goofiness aren't an issue to them because they want to express the brainworms. Same reason that John McNaugton paints Trump in that weird, realist style you also see with religious stuff, like this (CW: Drug Use):
I guess they can't have deeper meaning behind their work because to express deeper meaning one needs to actually have something deeper behind it. There is a skull on the table because...drugs bad? All the imagery just reinforces the central idea, that taking drugs is bad because if you're shooting, jesus is the one really getting high.
edit: My rambling actual point is that they can't really express things in the abstract, everything has to be literal. AI is incapable of abstracting deliberately, as it just follows a prompt, so it is likely that they like it for this reason, there is no deeper meaning behind conservative art, and there is no deeper meaning behind AI art.
A lot of insular religious communities in the US, like the Amish, have much higher rates of polydactyly than the the general population. The AI was clearly making a reference to that.
The entire concept falls flat on its face the second you want to write an intra-family conflict that lasts more than the run time of an episode. It's a concept we've discussed in my writing group. If you're going to be episodic, your characters need to be kind of 2 dimensional. Since I don't read enough, I think of Family Guy where Lois gets a job at the news and when asked about how she lost the job at the end, she replies "does anyone really care?"
Well, since you're a hog and your brain doesn't really do lateral thinking, non-negotiably you want the themes of the show to reflect some kind of rejection of modern culture. "I mean it, this shit around me is not Christcore." You might get through 2 seasons, an introduction to the family and a drawn out conflict with a trans school principal or something. Well, eventually your audience is going to ask how the family deals with a child losing faith or martial issues. The shit will turn into pure ideology. The resolution will be unhelpful because when the wife decides to trust the husband because of a vision from God and the real life woman cannot square the circle of someone fucked up on their vice of choice because they're both evermore atomized. The show will show its thin veneer of aesthetic.
It would only be dogma that Christians I know don't even do. Shows in that position, at best, turn into camp and dumb down their characters. Like one of the kids becomes an atheist for 5 episodes, gets really into anime, and the mangaka of his favorite series is Christian so he converts back. Otherwise they get weird and probably double down on transphobia or something.
Most of the glasses are empty except for one on the left which seems to contain cola and a really small pitcher on the right that seems like it's close to the bottom but contained piss.
They all look unwell. Cheeks more flushed than rosy. Like they’re all drunk as shit. Or afflicted with scarlet fever. Or perhaps malnourished from their bread and apples diet. Sounds like a great show.
What kind of situations would this type of family even encounter? They saw some black people doing a sit-in at a malt shop? And then the dad sits the kids down to explain why segregation is good?