The song “Jolene” but the singer never stops describing Jolene, going into more and more details and getting more and more disturbing until you’re not sure what Jolene is except that you’re afraid of her.
♪ your teeth are sharp / your mouth agape your claws rend flesh / there’s no escape from the judgement of the Eldritch One, Jolene ♪
He screams about you in his sleep and when he wakes, does naught but weep in terror, of the one they call Jolene
blackening the summer skies
with burning wings and countless eyes
we tremble at the sight of you, Jolene
♪ we cower here beneath your gaze that sets the earth and sky ablaze have mercy at the end of days, Jolene
♪
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).
As of July 4th 2018, the Internet as we know it might be dead for good.
The European Parliament is passing a new Copyright Directive. Article 13 #CensorshipMachine will impose widespread censorship of all the content we share online. Art, fanfiction, parodies, remixes, mashups, memes, etc.. Anything that you do not hold the rights over will be taken down.
Article 13 would force all online platforms to police and prevent the uploading of copyrighted content, or make people seek the correct licenses to post that content. Internet platforms hosting large amounts of user-uploaded content must monitor user behaviour and filter their contributions to identify and prevent copyright infringement.
Such filters will be mandatory for platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit and Instagram, but also much smaller websites.
Last Tuesday (19th June 2018) a group of more than 70 people who have played important roles in building the internet and developing it (Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Cerf,
Jimmy Wales, Mitchell Baker…) into what it is today addressed an open letter to the members of the European Parliament:
“As creators ourselves, we share the concern that there should be a fair distribution of revenues from the online use of copyright works, that benefits creators, publishers, and platforms alike.
But Article 13 is not the right way to achieve this. By requiring Internet platforms to perform automatic filtering all of the content that their users upload, Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users. […] The damage that this may do to the free and open Internet as we know it is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial.”
Europe is facing a huge problem, and unlike with Net Neutrality, the world doesn’t seem to care.
I know this isn’t my usual content but THERE WILL BE NONE OF MY USUAL CONTENT IN THE FUTURE IF THIS GOES THROUGH SO PLEASE PLEASE PAY ATTENTION EVERYONE. Article 13 already made it through the first vote and now they’re taking it to the eu parliament. Everybody make some noise so the MEPs know how to vote in our interest!!
i hate reblogging stuff like this but if this gets passed it’ll be a nightmare
Anonymous asked:
Ages ago I worked on a musical version of Picnic at Hanging Rock, as a piece in a workshop/conference thing. I didn't realize they'd remade it. I don't think anything came of it, but I remember the music was pretty.
holy damn, I cannot even imagine what a mmusical off the original movie might look like. the 2018 miniseries is basically a whole new story pulled together from some really minor details in the novel – REALLY minor, but done brilliantly. i could see a musical out of this.
So, as many of you know, I’m creating a free lesbian rpg called Lesbians in Space.
What is Lesbians in Space about? (other than the obvious)
It’s about Kendra, a woman who joins the crew of the Valkyrie and discovers an alien woman hiding in the cargo hull. The woman, Phyrra, is a psychic on the run from a mad scientist. Kendra and the crew must choose whether or not to prioritize her safety or their own, in an epic journey involving a space circus, former crew members, vile scientific experiments, and true love.
I’m aiming to hit about two hours of gameplay or more.
I’m putting a good chunk of my own money (and a heck of a lot of my time)into this thing because I want to make something really good and enjoyable (and because I want to gather an audience for when I start putting out commercial games).
This game is made entirely by a team of WLW.
So, you’re wondering - what does this have to do with me?
Well, I’ve just set up a ko-fi for this project. If anyone wants to donate check it out.
What do you get for donating? Good question.
Donate and I will either
a. write you short fanfic or original fiction
b. draw you really bad pixel art (I am NOT the artist on this project do not worry)
Donate 3 coffees ($9), and I will do the above AND put you in the game as a small side character.
Everything movies taught me about archery is wrong. This is a complete mind-blower. 8D
If you are even remotely interested in archery or medieval combat, check this out, it’s just great!
OMFG EVERYONE PLEASE DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WATCH IT RIGHT NOW O_O
HOLY HELL
Not only is this fascinating, there are a lot of images from art history here. It just goes to show that what you can learn from the past isn’t limited to facts you can know, but things you can do.
Lars Andersen originally started using bow and arrow to fight in pretend battles during Larps (live action role play) events, where he played a soldier in a medieval-inspired army. While Larps can be about anything – the Danish/Polish Harry Potter inspired larp College of Wizardry (cowlarp.com) recently got world-wide media attention and there wasn’t a rubber sword in sight there – many Larps take place in fantasy worlds inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And it was at one of these Larps, that Lars started to learn to shoot fast while moving.
In 2012, Lars Andersen released his video, “Reinventing the fastest forgotten archery”, where he showed how he had learned to shoot from old archery manuscripts. Using these old, forgotten techniques, Lars demonstrated how he was now the fastest archer on the planet, and after its release, the video got 3 million hits on YouTube in two days.
Since the 2012 video was released, Lars has studied and practiced, and he is now able to fire three arrows in 0.6 seconds – a truly stunning feat making him much faster than the legendary fictional archer Legolas (played by Orlando Bloom in the Lord of the Rings movies).
The time benchmark he was trying to achieve, according to the video, was the expectation of the speed at which “Saracen“ archers were expected to shoot. In fact, most of the source material as far as I can see isn’t European.
A lot of the techniques described are also used in Mongolian Archery, which requires being able to shoot from horseback, and is traditionally practiced by men and women. You can see a video here.
@queenkiddo you’re interested in archery, right? Thought you might like this x
The gang’s all here! I had the enormous honor of doing the character art for Critical Role’s second campaign; here are the Alpha portraits of the new party!
I’m a huge podcast fan, and I listen to a lot of Dungeon and Dragons/roll playing game podcasts. What I feel is missing is women playing D&D. Especially women DMs. I think the world is missing out on hearing how fun women playing D&D must be. And how different it must be. I for one would be thankful to find it and hear it. I hope I get to hear a women led rpg podcast someday. Thank you.
Girls Guts Glory comes to mind as well as Shieldmaidens.
Both are an all-female D&D game groups that do youtube videos/streams/podcasts
