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@Leo Gura Ever considered chatting to Angelo from the 'Simply Always Awake' YT channel? I feel like he's super open-minded and often does informal interview-style videos with people.

I'm playing Factorio atm. Good fun but can get a little repetitive.

I've been thinking a lot about it, and my perspective has shifted quite significantly since making the original post. I'm not personally using the AI in conjunction with my own work because most of the time I find it hinders my process and detracts from my style and voice. However I am keeping up to date with everything that's going on, new developments etc. I actually don't see this technology having a significant impact on professional artists' jobs any time soon. Although it's not that simple because some jobs will be impacted and replaced, some sooner rather than later and some not at all. Each sub-field of art & design needs to be looked at separately because each one will be impacted in different ways. So anyone giving a quick simple answer response to this technology is just factually wrong. AI will be able to do basic graphic design work way before its able to create professional work for big-budget games or animations. But then even within 'basic graphic design' you have more sub-fields, like logo design or leaflet design. Each one will be impacted differently. It's much more realistic to imagine the AI creating a bunch of new logo designs compared to creating a finished frame for a big-budget animation or final character design for a game. But my general view is that Ai-images are, to put it simply, just pretty pictures. They are exceptionally good and arguably 'human-level' pretty pictures, but aesthetic and technical proficiency is not enough to replace a human artist. There is far too much implicit understanding that is required in order to create useful professional artwork that can be used in actual professional contexts. Much of being an artist is about implicitly understanding an art director's or a client's needs, vision, specifications, requirements, personal creative ideas and combining all of that into a finished piece of work. So much subtly and nuance even the most simple projects. No AI can do this, let alone the current AI image generators, and arguably never will be able to because they can only understand explicit communication and prompts. Anyway, there's way too much to say, I could go on forever about this.

Damn I used to have that, but didn't realise it actually had a name or that loads of other people had it. I used to have it when traveling on public transport. At some point it just went away, not sure why. Just getting older and caring less about other people I think.

Yea thats kinda' what I thought as well haha.

Start with a small dose, around 10mg, and slowly work your way up to the larger dose of 25-30mg. Do NOT go straight to >25mg. No food for 4 hours before. Have a bucket just in case you get nauseous. Make sure you won't be interrupted, have a safe space etc, etc. Usual stuff. Yes it can help with trauma related issues if you go slow and steady with it. No sourcing questions allowed. Wow thats a lot of drugs haha! That looks pretty similar to mine.

@Bufo Alvarius I've read this response from Ralston before. I'm still adamant on my perspective that unless you've done incrementally higher doses of synthetic 5-MeO you don't know what you're talking about with psychedelics. I don't even consider LSD or mushrooms or ayahuasca worth doing anymore. And, except for very rare cases, they will never create deep awakenings (unless you've had a true breakthrough and energy-body transformation with 5-MeO before). Ralston also makes the point about drugs not being direct and not being YOU. Here's the mind-bending paradox: Ralston is right. Psychedelics cannot 'induce' Enlightenment. Yet, I came to this realisation whilst having a 5-MeO induced Enlightenment and being directly conscious of myself as Eternal Infinity. Enlightenment cannot be created by a psychedelic because how could it be?! Enlightenment is pure Infinity, it cannot be created or caused by anything else. It is completely and totally causeless. Yet a psychedelic can, at the same, cause or create this realisation. And it is direct, there is no doubt. A true psychedelic Enlightenment is direct. There is no 'indirect Infinity' hahaha. There is no indirect ego dissolution?! Ridiculous. Ralston also is ignorant of the deep permanent changes to one's consciousness + the healing qualities of 5-MeO when used correctly. 5-MeO creates lasting permanent changes, unlike any other psychedelic.

Yea i'm really looking forward to it tbh. I've been watching a lot of Destiny's streams recently. He has a lot of really balanced sensible perspectives on lots of different topics.

@Vido For sure man. Sort of reminds me of Ralston's books which I've read multiple times over the years and each time it feels like a completely new book.

Man i've been saying this for a while now. I had the same experience. After my 5-MeO breakthroughs, weed is just insanely powerful for me. Some of my deepest trips just after a few tokes on a joint. Before 5-MeO breakthrough, my experience of weed was just like everyone else's - fairly unremarkable.

There are skills that cross over between comic art and concept art, but again, I would suggest picking one and going all in on that. And concept art is a pretty big field, there are lots of different type of concept artists e.g. character art, environment design, landscapes, building interior design, creature design. All these fields have cross-over skills but in my experience you'll find people specialising in one or two of these areas and basically nothing else. So you'll need to pick something that you enjoy producing most of the time. When I say 'brief' I don't mean short or small, I mean 'a set of instructions given to a person about a job or task.' Same spelling, different meaning. In every professional context, unless you're a fine artist, you're working to a brief or a specific set of requirements from the client or from your art director. As opposed to just randomly creating whatever work you feel like. It's really important you get good at responding to briefs because this is essentially all you do as a professional. They also provide an opportunity to create lots of finished pieces of work, rather than just lots of sketchbook stuff or half-finished work. But these briefs don't have to be set by a client or someone else, you can just create your own mock briefs. It's basically all I do outside of professional work. Here's a website that provides mock briefs for artists https://fakeclients.com/ But of course you'll need to cater the briefs to your line of work.

This is a fairly old post, are you still looking for advice? I'm a professional freelancer illustrator so I should be able to offer some useful pointers. My first question is, what kind of illustration do you want to go into? Because there are a lot of different fields under 'illustration', and each one requires a different set of skills and knowledge. For example, concept illustration, comic art and editorial illustration are all completely different. You need to get really clear on this because you need to specialise in one area, at least in the beginning. Once you know what kind of illustrator you want to be, you need to go all in on that obsessively and then 1) start deliberately practicing the skills associated with that line of work, and 2) do lots of brief-based projects to build up your portfolio. Your portfolio of work is the only thing between where you are now and getting hired. That portfolio needs to be catered to a particular line of illustration, it needs to show that you can respond to a brief successfully, it needs to have a consistent and coherent style and in general it needs to be very high-quality work. A portfolio should be around 10-20 pieces of work, depending on the type of illustration.

@Danioover9000 I've said for a long time that Tiktok is actual cancer. You know how things fractelise at different scales. Blood veins look like rivers, galaxy formations inside small rocks. Tiktok is a malignant spread of toxicity, like cancer, but at a larger societal level. We have the medical definition of cancer but we also have a second definition: "an evil or destructive practice or phenomenon that is hard to contain or eradicate.". Literally Tiktok. One of the biggest problems with Tiktok is that it has infected all the other social media platforms. Go onto Youtube, Facebook, Instagram. What do you see? An infinite feed of short, quick videos. Instagram is basically Tiktok now.

You're being incredibly naive if you think most people aren't slightly racist. The reality is that most people will never admit it - not even to themselves! The majority of the people in the UK probably have similar views to Leo's. But no one would say that of course. Most people around today are still slightly homophobic. But no one is gonna say that either. There's subtly and nuance to be recognized here.

No idea what the wizard discord is. There's only 1 discord application, but you can be part of lots of different discord groups, if that's what you mean? There's only 1 official Midjourney discord group.

Midjourney works through Discord so you'll need to download that and create an account. The sign in button on the midjourney website takes you to your dashboard where you can see your image generations, community images etc. But you can't do any image generations on the website - it's mostly just for viewing images. It's all very easy to access and set up.

I don't think there's any special reason for their existence over any other plant. Some plants contain certain chemicals and certain combinations of chemicals which interact with our brains. They're just a product of a spontaneous, evolving, natural world.

Leo you mentioned in your recent video you've been going out multiple times a week. I'm honestly struggling to find the motivation to develop my social skills and talk to women/date etc. It's so easy these days to just sit at home and work, stay on the computer. How do you muster the motivation the go out so regularly? Does it retract from your capacity to work, in terms of time and energy?

I haven't watched the video so can't comment on it. Although I'm making my own videos on the topic and part of me wants to stay true to Leo's most recent video and come up with my own thoughts and insights - of which I have many already. I'll probably watch the video though. My thoughts have been changing a lot in the past week or so. Particularly as I've been using the technology more and more and absorbing more AI images. I should say I don't consider prompt writing to be artistic. Is writing artistic? I guess you could call it that if you want. But I generally consider prompt writing as a whole separate field to artwork. It's like a completely different thing altogether, which certainly has merit and value in itself. But I see people online saying they're creating art for the first time in their life. I very much disagree with this. They just entered a bunch of random prompts and picked the one that looked the best. Not even remotely close to or related to the process of creating artwork. But the technology can and will be very useful in certain contexts. I think its primary and most impactful role will be in the initial idea generation stage, creating mood boards, developing an overall aesthetic for a project, and helping artists think outside the box. I can see it being really powerful for these uses. I'm still concerned about my own field, editorial illustration, because its so unique and different to other artistic domains.

It will be many generations before the monarchy is abolished. It will happen eventually but it's too deeply embedded into British culture. Like how the US will eventually ban guns, but it will be many many generations and decades in the future. All the traditionalists need to die off basically.

Well, not that many people have done 5-MeO. But of the people that have it seems like only a small number of people have these experiences. Hard to know about the dosage because there's so few reports. I'd say a minimum of 20mg is probably needed to start releasing. You don't need a "breakthrough" to God or Infinity. But my theory is that once you start having the releases on a higher dose, you'll have them on lower doses every time after that. This is all just based on my own experience so nothing set in stone here, could be very different for other people.

RIP Lizzy! May she rest in Peace for all Eternity.

Yes I have experienced this a number of times. But I've never blacked out or forgotten the experience. I'm always conscious of everything happening. Always plugged with eyes open. What you describe is basically my experience as well. There is no effort in the process, it all happens completely spontaneously once the ego has partially or fully dissolved. For me it has usually manifested as intense body shaking and vibrating but in my most recent session I started to speak really weird noises like I was speaking an alien language. Completely spontaneous. It once felt like a band of healing energy moving up and down my body. But it all feels like a massive release. Like I'm literally shaking away contractions within the body. It's a deeply pleasurable experience and I always feel profoundly lighter and free-er after the experience. Once I started having the healing energy with 5-MeO, I started having it with other psychedelics as well. Well I've only ever done LSD once since doing 5-MeO so maybe not with all psychedelics. It happens every time I do 5-MeO so I suspect it will happen every time for you as well. I haven't done enough sessions to tell whether it stops or not. I guess it probably will.

I have significant investments in the stock market. But that is a completely different matter and doesn't relate to this thread. Thank you for understanding my original post. I've got some plans for alternative sources of income. But as everyone always says there are no get-rich-quick schemes! So it'll take a lot of work and foresight to get into motion. I just completely disagree but if that's your definition, sure. I think art is defined as 'the vision behind the drawing AND the drawing itself'. Because there is no artwork without drawing (or any other medium). But we could say that drawing without creative vision is still art. A young child scribbling on paper has no vision. It's just pure creativity. A pure free flow of artistic expression.

I think there's an important distinction between being inspired by an artist's style vs copying their style. Atleast on that website, I see the AI copying the artist's style. When an artist is inspired by another artist, there are always differences. Style is actually very difficult to copy as a human because style is developed over years of work and trial and error. So it's always an interpretation rather than straight up copying. But I see the AI having the capability to fully copy their style. A very good (and sad) example on that website is Simon Stalenhag (https://tinyurl.com/2p9f5z6r). One of my favourite artists around today. It's a blatant rip-off of his style. But I suppose it could be argued that this actually increases the value of Simon's work. A rip-off of Simon's work is essentially value-less. This raises an important question of whether an artist owns copyright over their style. I'm not sure what the legalities of this are. It would be difficult to define and draw boundaries around one's art style so there's definitely some grey-area here. Yea either Adobe will buy these companies or develop their own. My bet is that they'll just develop their own and integrate it fully into all the Adobe software suite. I've already seen videos showing third-party plugins, but it seems quite rudimentary at the moment.