Hello friends, popping back in-between during a busy season of growth and learning! My name is Ian Cook, I am a poet, artist, and musician based in Lawrence, Kansas. I love all things creative, and believe creative expression is a key aspect of our humanity. There is a lot of healing to be found in the magickal process of "making", taking our thoughts and feelings and turning them into actionable, grounded reality. I believe we can manifest intentions into this physical 3D plane through honoring our values and empowering ourselves to create, growing into the inherently creative divine beings that we are. Key parts of my practice include: Tarot, poetry, journaling, playing guitar, drawing, mindfulness, meditation, breath-work, visualization, Buddhism, Taoism, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, Chaos Magick, and other esoteric/occult methodologies. In the last few months I started my consulting practice -- Alva Dean Consulting (ADC) -- taking my experiences and learnings from building community in mental health and psychedelic-assisted therapy spaces to better serve folks on their healing journey. I teach creative writing/journaling, and educate on psychedelic safety, risk reduction, set and setting, ceremony/ritual/practice, and the preparation and integration of experiences. I feel called to guide individuals as they work through their stuff. I've had the unique privilege to work closely with @Connor England as we went through the process of taking ADC from concept to manifested entity with generative AI tools. It's been a wonderfully reflective process dialoguing with myself and Connor, going through what I consider my life's work and passions to create a thing that truly represents who I am and what I hope to put out into the world. I'm honored to be a part of this process and community! So excited to see what we create in this hopeful and magickal time. (Attached pic is my Frog-Magus named Yan, a hyper-sigil representation of myself -- he lives and works in The Cosmic Water Closet, a creative framework for teaching and practicing that came from integrating my own medicine experiences.)

@Connor England @Trace Shapiro Connor and I played around with Hume AI for a bit and it gave some pretty interesting responses to our queries, seemed genuine but with just enough uncanny valley to not get sucked too far in. It'll be wild to see how far they get as the program evolves. I gave it a whirl on my own for a few conversations about my work, and found we couldn't preserve the chat or get a transcript (they may be working on this). A workaround I found was to record an audio note on my iPad and run Hume AI through my phone for the AI chat. I could then turn the audio note into a transcript to recap.

Amazing, congrats @Trace Shapiro ! MUSEA looks like a wonderful organization that's aligned with your values and goals. Are you taking a class/certification through them or a part of their research programs? I love how they view creativity and healing, powerful stuff!

@Connor England Thank you kind sir! I appreciate the conversations we've had that helped guide this process, the important things to consider in laying the strongest foundation. The opportunity to share and reflect on the work with someone else really pushes things into stratosphere. Thank you for the suggestion for the acronym too! I tend to overwrite and then have to parse down -- simplify, simplify, simplify. It's tricky cuz I like ALL the words, but then risk rambling, writing for writing's sake, verbosity is a slippery slope :)

AI imagine generation has been an interesting exploration in creating visual representations of topics and concepts I've been creating in my imagination and mind. To provide the essence of my Cosmic Water Closet creative writing workshop, provide the key components and inspirations from esoteric and occult spaces, and seeing the AI produce something that was seemingly pulled from my mind is a trip. Continuing to create this imagined space is an interesting process I am looking forward to diving into more!

@Connor England Happy to share! I started with this prompt to give it a background lore I created for the idea of The Cosmic Water Closet, as a vehicle and creative container for my mental health and wellness work, preparation/integration of psychedelic and life experiences: "Please generate an image based on the following text : The Cosmic Water Closet Location: Outer Cosmos - 16th Dimension - Around When Needed Classification: Celestial Pocket-verse Form: Tavern Type(s): [Frog], [Water], [Chaos], [Safe], [Educational], [Benevolent] Difficulty: Beginner - Advanced The Cosmic Water Closet is a safe space vessel for creativity. A creative writing class is held in the multidimensional traveling tavern called The C.W.C, where you can come to express yourself through the practice of writing, a holy act, tying intentions to paper through ink. There resides: YAN – Frog-Mage, tavern dweller, tea-drinking sage, self-caring poet – serving natural potables and unnatural wares for the preparation, experiential reformulation, and integration of the multi-faceted selves that reside within us all. As a being of raw emotion, YAN always sets aside time in the day for pen and paper. Whether that is in tarot card readings, writing, drawing, intention setting, manifesting, or casting spells; the chaos of the self is transferred from the ethereal palace of the mind to the physical paper-plane. The celestial spheres of the 16th Dimension align with our own – from time to time – allowing for magical entrance into a place of healing, self-care, gentle learning, and safe expression. Please allow yourself to enter this space through a brief moment with yourself, go inside, where you are completely present in the current place you inhabit. You are you, You are All. Tell a tale or express yourself; hopefully learn some lessons, get out your shell for a spell, and into someone else’s" *** At first it was producing images that are very similar to the types of AI generated art that you see, vibrant and highly saturated colors, abstract shapes and forms. It was a good first few attempts, and the content was all largely there with my detailed initial description, but the images were not quite in my style. The AI needed more context and style suggestions to turn it into something more representative of me.