I’ve been using Midjourney in small ways to generate images for a couple of years. Recently I saw email touting Ideogram 3.0 as a new, highly flexible image generator. I decided to feed it some of my old Midjourney prompts to see how it would do. TL;DR – Midjourney rules! In the following, the prompt is followed by the best Midjourney image, then the best Ideogram image.

two young adults, a man and a woman, leaning together to read a message on a phone she is holding, they appear concerned about the message they are reading, the young man has an olive complexion, dark curly hair, and is clean-shaven, the young woman has a mop of blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses which she has pushed up onto her head

In several tries, Midjourney just could not understand glasses “pushed up onto her head” but the rest was very satisfactory

Ideogram got the glasses right in one (1) of 4 tries, but also in only one of the four was the man clean-shaven. The other three men had a moustache or a beard.

I read a cheap SF novel which featured a green-skinned humanoid female warrior, and decided to see if Midjourney could do SF illustrations.

Style of frank frazetta: The alien female has light green skin and bronze hair in a long braid, with intricate tattoos on her arms and face. She wears an armored vest and black trousers and carries a futuristic rifle and has pistol in her belt.

Frank Frazetta was a well-known SF illustrator whose style featured voluptuous space babes. Midjourney had some shaky details in the guns, and the “pistol in her belt” is reduced to some sort of empty holster. But the mood and the expression are excellent.

Ideogram had no idea what Frazetta art was like. It got the guns right, but the style is totally wrong.

One of the images I used to illustrate “Annie’s Song” used this prompt:

a mature caucasian couple enthusiastically hugging seen from the side both wearing off-white garments background out of focus garden

Midjourney took “mature” to mean “old”, which was OK for what I wanted. Certainly it imagined a pleasant couple of people.

Let’s see what Ideogram makes of that:

Oooops! Count her fingers! Ideogram is making the kind of “hand errors” that Midjourney and DALL-E were ridiculed for in 2023. In addition, it threw in some out of focus vegetation in the foreground as well as the background as requested.

OK, enough. Clearly Midjourney wins, at least for my usage.

Sunday 03/30/2025

Sunday morning usual stuff. Wrote a thoughtful email about the common spaces committee. Played some music. Frankly I don’t remember what I did this morning, but I was busy doing it.

After lunch I joined the four-car carpool going to the Pear theater, although as a rider not a driver for once. Rode in Lois’s Prius, which looks just like mine (but not a plug-in).

The play was Penelope, and frankly I didn’t enjoy it much. I respected it, as a performance and as a construction, but I didn’t enjoy it. Lois and the other two riders in her car wanted to stay for the talk-back discussion afterward, so we did. Another half hour of not very interesting material.

Ordered my supper as take-away and ate in my room. Not feeling grumpy or anything; just not feeling like more socializing. Feeling introvert-y.

Saturday 03/29/2025

In the morning I worked on my how-to document for using the auditorium cameras. I wanted to add a section on recording video from the cameras. There are two ways to do it. I went to the auditorium and took some pictures of the equipment. Then added the section for the first way.

After lunch and a nap I drove to the museum and led a tour for some SAP employees. The total group was 80 people, but there were four of us docents. I took the first 20, and the other guys led off their groups of 20 at 15 minute intervals. It was a pretty nice deal, being first. By the time, 40 minutes later, I reached the end of the main area tour, I led the group to the other end of the museum and got them started on the new Chatbots exhibit. Then I left them and came on home.

Met a new couple, the Benedicts, two days since moving in. Had dinner at the same table. He was an independent computer consultant, helping businesses computerize back in the day.

Friday 03/28/2025

Took a somewhat shorter walk in the morning. Because I had an idea and limited time to work it out. Today at 2pm the AV group would meet, and in the middle of the night I conceived something I wanted to share with them. I wanted to impress them, especially the newer members, that the auditorium with all its gear, cameras, projector, sound and computers, all that was ours to play with. Everybody in the group could come into the auditorium when they had time free and no events were in progress (which is most of the time) and just turn things on and play around.

That was the general message but I wanted to make it explicit. So in the wee hours of the morning I composed a little self-study course in how to use our three cameras and the video switcher and the box for controlling them.

On the way out to my walk I stopped and took a few pictures with my phone. After my walk I spent three hours fixing up the pictures and dropping them into a document with what I think are very clear directions on how to explore the features of the cameras. If a person sits at the AV desk and goes through this line by line, doing all the things it says, they will understand our camera setup. And should have fun doing it.

So at the meeting I gave that message and handed out 4 copies of the document (all I felt like printing with my ink) but later sent out a PDF to everyone.

Thursday 03/27/2025

Today being uncommitted I decided to do something I had been putting off: go shopping. A friend had recommended that I try to get some color into my wardrobe. What I wear during daylight savings time is polo shirts. (Long-sleeve turtlenecks are for standard time.) And the majority of my polo shirts are gray or black. So I decided to go over to Stanford Shopping Center and find me a couple of polos in non-black, non-gray colors. The shopping center web page let me list the stores that had men’s casual clothes. Well, I have a thing about Macy’s. I took Nordstrom off the list just because. But off I went.

At J. Crewe I found one nice polo in a sort of dark beige, well, better than gray. Off to The Gap. Nothing. Urban Outfitter? Lord, what a useless store that is! Finally one that I am not familiar with, an Italian place, Brunello Cucinelli. Obviously an upscale place; so upscale they don’t have anything like a rack, just individual garments spaced out on counters like museum artifacts.

I was helped by a very friendly young woman, Mona, who was sure they had a nice polo shirt I would like. She found a couple, and one I actually liked. Cotton, medium blue, looks and feels nice. “I’ll take that one, please” I say.

So off to the checkout counter and I ask Mona, “So how much is this one?” There’s no price visible. She says, “Oh, the price is here,” and she looks through all the tags on the garment and does not find a price. She goes over to a computer, and comes back and says brightly, “It’s a thousand.”

I said, “What, lira?” thinking she was making some kind of joke about Italian clothes.

“No,” she said smiling, “A thousand.”

“Dollars?”

“Yes, of course.”

“A polo shirt for one thousand dollars.”

“Mm-hmm,” she smiled.

So I very politely said sorry, I can’t do that. “Maybe I could pay a thousand for a tailored blazer? But not a polo shirt. Thank you for your time, Mona, you’ve been very helpful.”

So ended my shopping trip.

In the afternoon I played guitar for an hour, and played a video game for about the same length of time.

Wednesday 03/26/2025

Did the laundry. During the first load, I went down to the fitness room and put in 30 minutes on the treadmill, 3mph which is supposed to be the minimum for “aerobic” exercise.

I had been asked by marketing to participate in a photo shoot at 3pm. I have taken part in other ones. Back in October 2022 I was one of several CH residents who were shot walking around a local park. So I assumed this would be another such but in fact, it was a single-person deal, just me on a stool in front of a gray backdrop. Very professional, there were lights and a crew of three, and the photographer must have snapped 50 or more exposures, having me turn and smile and hold a book and so on. Then, I guess because I had said a couple of things that made them laugh, they asked if I was ok with being interviewed. Oh heck yeah why not. So they asked some softball questions about life at Channing House and I answered as charmingly as I could.

That was about it, a little guitar, a little reading.

Tuesday 03/25/2025

In the morning I wrote something for the writers group. The cue was “favorite time of day” and I wrote about my morning routine and how productive I am in the mornings. I also edited an old essay that Susan wants for the upcoming Scribble and Sketch.

At 3pm was the quarterly tech squad meeting. There’s quite a few people on the tech squad when you see them all in a room at once. The density of calls has dropped slightly, down to about 2/day, so each person gets dispatched a few times a month. Is this due to an increase in tech savvy among our residents?

After supper I went to the activity room and put the Computer History Museum event, “The Great Chatbot Debate: Do LLMs Really Understand?” on the big TV there. About 5 people from the AI interest group joined me to watch. It was a good show, although nobody really changed any minds. The vote on the web and in the room was, “No, but it doesn’t matter, they’re useful.”

Monday 03/24/2025

Took the standard walk in the morning. Then spent 2 hours at FOPAL processing 8 boxes of books. Not a good-quality donation; looked like the library of somebody who had been heavy into computers from the 70s to the 90s, so not much saleable today.

Practiced a little guitar. Then at supper I realized that the Palo Alto Library people were coming tomorrow morning. I wanted to meet with them because I had seen a problem trying to sign up for the Kanopy service, which is supposed to give access to many films for free by way of the library. Before, when I tried to register my library card number, it would say there was a problem, see your library. So, yay, the library was coming. So I signed up on the sign-up sheet.

Then I thought, better try again so I can show them exactly what happens. And it didn’t happen. It took my library card number smooth as you please. I was able to browse the movies and showed myself one, a short film from Brazil? I think? Plus, I was able to “cast” the film from my phone to my 55-inch LG TV. So I had to go downstairs and cross my name off the sign-up sheet.

Then I found that after the phone stopped casting, the TV screen was full of a message about “you have no new notifications” and I couldn’t get rid of it. Took 20 minutes of screwing around to get the TV back to normal. Guess I can’t blame the library for that, thought.

Sunday 03/23/2025

For fun on a Sunday morning I decided to try a new farmers market. The SJ Mercury News published an annual “Best of Silicon Valley” supplement, and under the head of “best farmers market” they said Campbell. Campbell is a suburban town on the south-west corner of San Jose. And supposedly their Sunday farmers market was good. So off I went. It was a half hour drive. But a very nice market, about 150% the size of the California avenue one I often visit. Lots of ready to eat food including middle eastern and asian, and lots of fresh veg and fruit.

So I was walking around looking at the tasty-looking oranges and tangerines and I was hit by a wave of grief, first I’ve had in a year or more. For at least two decades, probably longer, it was Marian’s and my habit on a Sunday morning, to talk about the upcoming week and decide what we would cook for dinners. And we would make out two shopping lists, one of staples and meat for the grocery store, and a list of what we needed in fruits and veggies. Off we would go to the store, and then to one of the street markets to buy a week’s worth of fresh stuff. We always had fruit as part of supper, plus a veg, plus whatever we wanted for lunch or snack. So walking around this market just suddenly brought back that long-standing pattern of a life that is gone.

After lunch I put on my red shirt and went to the museum, thinking I was signed up for a large tour group. But there was no tour. I came home and worked it out: I am signed up to help with a large tour on the 29th. It’s even in my calendar on that day. But somehow at some point, I had thought, oh no I forgot to put that big tour in my calendar, and put it down incorrectly, for today. I’m not sure where I went wrong, but that’s what I did. So that was a wasted hour.

For supper I had been invited to share a birthday supper with Jerry and Betty. It’s Jerry’s birthday. He’s probably the youngest CH resident at 77. (I came into CH at age 77, 5 years ago.) Anyway by arrangement, John had brought his clarinet, Kay her flute, and I my guitar so we could actually sing happy birthday with instruments. It was nice.

Saturday 03/22/2025

In the morning I walked to Cafe Zoe, which is at least a change from my usual coffee places, and a nice walk. Spent some time working with my new writing pal Claude. Claude may be too good. It’s full of ideas but quite ready to reel out a few paragraphs of its own. I can see where unless I keep a tight rein I could end up with a story of which a significant fraction was not by me.

Practiced some music, read a bit, watched some videos. Not much of a day.