PicoBlog

A newsletter (and podcast) about making space for your art and yourself. Personal essays and supportive links for living well. By Jillian Anthony · Over 1,000 subscribersMaybe later“Jillian is a real inspiration--she lives her life with guts and gusto. ” ncG1vNJzZmiboqqyrb%2FUpqSeqpKkvKyvy66ZZ6ull8C1rcKkZZynnWQ%3D

I want to thank everyone who commented on last week’s newsletter for a chance to win a free one-year subscription to Susanality. I loved reading all of them, and appreciate all of the nice things you said! Big congrats to Phoebe, Ava, and Candice, who were the lucky winners. I also want to thank everyone who took the time to complete the survey I shared last week. It was a great opportunity to get to know you better and to tailor my content to meet your needs (and wants!

Crystal Marie, Deeper By Crystal Marie, Artist I'm a writer and artist. Or an Artist who writes. I see life in metaphors. Author of The Art of Expressive Collage. Working on my next book about the art of identifying and listening to the Intuitive Voice. ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kjaS%2B2KyrmqSdlr%2BqsQ%3D%3D

Welcome to the first Metric Stack Newsletter of 2022! I’m Priyaanka Arora, your personal metric assistant. It’s my job to take you through a new metric each week, accompanied by industry trends and the latest benchmarks. Remember how it works? One (or two) metrics, definitions & formulas, benchmarks, and tips to maximize the potential of your data. Ready for the ride? Let’s start #MetricStack2022 with some good old email marketing metrics:

A “Cucurucho” (at least in Argentina) is an ice cream cone. Last night was my last in Buenos Aires until August 15th. It was also the third day in a row that I would eat a cucurucho at some point. I shared a Rapanui (local chocolate & ice cream shop) cone with Luciana of Eastern Bolivia, Jacob of Northern England, Serena of Southern Buenos Aires, and myself of Eastern Kentucky. They are some of the usual suspects of sharing a cone, but I also have had the regular pleasure of ice-creammin’ in Buenos Aires with my William (brother), Ian (longtime friend and visitor), Brandon (friend and local musician), and Rian (friend, medical student and chess bro).

When I finally finished American Horror Story: Cult on Netflix, then promptly went to sleep and dreamed that a man who looked not unlike Donald Trump was chasing me with a knife. I did it to myself, watching it so late at night. But it might also be true that Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk did it to me. I admire the way that this season was able to tap into contemporary American fears about politics, sex, and violence in a way that felt contemporary.

A recurring theme with inquiry partners in my philosophy practice is their desire to express their creativity more, which usually means putting something online. The resistance to freeing their creative life has a source: fear of criticism. I don’t believe this fear is irrational. Instead, it is intuitively pointing toward the rite of passage that will occur when creating in front of others on the enmeshed shit show that is the internet.

I’m delighted to let you know that Cup of Jo founder Joanna Goddard is my guest on today’s Dinner A Love Story podcast. We talk about her dinner table, of course, but also about how she built one of the internet’s most influential lifestyle websites, and how she has created a community where everyone feels welcome. (It’s not as easy as it looks.) Here are a few things that came up in conversation if you’d like to explore further:

With playing around with local Stable Diffusion it became obvious that upscaling of generated images is needed as generated images are relatively low resolution. Most people online recommend using Topazlab’s gigapixel-ai but you need to pay for it and I wanted to check out if there’s an open-source approach. Holly F* - OneClick Stable Diffusion local install It was never thought that computers would encroach let alone overtake humans in creating art but here we are.