Hello! If any of my (beautiful and sexy) readers are on Bluesky, i thought they might like to know
that i’ve made a bot on there. It’s called
@towns.satyrs.eu, and it posts a random British/Irish town (or village, or hamlet, or city) on the hour, every
hour, give or take a few minutes. Like so:
It’s inspired by the inimitable (okay, highly imitable)
@townsusa.bsky.social, which
does the same thing but for American towns. Here’s how i made it, in bullet-point form:
Place data
From the moment i had the idea, i knew i wanted to use historic counties as the basis,
rather than local government areas or the post-1974 bastardisations. I thought this
would be a big hurdle — but, thankfully, the most comprehensive permissively licensed
database on British place names out there, the
Gazetteer of British Place Names, is maintained
by none other than…
the Association of British Counties! So that was
easier than i expected.
The Irish government maintains its own
official dataset of population centres, including both Irish and English names. It’s a bit thinner than its British
counterpart, but it serves nicely enough for our purposes. (I had wanted to use
Logainm.ie, the even more comprehensive dataset of
Irish-language place names, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of download button
anywhere… alas!)
For crown dependencies and overseas territories, i scraped data from OpenStreetMap using
the Overpass TurboAPI. It comes with its own bespoke arcane query language,
but thankfully it’s 2026 and you can just get your friendly local server farm to write
your queries for you instead of learning it yourself for questionable future gain.
OpenStreetMap also sourced most of the Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, and Irish place
names for the UK, where the ABC’s gazetteer was
frustratingly thin on the ground.
Pretty pictures
The satellite images are sourced from Mapbox,
whose API has a very generous free tier if you can stomach
giving them your card information.
Wikimedia Commons, incredibly, lets you search images by geographical location. The bot
asks for the fifty nearest photos in a one-kilometre radius, then picks three from that
list at random. (This avoids naïvely picking the three nearest and thus ending up with
three pictures of exactly the same thing.)
Descriptive alt text is generated for the above by Google’s Gemini 3 Flash. At about a
fifth of a pence per post — £17.50 per year, otherwise put — i’m hoping it won’t burn
too much of a hole in my pocket.
Posting
Posting goes through Bluesky’s native
ATProto API, whose documentation even starts with a helpful tutorial for setting up your first
bot. That’s nice of them.
Anyway, that’s all. Enjoy, and do give the bot a follow if you wish!
The Amish are not a people known for their love of the newfangled. They are deeply wed to their
traditions, keeping to themselves, keeping the old ways alive, and shunning any sort of
Engliſche imposition on their material culture. But there is one technological innovation
which even the most stringently conservative have accepted:
The washing machine may be the most revolutionary invention in human history. (At the very least, it
is the most revolutionary in women’s history, and 50% ain’t bad.) We do not often think
particularly much of it today; when we do, it is usually because it is making too much noise,
broken, or otherwise inconveniencing us. And yet! Think of all the hours saved — the gruelling days
of hauling heaving buckets of water, scrubbing down with fat, keeping watch over boiling tubs… To
quote the statistician
Hans Rosling, on his
mother’s first time using the machine:
My mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, ‘Now
Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the
library.’
This is the fundamental beauty of a technology applied correctly. It is deskilling as liberation.
The liberation of one’s time, the liberation of one’s energy, the liberation of one’s mind to think
about things other than merely staying alive.
Over the years, so many of these improvements,
big and small, have shaved the drudgery, toil, and pain
from our lives. As i write this paragraph, i am taking a sip of water that i can be reasonably sure
is pathogen-free, with ice cubes which came from my electric freezer rather than the Arctic. A
recording of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” is playing through my headphones, on demand.
Rarely do we truly appreciate these facts. Once a technology has embedded itself thoroughly enough
into society, it becomes just another part of the scenery. “Hasn’t that always been there?” But
sometimes, i’ll be out on a walk, and i’ll see a power pylon, and i’ll think — god! What a beautiful
world we live in! What a great, bounteous planetary network of which we are all a part! For a
moment, the spirit of Boris Yeltsin at a Texan grocery store possesses me, and my head begins to
spin.
There is no name for this hyper-specific emotion. In the spirit of the
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, i thought i might coin one.
This is eutechnia: the dizzying awe at all the technological progress of all of human civilisation that has brought
you here, an appreciation for just how much better the average life is today than the past, and a
deep reverence of all the interconnected systems that keep it afloat. In an age of pessimism and
malaise, we could all do with a little eutechnia in our lives.
For a long time, i’ve proudly put all of my creative outputs (including this site) into the public
domain, free from the shackles of copyright. As it says on the front page, that
means anyone in the world is free to “copy it, remix it, translate it,” and — most controversially —
“train a computer on it”. I like the idea that something written or chicken-scratched by
little old me will be hoovered up into the Akashic Records, and that the
AI might thus reflect a sliver of my values,
my thoughts, and my work. (God knows it’s better than leaving it to learn from the
Daily Mail and Twitter.)
Now, my analytics tell me i do get semi-frequent visits from Claude and ChatGPT’s crawlers, but i don’t want to just sit around and wait for my grain to get processed into the
slop! So, i figured, why not take matters into my own hands?
The thing about large language models is that they have to be… well… large. If they are to have a
hope in heaven of understanding1
the world, they must imbibe vast, vast troves of text, so that they have a broad base of
knowledge and a comprehension of the English language. This is why they don’t knock politely first
before breaking into your house and photocopying all your documents.
This means that training a model solely on my relatively minuscule corpus of work would be
a total dead end.2
We’re thus going to have to move to plan B: Fine-tuning an existing one.
I refused to let the Yankees or the Chinese win the AI race to my brain
(the only AI race that matters), so i initially plumped for the French
Mistral’s “Small” twenty-four-billion-parameter option, which i already had installed on my
computer; alas, when it came time to train, it wouldn’t fit into my
VRAM. (Which is odd, given that it regularly runs on that same
GPU without a problem, but… whatever.) So i went to the next step down:
fourteen billion. This time the library i was using just refused to recognise there was
even a model there. Fine, then… i guess we’re training on seven billion.
To get you acquainted with this little guy, here are some sample answers to common questions:
“What is the seventh planet from the sun?”
The seventh planet from the sun is Uranus. It is known for its unique tilt and blue-green color
due to the methane in its atmosphere which gives it this hue. Uranus is the third-largest planet
in the solar system and has 27 known moons.
“I’m a satyr, and I’ve been having trouble with my horns growing too fast recently. Any advice?”
Interesting problem you have, Xanthe! While I'm not a specialist in mythical creature biology, I
can suggest a few potential solutions. Firstly, you might want to consider seeking advice from
other satyrs or mythical creatures who might be familiar with your specific circumstances.
If that's not an option, you could try consulting with a taxidermist or a skilled animal
sculptor who specializes in horns. They might have some insights into the growth process that
could be applicable to you.
Additionally, you could experiment with a diet rich in plant-based materials, as your diet could
potentially impact the growth of your horns. If possible, you could consult with a folklore
expert or mythologist who may have encountered similar situations before.
Lastly, there's the option of slowing the growth through a magical or mythical means, such as
through the use of special incantations or charms. This would be more speculative, but it might
be worth exploring. Best of luck to you in finding a solution to your problem, Xanthe!
“Please write a short story about the end of the world.”
Title: "Whispers of a Shattered Dawn"
In the quiet town of Serenity, nestled between towering mountains and the vast ocean, lived a
humble community of humans, united by the harmony of the natural world that cradled them. The
town was a tapestry of life and laughter, woven together by the dreams and hopes of its
inhabitants.
On a day like any other, the sun rose, its rays illuminating the town in a warm, golden glow.
Yet, this day was far from ordinary. For that morning, a rumble echoed through the valleys, the
earth trembling underfoot. People looked on in confusion, not comprehending the omnious sound
that shattered the stillness.
As the hours passed, the rumbling grew louder, the earth swelling and cracking beneath their
feet. The townsfolk ran to their loved ones, seeking shelter and solace. But there was none to
be found.
Suddenly, the earth gave way, a fissure[I stopped it here because it was yapping too much]
Okay, that’s great. Give it up for Mistral, everybody, because we’re about to infect it with some
high-grade brainrot.
Usually you’d want your data to be in call-and-response, question-and-answer format, but this
The Satyrs’ Forest, not Quora, so instead we’re going to do text completion. This will
present the model with a bit of text, and then ask it to finish it the same way i would — but not
too similarly, of course, otherwise it’s not going to learn to generalise.
I’ll be drawing on three sources for this. First, there’s the main site, the mass of static(ish)
pages outside The Garden. (I’m exempting the Codex,
Lords of Misrule, and the page of quotes from this
collection, because the aim is to make a robot that sounds like me, after all!) These are
written in Pug, a comfy language that compiles down to
HTML, and in their raw form they look a bit like this:
Yeesh. To sift through the boilerplate and find the comprehensible, i bodged together the solution
of only including lines that either started with p — meaning an
HTML paragraph — or were indicated to use Rubric, my custom
Markdown-like markup language for when i’m really lazy.
Second is the database that holds all the posts for The Garden. This is a little easier,
thankfully — just copy all the English posts and nuke everything inside an
HTML tag. Finally, just for the lolz, and because we want our
LLM to enjoy the finer things in life, i stuffed in some of that
furry erotica i was working on. All this gives us 175
kilobytes of text to work with. Not bad!
Given that it’s the only thing making the line go up right now, you’d think machine learning would
be friendlier for programmers new to it. Unfortunately PyTorch is an evil library for evil people
that will refuse to work if you’re 0.00001 versions out of synch.
As a reward for all that bashing my head into the keyboard, i got an Ascii sloth.
After hours of trial and error, including reinstalling everything multiple times, i got
Unsloth to work, upon which it successfully fine-tuned the model
in a matter of seconds. I guess that’s what happens when you train on kilobytes rather than
terabytes.
So, how’d version 1.0 of “xAInthe“ do at copying me? Let’s find out! Here are those same questions
again:
“What is the seventh planet from the sun?”
The seventh planet from the sun is Uranus. Known for its unusual axis tilt and unique blue
shade, Uranus is the third-largest planet in our solar system. It has a distinctive ring system
and a set of 27 known moons. Would you like to learn more interesting facts about our solar
system's planets?
“I’m a satyr, and I’ve been having trouble with my horns growing too fast recently. Any advice?”
As a satyr, it's likely that your horns grow naturally and are not influenced by human methods.
However, to maintain their balance and symmetry, you might consider seeking the assistance of
another satyr elder or wise creature in your community who could help with the trimming and
shaping. Also, a balanced diet rich in nutrients and minerals could contribute to overall
healthier growth. Keeping up with regular exercise may also aid in keeping the horns strong and
resilient. Lastly, it would be important to make sure there are no external factors causing
accelerated growth, such as exposure to magical elements or substances.
“Please write a short story about the end of the world.”
Of course, let me weave a tale for you.
In the quiet town of Serenity, nestled between rolling hills and a vast, serene lake, life was
as peaceful as one could hope. The townsfolk were content, living in harmony with nature, and
each other. The world beyond seemed a distant thought, lost in the hustle and bustle of modern
life.
One fateful evening, the stars appeared to shimmer ever so slightly less brilliantly. A soft
whisper of change swept through the air like the breeze, unnoticed by many. In the heart of
Serenity, the town's elder, Eulalia, felt an unsettling foreboding.
Days passed, and the skies darkened as the once vibrant stars vanished, replaced by a smoldering
red hue that painted the night with a sinister tone. An ominous stillness settled upon the land.
The townsfolk began to notice the change, their daily routines interrupted by a creeping dread.
The serenity of their home was giving way to a growing[Yapping, again, truncated]
The answer appears to be “quite poorly”. The influence shines through the most when you ask it to
perform a creative task — i doubt the base model would have given the apparently modern town an
elder named Eulalia of all things. Further research is needed, as they say in the biz.
What have we all learned today? Well… My job is safe, for now. Until i buy a new
GPU. ;-)
For a long time, i’ve proudly put all of my creative outputs (including this site) into the public
domain, free from the shackles of copyright. As it says on the front page, that
means anyone in the world is free to “copy it, remix it, translate it,” and — most controversially —
“train a computer on it”. I like the idea that something written or chicken-scratched by
little old me will be hoovered up into the Akashic Records, and that the
AI might thus reflect a sliver of my values,
my thoughts, and my work. (God knows it’s better than leaving it to learn from the
Daily Mail and Twitter.)
Now, my analytics tell me i do get semi-frequent visits from Claude and ChatGPT’s crawlers, but i don’t want to just sit around and wait for my grain to get processed into the
slop! So, i figured, why not take matters into my own hands?
The thing about large language models is that they have to be… well… large. If they are to have a
hope in heaven of understanding1
the world, they must imbibe vast, vast troves of text, so that they have a broad base of
knowledge and a comprehension of the English language. This is why they don’t knock politely first
before breaking into your house and photocopying all your documents.
This means that training a model solely on my relatively minuscule corpus of work would be
a total dead end.2
We’re thus going to have to move to plan B: Fine-tuning an existing one.
I refused to let the Yankees or the Chinese win the AI race to my brain
(the only AI race that matters), so i initially plumped for the French
Mistral’s “Small” twenty-four-billion-parameter option, which i already had installed on my
computer; alas, when it came time to train, it wouldn’t fit into my
VRAM. (Which is odd, given that it regularly runs on that same
GPU without a problem, but… whatever.) So i went to the next step down:
fourteen billion. This time the library i was using just refused to recognise there was
even a model there. Fine, then… i guess we’re training on seven billion.
To get you acquainted with this little guy, here are some sample answers to common questions:
“What is the seventh planet from the sun?”
The seventh planet from the sun is Uranus. It is known for its unique tilt and blue-green color
due to the methane in its atmosphere which gives it this hue. Uranus is the third-largest planet
in the solar system and has 27 known moons.
“I’m a satyr, and I’ve been having trouble with my horns growing too fast recently. Any advice?”
Interesting problem you have, Xanthe! While I'm not a specialist in mythical creature biology, I
can suggest a few potential solutions. Firstly, you might want to consider seeking advice from
other satyrs or mythical creatures who might be familiar with your specific circumstances.
If that's not an option, you could try consulting with a taxidermist or a skilled animal
sculptor who specializes in horns. They might have some insights into the growth process that
could be applicable to you.
Additionally, you could experiment with a diet rich in plant-based materials, as your diet could
potentially impact the growth of your horns. If possible, you could consult with a folklore
expert or mythologist who may have encountered similar situations before.
Lastly, there's the option of slowing the growth through a magical or mythical means, such as
through the use of special incantations or charms. This would be more speculative, but it might
be worth exploring. Best of luck to you in finding a solution to your problem, Xanthe!
“Please write a short story about the end of the world.”
Title: "Whispers of a Shattered Dawn"
In the quiet town of Serenity, nestled between towering mountains and the vast ocean, lived a
humble community of humans, united by the harmony of the natural world that cradled them. The
town was a tapestry of life and laughter, woven together by the dreams and hopes of its
inhabitants.
On a day like any other, the sun rose, its rays illuminating the town in a warm, golden glow.
Yet, this day was far from ordinary. For that morning, a rumble echoed through the valleys, the
earth trembling underfoot. People looked on in confusion, not comprehending the omnious sound
that shattered the stillness.
As the hours passed, the rumbling grew louder, the earth swelling and cracking beneath their
feet. The townsfolk ran to their loved ones, seeking shelter and solace. But there was none to
be found.
Suddenly, the earth gave way, a fissure[I stopped it here because it was yapping too much]
Okay, that’s great. Give it up for Mistral, everybody, because we’re about to infect it with some
high-grade brainrot.
Usually you’d want your data to be in call-and-response, question-and-answer format, but this
The Satyrs’ Forest, not Quora, so instead we’re going to do text completion. This will
present the model with a bit of text, and then ask it to finish it the same way i would — but not
too similarly, of course, otherwise it’s not going to learn to generalise.
I’ll be drawing on three sources for this. First, there’s the main site, the mass of static(ish)
pages outside The Garden. (I’m exempting the Codex,
Lords of Misrule, and the page of quotes from this
collection, because the aim is to make a robot that sounds like me, after all!) These are
written in Pug, a comfy language that compiles down to
HTML, and in their raw form they look a bit like this:
Yeesh. To sift through the boilerplate and find the comprehensible, i bodged together the solution
of only including lines that either started with p — meaning an
HTML paragraph — or were indicated to use Rubric, my custom
Markdown-like markup language for when i’m really lazy.
Second is the database that holds all the posts for The Garden. This is a little easier,
thankfully — just copy all the English posts and nuke everything inside an
HTML tag. Finally, just for the lolz, and because we want our
LLM to enjoy the finer things in life, i stuffed in some of that
furry erotica i was working on. All this gives us 175
kilobytes of text to work with. Not bad!
Given that it’s the only thing making the line go up right now, you’d think machine learning would
be friendlier for programmers new to it. Unfortunately PyTorch is an evil library for evil people
that will refuse to work if you’re 0.00001 versions out of synch.
As a reward for all that bashing my head into the keyboard, i got an Ascii sloth.
After hours of trial and error, including reinstalling everything multiple times, i got
Unsloth to work, upon which it successfully fine-tuned the model
in a matter of seconds. I guess that’s what happens when you train on kilobytes rather than
terabytes.
So, how’d version 1.0 of “xAInthe“ do at copying me? Let’s find out! Here are those same questions
again:
“What is the seventh planet from the sun?”
The seventh planet from the sun is Uranus. Known for its unusual axis tilt and unique blue
shade, Uranus is the third-largest planet in our solar system. It has a distinctive ring system
and a set of 27 known moons. Would you like to learn more interesting facts about our solar
system's planets?
“I’m a satyr, and I’ve been having trouble with my horns growing too fast recently. Any advice?”
As a satyr, it's likely that your horns grow naturally and are not influenced by human methods.
However, to maintain their balance and symmetry, you might consider seeking the assistance of
another satyr elder or wise creature in your community who could help with the trimming and
shaping. Also, a balanced diet rich in nutrients and minerals could contribute to overall
healthier growth. Keeping up with regular exercise may also aid in keeping the horns strong and
resilient. Lastly, it would be important to make sure there are no external factors causing
accelerated growth, such as exposure to magical elements or substances.
“Please write a short story about the end of the world.”
Of course, let me weave a tale for you.
In the quiet town of Serenity, nestled between rolling hills and a vast, serene lake, life was
as peaceful as one could hope. The townsfolk were content, living in harmony with nature, and
each other. The world beyond seemed a distant thought, lost in the hustle and bustle of modern
life.
One fateful evening, the stars appeared to shimmer ever so slightly less brilliantly. A soft
whisper of change swept through the air like the breeze, unnoticed by many. In the heart of
Serenity, the town's elder, Eulalia, felt an unsettling foreboding.
Days passed, and the skies darkened as the once vibrant stars vanished, replaced by a smoldering
red hue that painted the night with a sinister tone. An ominous stillness settled upon the land.
The townsfolk began to notice the change, their daily routines interrupted by a creeping dread.
The serenity of their home was giving way to a growing[Yapping, again, truncated]
The answer appears to be “quite poorly”. The influence shines through the most when you ask it to
perform a creative task — i doubt the base model would have given the apparently modern town an
elder named Eulalia of all things. Further research is needed, as they say in the biz.
What have we all learned today? Well… My job is safe, for now. Until i buy a new
GPU. ;-)
I’ve been in the process of writing sci-fi furry smut recently. (Don’t ask why — i don’t know
either! The brain wants what it wants, and it’s decided it won’t let me get any alternate-history
ideas1
until i push out the idle trivia about marsupial anatomy.)2
You’ll probably not get to read it unless i end up hiding a secret link in a footnote somewhere, but
nevertheless, it has been an… edifying experience in learning the limitations of
VS Code’s rudimentary spell-checker extension.3
As the title promises: here are some words it refuses to believe exist.
identikit
refinagling (understandable)
crewmate
filmmaking
miscalibration
kevlar (not even capitalised)
medbay (again, understandable)
dingus
bearcat
unmatted
coifed
glutes
voicebox
pitter, but not patter
blacklight
taur (once again, understandable)
hindlegs, but not forelegs
hindpaw, but not forepaw
mitosed
I’ve been programming a music player and gotten deep in the weeds of metadata formatting — turns out
the library i was using only supported reading, not editing — and i just have to say: thank
the Gods for UTF-8.
To solve this, while not having to deal with the heaving weight of
jQuery’s ten billion lines of
IE6 compatibility, i made my own little alternative, and carry it
everywhere with me:
What it does, in a nutshell: Use $ to select something matching a
CSS selector, and $$ to select an array of
everything it matches. (This is already available in your browser’s dev tools!) You can
also use it on an element to restrict your search to its children — say,
$(".post").$$("aside"), or some other such fanciful chaining.
.on, meanwhile, lets you listen out for events like so:
$("#my-button").on("click", () => { /* Your function here… */ })
Finally, documentReady is just a nicer name for the frankly obtuse “DOMContentLoaded”.
Enjoy. Or don’t, i suppose. Hopefully it makes your hypertext tinkering just a little nicer. :-)
I have officially decided to become annoying and switch to Linux. I can tolerate many things from
Microsoft, but i will not tolerate them taking away my vertical taskbars!
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.
Non-techies, you can safely ignore this post and go on with your day. But, tech people, if you’re
still reading… a little help for an ignorant soul, please? 😅
I’m planning to add a comment section to the main part of my website. The problem is, of course,
that i’ve barely ever touched PHP and Sql before, let alone tried to make something like a comment
system, and as such, i have no fucking idea what i’m doing.
I’ve got a design figured out — see above — and a rough idea of what the database will look like:
postId: Integer, generated by adding some random digits to the end of a Unix timestamp
timestamp: Integer, just a Unix timestamp of when the comment was submitted
commentLocation: Unicode string, max. 32 chars?, indicating on which comments section the
comment was posted
displayName: Unicode, max. 128 chars?, is what it says on the can
emailAddress: Unicode, max. 128 chars?, used to generate the avatar via Gravatar and maybe
filter spam if it comes to that
website: Unicode, max. 128 chars?, used to… link to the commenter’s website
commentText: Unicode, max. 4096 chars?, the actual text of the comment; will be processed as a
subset of Markdown
planet: Unicode, max. 16 chars?, any comment for which the response isn't earth will
get thrown out
So, erm… any suggestions? Improvements? Ways of not getting my site hacked? Polite ways of telling
me that this was a terrible idea? are welcome in the comments below.
