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Kitchen Sink Science Fiction
Simon Stålenhag, artist, musician, and designer specialising in retro-futuristic digital images, may have a new production coming out... The Electric State.
Succession Quotes > Midjourney Prompts
In honor of the final Succession Sunday, thought I'd share a project I've been working on throughout the season.
I take my favorite quotes from each episode and turn them into prompts in Midjourney.
It gives me great delight and I'm happy to take requests if there's a pre-season 4 quote that's near and dear to your heart.
Use Your Claws Luke
A new Engineer's Guide to Cats, on the subject of Cat Future Technology, with bonus reenactment of Star Wars with cats. A lot of other feline-focused film frivolity can be found on klusmanp's Youtube Page. (Engineer's Guide to Cats previously, again, also.)
Breaking things down so you don't.
goblin.tools
is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult.
USE CONVERSATIONAL DOORKNOBS
When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating. from Good conversations have lots of doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni
Beweging is Leven! (Movement is Life)
Beweging Is Leven is an eldercare initiative by Azmi Alubeid & Joël Kruisselbrink and it's the most charming, clever, and funny use of every-day objects and whatever is around. Seriously, the videos are just the best.
By far the most content seems to be in Instagram so these are Instagram links I'm afraid! But so worth it.
Listen to Wikipedia
Listen to the sound of Wikipedia's recent changes feed. (English, French, Sanskrit selected - you can choose your own filters).
Dizzying shooters, agonizing puzzles, and water stages (ugh)...
The 100 Hardest Video-Game Levels of All Time [Vulture]
“There are so many different ways to create a hard level. This list contains resource-draining RPG grinds, uncompromising tactical grids, mind-melting adventure-game puzzles, and the sort of quicksilver, arcade-y gauntlets that require a speedrunner’s acumen. *(It does not contain, we want to note, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which came out too recently for us to confidently make a determination about whether any of its challenges warrant a spot. We reserve the right to add it at a later date.)”
Not even dying is an escape.
"On March 3, a largely unknown creator named Steve ‘Veddge’ Nelson shared an unassuming-sounding mod on the Doomworld forums. He claims this is an enhanced version of a 15-year-old "my own house but full of demons" map file (who hasn’t tried to make one of those?) left behind by a recently deceased friend. Tragic, but curious."
A Freedman Writes His Former Master
Jourdon Anderson, a formerly enslaved person, responds to a request from his former master to return to work for him.
give him the gopher repellant
In How To Find Things Online, v buckenham looks at the web as an unwilling data source for Large Language Models (among other omnivorous machine learning projects), and how the changing incentives for both people making content and corporations hosting/controlling that content may undercut the assumption that useful information will continue to find its way into those hungry artificial hippos.
"Athenais compared it to a sconce ... Dick Tell-truth to a mat"
Enlinko and Unrelated Words are solo games of semantic connections between random words. The TikTok #gotitchallenge, demoed on YouTube by Hank & John Green, is a similar 2-player game. "What is My Thought Like?" was an eloquent multiplayer game of connections between random words, once common (1786, 1789, 1790, 1806, 1831, 1849, 1855, 1858, 1863, 1867, 1871, 1875, 1904, 1913, 1917, 1922), mentioned in 1750, and essentially the same as "Le Jeu de la pensée" in 1701. But Semantle and Pimantle (previously) are semantic connection games too, according to a FAQ resembling "French Toast" and the 20 Questions variant "Plenty Questions" (co-invented by MeFi's own moonmilk and re-invented on TikTok as "Guess the Word"). 20 Questions appears in English in 1796 and 1799, maybe inspired by "Les Douze Questions" (1788).
what's red and invisible? no tomatoes
Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn’t survive transcription: a talk (or the text thereof, and, yes yes, you're very clever, now shut up and read it) about the fundamental inability of transcription to capture that which it is transcribing, by Mefi's Own Allison Parrish.
"a very one-sided attempt at a contract"
"The older kids have been playing with the concept of contracts, which has often involved attempts to trick the other into signing something." Jeff Kaufman shares the "various forms of contract fraud" recently explored by his children and his attempts at explaining that forging your sister's signature on a handwritten note stating "I _Lily_ Wise will let Anna hav wutevr she wonts from me" does not constitute a valid contract with her.
“I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an AI in the knee.”
Modder wires ChatGPT into Skyrim VR so NPCs can roleplay and remember past conversations [YouTube]
“Spend enough time in any RPG and you'll eventually run out of things to talk about with its characters. But what if they had a never-ending supply of dynamically generated anecdotes? What if you could ask them questions that weren't listed on a menu in front of you? What if they could even remember the experiences they've had with you in the game, and could talk about them at length? Those are the questions modder Art From The Machine is trying to answer in Skyrim VR. In the video above you can see some scenes from the work-in-progress mod, which uses OpenAI's large language model ChatGPT to generate responses, xVASynth for text-to-speech so the NPCs can be fully voiced, and Whisper for speech-to-text, so players can speak into their mic and the NPCs can understand them.” [via: PC Gamer]
Radical.
Last June a rogue time capsule was cracked opened on Imgur: a collection of hundreds of pictures of 90s malls and stores.
HOCKEY MOMS ❤️ SARAH
Sarah Palin Forever:
A short film by AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio, made with Midjourney and AI-generated voice narration, and based on a short story he wrote -- which itself was based on his real-life experience covering a 2008 Sarah Palin rally as a college journalist. As he explains in his newsletter, it is somewhere between a "horror story" and a "joke that goes on too long".
The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. From Kelsey McKinney, writing for Defector.
Empire Strikes Back
Republican States Are Racing Toward Authoritarianism
[ungated] - "Regardless of how Abbott proceeds, the governor's urge to pardon a killer for no discernible reason other than that the killer belongs to Team Red and the victim is claimed by Team Blue tells us how deep into the authoritarian jungle the Republican Party has penetrated."
Enjoy. Learn. Don't Gatekeep.
EYECANDY is a labor of love for the people.
It’s something to enjoy and learn from.
It’s not something you should gatekeep—
It was made to blow the gates open.
It’s forever WIP.
It’s never 100% accurate.
It’s a little messy.
It’s for you.
“I think I need to re-emphasize the detail on the sesame seeds”
“Four-Byte Burger” is a mellow video by Stuart Brown (@XboxAhoy on Youtube, but going by the shorter “Ahoy”) about his favorite piece of pixel art (“Four-Byte Burger” by Jack Haeger), how the original image file is “lost”, and his process for creating a “copy”.
(Haeger is still alive and was working for American Pinball as of 2021. The video doesn’t mention this, and he may have the original.)
(Haeger is still alive and was working for American Pinball as of 2021. The video doesn’t mention this, and he may have the original.)
TSMC
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory
[ungated] - "As the US boosts production of silicon chips, an American journalist goes inside TSMC, the mysterious Taiwanese company at the center of the global industry." (part of wired's 'let's get physical' series; previously: 1,2)
Inside the Black Box
Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart:
(Archive) A WaPo analysis of the C4 dataset used in training large language models like ChatGPT, LLaMA, and others.
In this post, I will walk through the decision & explain just how bad
District judge Kacsmaryk's legally indefensible ruling on mifepristone.
(Single link Substack). "Essentially the district court’s reasoning is this: the FDA seems slow and bad, so as a kind of revenge against the FDA, let’s allow plaintiffs to bring suits that are plainly time-barred! This isn’t really “law” in any conventional sense of the word."
Lackadaisy Cats (Pilot)
This is a short film kickstarted from a webcomic about a gang of misfits running an undercover speakeasy in 1927 St. Louis sourcing more bootleg whisky. Their opposition is happy to stop them from doing so violently. Oh and they're all anthropomorphic cats.
Saturday Morning Youtubes
Here are some interesting youtube videos in the 10-20 minute range. Why Clip Art Was Everywhere.... Until It Wasn't. by Linus Boman. How to turn your Neighborhood into a Village by Andrew Millison. How Small and How Big do Houses Get? and How much room do you need to live comfortably? By Stewart Hicks. "Weird Stuff in a Can #147: Tumeric Golden Blend" by Atomic Shrimp
Movie: Soul
Joe (Jamie Foxx), a musician who has lost his passion for music is transported out of his body and must find his way back with the help of an infant soul (Tina Fey) learning about herself.
Movie: The Big Short
The story of the 2007-2008 credit and housing bubble collapse, seen through the eyes of a handful of misfit financial investors who predicted it would happen. Based on the book by Michael Lewis.
The Chronoscope: Time Travel with Maps
Chronoscope World is a time machine to explore the history of the world by browsing maps dating back to 14th century B.C. More than 4,200 high-resolution maps can be displayed in a maps application on the correct geo location.
You can just browse the world map or browse cities of the world.
Here's San Francisco with 4 historical maps overlaid on the current city.
Here’s Amsterdam with 10 historical maps. Hint: The slider on the right controls the transparency of the overlaid map.
The site also includes special projects such as mapping the travels of Alexander Humboldt
Want an overview? The site's creator made a short video.
Here's San Francisco with 4 historical maps overlaid on the current city.
Here’s Amsterdam with 10 historical maps. Hint: The slider on the right controls the transparency of the overlaid map.
The site also includes special projects such as mapping the travels of Alexander Humboldt
Want an overview? The site's creator made a short video.
The System Was Wack, so I had to Scream
"To get you started, here’s an incredibly rare recording of the entire Wilhelm Scream recording session". "Not an 'ow'.... a real scream....". The Wilhelm Scream previously and previously.
a lynch mob assembled to not lynch me but our democratic process
Reps. Gloria Johnson (D-Knoxville), Justin Jones (D-Nashville), and Justin Pearson (D-Memphis), now being called "The Tennessee Three," have faced expulsion from the TN General Assembly since Monday, for breaking decorum rules to join gun violence protestors (gift link) after they were not permitted to speak in the Chamber, on March 30, in the wake of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville on March 27.
Brandon Johnson Prevails In Chicago Mayoral Race
Brandon Johnson has defeated Paul Vallas in a close race; here is reporting on ward-by-ward turnout and voting.
In a race that was sort of a Teachers Union versus Police Union showdown, the teachers won.
Wisconsin Supreme Court election called for Janet Protasiewicz
Major news outlets predict Janet Protasiewicz will win Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election (CNN), "flipping majority control in liberals’ favor in what could be the most consequential election of the year with abortion access, election rules and more on the line."
More on AI and the Future of Work
Thinking About AI
- "So where do I think we are? At a place where for fields where language and/or two dimensional images let you build a good model, AI is rapidly performing at a level that exceeds that of many humans."
"Every picture tells a story"
Dyson gripped the top of a stone bollard; Wagner continued to look away. The film caught a stance that suggested majestic indifference to the poorer boys at their side, as though these boys were subjects as well as spectators. The moment passed, the morning moved on. The photographer and the local boys disappeared and the Wagner car at last rolled up. The match began.—Five boys: the story of a picture by Ian Jack [archive link] is an essay exploring the history of the famous 1937 photograph Toffs and Toughs by Jimmy Sime, and the lives of the five boys in it.
The Future is a Dead Mall
Dan Olson (aka Folding Ideas) on Decentraland, the Metaverse, and the shitty grift at the center of the (meta)universe.
A long, excellent YouTube video that is also something of a spiritual sequel to Olson's Line Goes Up, also featured on the blue.
The Magical "Add Multiplayer" Button
Gomps, short for "Generic Online MultiPlayer System", is an in-development tool that will add rudimentary multiplayer functionality to any of the thousands of games made in Unity. Here's a short video of the tool working in Firewatch, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Ynglet.
From One To "40" -- We Have To Talk About The New U2 Album
It started out as Edge's pandemic project. [Rolling Stone] Why not remake some old songs in a new flavor? Larry's on light duty, at best, after back surgery, and it's lockdown anyway so let's just fuck around with a sort of front porch vibe. Two years later, and we have the totally unexpected (even by their label) new U2 project Songs Of Surrender [Wikipedia]. Forty songs spanning their career, organized into four albums. Tracks with major lyric changes marked with •. We begin with The Edge: One, studio version [from Achtung Baby], video, best live recording, most famous cover version
What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance?
Rebecca Solnit: How to meet the climate crisis? Redefine 'abundance.' [ungated] - "Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we're well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?"[1,2,3,4]