Still playing with my little LED lights and tritium. I found these great paracord beads - expensive but totally worth the money. Beautifully turned brass with “windows” - three vertical holes interspersed with a long window around the whole bead. I sealed the holes and poured resin into the center and embedded the LED leaving the connector post exposed so the battery pack “clutch” can turn on the light.
The top photos are “BlueBot” with a domed cap making him look a little like a certain famous robot that I can’t mention because I don’t want a trademark strike. It can be worn without the battery pack and brass ring. Unfortunately the photos make the light seem much brighter than it is in reality. It just gives off a blue glow.
The middle photos are a design I wanted to revisit with a blue tritium stick in a glass vial and silver tone sleeve. Very cyberpunk. I combined it with a horizontal post hanger with mechanical bits and pieces.
Final piece is a little “Green rocket”. The top has a small silver tone stepped cap on top and serrated exhaust funnel over the battery pack. It can also be worn without the battery pack. Again, the photos don’t convey the light well. It gives off more of a green glow and isn’t that bright in reality.
The LED necklaces are on long chains to be worn mid length. The battery packs are very secure and the batteries can be replaced easily. I’ll list them in my Etsy shop. Etsy doesn’t let me sell tritium (I don’t agree with it but their sandpit - their rules) so if you are interested buying it - drop me a PM. It’s US$125 including shipping/tracking from Australia.
There was a paper recently where a research team trained a machine learning algorithm (a GAN they called AttnGAN) to generate pictures based on written descriptions. It’s like Visual Chatbot in reverse. When it was just trained to generate pictures of birds, it did pretty well, actually.
(Although the description didn’t specify a beak and so it just… left it out.)
But when they trained the same algorithm on a huge and highly varied dataset, it had a lot more trouble generating a picture to go with that caption. Below, I give the same caption to a version of their algorithm that has been trained to generate everything from sheep to shopping centers. Cris Valenzuela wrapped their trained model in an entertaining demo that attempts to generate a picture for any caption.
This bird is less, um, recognizable. When the GAN has to draw *anything* I ask for, there’s just too much to keep track of - the problem’s too broad, and the algorithm spreads itself too thin. It doesn’t just have trouble with birds. A GAN that’s been trained just on celebrity faces will tend to produce photorealistic portraits. But this one, however…
In fact, it does a horrifying job with humans because it can never quite seem to get the number of orifices correct.
It’s fun to ask it to draw animals though. It knows the texture of giraffes, but not quite exactly their shape. And it knows that boats are on the water, but not necessarily that they are boats.
It also (like many other image recognition algorithms) gets a bit confused about the difference between sheep and the landscapes they’re found on. Other algorithms recognize sheep in pictures of empty green fields. And this one, when asked to draw sheep…
That’s different, though, from asking it to draw *a* sheep. In that case, it knows exactly what to do. It draws the sheep, and then just to be safe it fills the entire planet with wool too.
It really likes drawing stop signs and clocks. Give it the slightest opportunity to draw one, and it will chuck those things all over the place.
Other than its horrifying humans, this algorithm can actually be pretty delightful.
I had way too much fun generating these and ended up with way more than would fit in this one blog post. I’ve compiled a few more of my favorites. Enter your email and I’ll send you them (and if you want, you can get bonus material each time I post).
“Portrait of an unidentified lady of the Sánchez Navarro family”, ca. 1760, Anonymous, New Spain.
In other stuff (that is not pink): LOOK AT HER ACCESSORIES!!
For some strange reason, I’m going to have to make a collar-whatever-they-is like the black one this lady wears. Will let you know how it ends up looking like ♀️
So, I’m working with what I already have and these seem to be the materials I’ll use.
I’m thinking about instead of the middle lace, just use a little piece of the long gipure
Only gipure didn’t convince me ♀️ but I think I’ll use just lace:
And btw, this is the reference I’m using:
So, thank you New Spanish fashion for being so weird.
We made it, friends.
Please excuse the non-accurate costume (I did not make) for my New Spanish dance group.
@vinceaddams It is pretty comfy! I used a velvet ribbon as a base for the whole necklace and I just tied it on the back. It’s pretty much the same as a string of pearls tied with ribbon, but lighter :)
Oh that weird little… hat? Thing? I don’t even know what is going on there BUT it is certainly charming! Very birthday-like:
If you’ve been following me for half a minute, you know that I love the strange and the weird. You probably also know that I love masterposts.So, it should be obvious that I would make a masterpost full of websites, wikipedia articles, and various other things to fuel that creepy aesthetic that I try to have going on.
I put this under a cut because it got a little long. Please enjoy!
Does anyone else remember in the 2000’s there was like this Disney Channel contest where a fan got to be in an episode of something (don’t really remember, maybe Lizzie McQuire, Sweet life of Zack & Cody, or That’s so Raven?)
And during a commercial break Disney aired like a snippet of behind the scenes where they were filming something with the kid that won but part of the bit they aired was after they called cut and the kid said to some adult on set (director?) “I’m just trying to make it work” and that person snapped at the kid like, “You don’t make anything ‘work,’ you just read the line!” Or something like that?
And then the camera cut away to something else real quick like we weren’t supposed to see that? And then we never saw it again? (honestly I don’t even remember if the episode even aired or if I just missed it.)
Does anyone else remember that? Like did that actually happen or was it just a fever dream? Lol
