Ways to the Deep Meadow, 1st Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Happy New Year, friend! May this incoming year find you safe and contented.  

It's been a while since I've discussed all this or tried to explain myself, but you might be wondering what the hell is going on here. Someone coming to this blog for the first time or returning after a long absence is excused from thinking I've lost my goddamn mind. I may have, but that's another story and has little to nothing to do with what's happened to WDW.

First of all, you might ask what's with all the AI slop at the top of each post? Actually, I have issues with the term "AI slop." I'm not denying its existence or saying that AI slop is not a problem (it is), but all AI content is not automatically "slop" just because it was computer generated.

For over 20 years, since this blog first started in May 2004, the format has always been a picture at the top of each post and text below. My problem was that not being an artist or graphic designer, I had no way of  producing the pictures I needed. I would have to "appropriate" images from the web, trying to be reasonably mindful of not violating copyright beyond fair use, but I can't deny the fact that each day I was using someone else's artwork without explicit permission. 

I tried using my own photographs for a while, but very quickly burned through my backlog of useable pictures and then ran out of ideas of new daily photos. When you're posting a picture of your coffee maker for the third time, you know you've exhausted your imagination.

But two or three years ago, when AI image generators started getting better, I finally had a source of pictures that wasn't exploitative of others and wasn't relying of my few and frankly tired attempts at photography. 

Also and for the record, despite the images, none of the text posted here is AI generated. None. Not a word. I wouldn't want to read someone else's daily AI output, and beside, I enjoy expressing myself here and do this because there are things I want to say. I'm not trying to fill some random space with text copy and I don't want to relinquish my soapbox to a machine. 

Okay, then what's with those weird lead-in lines beneath the pictures? What the hell does "Ways to the Deep Meadow, 1st Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran)" mean?

Short answer is it's the date according to my New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. Several year's ago, I came across a spoken word performance by the musician and artist Angus MacLise titled Universal Solar Calendar. I had no context for the piece and no idea what it was or what it meant, but a Google search showed me it was a reading of the 365 days of the year in an alternative calendar that MacLise had invented. His actual calendar is actually a piece of calligraphic art - instead of a grid of days arranged in rows of weeks, each season is laid out like a wheel, with the names of the days radiating out from the center like spokes. There are five season in MacLise's USC, like in the Discordian calendar, starting with Childwinter, then Spring, Summer, Autumn, and finally, Hagwinter. Each day of the year has its own unique and poetic name, starting with the first day, Ways to the Deep Meadow. 

Cool idea, but the calendar is difficult and impractical to read and use.  You have to turn it upside down to read half the days, and MacLise's calligraphy isn't always easily legible. So I decided to make a version of his USC in a grid format, and I also wanted a calendar doesn't start on a random day of the week each year. Every year should start  and end on the same day of the week, so you wouldn't need a new calendar for each year. Since 365 isn't evenly divisible by 7 days a week, I came up with the idea of a 366-day year by including Leap Year Day in the calendar and shortening the week to six days. 366 days divided a six yields 61 six-day weeks.

The revised week needed new names for the days of the week, and since this was a solar calendar, it seemed appropriate to name the ultimate, final day of the week Helios for the Sun. I then named the preceding five day for other suns/stars in alphabetical order: Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Castor, Deneb, and Electra. So the "(Aldebaran)" in the first line above is the day of the week on which the 1st day of Childwinter falls.

All that being said and done, "Ways to the Deep Meadow, 1st Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran)" is sort of the equivalent of saying "New Year's Day, 1st of January, 2026 A.D. (Thursday)." I list my New Revised Universal Solar Calendar date at the start of each post because I can't figure out how to change the dates in the Blogger templates. 

It's all less complicated than it sounds. Here's the calendar grid for Childwinter for your reference.

Leap Year Day (February 29 of the Julian calendar) is the 60th day of the year. I added it to MacLise's original names as "Fifth Twelve" (60 = 5 x 12) since he already had a "Second Twelve" on the 24th day of the year. To keep the 366-day calendar in sync with the Earth's orbit around the Sun, Fifth Twelve is simply skipped on non-Leap Years and one goes directly from Electra to Aldebaran those years without recognizing Helios. That might sound odd, but is it any odder than instead inserting an extra day into the calendar every four years?

All of this was an evolving process, not some sudden flash of insight or inspiration. I took some other liberties with MacLise's calendar although I tried to keep MacLise's poetic names as much as possible. But I moved some names around to better fit the six-day grid and to align with some of the underlying logic and patterns I sensed in the original. That's why if you try to read the calendar above along to the recording of MacLise reciting the names, they don't always align. 

Back to that AI slop those pictures above. Another one of the evolving ideas was to use MacLise's day names as prompts for the AI images. And when the Midjourney generative AI introduced the "--cref" prompt (later replaced with the "Omni Reference") to have consistent characters appear in images, I developed avatars for each season, the Winter Child, Spring's Earth Mother, the Summer Girl, Autumn's Retired Old Man (which is a version of my own face), and the Winter Hag.  The picture above was generated by Midjourney based on the prompts, "Ways to the Deep Meadow," "Childwinter," and my new (this year) Winter Child avatar. I don't consider the result "AI slop" because I go through many iterations, refinements, and edits before selecting the one I want to post. It's not like I'm just typing some words into the computer and posting whatever random picture the AI spits out. 

That all may be way more information than you wanted or needed, and it may have had the opposite effect of what I intended, that is, that I haven't lost my mind. But it's a new year and a new season, and it seemed like this is as good a time as any to explain what I'm doing.