Across nearly three years Thomas Hunt ran 9,481 Midjourney generations from 1,662 distinct prompts. Most of those prompts were written once and never again. A small minority were typed dozens of times, in slight variations — the same idea asked of the model again, and again, until it answered correctly. This report walks through that pattern: the leaderboard, the heatmap, the long tail, and what the shape of 9,481 iterations says about how the work was made.
The top fifty prompts by number of generations. A few break clear of the field; the rest hover between five and twenty iterations — the size of a normal creative pursuit before moving on. Click any row to see sample images, date range, and daily cadence.
Each row is one of the named collections from the main MadArt gallery; each column is a calendar week from August 2022 to March 2025. Brighter cells mean more generations that week. The visible bands tell the story of when each obsession was active — and how cleanly they handed off to the next.
Two answers to two questions: how are iterations distributed across prompts, and when did the work happen?
On a log–log axis a power law plots as a straight line. The MadArt distribution does. 1,213 prompts run once; one prompt run sixty-four times; everything else slots between.
Weekly generation count over time. The peaks are deep-iteration weeks — the troughs are when Thomas left Midjourney alone.
Four short readings of the data — what 64 iterations actually looks like, why most prompts ran exactly once, the shape of the distribution, and the rhythm of three years of generation.
The single most-typed prompt across nearly three years is “cartoon racoon samurai.” Sixty-four generations, with the same misspelling held throughout — racoon, not raccoon. The result is the visual nucleus of A Raccoon Bestiary: a masked, armored figure in dozens of slight variations, ronin against a black background, ronin under cherry blossoms, ronin holding a sword and a bowl of rice.
Sixty-four is not 700. The collection has 700 images because Thomas also typed “cartoon racoon on the moon” (26x), “a racoon version of speedracer” (20x), “cartoon racoon making breakfast --v 3” (16x), and dozens of others. The obsession is the cluster. The literal prompt is just the brush.
Of the 1,662 distinct prompts in the archive, 1,213 — seventy-three percent — were run exactly once. Typed, four tiles produced, never returned to. They are the opposite of the obsessive pattern: passing thoughts, one-off jokes, image-tests, things that worked the first time, things that didn’t and got abandoned without a second try.
The long tail is the silent partner of the leaderboard. The headline shows what Thomas couldn’t let go of. The tail shows everything else he tried. Together they describe a working method that’s neither random sampling nor pure obsession — it’s something more like a writer keeping a notebook, most entries small, a few worked over and over.
Plot the number of prompts at each iteration count on a log–log axis and the result is a straight line. 1,213 prompts at one iteration. 186 at two. 85 at three. 46 at four. The decay continues smoothly all the way to the single prompt at sixty-four — the same self-similar shape you find in city populations, citation counts, and Wikipedia revisions.
Power-law distributions in human attention aren’t accidents. They emerge when the artist isn’t deciding what to make in advance but is following the results — iterating on what hit, abandoning what didn’t. The shape says Thomas wasn’t executing a brief. He was responding.
The velocity chart shows three distinct eras. August–September 2022 is a giant first burst — a thousand generations in the first month as Midjourney v3 came online. October 2022 — mid 2023 is the dense Raccoon/Rabbit/Cubist period: hundreds of generations per week, the collections all running in parallel.
Then a long shoulder through 2024, fewer weekly generations but more concentrated prompts — the Bond Sequence, the Howard Stern Mythos, Satan Smoking Weed. The last burst is in March 2025 as Midjourney v5 lands and Thomas returns one more time, with longer, more cinematic prompts. Then the file ends. The pattern below is the pattern above: a few bright, recurring obsessions amid a constellation of single shots.
Every distinct prompt in the archive, sortable and searchable. Click a row to expand a strip of sample images. By default, only prompts run twice or more are shown (449 of 1,662) — toggle Show all to include the long tail.
| Iterations | Prompt | First seen | Last seen | Collection |
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