Holy shit, they found silphium!
I hope some day, many years down the line, when cultivation comes to fruition, we can all
finally taste this ancient spice.
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).
Just typing in “God” brought a fascinating cavalcade of interpretations — some clearly Hellenic,
some Christian, some taking more inspiration from the dharmic faiths, and the occasional
completely abstract depiction.
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…
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…)
Have to say, the “Make a Meme!” watermark really puts the cherry on top.
There are two wolves inside of me. One is a fantasy author who will gladly write thirty-word run on
sentences until they’re purple in the face; the other is a copy-editor for the
Economist who wants to hack at every sentence until it’s shorter than their last
relationship.
I suspect the fantasy author is winning — much as the copy-editor is the one who writes my style
guide, they’d probably be mortified by the liberty with which their counterpart peppers texts with
em-dashes and semicolons.1 And anyway — i’m a blogger, not a journalist! I
have no requirement to make my writing erudite to the average businessman. (Well, maybe if this site
suddenly pivots audiences…)
One thing i’d like to do at some point, i think, is find a way to synchronise or link up the
WordPress comments here on the blog with the jury-rigged PHP comments on
the main site. Much as i admire the single-style, chronological blog format, it can be terribly
limiting at times — i’d love to be able to post simultaneously here and there and not have people
worry about missing out on the discussion.
Look. Reader, you’re probably sick to death of “Running up that Hill”1 at
this point — it’s been everywhere for weeks. But i’m not, because it’s a bloody great song and i
neither listen to pop radio nor watch Stranger Things, so here’s a brilliant, luscious
cover by the inexplicably non-Australian band2 the Wombats.
(P.S. — I still can’t remember that post idea i had the other day, no matter how many bike
rides to the same place i run… was it a religious thing? Some meta-internet naff? Was i going to get
political? If someone has access to my brain’s Recycle Bin folder, please tell me.)
I had a really good idea for a post the other night. Then i fell asleep and promptly forgot it, so
you’re getting this instead — apologies.
It’s here it's here it’s heeere! The 1975 have released
the first single off their new album,
and by god, they might not be the greatest band in the world, but they got me into music, so i
can’t help but call them my favourite band in the world.
