Go Flux Yourself: Midjourney Still Runs the Realism Game

Drew and Rory start with eyeball horror, Stranger Things hype, and the idea of AI-powered contact lenses before stumbling straight into the real mind-melt: Midjourney, Grok Imagine, Mystic 3, and Flux all colliding in one episode.

They roast their own prompts, trigger an accidental NSF-DoubleU moment live inside Grok, argue about “flux face,” and still somehow manage to pull out real, practical tips for people trying to make better AI images without losing their minds.

Across an hour of chaos, they unpack Midjourney v8’s subtle shifts, hidden personalization signals, Style Explorer tricks, Smart Search shortcuts, Grok’s Sora-style infinite feed, Mystic 3’s scary-good skin detail, and why Midjourney still owns lo-fi, lived-in, “shot-on-a-phone” energy.

If you care about composition, cinematic ratios, editorial portraits, food realism, or just want to hear two people dunk on Flux and node editors while actually teaching you something, this one hits.

Listeners will come away knowing how to use stills archive for composition, when to skip upscales for more analog realism, how Grok Imagine’s image + video workflow really behaves, and where Mystic 3 can replace Midjourney in a serious portrait or product stack.

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⏱️ Midjourney Fast Hour

0:00 Intro, eyeballs, and a Friday brain check

2:05 Contact lens horror stories, Mission Impossible, Black Mirror eyes

3:07 Stranger Things Season 5 hype and binge vs weekly TV

4:51 Movies, biopics, sports docs, and couch season setting in

6:23 Cowboys documentary, sports pipelines, and TV as passive story feed

7:00 AI overload, nobody keeping up, and why this pod exists

8:30 Midjourney profiles, Style Creator, and new personalization talk

9:29 Like/dislike buttons as hidden training data and 7:3 aspect ratio love

10:35 Stills Archive, cinematic framing, and cleaner compositions

12:00 Style Explorer vs old-school SREF and what quietly vanished

13:16 Three under-the-radar Midjourney Smart Search + right-click + Option-upscale tweaks

15:35 V8, fewer wall-of-text prompts, and a move toward visual controls

18:12 First look at Grok Imagine’s interface and infinite scroll feel

19:35 Sora-style endless bottom feed, variants, and “make video” in Grok

22:51 Cinematic looks, color grading, and Grok as “idea and curate” engine

24:19 Live NSFW surprise inside Grok Imagine and instant rating change

25:23 Finding Grok history, stills, and video exports with sound

26:31 Who actually gets Grok video and Drew’s first real reaction to using it

27:38 Mystic 3 enters the chat and upscaling less for analog vibes

29:02 Why “too sharp” screams AI and how grain + smart detail saves realism

30:18 Outpainting, editing, and why Midjourney still wins surgical compositing

35:01 Mystic 3 V3 screen-share and first impressions

35:45 Editorial portraits, skin detail, eyelashes, and hands that finally look human

37:26 Mystic 3 model comparisons: Zen, State-of-the-Art, and weird description blur

39:16 Zooming all the way into pores, fingerprints, and micro skin texture

43:44 Cocktail and food prompts where Mystic falls behind Midjourney

50:05 Nano Banana 2 rumors, native 4K wishes, and how Midjourney might respond

50:58 Why Midjourney still rules lo-fi, disposable camera, and Polaroid-style shots

52:16 Grok Imagine vs Flux vs Midjourney for lived-in Y2K flash photos

53:39 Flux face, direct flash tests, and “go flux yourself” is born

55:30 Nodes, Grok workflows, and why scrolling is faster than wiring graphs

56:01 Why Midjourney is avoiding node-based interfaces on purpose

57:05 Final sendoff: go flux yourself and get out of here