Author: Matthew

IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY

Yet another thing MidJourney is not great at is capturing iconic but sort of vague phrases or song lyrics. Granted, this one is pretty nebulous and that’s reflected in the weirdly specific non-specificity of the resulting images, but come on: you know what I mean.

(Parenthetically, earwormed by that lyric in the run up to this moment, I’ve been listening to a bunch of Beatles stuff lately — inspiring this p5.js doodle, inter alia. This is music I grew up with — I am almost exactly the same age as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — and given its extreme familiarity it’s easy to lose sight of how brilliant and strange and also very very silly it is. Musos can argue back and forth about who was over- or under-rated and which bands revolutionised what, but fucking hell, what a body of work.)

Anyway, 20 years is a really long time — in real life and especially on the internet. WT has certainly had its ups and downs over those two decades, but haven’t we all?

I’m not going to attempt some kind of valedictory address — I sort of did that at the 5 year mark, tying off the original blog, and look where that got us. I can’t see any point in spawning WT5 now, it’s not as if it would change anything. Let’s just acknowledge and move on.

Still, as I said then and so many times before and since: it’s been a slice.