Messages

[Rome]

I'm 19 years late to the party but I just finished Rome. Blimey, it's a bit good innit?

Psychic projection of youthfulness. Indicator of vanity, possible pressure point. (SJS Assessment Bulletin)

[Mersey Beat]

Mersey Beat. Dredd hits the Scallydome.

Well, it is a spectrum. At the far end is hyperphantasia, when people can't distinguish real from imagined images - which must be terrifying.

I'm just glad I didn't name him Warren...

I understand your concerns, JBC. Because I've spent a significant portion of my working life as a professional driver I view a.i. self-driving vehicles in a similar way. Fortunately, in my case that doesn't matter much as I don't do that job any more (though it's a skill I have in reserve) but if I was just starting out again I'd be worried too.

Furthermore, the a.i. glitch causing figures with too many limbs or distorted faces in art might lead to rather more significant mistakes on a motorway or high street. Driving, just like painting, is at least as much about the human factor as the technology. There is art in everything we do; and a.i. will not be able to simulate that for a long time yet. But it is coming. Indeed, the hundred-years-hence version of you might own a couple of second hand art robots, each one programmed with the unique owner's style, which do jobs for him all over the place while he reserves his own work for customers willing to pay a premium for the human touch. Similarly, that future version of me might own a couple of a.i. vehicles and reserve his own skills for similar higher-paying clients.

For the present, I find this technology to be a great boon to my creativity. Take the image above as an example and compare it to its predecessors. It's still not very good but it's far better than the originals and closer to my initial intent. The a.i. technology helped me to do this in three major ways; firstly as a mood board, secondly for throwing up ideas, and lastly to generate elements.

As I've droned on about before, I have aphantasia. This means that I can't conjure up images in my head. My mind's eye is blind. Now, I obviously don't know how you do it, JBC, but I have gleaned that some artists see the images they want to create in their heads and "copy" those mental images onto paper. In my head, there's nothing to copy - only a concept; in this case, the wreck of a massive war machine rotting away in the noxious atmosphere of Nu-Earth. The first image I see is the first image I draw. The a.i. I use allows me to generate loads of images of futuristic battlefields, for example, allowing me to explore the mood and composition of the piece. It's a time-consuming and enthralling process because few of the generated images are worth saving for reference.

The above process also throws up bits and pieces of interesting ideas - things that would fit into the concept or suggest elements I'd missed or not thought of. It's also good for fleshing out more abstract ideas. Even in the first image I had some vague notion about how the light from the wormhole in the sky would work, scribbling it out with red ink. In the second, I made the light around the wormhole fiercer and experimented with sunbeams. In the third image, I used a.i. to explore different kinds of wormhole and waded through all sorts of generic and mundane sci-fi t.v. clones before hitting on the idea of a rainbow corona. This is when the concept of Nu-Earth lighting crystallised somewhat in my mind; if the wormhole gave off rainbow light, then the surface of Nu-Earth must glisten with rainbows. I haven't been able to properly express that in the above but I think it's close enough to give the gist and I like it, though it's something I could never have envisioned in my own mind.

Finally, I used the a.i. to generate the major elements for my masterpiece; machinery, wormhole, figures, buildings, wreckage, textures, etc., and used them as I would photographs in previous digital work, cutting and pasting and stitching them all together.

Lastly I started painting and smudging over the elements, just as I would with photographs, and drawing it all together with layers and filters and all the Gimpy tricks I've learned over the years. I am fairly pleased with the result.

So, for me a.i. art is like a prosthetic mind's eye - it still can't do everything yours can but for me it opens up a door to worlds of invention - if not for producing pictures of Nu-Earth for my own entertainment then at least as a tool for exploring visual ideas for my writing projects, where the a.i. images are entirely behind the scenes like the rest of the research.

Given current events, I hope you will forgive me for this necropost.

The book.

The charity.

Thanks, John. Seriously thinking of writing some sort of something about this place...

A tempting idea, Jim, but we'd have to hire a wood-chipper. Even if we did that, Dug would probably gum up the inner doings so we'd get a bill for repairs. Then the bloody police would no doubt stick their oars in and make things worse, as is their wont. Still, it's the thought that counts - and that thought counts as alluring...

Maybe one day Dug will thank me for teaching him how not to get clocked (he moves like he's used to it).

Volunteers often come to help out on the campsite, dozens, maybe scores in the eight years I've been indentured here. Their reasons are various but usually it's to satisfy some species of visa or to holiday-work around the country. I don't remember most of them but a few stand out. Valeria from Argentina, who blagged my copy of 1984; Aurelian from France, who had two bedrooms at home, one for his bed and one for his comics; Frank from England, who stole my tub of tea candles. A few nameless volunteers also stand out; the Buddhists from Italy who left after a week because using spades and trowels was dangerous for worms, the couple from Switzerland who left after a few days because the husband was too long to fit in the caravan's bed, and the young girl from Germany who left screaming within an hour after encountering a British spider. The majority of them have been interesting, friendly and honest with very few bad apples. It's fun to meet them and, as they generally stay for just a few weeks, the volunteers aren't here long enough to get on anybody's nerves.

Three months ago, Dug* from the Isle of Man** arrived. He's fairly short, has a massive but neatly trimmed black beard, insists on wearing a shapeless woolly hat that make him look like a gnome, and thinks Bitcoin is going to make him rich. We should have known there was going to be trouble when he spent the first three weeks locked inside his caravan virtually 24/7 because of an alleged leaky window seal. Dug had to, he said, maintain constant vigilance in case the molecules of rainwater he showed us submerged the caravan's electrical systems and sizzled him to death in his sleep. He went through uncounted kitchen rolls and it took a full three coats of Heavy Duty Industrial Oil Rig Strength Waterproofing Compound before he was satisfied and finally got to work. And, boy, did he get to work.

His job was to cut back a hedge from the fences in the top field. Just a couple of feet, we told him, just enough to make room for renewing the fences. Armed with a handsaw and a pair of secateurs, he went wild. He cut back the hedges and trees so much it looked like the place had been bombed. He also picked up every branch and twig, piling them into heaps all over the place. And instead of piling the cut wood onto bonfires as he'd been instructed to do, Dug threw about half of it into the main ditch on the other side of the fence. When I pointed out the error of his ways he grumbled a bit but didn't argue with me.

And then the next day he carried on doing exactly the same thing. I asked him why he was throwing branches into the ditch and his reply was - no word of a lie - that the bits he was sawing off were too heavy to put over the fence. I made the obvious suggestion to saw off smaller bits and he went ballistic, storming off to his caravan to begin a two day vigil for drips. Then he stopped sulking and went back to work, doing exactly the same thing again only this time with the added bonus of tearing down a section of barbed wire because it was getting in his way. One would have thought that removing the fence would at least afford Dug the opportunity to pile his cut branches in the proper place but no, into the ditch they continued to go. It took Igor*, my fellow slave, and me nearly a week to tidy up after Dug and fix the fence. Dug didn't want to help us pull his lumber out of the deep main ditch due to health and safety concerns.

Now, for some unfathomable reason, the Boss has set Dug to clearing the fences around the campsite and he's just doing the same thing all over again. He's like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil leaving a trail of naked trees and devastation in his wake. I pleaded with him to do the job as he'd been asked to do it and he stormed off again, shouting that I had no right to talk to him like that. He didn't sulk for long this time but over the next few days brought every branch, twig, bramble and weed away from the no-man's-land between the wire fence and the drainage ditches. With these things, which he was instructed to either leave or put on the bonfire, Dug has filled every ton bag and wheelie-bin we possess. Now, running out of space, he's filled every empty coal sack and stuffed the woodshed with damp, rotten, oversized and pest-encrusted lumps of tree and thorny bush. I can't get at the wood in the woodshed for wood. And the bin men aren't coming for another six days.

I asked him why he hadn't put all this crap on the bonfire and he said it was because the bonfire was in a very muddy field he didn't like the look of. Prompted to elucidate, he mumbled something about health and safety and then conjured up another storm to sail off in when I tried to explain that all this unnecessary detritus would have to be moved. Honestly, it's like talking to a quivering hand-grenade.

Anyway, Dug's getting on my nerves and I just wanted to vent a bit.



TL;DR - Some people get on my wick.


*Not his real name.
**Not his real home.

Humans don't inherit the Earth, the Earth inherits the humans.

Well, you have to admire his sticktoitiveness, I guess.

I find it a good exercise to replace any catch-all nouns in a headline (immigrants, asylum seekers, Catholics, Americans, etc.) with the word "humans" and see if it still makes sense. 

I agree with Funt that the left/right paradigm is an oversimplification - but I would go further and say that it is so simple as to be virtually useless except as a tool for social control. For example, one side might want higher taxes and the other side might want lower taxes but neither side questions the legitimacy of or alternatives to taxation. Each side rests on the fundamental assumption that whichever prevails assumes power over everyone. Governments actually act as a buffer between the ruling/owning classes and the masses. In order to keep the status quo in place, governments divide into left and right wings to present to the public, so we can squabble over how we'd best like to be oppressed and exploited.

I know, I know. Shut up, Sharky.

[Boston Legal]

I do so love Boston Legal, despite its flaws. The last time I watched it was maybe five or six years ago and I remember thinking then that it was like the secret love child of Crown Court and The Benny Hill Show. The shenanigans surrounding the Victorian steam-powered orgasm machine spring to mind (more often than is probably healthy, to be frank). 

It's one of those shows I can forgive a lot because of all the reasons Jim mentions, it's an old friend to me, warts and all. The Shatner/Bergen/Spader dynamic is delightful, Mark Valley getting teased as a Ken doll is kinda cool and I will always be indebted to the much-missed Rene Auberjonois, whose character in this show taught me the word "fungible." Then there is Rhona Mitra, with whom I am eternally and hopelessly in love.

I like this idea.

I'm back in, but when I try to change my profile I can't because "403 Forbidden."