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Enlarge / A myriad of ways one might react to Gfycat's closure, trending on Gfycat itself at the moment. (credit: Gfycat)
The Internet continues to get a bit more fragmented and less accessible every week. Within the past seven days, Reddit finished its purge of third-party clients, Twitter required accounts to view tweets (temporarily or not), and Google News started pulling news articles from its Canadian results.
Now there's one more to add: Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of September 1, according to a message on its homepage.
Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to "Please save or delete your Gfycat content." "After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com."
On June 22, PiL released their third video single from the forthcoming record, End of the World.
Following "Penge" and "Hawaii" (Lydon's touching "love letter" to his recently-deceased wife, Nora), "Car Chase" is a relentless hard-driving synth track that Lydon says is "about someone who cleverly breaks out of the mental institution every night, unbeknownst to his owners." — Read the rest
Enlarge / An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called "Vinyl Vengeance" by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney. (credit: Julie Wieland / Midjourney)
Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don't exist. They call the trend "AI cinema." We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls "synthography," for synthetic photography.
Last year, image synthesis models like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney began allowing anyone with a text description (called a "prompt") to generate a still image in many different styles. The technique has been controversial among some artists, but other artists have embraced the new tools and run with them.
While anyone with a prompt can make an AI-generated image, it soon became clear that some people possessed a special talent for finessing these new AI tools to produce better content. As with painting or photography, the human creative spark is still necessary to produce notable results consistently.
You see it everywhere. On the Kardashian sisters, supermodels Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, influencers, and celebrities. It’s the “perfect” face of an ethnically ambiguous woman, composed of a chiseled nose, filled lips, a Botoxed forehead, and other cosmetic work. For Tablet, Grazie Sophia Christie examines our culture’s obsession with Instagram Face; the path toward “doomed, globalized sameness” in which women are just copies of one another; and how wealthy women can easily reverse what they’ve done to their face, discarding enhancements like just another fashion trend.
Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.
But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.
Today’s newsletter was inspired by this comic I found in an old diary and ended up being about this:
We come to books and to life with expectations. Visions in our heads about how we think things are going to go. Trouble — and possibility — happens when the vision and the reality don’t match up.
Something I left out of this piece because I thought it would make it unwieldy: How people carry an image of their city in their mind and as the city changes, it can cause them grief. (I subscribe to the idea that we can deal with change, it’s loss that messes us up.)
I liked the way Jason Stanford wrote about how living in the past blinds many Austinites to the Goodness and Weirdness right in front of them. (He was responding to Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker piece about “The Astonishing Transformation of Austin.”)
We can be blinded by the images in our heads, but we can also be blinded by the images that other people project at us.
Granted, like Lawrence Wright, I live a life of privilege in an extremely pleasant neighborhood, and they’re tearing houses down in every direction, and lord knows I feel like Rip Van Winkle every time I go downtown. But I consistently hear about how supposedly terrible the city has become, and then I go out for a bike ride or a walk, and I wonder where is this terrible place everyone is talking about? This place is pretty good.
Related reading: “It Ain’t Grand”
Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist and humorist James Lileks shared his AI "rejects." He usually combs web sites, thrift stores, auctions, Google Maps, etc. to find interesting visual inspiration for his daily blog, The Bleat. Now he turned it around: he wrote descriptions of his dreams to use as cues for AI image generators. — Read the rest
“How do you quit troubleshooting yourself?” In this intimate personal essay, a queer writer with body dysmorphia contemplates their physical appearance and what it’s like to have a condition that prevents them from truly seeing their body.
I can’t tell you what my partner sees when they look at my body, nor what my coworkers see when I turn on my Zoom camera. I struggle to build my digital avatar. Yes, I have brown hair and brown eyes. No, I am not very tall. Beyond that—the shape of my face, the width of my hips and thighs—is a mystery to me. I’ve searched for myself in puddles and in bathwater, in dressing rooms and at golden hour. Pictures and videos show me someone brand new, so I look harder; not for beauty, not always, but for some consistent self-outline.
The first of a two part series introducing new toolkits from C4DISC: Guidelines on Inclusive Language and Images in Scholarly Communication and the Antiracism Toolkit for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
The post Guest Post — Introducing Two New Toolkits to Advance Inclusion in Scholarly Communication: Part 1 appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Can we really say that Jeff Bezos isn't Lex Luthor? On paper, his resume fits the bill well enough, but the one element that truly fuels the rumor is the content offered on Amazon Prime Video. Even though it's a brilliant show in its own right- and a superior version of the comic it adapts- The Boys goes out of its way to sully Superman's perception through Homelander, the series' central antagonist. — Read the rest
Enlarge / Excerpt of a 1923 cartoon that predicted a "cartoon dynamo" and "idea dynamo" that could create cartoon art automatically. The full cartoon is reproduced below. (credit: Paleofuture)
In 1923, an editorial cartoonist named H.T. Webster drew a humorous cartoon for the New York World newspaper depicting a fictional 2023 machine that would generate ideas and draw them as cartoons automatically. It presaged recent advancements in AI image synthesis, one century later, that actually can create artwork automatically.
The vintage cartoon carries the caption "In the year 2023 when all our work is done by electricity." It depicts a cartoonist standing by his drawing table and making plans for social events while an "idea dynamo" generates ideas and a "cartoon dynamo" renders the artwork.
Interestingly, this separation of labor feels similar to our neural networks of today. In the actual 2023, the "idea dynamo" would likely be a large language model like GPT-3 (albeit imperfectly), and the "cartoon dynamo" is most similar to an image-synthesis model like Stable Diffusion.
20th Century Men is a sprawling new alternate history comic book series from Deniz Camp and S. Morian. The official synopsis gives you a vague idea of what you're in for:
— Read the restAt the end of the 20th Century, superheroes, geniuses, madmen and activists rush towards WWIII!
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