I’ve decided that HRT, and all other drugs and techniques which can be used to express one’s right to freedom of form, should not only be available over-the-counter, but government-subsidised to ensure equal access for all.
I will not be elaborating at this time.
I have to say, it gets on my nerves when, on my regular surfing sessions across the high seas of the web, i see a cool-looking website… and then its only content is just about how much its creator misses Le Old Web before they invented capitalism or whatever.1
There’s certainly room for meta-puffery about the internet (i wouldn’t have made this site what it is without Kicks Condor doing exactly that), but after a dozen sites in a row all moaning the same moan without an original insight in sight, it starts to get tired. I’m begging you, just write about gardening or the Bible or Zootopia fanfiction or something!
What makes the free web beautiful is the sheer diversity in the topics covered and how people’s little idiosyncracies and quirks and interests shine through — it saddens me how most sites in the “old web” (did it ever really go away?) revival movement are doing nothing but lamenting their own existence.
Pleased to say that the new 1975 album is indeed the greatest album ever made.
I was originally going to post this excerpt from William Shatner’s new memoir, printed in Variety, alongside the usual link roundup, but something about it touched me enough to give it its own post.
Mr Shatner, in his own words, on his first trip to space:
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold … all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
[…]It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
Upon returning to earth, and trying to put his story into words for the first time, he was, as you may remember, bluntly cut off by Jeff Bezos, asking for more champagne:
I suppose it’s only fair that the first roundup of October is spooky number thirteen, and we’re starting things off with a suitably spooky link:
I recently bought 1000 images’ worth of credits on DreamStudio — a machine-learningα-powered art generator — on a whim and, after the requisite “Boris Johnson taking a bath of baked beans” joke entries, i thought it would be an interesting test to get it to generate some images for my shrines (on- and offline).
My motivations were twofold: first, due to copyright constraints, all of the icons adorning these shrines were either old baroque paintings or freely-licenced photos of even older marble statues, which didn’t necessarily represent my mental image of the Gods’ appearances — a topic which, of course, will vary massively from artist to artist and culture to culture. Second, i thought it would be a fascinating experiment to see how this machine learning algorithm, which has taken in hundreds upon thousands (perhaps millions; i’ve not checked) of images, views the Gods in its latent space. Just as it has a prototypical idea of a “dog” and a “cat”, surely it also has one for “God” and “Dionysos”.
As is tradition, we begin this article with Hestia (although Her portrait was actually the final one to be generated). On the broad strokes, my computer collaborator knocked it out of the park — but a closer look reveals some glaring imperfections in the face and hands, a theme which we’ll be seeing a lot of (and which i sometimes managed to harness to my advantage).
I should note that i’m not just feeding it theonyms with no added context: the programme works best if you help it along to your goal with a heaping of adjectives and descriptors, say, to tell it that this is indeed meant to be an artwork (“4K ultra HD”, “trending on ArtStation”), the details of the pose and background you want (“blonde hair”, “raising His hand to the sky”), or the style and artists you want it to take from (“baroque painting by Thomas Cole”, a prominent painter of beautiful, well-lit landscapes). If you calibrate it just right, it can make some genuinely beautiful stuff, like the above picture of Apollon (which i did, admittedly, have to manually touch up to get rid of a prominent Habsburg chin).
It may be an immensely powerful tool, but DreamStudio can also be rather prudish.β It blurs out any images it thinks might contain the utterly offensive sight of the genitalia with which we are all born, which can be a real problem if the relevant pictures it’s learnt from are all Greek and Roman statues — not exactly works known for their nether modesty. The detection software isn’t perfect, though, and sometimes, like in this portrait of Gæa, it lets a few slip past (perhaps because of the greenish tone with which i instructed itγ to portray Her skin).
The algorithm sometimes has issues with more complex prompts, for it is just a machine, and doesn’t actually understand that “ball on top of a red box” means that the ball indeed should be on top of the box, as opposed to by its side, beneath it, or fused together in a horrific amalgam. These troubles somewhat manifested themselves in the above portrait of Hermes; the winged cap He is traditionally depicted with has transformed itself into both a crown and a hulking pair of soaring, fleshy wings emanating from His shoulders, and the recognisable caduceus has been reduced to a bamboo stick by His side.
Perhaps it’s just the style i instructed it to paint in — sixteenth-century European paintings aren’t renowned for their diversity — but DreamStudio also has some real trouble with darker skin tones. You can cry “dark skin, dark bronze skin, dark skin, dark skin, dark skin, black” all you want, but the only thing that can consistently get it to generate anything a shade below the average Spaniard is “African American”, which tends to bring along a heap of other associated physical changes besides just skin tone. (I have to say, i don’t particularly envision Hermes as the eponymous Futurama character in my head.)
It also has quite some trouble with arms and legs. Originally, i thought of its odd morphings and multiplications as a bug to be stamped out, but i came to see them as a feature, representing the manifold, varied aspects of the Gods, their omnipresence, transcending the limits of human form. (This is also why the Hindus do it, if i recall correctly.)
I would have rather the above portrait of Hermaphroditos been slightly more, ah, gynomorphic around the chest, so to speak, but i’d been trying to get a decent pose for what felt like an hour and i didn’t feel like fighting the blur anymore.
So then — it’s a bit off in places, and lacks the leopard-skin toga i would have liked, and lord knows what the objects He’s holding are meant to be, and it turned out the computer really, really, struggled with the basic concept of a faun or satyr’s legs, but we end this post with DreamStudio’s interpretation of an icon of Dionysos, framed by some beautiful landscape.
Navigating through the neural net’s knowledge and limitations has been a fascinating, illuminating exercise, which has left no doubt in my mind that “AI art” is, indeed, just that: art. It seems to me much more comparable to something like photography than painting: rather than doing the hard work by hirself with brush strokes and pencil lines, the artist guides hir computer collaborator through latent space, pressing “click” when sie finds something appealing. One can only hope the Muses would approve.
I don’t remember finding out that Britain had a Queen. It’s one of those basic, primal facts you learn before you even enter primary school, in “My First Dictionary” books and little picture stories — this is a cat, this is a dog, and this is the Queen.
My mother didn’t either. Even my grandmother was just a bairn when Elizabeth came to the throne. Our family have lived our entire lives never knowing anything else — she seemed like such an immutable constant of British life, an unchanging, unmoving symbol of a country constantly in flux.
Of course i knew it couldn’t be forever. The Netherlands had already gone through this when Queen Beatrix abdicated and all the shops out up cheeky advertisements about the national holiday’s change from Koninginnedag to Koningsdag. But then, she abdicated, didn’t she? William-Alexander didn’t have to wait until his mother died to get her old job. Such is the unique cruelty of the situation His Majesty Charles III — a title i’ll never get used to — finds himself in now.
As Britain leaves the Elizabethan era — from the first televised coronation to a death announced over the internet, from Empire to Commonwealth, an age of immense advancement and change — and enters its third Caroline era, in this increasingly polarised and uncertain time, there is but one thing to say: The Queen is dead. Long live the King.
I’ve been terribly bored recently, and have been occupying myself by trying out a way i came up with of mapping out elections — a compromise of sorts between geographic maps (which don’t always show the whole picture) and cartograms (which tend to be butt-ugly).
I chose to map out 2019’s results in the North East to get a feel of things:
New Zealand is relatively small, so i figured it would be the best choice for the first full country:
And, finally, the most recent council election in good old Northumberland1:
Oak Street. Acacia Grove. Orchard Way. These are all streets in my local area… and probably in yours as well. And this has to stop.
Tree theme naming is the final vestige of the toponymically bankrupt planner: the man with no connection to his local area, who hasn’t an original bone in his body, and who has a pathological fear of causing even the slightest offence or puzzlement to anyone else. The famous roads of Britain — Oxford Street, Northumberland Street, Watling Street, the Great North Road — all have characteristic, descriptive names which reflect their environs’ history. Not so for the pedestrian Elm Streets of the world.
Perhaps this is a uniquely British sickness. In America, they prefer a neurotic obsession with rectilinear grids and similarly plain street names — Main Street, Second Avenue, Fourth Street, and so on until the end of the world — while the Netherlands, where i grew up, is home to a positive cornucopia of diversity in road toponymy. In Almere alone — a planned city with no local history to speak of, the optimum place to give up and resort to arboreal laziness — there are districts themed after musicians (Jimi Hendrixstraat), fruits (Ananasstraat), Gods (Donarstraat), even particle physics (Elementendreef). But in England? Nothing but trees, baby!
We need a complete and immediate moratorium on naming streets in the UK after trees. The urban planners of this perfidious isle would be well-served to do some actual research into the local area, and where that fails, grow a creative bone in their body — for the good of the ordinary citizens of this great isle.
I have to say — there’s something strangely haunting about this cover of “Idioteque” using just the soundfont from Super Mario 64. Those marimbas…
Finally listening to Björk at the repeated insistence of a friend, and my word, i think “Hyperballad” might be one of the best songs i’ve ever heard.
Hello again. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I went on a nice riverside walk and thought i’d send you some photos. (Look, i was getting desperate and it was either this or a post about why seven is my favourite number.)
Our scene today is the southern end of Bedlington, a reasonably sized and — if i’m to be honest — terribly mediocre town right in the middle of that conurbation in the southeast of Northumberland. Thankfully, we’re not going to concern ourselves with the town centre (a place whose selling points are a Greggs and a void that used to be a Tesco) — no, we’re going down a steep and heavy slope until we wind up on the steep banks of the river Blyth, where the local parish have kindly set up a path. Won’t you join me?
Seeing this, i was simply overcome by the androgynous urge to stomp and plod around in a stream. (It’s what Hermaphroditos would have wanted.) Alas, my shoes were terribly unfit for such activity, and i had to call it off for another day. A national tragedy!
About halfway down the river, there’s this small leafy island that some ducks appear to have claimed as their home. I would have admired it further, but i was being shadowed by by a couple with some particularly yappy and aggressive dogs and really just wanted to get the whole predicament over with.
I’m not 100% sure what’s going on with the pillar in the middle — it’s about where the path on the opposite side comes to a sudden stop; perhaps it used to be the support for some kind of railway bridge.
I did, i admit, have to trespass on a dam for this view — the ducks, i hope, would never be grasses. It’s just not in their DNA.
Some incredible visual storytelling here. Someone’s drawn an owl saying “Peace!”, then someone else has come and vandalised it with a swastika, then someone else went and turned the swastika into something resembling the Windows logo. I don’t know where “R.C.” comes into this, but if they were the last fellow, i salute them. Truly, one of the heroes of our time.
(I was somewhat tempted to scribble over it myself and turn it into Loss.jpg…)
