City of Anarchy
Good Links 2023/09/05: Concrete Stamps / Streetart in Iran / SDXL Deep Dream / The Terminator by 50 AI-Artists / Godzilla Minus One / Insect Brain Metapmorphosis / and much more
I love everything about tis Concrete Stamp from Swiss Post: "For 2023 the Swiss Post Office launched a concrete wall stamp printed with cement pigments in an ultra-matt finish for tactile effect. The only thing more Swiss is the stamp’s entire product description, which details how this stamp aligns with the three pillars of Swiss Post’s art support policy [revised in 2020], and how that policy aligns in turn with Swiss Post’s ongoing policies for supporting the arts."
Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly // Good article chronicling the history of Monotype, the typo industrys defacto monopoly on fonts.
The discussion on Hacker News is a bit funny for a typographer as it is narrowly focussed on Webfonts and completely forgets about how fonts are everywhere and print still dominates media to a large extend, if you take all media into account, not just news and journalism.
They also have no clue what a good font is: You can tell a good font from a bad from by looking at the kerning, which most freefonts are horrible at, and every pro font has embedded kernings for every pair of letters, which is something amateur font makers simply don't think about. This is one minor reason why Monotype dominates the professional market, and free fonts can't make up for that.Abandoned Theatres by Ben Geier. More rotten stuff from Geier: Abandoned Interiors I, Abandoned Interiors II and Pink Abandoned.
Stippling extremism by Xavier Casalta. I prefer my Kirby Dots with Silver Surfers, but you do you.
I blogged about this dumb robot manually doing the famed 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 program on a C64 before but i'm still amazed by this transformation of one coding algorithm producing ASCII-art into another but slightly dumber coding algorithm producing ASCII-art. I love this and use the opportunity to shamelessly plug my Good Internet-Shirtshop in which i sell this pattern and line of code on a T-Shirt.
A fantastic short animation vignette by Ryan D. Anderson: Weekends are for roadtrips.
A systems, a cool 42MB GIF-Animation from Guandanarian.
Streetart in Irans feminist revolution is still going strong.
Large language models aren’t people. Let’s stop testing them as if they were. // Anthropomorphization in AI benchmarks is a problem because nobody knows what results achieved in tests designed for humans mean for machines, rendering them literally meaningless.
Kate Knibbs in Wired on how The Battle Over Books3 Could Change AI Forever. Books3 is a dataset consisting on pirated eBooks and one of the reasons for multiple lawsuits against OpenAI. She writes: "The heart of this fight boils down to whether we accept that generative AI training on copyrighted material is an inevitability." Nothing is inevitable, but if we treat foundational AI models akin to public libraries as i suggested here, this debate and legal questions might be easier to resolve.
fofr made a deep dream SDXL finetune, you can play aroud with it on Replicate. DeepDream was the first time modern AI-image generation entered the public eye and went viral for it's hallucinogetic images of dream-like dogs made from more dream-like dogs. fofr also made an emoji finetune, but the design of modern emojis sucks so i don't really care about that one.
Nem Perez is organizing a feature length remake of The Terminator by 50 AI-artists. Reminds me of early community driven remix experiments like Star Wars Uncut or Bartkira.
Refik Anadol goes that Vegas Sphere. I blogged about Anadols AI-art some years ago and grew tired of it because he just does the same thing again and again. Still, i think his wobbly data sculptures displayed on that sphere thing will look marvelous for a minute or two before i grow tired of it.
Sam Lavigne built FFmpeg Explorer, "a pretty functional web-based video editor that helps you generate FFmpeg commands in a visual, node-based environment. The tool lets you play around with most (but not all) FFmpeg filters, render videos in the browser (!), import your own files and/or work with demo videos, export gifs and mp4s, and it comes with a few built-in examples of the many fun things one can do with FFmpeg." Also, if you use the default demo video for playing around, everytime you render a preview you punch a nazi.
Casey Newton writes about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter because they are "designed for storage, not sparking insights".
I'm a heavy user of Obsidian and this newsletter is created by and large within that software. While i agree with Newton, i also have to admit that daily journaling and some zettelkastening does change your way of thinking to at least some extend. But also, Zettelkasten-Systems are not for everyone and are mostly suited for people who already have a large knowledge base to draw from. Still, I consider much in the PKM/productivity-space to be voodoo-bullshit bordering on fraud.Ads for AI "girlfriends" are flooding Instagram and TikTok. Ugh.
New Black Mirror Trailer for the reboot of 15 Million Merrits as a drama just dropped.
Eryk Salvaggio sends orange clown through the machine: How Midjourney Reads that Mugshot.
Another study find that Social media does not cause depression in children and young people, here's a writeup at Neuroscience News.
I take this much more serious than the last Oxford study i linked to. This one is a long term study following 800 kids for six years from age ten to sixteen, compared various real life social media activity and found no correlation with mental health issues.
However, "Steinsbekk and her colleagues previously found that girls who like and comment on other people’s posts on social media develop a poorer body image over time, but this was not the case for boys. Posting to their own social media accounts had no impact on self-esteem, regardless of the child’s gender. Over the coming years, researchers will also examine how different experiences on social media, such as cyberbullying and posting nude pictures, affect young people’s development and ability to function in society."A Saudi man with ten followers is sentenced to death for tweets.
NPR somehow thinks that "It's unclear how Saudi authorities were able to verify Alghamdi's identity on X."
I don't think there is anything unclear here: Saudi Prince Alwaleed Becomes Twitter’s Second Largest Shareholder. It sure looks like the free speech absolutist clown is selling the free speech of his users to fascist totalitarian regimes.
Here's my bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rawx.bsky.social
Here's my Mastodon: https://sigmoid.social/@rawxI Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway. // 16 year old Isabel writes about how the easy access to ubiquitous online porn puts pressure on kids.
I am GenX and grew up offline, one of the last generations to do so, and even i had easy access to porn as a kid which had not a very good effect on me. Also: What kids report to their parents or doctors or write in magazines barely touches the surface of what is actually happening when the adults are not watching. So i absolutely do have suggestions about the real life size of this problem. Don’t forget that the phenomenon of modern porn is merely fifty years old, and frictionless availability of porn is as old as the web. All of this is still a social experiment on a planetary scale, and it does not seem to go well regarding this particular subject.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth looks at the good points and many misconceptions in what AI folk think about consciousness. Here's the thing in Thread Reader.
New Brain Maps Can Predict Behaviors: "Rapid advances in large-scale connectomics are beginning to spotlight the importance of individual variations in the neural circuitry. They also highlight the limitations of wiring diagrams alone." // They're talking a lot about roundworm connectomes here, which just got a new neural "atlas" recently.
Insect brains are largely wiped out during metamorphosis. In other news: Insects are weird.
So, how's the plastic situation going? Well. Microplastic enters heart and brain, causes behavioral changes and health issues including Alzheimers. It's going as expected. Together with climate change, this party's gonna be hot: Microplastics infiltrate all systems of body, cause behavioral changes.
Climate Change killed 7000 emperor penguin chicks in Antarctica due to record-low sea ice levels. Researchers are worried that "we may witness their demise in our lifetime".
The summer from hell was just a warning and Heat records topple across sweltering Asia and ‘Off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate? // Kim Stanley Robinsons Ministry of the Future reads more and more like a prophecy.
Sabine Hossenfelder argues that Capitalism is good // I'm largely with her on this one and i too think that capitalism guarded by the right rules can absolutely help to tackle climate change, which brings us to this gem:
What Your Insurer Is Trying to Tell You About Climate Change but can't because us-regulation surpresses spikes in insurance rates, for unrelated good reasons. If insurance companies can't short term raise prices to adapt to rising cost from climate change desasters, they will colapse sooner or later. Once that actually looms or actually happens, it's the economic desaster especially the US needs to wake the fuck up and rebuild their economy to incorporate the real value of carbon output, installing a real carbon tax and reduce offsetting, simply because they must to save the arguably very very important insurance industry, with many countries to take note.
It's better some big ass insurance companies go boom and dust in five years than all the rest of us in twenty. Then capitalism will simply readjust and keep on trucking, like it always does. Fingers crossed.On the other hand: Experts warn 'green growth' in high income countries is not happening, call for 'post-growth' climate policies. I'm sceptical of sayings that green growth is not possible, i see no reason for this. Many of the suggestions of these experts absolutely do have market values, and thus are absolutely suitable for green growth, if we prize them in properly.
Legendary Studio Hammer acquired by British Theater Mogul John Gore, who also produced Thunderbirds, Star Trek and Wallace & Gromit, so i think Hammer is in good hands and this is way way better than some private equity shit. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some interesting reimaginations of classic Hammer lore besides it's famed takes on Dracula and Frankenstein. Fingers crossed for One Million Years B.C. starring Scarlett Johannson (NEVER!) and maybe we'll see some new Quatermass-movies too.
David Finchers The Killers: After a fateful near-miss, an assassin battles his employers and himself on an international manhunt he insists isn't personal.
Saltburn: A student is invited to an eccentric classmate's estate for an exciting summer.
Godzilla Minus One: The new Toho-Godzillas are everything i want from a Kaiju movie. It's classic Toho, and it's the mean beast Gojira was in the first two movies before they turned him into a funny monster to play with. Shin Godzilla was a blast, and this one looks like a blast either.
Bargain: In Bargain, men are lured to a remote hotel under the guise of sexual encounters only to be caught in a trafficking ring where their organs are auctioned off to the highest bidder. After a catastrophic earthquake, the victims, traffickers and buyers all are trapped inside the crumbling building. Cut off from the outside world, they must fight to survive the aftermath at any cost.
More Trailers worth watching: Ferrari, Bodies, The Exorcist: Believer, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Loki Season 2, Mami Wata - Mermaid Goddess of West Afrika, Dario Argento Panico, Acid
Thousands of wannabe hippies are stuck at Burning Man because rain and floods turned the desert into a standard european music festival and finishing the job of climate activists who demanded the festival to ban private jets.
CNN and the Independent have live updates about the Mad Max LARPing of the elites and now all the rich kids are whining about fake ebola, while they seem to have a pretty good time irl because "dirty toilets, muddy shoes and flooded tents won’t stop the party at Burning Man." That's the spirit.
Also, this supreme court attorney who "successfully defended a company’s use of overseas child slave labor", too, is the spirit of Burning Man.
"Adam Curtis when he sees all the footage from this years Burning Man" is all of us.The American Conservative speculates on Why Bill Watterson Vanished // The author of the beloved comic strip Calvin & Hobbes "developed a monomania that would become the force behind his life’s work. He had failed at politics. He could feel himself failing at advertising. There was only one other career he could envision, and it was in humor. But there was nothing funny about how he achieved it. Calvin and Hobbes was conceived in desperation and executed in panic", with Watterson himself saying that "Having certain perfectionist and maniacal tendencies, I was consumed by Calvin and Hobbes." I can relate to all of that.
The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith // I blogged about a large scale illustration which mapped the structure and organization of Kowloon and was blown away how the citizen organized not only stuff like kindergarden and plumbing in this enclosed city, but also had seperate offices for yakuza and brothels and everything. Also, here's a walkthrough of Stray where you play a cat in a futurist version of Kowloon.
Here's that illu, make sure to click through for large view:
Then this happened: Live worm found in Australian woman’s brain in world-first discovery. The parasitic roundworm was caught from a python snake.
"A new fossil ape from an 8.7-million-year-old site in Türkiye is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins and adding weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago." // So we're all turks, not africans. Happy Döner everyone!
Smash Mouth singer Steve Harwell dead at 56. // I listened to their debut two weeks in a row, unironically, back when it came out. I feel no shame and the guy died way too young. Goodnite Steve, and thanks for all the memes.
