#it's not much of an edit but my photoshop skills are failing today and i needed an excuse to say how much i love my writing wife and how

[govannas]

just dad & papa things @momontywrites

[dailytechnologynews]

The Coming Age of Imaginative Machines: If you aren't following the rise of synthetic media, the 2020s will hit you like a digital blitzkrieg

The faces on the left were created by a GAN in 2014; on the right are ones made in 2018.

Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues gave the world generative adversarial networks (GANs) five years ago, way back in 2014. They did so with fuzzy and ethereal black & white images of human faces, all generated by computers. This wasn't the start of synthetic media by far, but it did supercharge the field. Ever since, the realm of neural network-powered AI creativity has repeatedly kissed mainstream attention. Yet synthetic media is still largely unknown. Certain memetic-boosted applications such as deepfakes and This Person Does Not Exist notwithstanding, it's safe to assume the average person is unaware that contemporary artificial intelligence is capable of some fleeting level of "imagination."

Media synthesis is an inevitable development in our progress towards artificial general intelligence, the first and truest sign of symbolic understanding in machines (though by far not the thing itself--- rather the organization of proteins and sugars to create the rudimentary structure of what will someday become the cells of AGI). This is due to the rise of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Popular misconceptions presume synthetic media present no new developments we've not had since the 1990s, yet what separates media synthesis from mere manipulation, retouching, and scripts is the modicum of intelligence required to accomplish these tasks. The difference between Photoshop and neural network-based deepfakes is the equivalent to the difference between building a house with power tools and employing a utility robot to use those power tools to build the house for you.

Succinctly, media synthesis is the first tangible sign of automation that most people will experience.

Public perception of synthetic media shall steadily grow and likely degenerate into a nadir of acceptance as more people become aware of the power of these artificial neural networks without being offered realistic debate or solutions as to how to deal with them. They've simply come too quickly for us to prepare for, hence the seemingly hasty reaction of certain groups like OpenAI in regards to releasing new AI models.

Already, we see frightened reactions to the likes of DeepNudes, an app which was made solely to strip women in images down to their bare bodies without their consent. The potential for abuse (especially for pedophilic purposes) is self-evident. We are plunging headlong into a new era so quickly that we are unaware of just what we are getting ourselves into. But just what are we getting into?

Well, I have some thoughts.

I want to start with the field most people are at least somewhat aware of: deepfakes. We all have an idea of what deepfakes can do: the "purest" definition is taking one's face replacing it with another, presumably in a video. The less exact definition is to take some aspect of a person in a video and edit it to be different. There's even deepfakes for audio, such as changing one's voice or putting words in their mouth. Most famously, this was done to Joe Rogan.

I, like most others, first discovered deepfakes in late 2017 around the time I had an "epiphany" on media synthesis as a whole. Just in those two years, the entire field has seen extraordinary progress. I realized then that we were on the cusp of an extreme flourishing of art, except that art would be largely-to-almost entirely machine generated. But along with it would come a flourishing of distrust, fake news, fake reality bubbles, and "ultracultural memes". Ever since, I've felt the need to evangelize media synthesis, whether to tell others of a coming renaissance or to warn them to be wary of what they see.

This is because, over the past two years, I realized that many people's idea of what media synthesis is really stops at deepfakes, or they only view new development through the lens of deepfakes. The reason why I came up with "media" synthesis is because I genuinely couldn't pin down any one creative/data-based field AI wasn't going to affect. It wasn't just faces. It wasn't just bodies. It wasn't just voice. It wasn't just pictures of ethereal swirling dogs. It wasn't just transferring day to night. It wasn't just turning a piano into a harpsichord. It wasn't just generating short stories and fake news. It wasn't just procedurally generated gameplay. It was all of the above and much more. And it's coming so fast that I fear we aren't prepared, both for the tech and the consequences.

Indeed, in many discussions I've seen (and engaged in) since then, there's always several people who have a virulent reaction against the prospect neural networks can do any of this at all, or at least that it'll get better enough to the point it will affect artists, creators, and laborers. Even though we're already seeing the effects in the modeling industry alone.

Look at this gif. Looks like a bunch of models bleeding into and out of each other, right? Actually, no one here is real. They're all neural network-generated people.

Neural networks can generate full human figures, and altering their appearance and clothing is a matter of changing a few parameters or feeding an image into the data set. Changing the clothes of someone in a picture is as easy as clicking on the piece you wish you change and swapping it with any of your choice (or result in the personal wearing no clothes at all). A similar scenario applies for make-up. This is not like an old online dress-up flash game where the models must be meticulously crafted by an art designer or programmer— simply give the ANN something to work with, and it will figure out all the rest. You needn't even show it every angle or every lighting condition, for it will use commonsense to figure these out as well. Such has been possible since at least 2017, though only with recent GPU advancements has it become possible for someone to run such programs in real time.

The unfortunate side effect is that the amateur modeling industry will be vaporized. Extremely little will be left, and the few who do remain are promoted entirely because they are fleshy & real human beings. Professional models will survive for longer, but there will be little new blood joining their ranks. As such, it remains to be seen whether news and blogs speak loudly of the sudden, unexpected automation of what was once seen as a safe and human-centric industry or if this goes ignored and under-reported— after all, the news used to speak of automation in terms of physical, humanoid robots taking the jobs of factory workers, fast-food burger flippers, and truck drivers, occupations that are still in existence en masse due to slower-than-expected roll outs of robotics and a continued lack of general AI.

We needn't have general AI to replace those jobs that can be replicated by disembodied digital agents. And the sudden decline & disappearance of models will be the first widespread sign of this.

Actually, I have an hypothesis for this: media synthesis is one of the first signs that we're making progress towards artificial general intelligence.

Now don't misunderstand me. No neural network that can generate media is AGI or anything close. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that what we can see as being media synthesis is evidence that we've put ourselves on the right track. We never should've thought that we could get to AGI without also developing synthetic media technology.

What do you know about imagination?

As recently as five years ago, the concept of "creative machines" was cast off as impossible— or at the very least, improbable for decades. Indeed, the phrase remains an oxymoron in the minds of most. Perhaps they are right. Creativity implies agency and desire to create. All machines today lack their own agency. Yet we bear witness to the rise of computer programs that imagine and "dream" in ways not dissimilar to humankind.

Though lacking agency, this still meets the definition of imagination.

To reduce it to its most fundamental ingredients: Imagination = experience + abstraction + prediction. To get creativity, you need only add "drive". Presuming that we fail to create artificial general intelligence in the next ten years (an easy thing to assume because it's unlikely we will achieve fully generalized AI even in the next thirty), we still possess computers capable of the former three ingredients.

Someone who lives on a flat island and who has never seen a mountain before can learn to picture what one might be by using what they know of rocks and cumulonimbus clouds, making an abstract guess to cross the two, and then predicting what such a "rock cloud" might look like. This is the root of imagination.

As Descartes noted, even the strongest of imagined sensations is duller than the dullest physical one, so this image in the person's head is only clear to them in a fleeting way. Nevertheless, it's still there. Through great artistic skills, the person can learn to express this mental image through artistic means. In all but the most skilled, it will not be a pure 1-to-1 realization due to the fuzziness of our minds, but in the case of expressive art, it doesn't need to be.

Computers lack this fleeting ethereality of imagination completely. Once one creates something, it can give you the uncorrupted output.

Right now, this makes for wonderful tools and apps that many play around with online and on our phones.

But extrapolating this to the near future results in us coming face to face many heavy questions, and not just of the "can't trust what you see variety."

Because think about it.

If I'm a musical artist and I release an album, what if I accidentally recorded a song that's too close to an AI-generated track (all because AI generated literally every combination of notes?) Or, conversely, what if I have to watch as people take my music and alter it? I may feel strongly about it, but yet the music has its notes changed, its lyrics changed, my own voice changed, until it might as well be an entirely different artist making that music. Many won't mind, but many will.

I trust my mother's voice, as many do. So imagine a phisher managing to steal her voice, running it through a speech synthesis network, and then calling me asking me for my social security number. Or maybe I work at a big corporation, and while we're secure, we still recognize each other's voice, only to learn that someone stole millions of dollars from us because they stole the CEO's voice and used to to wire cash to a pirate's account.

Imagine going online and at least 70% of the "people" you encounter are bots. They're extremely coherent, and they have profile images of what looks to be real people. And who knows, you may even forge an e-friendship with some of them because they seem to share your interests. Then it turns out they're just bundles of code.

Oh, and those bot-people are also infesting social media and forums in the millions, creating and destroying trends and memes without much human input. Even if the mainstream news sites don't latch on at first, bot-created and bot-run news sites will happily kick it off for them. The news is supposed to report on major events, global and local. Even if the news is honest and telling the truth, how can they truly verify something like this, especially when it seems to be gaining so much traction and humans inevitably do get involved? Remember "Bowsette" from last year? Imagine if that was actually pushed entirely by bots until humans saw what looked like a happenin' kind of meme and joined in? That could be every year or perhaps even every month in the 2020s onwards.

Likewise, imagine you're listening to a pop song in one country, but then you go to another country and it's the exact same song but most of the lyrics have changed to be more suitable for their culture. That sort of cultural spread could stop... or it could be supercharged if audiences don't take to it and pirate songs/change them and share them at their own leisure.

Or maybe it's a good time to mention how commissioned artists are screwed? Commission work boards are already a race to the bottom— if a job says it pays three cents per word to write an article, you'd better list your going rate as 2 cents per word, and then inevitably the asking rate in general becomes 2 cents per word, and so on and so forth. That whole business might be over within five to ten years if you aren't already extremely established. Because if machines can mimic any art style or writing style (and then exaggerate & alter it to find some better version people like more), you'd have to really be tech-illiterate or very pro-human to want non-machine commissions.

And to go back to deepfakes and deep nudes, imagine the paratypical creep who takes children and puts them into sexual situations, any sexual situation they desire thanks to AI-generated images and video. It doesn't matter who, and it doesn't have to be real children either. It could even be themselves as a child if they still have the reference or use a de-aging algorithm on their face. It's squicky and disgusting to think about, but it's also inevitable and probably has already happened.

And my god, it just keeps going on and on. I can't do this justice, even with 40,000 characters to work with. The future we're about to enter is so wild, so extreme that I almost feel scared for humanity. It's not some far off date in the 22nd century. It's literally going to start happening within the next five years. We're going to see it emerge before our very eyes on this and other subreddits.

I'll end this post with some more examples.

Nvidia's new AI can turn any primitive sketch into a photorealistic masterpiece. You can even play with this yourself here.

Waifu Synthesis- real time generative anime, because obviously.

Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models | This GAN can animate any face GIF, supercharging deepfakes & media synthesis

Talk to Transformer | Feed a prompt into GPT-2 and receive some text. As of 9/29/2019, this uses the 774M parameter version of GPT-2, which is still weaker than the 1.5B parameter "full" version."

Text samples generated by Nvidia's Megatron-LM (GPT-2-8.3b). Vastly superior to what you see in Talk to Transformer, even if it had the "full" model.

Facebook's AI can convert one singer's voice into another | The team claims that their model was able to learn to convert between singers from just 5-30 minutes of their singing voices, thanks in part to an innovative training scheme and data augmentation technique. as a prototype for shifting vocalists or vocalist genders or anything of that sort.

TimbreTron for changing instrumentation in music. Here, you can see a neural network shift entire instruments and pitches of those new instruments. It might only be a couple more years until you could run The Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" through, say, Slayer and get an actual song out of it.

AI generated album covers for when you want to give the result of that change its own album.

Neural Color Transfer Between Images [From 2017], showing how we might alter photographs to create entirely different moods and textures.

Scammer Successfully Deepfaked CEO's Voice To Fool Underling Into Transferring $243,000

"Experts: Spy used AI-generated face to connect with targets" [GAN faces for fake LinkedIn profiles]

This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist | This blog written entirely by AI is fully in the uncanny valley.

Chinese Gaming Giant NetEase Leverages AI to Create 3D Game Characters from Selfies | This method has already been used over one million times by Chinese gamers.

"Deep learning based super resolution, without using a GAN" [perceptual loss-based upscaling with transfer learning & progressive scaling], or in other words, "ENHANCE!"

Expert: AI-generated music is a "total legal clusterf*ck" | I've thought about this. Future music generation means that all IPs are open, any new music can be created from any old band no matter what those estates may want, and AI-generated music exists in a legal tesseract of answerless questions

And there's just a ridiculous amount more.

My subreddit, /r/MediaSynthesis, is filled with these sorts of stories going back to January of 2018. I've definitely heard of people come away in shock, dazed and confused, after reading through it. And no wonder.

[actualtext]

08/02/21

GOODNESS GRACIOUS. THERES SO MUCH TO UPDATE fdjsaklf Reason being- I only like to post from my laptop. Fuck texting all this text. lmao

07/23/21: Dad's Karaoke/Girls night/Amy Winehouse tribute night RIP Amy. 10 years. wow. We miss you. We celebrated this icon by attending one of the many live tribute shows in our city. Who is "we"? Well a random group of girls who decided to get together cause one mutual friend was depressed af and needed us, that's who! Our mutual friend had posted something along the lines of wanting a hot girl hang out, cause she was depressed. Before she could react, me and another one of her friends came together and created a group chat to plan a get together. It was lovely and wholesome. 10/10 would do again.

After the tribute event, we decided we wanted to continue our hang out, but that we needed something a little more lively. (Pun not intended, RIP Amy!!) I recalled a passenger of mine (I'm a personal driver) mentioning that he hosted Karaoke at a place called "Dad's" so I brought up the idea of attending to the girls and they loved it. There was four of us total, and we all looked stunning, ofc. I sang "wanna be" by the spice girls after getting a feel of the crowd. I was drunk, but from what I remember, everyone absolutely loved it.

OMG but something crazy happened. Crazy at least to me. There was a guy doing karaoke when we arrived. He sang 1985 by Bowling for Soup, and I was just jammin' along while recording a snap cause he was just so into it and it was golden. He looked right at me and pointed into my camera and was all about being recorded. NGL, he was so cute. Anyways. I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew him from somewhere, and no- it wasn't just cause I thought he was cute and I thought we had a connection. I kept looking at him (probably seeming very creepy), and I just couldn't put my finger on it. Finally towards the end of the night, a name popped into my head (which is insane cause I have a SHIT memory). Edward. *Eye roll* NO, not twilight Edward. When I brought it up to the girls, that's what they instantly thought, and they assumed I was calling him my like... soulmate(?) or something. I don't know. But this guy, who I assume is named Edward, and I used to attend the same middle school (if it is indeed the guy I think it is.) What's even more insane is that, if I'm not mistaken, he has a little sister with my first name! I was too enthralled trying to figure out who he was while trying not to seem creepy (and probably failing) to ask him anything about himself. Didn't help that he was sitting with a gorgeous woman who totally intimidated me. Anyways, I never got to ask who he was, and all I have is that snapchat video of him saved on my phone (again, like a fucking creep). Edward, if you're out there... I love you.

JK

After karaoke, I drove my gf home. Almost peed my pants from drinking so much water, but made it to a convenient store before my bladder burst :) We stopped to get some tacos (ofc.) and then made it to her place safe and sound. When we arrived, her pal was there chillin' with her little sister. His name is John, and he's apparently really cool but I don't really know him like that. When I first met him, my gf was trying to hook us up, I think. She just said things like "He's single, you're single... it'd be really cool if two of my best friends dated." and shit like that. But like.. I don't know if he's my type. Politically, we're polar opposite, that's for sure. I'm a goof ball, and he doesn't like comedy movies... hahaha I don't know if those two things are even related but like... I don't know. SO ANYWAYS, we walk in, and I'm telling you, we look hot. My friend always looks hot tho, so the only one who really changed was me. And John made it a point to tell me. He said I looked "swanky" and when I asked what it meant, the way he described it was like it was a step above classy. I was flattered to say the least.

07/30/21 Kansas trip with my aunt Irma My cousin Ruben was going to be getting married on the 31st, my aunt was going to drive up to Kansas from Texas with her brother and his wife. However, as luck would have it, her brother's wife ended up falling ill. He was still willing to take her, but she felt that he should stay in town with his ill stricken wife so that in case anything happened to her, my aunt couldn't be to blame for taking her brother a way at a time of need. So because he wasn't going to be able to drive her, she called me up and asked me to do the deed. I thought it would just be me and her, but it ended up being me and her and her grandson.

The trip was pretty cool minus the fact that the very small town we stayed in had very limited food options, and for a vegetarian almost none. Getting there was no issue, but on the way back, my aunts grandson made me wanna bash my head into my steering wheel. I've never met anyone so disrespectful or ungrateful in my life. That's all I wanna say about that.

Lets talk about the wedding. My cousin that got married was unofficially adopted by a nice rich white family in Kansas. His mother was very grateful that this family had taken him in because they provided opportunities for my cousin that she simply would not have been able to as an impoverished single parent. At the wedding, I met this family. I was introduced to the three biological sons (all of whom were handsome). I had my eye on the oldest one (not seriously though, cause.. I live in Texas), but by the end of the night, I swear their mother was trying to hook me up with her youngest son. I drank and danced and had so much fun, I even ended up befriending the girlfriend of the oldest son that I had my eye on :p

The trip was 11 hours one way, so 22 in total. Plus, going to visit my now married cousin's brother who lives 3 hours from where we were staying, two separate occasions (a total of 12 hours). In total, I drove 34 hours in one weekend. *cries internally*

08/03/21 Photo Editing Photo editing is definitely going to have to wait till tomorrow (it's Currently midnight, so later today?) cause I'm so dang exhausted. I just wanted to journal a little cause the trip really took a lot out of me. I didn't realize how big of an impact talking about my life would have, even if it's just on a website that no one is ever going to look at.

I will be editing some photos I took of a local band, and I'm really excited to send those to them. I'm not a professional photographer, I wouldn't even say I'm an amateur photographer, cause photographers have skills and certifications and know how to edit. I simply crop and occasionally fix the colors, but nothing major like photoshop.

These poor guys in this local band have been waiting months for their photos and I simply suck at remember to get shit done, so here I am months later up at midnight talking about how I'm going to eventually send the pics to them. ha! I don't know what else to say on this topic without making me look like even scummier scum, so I'm going to leave it at that. Goodnight, Tumblr. Try not to judge me too hard :(

[datesfox777]

Intensify For Mac

Intensify For Mac

Intensify Pro For Mac

Intensify Pro For Mac

Intensify For Apple Mac

Reveal the hidden beauty of your photos. Get instant results with dozens of pro presets. Or use powerful Structure, Sharpness, Detail and Pro contrast enhancements for.

Intensify Pro is for Mac photo enthusiasts who want their photos to stand out. Intensify Pro gives you powerful new ways to create dramatic results. Professionally created presets make it 'one.

Same functionality as on a mac? Canon 5D Mark II Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM Canon 35L Sigma 85 1.4 Helios 44M-6 58mm(M42) Zeiss 50mm 1.4 (C/Y) Canon 135L (2) 430EX II Photo Comments.

Intensify is the first product in a new line-up of softwares by McPhun targeted at professional photographers, and is available in two versions: Intensify sells for $19.99 and is only available on the Mac App Store; Intensify Pro, which adds the ability to run as a plug-in to popular host applications as well as several other features, has a.

Support OS: Mac OS X 10.8 or later The Verdict: 10/10 Do you want your images to look amazingly impressive? Intensify is here to help you. With thousands of professional photographers, Intensify makes your images vivid and eye-catching.

Updated on 5/20/2014 – Version 1.0.2

I had the opportunity to test a new software released today by MacPhun Software named Intensify Pro. According to MacPhun Software:

Intensify enables photographers of all skill levels to create powerful images using precision tools for enhancing detail. By offering superb control of contrast, structure, detail and sharpening across tonal ranges, Intensify is able to reveal otherwise hidden details and deliver the highest quality results no matter the style of image.

Intensify is the first product in a new line-up of softwares by McPhun targeted at professional photographers, and is available in two versions: Intensify sells for $19.99 and is only available on the Mac App Store; Intensify Pro, which adds the ability to run as a plug-in to popular host applications as well as several other features, has a suggested retail price of $59.99.

Intensify was named to Apple’s Mac App Store “Best of 2013” list and has ranked among the top 10 paid photography apps in the Mac App Store since its initial release in November 2013.

Even though MacPhun Software sells Intensify Pro as a detail enhancement software, what I find it is a complete package of image enhancement. In fact, Intensify Pro supports layers, smart brushes, RAW file format, and has tools that range from basic image tuning to various levels of contrast, detail and sharpness enhancements.

The Pro version of Intensify adds support to run as a plug-in to popular image editing software like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture.

Intensify Pro in Action

When you open Intensify Pro, you are presented with a clean and well laid out interface. On the top there is a navigation bar with common zooming tools, a pup-up navigation window and before/after buttons. On the top right there are undo/redo buttons, and a set of four tools: the Hand Tool for moving your entire image within a window, the Draw Mode, the Erase Mask and the Gradient Tool.

Using the Draw Mode and the Erase Mask, you can craft masks using brushes. You can set brush size, opacity and softness, and you can clear and invert the mask. You can also toggle a show mask button that shows a red overlay of your mask over the image. The Gradient Tool allows you to create, well, gradients in your masks. This set of tools is very similar to Lightroom masking capabilities.

The masking capabilities are quite good, fast and reliable. This, paired with the layering capabilities of Intensify Pro, allows quite complex adjustments to images. What I miss here is a sort of feature like Lightroom’s auto mask or Perfect Photo Suite’s smart brush, and this could be a nice addition to a future release. Also, unlike Lightroom’s gradient tool, once you’ve positioned your gradient and applied it, you can’t move it anymore, but you can always reshape it using brushes.

On the right column of the interface there is the “core” of the software. On the top there is a layers panel where you can add and remove layers, set their opacity and toggle their visibility. Under the layers panel there are two buttons to switch from a presets view or an adjust view.

There is a good number of presets organised in folders. However there isn’t a preview of presets, but they’re applied instantly when you click on them. Also, under each preset there’s an opacity slider to tune their intensity. The default presets are quite over the top for my tastes, and they’re unusable at their default opacity, but they may be a good starting point. Obviously you can create your own presets and folders.

The Adjust view is where the “beast” is hidden. The depth of control over your image is amazing!

The first two panels are basic and common to a lot of softwares. You can fine tune colour temperature, exposure, overall contrast, highlights and shadows, vibrance and saturation. Quite identical to Lightroom’s Basic panel in the Develop module. There isn’t a colour picker to set the white balance though.

After this Basic Tune panel, there are the three core panels of Intensity Pro: Pro Contrast, Structure and Details.

Pro Contrast

In Pro Contrast you can adjust the contrast separately according to tonal ranges. You can set the contrast for highlights, midtones and shadows. Also, under each slider there’s an offset slider to adjust the median value for the contrast tonal range.

Intensify For Mac

It is intimidating at first and it takes a while to understand that offset slider, but after a little trial and error, the power of this contrast controls allows you to set the contrast precisely in a way no other tool allows you to do. Even the Pro Contrast filter in Google’s Nik Color Efex Pro isn’t as deep as Intensify Pro!

Structure and Details

Structure allows you to enhance low contrast areas of the image, helping reveal texture and details. You can control two levels of it: global and micro to target small or really small elements of the image.

You can control it separately for highlights, midtones and shadows (if you’ve used Google Silfer Efex Pro you know what that means). A softness slider allows you to set how soft or crisp this details should be, deciding how artistic or realistic the image is.

Details allows you to make the image crispier. You can act globally, on highlights or shadows on small, medium and large details. I find the effect of Details is quite strong, and it’s easy to overdo it. To obtain a natural effect I use it sparingly. However, the amount of control you have here is intimidating (in a good way!).

The Adjust view also contains a Micro Sharpness panel that allows to sharpen the image, and a Vignette panel to fine tune a vignette effect on the image. I don’t think I will ever use them in my own workflow, but they can be useful in some cases.

What’s new in the 1.0.2 release

The new Intensify release adds additional RAW file support for more cameras, more fully integrates features from Apple’s latest Macintosh OS (Mavericks), introduces the MacPhun Print Lab (powered by MILK Books) and adds the ability to export images to SmugMug, increasing the software’s sharing capabilities.

This is a small update. The big improvements are in the sharing capabilities with SmugMug and the MacPhun Print Lab, which I don’t think are really useful to the professional photographer. Being Intensify Pro an addition in the workflow (not a substitute for Lightroom or Aperture), I think they should focus in improving the editing capabilities rather than integrate it with SmugMug and such. This is a free update, so it’s ok. We’ll wait for the version 2.0 for something exciting.

Beware of colour spaces

MacPhun has solved the color spaces issue I pointed out on the initial release, and now it works correctly with ProPhotoRGB!

Before concluding, I want to write about a strange behaviour in handling colour spaces that looks like a bug.If you work in ProPhotoRGB in Photoshop, you can open correctly the image in Intensify Pro, but when you send it back to Photoshop, it somehow fails to save it with the correct profile, and you have to convert it manually.

This tells me Intensify Pro doesn’t work in the original colour space of the image, and I don’t like it!This happens only with ProPhotoRGB. I tested it with AdobeRGB images and it worked well.I hope MacPhun will fix this soon, because if they want to target professional photographers, they should know they much prefer to work in ProPhotoRGB for masters (a bigger colour space), and convert in sRGB only when exporting image copies for the web.

Conclusion

Intensify Pro is a great piece of software. Even though it doesn’t have groundbreaking technologies built in, in fact all the functions are already seen here and there in other plug-ins, Intensity Pro allows an unprecedented depth of control over contrast and detail in a single package.

It’s incredible, and quite intimidating, how deep the controls in Pro Contrast, Structure and Details go. Add to this the snappy performances and stability of the software, and you know that MacPhun has done a great job for its first professional package.

Here is a sample before/after of a recent image of mine, on which I tested

You can buy Intensify Pro here with a 10% discount using the coupon “DAVIDE2014”.

About MacPhun Software

MacPhun Software is a California based Mac app developer focusing on consumer photography and professional digital imaging markets, serving over 22 million customers worldwide.

Intensify Pro For Mac

First established in 2008 with a mission to create innovative photography software, Macphun’s products such as ColorStrokes, Snapheal, Focus 2, Intensify and Fx Photo Studio are consistently ranked among the top 15 in the paid photography category on the Mac App Stores around the world. The company has recently launched another new app–Lost Photos–a unique free app that enables anyone to re-discover forgotten photos in their email, save them to a folder on Mac or share via social networks.

Intensify Pro For Mac

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Intensify For Apple Mac

Disclaimer: if you purchase the software using one of the links in this article, I might earn a commission. Rest assured that my review is honest, and that it express my real opinion of the product.

[regulardomainname]

Everything You Need To Know About Kerning

Welcome to Webdesignledger, this is your Typography Sensei. Today I will teach you everything you need to know about KERNING. But before we study this notion in more depth, we have to look first at its sisters, LEADING and TRACKING. They are not twins, but can definitely give you a hard time when trying to tell them apart. If you are here, it means that you are just as passionate about typography as I am, keen to sharpen your font-maker’s eye and polish your talent.   LEADING I don’t know how it was for you all, but when I learned to write, my teacher had a problem with my Ts, Fs, Ps, Ls, Hs, and all the other letters that feature vertical lines. The rule was “go up with your ts, ls, fs, bs to the line above, and down with your ps, qs, gs, to the half of the row below. Avoid the letters from separate rows from touching.��� This is LEADING; the essential design aspect that determined the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type. Don’t let its spelling full you. The origin of the word is not the verb “to lead,” but the medal “lead (Pb).” Therefore, we pronounce it ledding. Back in the days of mechanical typesetting, the typographers would use strips of lead to separate the lines of a text. Leading is crucial in your design because it makes the difference between a squashed text, a properly divided lines in a text, or a too loose text. TRACKING This is where it gets a bit tricky. Pay close attention to your sensei. TRACKING and KERNING are very similar, thus frequently confused. Tracking strictly refers to the spacing you choose throughout your word. It determines a universal distance between every letter. Coming as a further step after KERNING, TRACKING can be used to equally change the distance between every letter at once. Tracking affects the density of your text, which may result in three possibilities. If you choose to cut the space between the letters, you risk to end up with a word that’s difficult to read. If you choose to add space, you might end up with a too airy text that looks like a super long word. But, of course, you have the third option where the spacing you choose is perfect and your text looks impeccable. KERNING We finally get to the part you are here for. I’ll try to make it as easy to understand as possible. When you write or type a word, you do not use the same space for each letter. The space the letter “m” takes, for example, is larger than the space letter “i” needs. So far so good. What does KERNING mean then? Imagine that each letter is in a separate box, but all the boxes for all letters are equal in size. When you take the letters and put them in a word, the boxes around them lose their margins, and you are left with letters awkwardly suspended in the air. Now you have to kern, to cut those imaginary corners and extra spaces of the boxes so that your word looks more compact, and your font flawless. Fortunately, Photoshop features a button for this. If you are not satisfied with the result, though, you can manually do it in the same program. Tips and tricks for kerning like a pro: When creating your own font, it is important to make it look good from all points of view. Learning to kern properly is not rock science, but there are a few aspects you need to take into consideration: 1. Certain letter combinations are trickier than others  Kerning is a matter of taste more than a mathematical problem. For certain letter combinations, you have to try different spacing until you get the one you like the most. When dealing with a problem letter in the middle of the word, you have to make sure that the letters on each side look alright. For example, “Massage therapist” logo that is so popular among the funniest design fails was based on a kerning mistake. Written in capitals, H + E looks just fine, but without kerning, E+R creates a bigger gap, even though the same spacing has been used. Because we are so used with the word “the,” the brain automatically perceives is and separates it from the rest of the words, resulting in “the rapist.” The biggest trouble makers are: * the letters: A, K, V, W, Y * letters that feature arms or cross strokes: F, L, T * combination A+V/W (or the other way around) * T/F + a lower case letter   2. In order to check your kerning skills, try the following tricks: * Whenever you think that you’re done with your editing, turn your word/text upside down. This allows you to view the spacing between letters without being distracted by the meaning of the words * Kern your words in groups of three letters so that you may visualize each letter with its neighbors at a time * Manual kerning is much more efficient than automatic kerning. Use the in-app kerning as a first step, but never skip the manual one. Your final will make your design unique. * Kernign deals with details, leading and tracking with the overall looks. Save it for the last step, and spend the most time on it. * Do not exaggerate with cutting the edges of the imaginary boxes. Make sure you “Kern,” not “Kem.” 3. Because I believe that this will make you the a master in kerning, I decided to save it ’till last. PRACTICE. Become the designer/lettering artist you dream to become practicing whenever you get the chance. I hope that this lesson has a great effect on your work and future, and I would love to know your progress and results. Share your journey with us in the comment section below. Read More at Everything You Need To Know About Kerning http://dlvr.it/QX2FGz www.regulardomainname.com

[leeandsleep]

Free Time!

During my free time, there are a lot of things going on. First off, I usually spend it lazing around my house or going to the nearest computer shop to play League of Legends, or going to Sports Center to practice dancing with my friends, or even reading the latest manga updates and watching anime for the next 15 hours until my eyes hurt.

Those are the common things that I do. Nothing really happens to me most of the time. I am a shut-in in my own home or the computer shop. There is nothing in between. I love spending my time over the internet and playing games. Without them, I would’ve bored myself to death.

Another thing I haven’t mentioned is playing the virtual dating app called ‘Mystic Messenger’ by Cheritz. This app has brighten up my boring day with sweet words and definitely ADORABLE stickers and everything that just melt my no-love-life ass.

Since then, I have preferred to fantasize on the men on this app and the fictional 2D characters I have come to love over the past 8 years. Today, I don’t really have any sort of feelings towards legitimate humans anymore because of this. I have devoted my heart to these fictional men.

Other times, when I don’t have the choice, I hang out with my friends very often. Sometimes, we would watch the movies together and other time simple just wasting our money because our saying goes, “because why not?”

By the way,

If you though I’m only wasting my time spending too much of myself in the internet and my phone, I do not. I practice my graphical skills on Photoshop most of the time and I even tried to do fanart but miserably fail because I was having fun being lazy. (you don’t need to see the art itself, you’ll just get disappointed by the result)

Nevertheless, there are still tons of things that I do during my free time like sleeping, sleeping, sleeping and more sleeping, then eating, then being lazy, then eating again then sleep, then hangout on Twitter, Youtube, Mangafox, and Myanimelist for updates, then go back to sleeping, then editing, then reading manga, then play League, then fangirl for quite a bit then sleep.

That’s a lot of things to over your free time right?

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

@iameducator2014

[eurekakinginc]

"The Coming Age of Imaginative Machines: If you aren't following the rise of synthetic media, the 2020s will hit you like a digital blitzkrieg"- Detail: The faces on the left were created by a GAN in 2014; on the right are ones made in 2018.Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues gave the world generative adversarial networks (GANs) five years ago, way back in 2014. They did so with fuzzy and ethereal black & white images of human faces, all generated by computers. This wasn't the start of synthetic media by far, but it did supercharge the field. Ever since, the realm of neural network-powered AI creativity has repeatedly kissed mainstream attention. Yet synthetic media is still largely unknown. Certain memetic-boosted applications such as deepfakes and This Person Does Not Exist notwithstanding, it's safe to assume the average person is unaware that contemporary artificial intelligence is capable of some fleeting level of "imagination."Media synthesis is an inevitable development in our progress towards artificial general intelligence, the first and truest sign of symbolic understanding in machines (though by far not the thing itself--- rather the organization of proteins and sugars to create the rudimentary structure of what will someday become the cells of AGI). This is due to the rise of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Popular misconceptions presume synthetic media present no new developments we've not had since the 1990s, yet what separates media synthesis from mere manipulation, retouching, and scripts is the modicum of intelligence required to accomplish these tasks. The difference between Photoshop and neural network-based deepfakes is the equivalent to the difference between building a house with power tools and employing a utility robot to use those power tools to build the house for you.Succinctly, media synthesis is the first tangible sign of automation that most people will experience.Public perception of synthetic media shall steadily grow and likely degenerate into a nadir of acceptance as more people become aware of the power of these artificial neural networks without being offered realistic debate or solutions as to how to deal with them. They've simply come too quickly for us to prepare for, hence the seemingly hasty reaction of certain groups like OpenAI in regards to releasing new AI models.Already, we see frightened reactions to the likes of DeepNudes, an app which was made solely to strip women in images down to their bare bodies without their consent. The potential for abuse (especially for pedophilic purposes) is self-evident. We are plunging headlong into a new era so quickly that we are unaware of just what we are getting ourselves into. But just what are we getting into?Well, I have some thoughts.I want to start with the field most people are at least somewhat aware of: deepfakes. We all have an idea of what deepfakes can do: the "purest" definition is taking one's face replacing it with another, presumably in a video. The less exact definition is to take some aspect of a person in a video and edit it to be different. There's even deepfakes for audio, such as changing one's voice or putting words in their mouth. Most famously, this was done to Joe Rogan.I, like most others, first discovered deepfakes in late 2017 around the time I had an "epiphany" on media synthesis as a whole. Just in those two years, the entire field has seen extraordinary progress. I realized then that we were on the cusp of an extreme flourishing of art, except that art would be largely-to-almost entirely machine generated. But along with it would come a flourishing of distrust, fake news, fake reality bubbles, and "ultracultural memes". Ever since, I've felt the need to evangelize media synthesis, whether to tell others of a coming renaissance or to warn them to be wary of what they see.This is because, over the past two years, I realized that many people's idea of what media synthesis is really stops at deepfakes, or they only view new development through the lens of deepfakes. The reason why I came up with "media" synthesis is because I genuinely couldn't pin down any one creative/data-based field AI wasn't going to affect. It wasn't just faces. It wasn't just bodies. It wasn't just voice. It wasn't just pictures of ethereal swirling dogs. It wasn't just transferring day to night. It wasn't just turning a piano into a harpsichord. It wasn't just generating short stories and fake news. It wasn't just procedurally generated gameplay. It was all of the above and much more. And it's coming so fast that I fear we aren't prepared, both for the tech and the consequences.Indeed, in many discussions I've seen (and engaged in) since then, there's always several people who have a virulent reaction against the prospect neural networks can do any of this at all, or at least that it'll get better enough to the point it will affect artists, creators, and laborers. Even though we're already seeing the effects in the modeling industry alone.Look at this gif. Looks like a bunch of models bleeding into and out of each other, right? Actually, no one here is real. They're all neural network-generated people.Neural networks can generate full human figures, and altering their appearance and clothing is a matter of changing a few parameters or feeding an image into the data set. Changing the clothes of someone in a picture is as easy as clicking on the piece you wish you change and swapping it with any of your choice (or result in the personal wearing no clothes at all). A similar scenario applies for make-up. This is not like an old online dress-up flash game where the models must be meticulously crafted by an art designer or programmer— simply give the ANN something to work with, and it will figure out all the rest. You needn't even show it every angle or every lighting condition, for it will use commonsense to figure these out as well. Such has been possible since at least 2017, though only with recent GPU advancements has it become possible for someone to run such programs in real time.The unfortunate side effect is that the amateur modeling industry will be vaporized. Extremely little will be left, and the few who do remain are promoted entirely because they are fleshy & real human beings. Professional models will survive for longer, but there will be little new blood joining their ranks. As such, it remains to be seen whether news and blogs speak loudly of the sudden, unexpected automation of what was once seen as a safe and human-centric industry or if this goes ignored and under-reported— after all, the news used to speak of automation in terms of physical, humanoid robots taking the jobs of factory workers, fast-food burger flippers, and truck drivers, occupations that are still in existence en masse due to slower-than-expected roll outs of robotics and a continued lack of general AI.We needn't have general AI to replace those jobs that can be replicated by disembodied digital agents. And the sudden decline & disappearance of models will be the first widespread sign of this.Actually, I have an hypothesis for this: media synthesis is one of the first signs that we're making progress towards artificial general intelligence.Now don't misunderstand me. No neural network that can generate media is AGI or anything close. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that what we can see as being media synthesis is evidence that we've put ourselves on the right track. We never should've thought that we could get to AGI without also developing synthetic media technology.What do you know about imagination?As recently as five years ago, the concept of "creative machines" was cast off as impossible— or at the very least, improbable for decades. Indeed, the phrase remains an oxymoron in the minds of most. Perhaps they are right. Creativity implies agency and desire to create. All machines today lack their own agency. Yet we bear witness to the rise of computer programs that imagine and "dream" in ways not dissimilar to humankind.Though lacking agency, this still meets the definition of imagination.To reduce it to its most fundamental ingredients: Imagination = experience + abstraction + prediction. To get creativity, you need only add "drive". Presuming that we fail to create artificial general intelligence in the next ten years (an easy thing to assume because it's unlikely we will achieve fully generalized AI even in the next thirty), we still possess computers capable of the former three ingredients.Someone who lives on a flat island and who has never seen a mountain before can learn to picture what one might be by using what they know of rocks and cumulonimbus clouds, making an abstract guess to cross the two, and then predicting what such a "rock cloud" might look like. This is the root of imagination.As Descartes noted, even the strongest of imagined sensations is duller than the dullest physical one, so this image in the person's head is only clear to them in a fleeting way. Nevertheless, it's still there. Through great artistic skills, the person can learn to express this mental image through artistic means. In all but the most skilled, it will not be a pure 1-to-1 realization due to the fuzziness of our minds, but in the case of expressive art, it doesn't need to be.Computers lack this fleeting ethereality of imagination completely. Once one creates something, it can give you the uncorrupted output.Right now, this makes for wonderful tools and apps that many play around with online and on our phones.But extrapolating this to the near future results in us coming face to face many heavy questions, and not just of the "can't trust what you see variety."Because think about it.If I'm a musical artist and I release an album, what if I accidentally recorded a song that's too close to an AI-generated track (all because AI generated literally every combination of notes?) Or, conversely, what if I have to watch as people take my music and alter it? I may feel strongly about it, but yet the music has its notes changed, its lyrics changed, my own voice changed, until it might as well be an entirely different artist making that music. Many won't mind, but many will.I trust my mother's voice, as many do. So imagine a phisher managing to steal her voice, running it through a speech synthesis network, and then calling me asking me for my social security number. Or maybe I work at a big corporation, and while we're secure, we still recognize each other's voice, only to learn that someone stole millions of dollars from us because they stole the CEO's voice and used to to wire cash to a pirate's account.Imagine going online and at least 70% of the "people" you encounter are bots. They're extremely coherent, and they have profile images of what looks to be real people. And who knows, you may even forge an e-friendship with some of them because they seem to share your interests. Then it turns out they're just bundles of code.Oh, and those bot-people are also infesting social media and forums in the millions, creating and destroying trends and memes without much human input. Even if the mainstream news sites don't latch on at first, bot-created and bot-run news sites will happily kick it off for them. The news is supposed to report on major events, global and local. Even if the news is honest and telling the truth, how can they truly verify something like this, especially when it seems to be gaining so much traction and humans inevitably do get involved? Remember "Bowsette" from last year? Imagine if that was actually pushed entirely by bots until humans saw what looked like a happenin' kind of meme and joined in? That could be every year or perhaps even every month in the 2020s onwards.Likewise, imagine you're listening to a pop song in one country, but then you go to another country and it's the exact same song but most of the lyrics have changed to be more suitable for their culture. That sort of cultural spread could stop... or it could be supercharged if audiences don't take to it and pirate songs/change them and share them at their own leisure.Or maybe it's a good time to mention how commissioned artists are screwed? Commission work boards are already a race to the bottom— if a job says it pays three cents per word to write an article, you'd better list your going rate as 2 cents per word, and then inevitably the asking rate in general becomes 2 cents per word, and so on and so forth. That whole business might be over within five to ten years if you aren't already extremely established. Because if machines can mimic any art style or writing style (and then exaggerate & alter it to find some better version people like more), you'd have to really be tech-illiterate or very pro-human to want non-machine commissions.And to go back to deepfakes and deep nudes, imagine the paratypical creep who takes children and puts them into sexual situations, any sexual situation they desire thanks to AI-generated images and video. It doesn't matter who, and it doesn't have to be real children either. It could even be themselves as a child if they still have the reference or use a de-aging algorithm on their face. It's squicky and disgusting to think about, but it's also inevitable and probably has already happened.And my god, it just keeps going on and on. I can't do this justice, even with 40,000 characters to work with. The future we're about to enter is so wild, so extreme that I almost feel scared for humanity. It's not some far off date in the 22nd century. It's literally going to start happening within the next five years. We're going to see it emerge before our very eyes on this and other subreddits.I'll end this post with some more examples.Nvidia's new AI can turn any primitive sketch into a photorealistic masterpiece. You can even play with this yourself here.Waifu Synthesis- real time generative anime, because obviously.Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models | This GAN can animate any face GIF, supercharging deepfakes & media synthesisTalk to Transformer | Feed a prompt into GPT-2 and receive some text. As of 9/29/2019, this uses the 774M parameter version of GPT-2, which is still weaker than the 1.5B parameter "full" version."Text samples generated by Nvidia's Megatron-LM (GPT-2-8.3b). Vastly superior to what you see in Talk to Transformer, even if it had the "full" model.Facebook's AI can convert one singer's voice into another | The team claims that their model was able to learn to convert between singers from just 5-30 minutes of their singing voices, thanks in part to an innovative training scheme and data augmentation technique. as a prototype for shifting vocalists or vocalist genders or anything of that sort.TimbreTron for changing instrumentation in music. Here, you can see a neural network shift entire instruments and pitches of those new instruments. It might only be a couple more years until you could run The Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" through, say, Slayer and get an actual song out of it.AI generated album covers for when you want to give the result of that change its own album.Neural Color Transfer Between Images [From 2017], showing how we might alter photographs to create entirely different moods and textures.Scammer Successfully Deepfaked CEO's Voice To Fool Underling Into Transferring $243,000"Experts: Spy used AI-generated face to connect with targets" [GAN faces for fake LinkedIn profiles]This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist | This blog written entirely by AI is fully in the uncanny valley.Chinese Gaming Giant NetEase Leverages AI to Create 3D Game Characters from Selfies | This method has already been used over one million times by Chinese gamers."Deep learning based super resolution, without using a GAN" [perceptual loss-based upscaling with transfer learning & progressive scaling], or in other words, "ENHANCE!"Expert: AI-generated music is a "total legal clusterf*ck" | I've thought about this. Future music generation means that all IPs are open, any new music can be created from any old band no matter what those estates may want, and AI-generated music exists in a legal tesseract of answerless questionsAnd there's just a ridiculous amount more.My subreddit, /r/MediaSynthesis, is filled with these sorts of stories going back to January of 2018. I've definitely heard of people come away in shock, dazed and confused, after reading through it. And no wonder.. Title by: Yuli-Ban Posted By: www.eurekaking.com

[bts-love-sweat-tears]

The Seven, Part 1

Title: The Seven, Part 1

Pairing: BTS x Reader (you are Snow!)

Type:  Fairytale!au,  Fluff, Angst

Rating: PG-13 (still no smut, but there might be more language and other themes, like depression and references to sexual situations later on)

Word Count: 2, 860

A/N: So it’s midnight, and I’m exhausted. I had my finance final today, so hopefully I can move on from the stress this class has been giving me. Keep your collective fingers crossed for good results! I haven’t edited so please let me know if it’s stilted. I love receiving asks or messages! Thanks to @dianas-world for being a sounding board, and making me realize that this is the second fic I’ve written featuring a blogger character lol! I wonder what the underlying cause is? :)

Snow’s POV

I slipped quietly down the hall, trying not to disturb my stepmother, who was filming a vlog for her fashion blog, Mirror, Mirror. Everyday she would post photos of her “#ootd” and wait for the comments and likes to roll in. She also did videos of her morning makeup routines and product reviews. I was somewhat in awe of her ability to create a community and become an influencer in that sphere. I mean, companies sent her (expensive!) free stuff all the time. It was true that she was very beautiful and very fashionable, but I worried what would happen if she even stopped blogging, or god forbid, lost popularity. She was reliant on external validation, sometimes taking posts down if they didn’t receive a certain amount of likes or comments that she had deemed necessary.

The blog had become even more important to her since my father died.  She had always been kind to me before his death, but things were different now. I didn’t think she was fake, but rather that his death had depressed her and her outlook on life. Things were a little stilted betweens us-she and my father had been married only a short time before he passed away in a freak accident. Her blog was filled with positive reminders of the network she had and the people who supported her. I could hardly blame her. I always tried to like her photos and to leave positive comments on the blog. Maybe she thought it didn’t count since we were legally family, but I wanted to bond with her or try to be on good terms.

My mother had been a professor of Caribbean and West Indian literature, constantly trying to better understand the culture she had left behind. My mother had died when I was around 7 or 8, so I missed her, but in a more muted way. I had memories of her reading stories to me, giving each character a different voice, but other than that the memories were hazy. My father was the one who had raised me from that point out, taking me on adventures, watching action movies together, and yes, playing tea time with my dolls and me. Losing him had broken something inside of me that seemed permanent.

My father had been an environmental scientist, focusing on snowfall rates and snowcap melting rates. had moved to this country for his work. He had spent time in various mountain camps out west, frequently telling me stories of one his favorite places in the whole world. While I was grossed out by this story, I was conceived in one of those mountain camps, and born during one of the biggest snowfalls on record, ever. Thus, my name. He had always promised that he would take me to one of these ecological camps when I graduated high school but fate had taken that chance away from us. I was determined to student environmental science in university, when I went in a few months.

Hearing my stepmother in the other room brought me back to the present. I had been on my way to the kitchen and decided to bring her some juice as a peace offering. Our apartment overall was nice, but her office had the professional photography lights, and different props to create flawless pictures. When she saw me, she smiled.

“I was just about to do my  Outfit of the Day post…do you want to be my ‘featured guest’?”

I shrugged and smiled. I wasn’t dressed up in any particular way, wearing leggings and one of my dad’s old flannel shirts, which came down to my knees. But if she was offering this olive branch, then I was sure as hell taking it. I just wanted us to live peacefully together until I went away to college. She arranged the cameras, and set up the lighting. Half an hour later, she had taken enough different shots and angles of the both of us to fill multiple blogs. I knew that she would only pick one though.  I smiled at her, and went back to whatever I was doing in my room. I don’t recall what it was, since what happened next changed our entire relationship, and possibly my future, forever.

The photo she selected was good (she had mad photography and editing skills), but it blew up more than she could have ever expected, with the most comments and likes she had ever received. People said that I was radiant, my skin “golden”  or “glowing,”  and wanted to know my skincare routine (soap? moisturizer? I didn’t really have any secrets to share, not to mention the fact that most of it was Photoshop). Other commenters raved about my  “girl next door” grungy style, and asked where I shopped. Others still were asking that I be a regular on her blog or start my own. There were thousands of others, and honestly for someone who didn’t have or necessarily want a blog and the following attention, it was all a bit overwhelming.

My stepmother was even more overwhelmed. She had featured me to show that she could be casual and “down to earth,” and I had inadvertently stolen her thunder. She was used to being the star of the show, and rightly so on a blog that she put so much effort, attention, and love into. She was used to people calling her beautiful, glowing, and radiant. My presence and popularity possibly reminded her that she was not alone at the center of the universe, and it was painful.There were no fights or blow-ups after that, just a quiet withdrawal from me. It got to the point where the things left unsaid were so unwieldy that we would literally tip toe around each other, waiting for the other to go to bed or leave the house before the other would go into the kitchen.

After finally accepting that this was how the relationship would be until I went away to school, I came home from my part time job a few weeks later, and found a letter on the table. It was from somewhere in the western mountains, inviting me to come and work as an environmental assistant in a national park. I hadn’t contacted them, but it seemed that whoever was offering the job had known my father previously. The way it was positioned on the table (already opened too, indicating that my stepmother had opened it, knew the contents and left it there) made it clear that I was no longer welcome in the house. It was just a building, but it held the few memories I had of my mother, not to mention the many good years with my father. The start date was in a week, meaning I would have to pack up the loose ends of my life quickly, not that there was much left for me here.

A week later

So I had said, being all emo, that “there wasn’t much left” for me back home, but now that I was looking down the cabin where I would be spending the summer, I realized that there were a lot of things. Like air-conditioning, wi-fi, and running water in the house, for instance. My dad had always romanticized his time in the woods, but now, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to relive his experience. The sunrise over the mountains had been ethereal and beautiful, but was it worth a summer of cold showers in an outhouse? The park ranger, a woman in her mid-forties, lived a few miles down the road in a cosy house with all of the amenities (namely, wi-fi), but was currently showing the cabin that I would be staying in. What she had failed to mention, was that I would be sharing a cabin. All of the park facilities were gender-neutral, but it just so happened that I was the only female intern for the summer. There were seven other “very nice boys,” she assured me, who were all out doing their work for the day. Despite the lack of modern conveniences, the cabin is small, and clean, with a main living area with large windows, a kitchen, and one large bedroom with four sets of bunkbeds lining the walls. It was small, but With the tour of the cabin lasting approximately all of three minutes, the park ranger said her goodbyes, and left me to my own devices. Namely, taking a nap on the first bunk I came across. They all had different blankets, pillows and personal effects, but one was spotlessly clean, and neatly made. I assumed that was mine and landed facedown, asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Used to the uncomfortable silence of my home, I jolted awake as soon as I heard the key in the latch, and experienced that fleeting moment of panic when you wake up in a strange place. I quickly closed my eyes again, still feeling overwhelmed and not ready to face seven new roommates. I heard them shuffle in. Luckily, I was a good actress, and was able to stay still when a gasp sounded in the doorway of the bedroom.

“YAHHHH, WHO IS IN MY BED?” A loud, fake whisper came from someone who was clearly agitated. “How can she sleep in someone else’s bed, and in OUTSIDE CLOTHES!” Another gasp.  My presence was already an affront to everything this person stood for, apparently, and we hadn’t even met officially yet. Clearly, my guess about this being the free bunk was incorrect.

“Hyung, calm down,” a bored sounding voice drawled. “She’s probably exhausted, not that I blame her. I wish I could have stayed here all day....” A sense of longing came through, even though I couldn’t see the speakers face or gauge his body language.

An authoritative voice, clearly the leader of the group said, “Leave her be. We can do our introductions and sort out this misunderstanding later, Jin-hyung,” he said, clearly trying to calm the original speaker. “Let’s get dinner ready as a proper introduction, and wake her in an hour or so.”

I heard footsteps as they drifted away, and assumed I was in the clear when a warm body shifted on the small twin mattress next to me. I let out a small squeak at the sudden closeness.

“You’re a shit actor, you know that?” I opened one of my eyes slowly to see the face of the person with the slurred speech. “You’re lucky that Jin-hyung was too busy working himself up into one of his comedic rants to actually pay attention to you.”

Still feeling discombobulated, the only response I could muster, in my most sarcastic tone of voice, was “And you are? I must know the name of the one who so gallantly did not blow my cover.”

He paused for a moment, waiting just long enough for me to start feeling uncomfortable. “Suga, or Yoongi. Whichever you prefer,” he said dismissively. “You made a rookie mistake, sleeping in Jin-hyung’s bed- he’s very particular. Do you think you’ll be able to make it through the whole summer, with him now out to get you?” He smirked and scooted closer, which I had thought was impossible.

Before I could come up with a witty retort, or anything at all really, another person burst into the room and my cover was officially blown. If I had thought that the apparent “Jin-hyung” was loud, he had nothing on this person.

“YAHHHHHHHH, LEAVE SUGA ALONE. How can you impose on him like this?! And so close too, how pushy!!!!!” This outburst was coming from one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen, but somehow I had inadvertently pissed him off as well. This was going swimmingly, I thought to myself.

“He was the one who crowded me in, after I was already sleeping here!” I shot back, feeling the need to defend myself.

“QUIT FLIRTING. THIS IS NOT THE TIME OR PLACE!” He huffed. He had some weird ideas about what flirting was-I had thought Suga was trying to intimidate me, if anything.

“Hyung, you’re needed elsewhere,” the beautiful boy said in a completely different tone of voice. Talk about a 180.

“Yes, Hoseok. Don’t give yourself a hernia or something,” Suga monotoned. As he passed through the door, Hoseok put his arm over Suga’s shoulder, and shot me a possessive glare. Well, I was learning names quickly, but maybe not making friends.

I remade the bed, even though I had only been on top of the covers, and shifted my stuff to the other open bunk, hoping that I wasn’t just repeating my earlier mistake. I ran my hand over my hair, having no way to check if it was presentable, before heading out to the common area. Hoseok and Yoongi were on the couch, watching a movie on a small portable dvd player. I was kept at a distance by another glare from Mr. Grumpypants. Turning to the window that graced the main room, I could see three younger boys I hadn’t met yet running around outside like little kids. How they still had energy after supposedly working outside all day, I had no idea, but to each their own.

“I’ll give you this, you know how to make an impression,” I turned abruptly to see the most amazing dimples I had ever seen, and the first genuine smile I received since the park ranger left.

I returned it with a small smile of my own, not trusting his reaction. “Apparently so. My name is Snow.”

“I’m Namjoon,” he said, extending his hand for me to shake. “I’m so happy to meet the newest intern.”

He had a commanding presence, but also seemed innocent and cute. Right as I was thinking how suave he was, he walked back to the other boy in the kitchen (who I assumed was the fake whisperer), and managed to burn himself, trip, and drop a sharp knife all in one go. It might be safer to admire from afar, I realized.

I walked over to help clean up the fallout from this apparent God of Destruction, and to hopefully make things right with who I was pretty sure was Jin.

“I’m sorry for sleeping in your bed earlier,” I said, cutting right to the chase. “I thought it was the spare since it was so tidy compared to the rest.”

He sighed under his breath, not entirely placated. I saw him getting ready to drain the water from the pasta he was preparing for dinner, and offered to help.

“Not to sound like a know-it-all, but if you save a little of the starchy water, and mix it into the sauce, it helps it stick to the noodles better,” I said, while trying to avoid an unwanted steam facial at the tiny sink where I was draining the water.

He had a completely different expression on his face when I turned around, and I had a feeling that we would be fine from here on out.

“You know about cooking?” He asked, eyes shining hopefully.

I was scared of what I might be committing to, but nodded my head.

“It was just my dad and me when I was growing up, and while he was a great cook, he had to work late sometimes. So if I wanted food, I had to learn.” I smiled at him, and he winked, which weirded me out a little. But he seemed harmless enough. We chatted about nothing in particular as we finished preparing dinner. Namjoon was setting the table, and from time to time we would hear suspicious clinking sounds of plates being almost dropped, and curse words muttered to himself louder than he intended (probably).

The others came in and before I knew it, we were sitting around the table, eating and chatting. Well, they were chatting. I was eating and feeling a bit left out as the new person, but it was to be expected as they had already been here together and knew each other. As I thought about it though, it was still the homiest experience I’d had in a long time. Dinner passed without me offending anyone else (a rarity), and I was able to meet Taehyung, Jungkook, and Jimin, who were the three who had been running around.

When dinner was over, I helped Namjoon & Jin clean up (they seemed to be the parents of this little family), and excused myself for bed. It was still early, but tomorrow was my first day out collecting samples and specimens, and I wanted to do a good job, especially since the park ranger had known my dad and said that she had “high expectations for me.”

The bunk bed, though small, felt heavenly, and I slept through the night with no anxiety dreams of my dad or stepmother for the first night in ages. Perhaps, looking back, the comfort I felt then was a sign of the things to come.

[jeremy5165882-blog]

week 8: photography

  This week, we were asked to play around with photography and edit the results with photoshop. As the most I've used a camera/camera function on anything is to send screenshots of essays or work, (and as I abhor cameras and photography in general for the intermittent sporadic bursts of photographic blackmail I occasionally receive) I've never been too keen on this whole idea of photography. My aunt also enjoys the camera far too much, so I think I'm also scarred from that.

So while I walked with friends trying to capture ‘good’ pictures (failed), after an hour, I appreciated the whole concept of photography and the skill and effort behind it. Don't get me wrong, i’m still quite adverse to it, but ye. Respect photography, but i’m gonna explore it as one would prod a dangerous animal who you’re entrapped with.

tbh i’m really bad with photoshop, so I explored as many functions as I could and found a myriad of interesting tools and results along the way. Unfortunately they we’re not quite applicable to my photos as I did not know the correct way to apply them. So I edited a bit here and there, but left some of them as they were pretty much.

-photo 1 (light tube along stair railing [lecture building]) no photoshop used as i preffered it as how it looked. -photo 2 (trove of cans under concrete slabs [roof of a student accommodation building]) played with a few minor adjustments to saturate the cans so they would be a small blur of colour amid the ordered and grey slabs. -photo 3 (metal sphere with a dorito bag inside) I’m not quite sure how to describe how I edited this because I have no clue. It looks funny. that’s also probably why I'm clueless as when I went back to see the adjustments, I didn't understand a lot of the terminology used with photos (which I'm slowly learning). -photo 4 (sunlight through trees) I felt like I could make this appear nicer with a photoshop edit, but all the changes I made to it looked worse than the original, so I kinda left it like it was. -photo 5 (railings and units) I changed the colouration and black and white highlights so that colour in the image would not detract from the pattern the photo formed.

Although I'm not the most enthusiastic when it comes to photography, I admire the results my classmates and others have produced and the effort and skill they had in creating it. Today’s lesson has helped me understand a bit more of photoshop and the importance which photography plays in design. I’ve added the whole camera thing to my ever growing list of things I kinda despise, but would be really useful if I worked on it. rip.

soz for the scrolling. I’m not sure how to format pictures so that all 5 would fit into one or into a smaller space.

[topicprinter]

I'm starting to really hate my business. It wasn't always this way.I entered the teen-young adult streetwear hat niche 2 years ago, specializing in designing a certain type of hat. Neff, Surpreme, and other skate/hiphop culture streetwear brands are my main competitors. After making loads of money illegally, I wanted diversify to something legal, sorta like the mob. I was 16 at the time. I got the idea after spotting a kid wearing a really awesome hat in my driver's ed class. It was sorta obnoxious, sorta feminine, sorta loud, but sorta chill all at the same time. I just liked it. I ended up buying it from him for $20. I fell in love with it myself, it used to be that kid's signature hat that he wore everyday, but then it became my signature hat. I started looking online where I could buy another and even went as far as to ask the brand if they still sold it if I could get another. "Nope, sorry we discontinued that item." I looked around for other similar types of hats online and they honestly all looked terrible to me (at the time, now I sorta like them). Eager to enter any legal business with my stockpiles of cash, I decided to make and sell my own awesome hats just like the discontinued one I loved so much. They'd be aesthetically far superior to the "terrible" ones my competitors were making. Worst that could happen is that I fail and walk away with tons of entrepreneurial skills.Fast forward two years, I've learned about sourcing from China, hiring and working with freelancers, web design trends, DSLR photography, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, basic accounting, social media marketing, interpersonal skills, cold calling, cold emailing, cold knocking, and sales. I've sold 4 hats online on a haphazard ecommerce strategy and am in 2 stores as I've been cold calling as of late, trying to get into enough stores to approach chains. I'm at what seems to be a crisis point. It feels like the "make a business around you passion" bubble burst a year ago. I'm not really in love with my hats anymore, I hardly wear them, and could hardly imagine designing any more of them even if they became an overnight firebrand success. I feel like a caterpillar that has gone through a metamorphosis; who I was in 2015, in love with the idea of making my own line of awesome hats that would outcompete the bigger brands and with ton of blood money from illegal activities to spare, is not who I am in 2017. My stockpiles of blood money have run dry from spending $1050 on my first two designs (200 hats) my first year and then after realizing just two designs was too little to be taken seriously, $2500 on four more designs (1500 hats) to total six hat designs. Also, the website and design freelancers cost a lot along with rent, food, and other basic necessities. I'd say in terms of just business expenses, I'm $5k deep in the hole.I've convinced myself to move forward for two years by saying, "Just wait until you have the hats made", "just wait until you learn DSLR photography", "just wait until you learn photoshop to manipulate product photos to post on social media for sales", "just wait until you have 6 hats instead of 2", "just wait until you learn accounting", "just wait until you learn cold calling", "just wait until you move halfway across the country to sell to stores in person", "just wait until you get your first store sale". Now it's "just wait until you're in 7 stores, then you can start approaching 10-20 store chains." But the closer I get to the end of the tunnel, I just don't see much of a route to take or a ending that I feel comfortable with. The ending that was fuzzy and imprecise in 2015 of "yeah, I'll just become a famous and great selling hat brand that sells purely off aesthetics!" is now much clearer. You see, from the start, I decided that cool designs trumped brand image. I thought the idea of wearing clothing to "represent something" was the biggest load of BS ever and that awesome aesthetics should trump a dumb logo on a nondescript piece of clothing. I still strongly believe this and would still never buy a piece of clothing because with a logo that symbolizes "forever fun", "Supreme", some home/regional affinity, and the litany of inspirational or edgy messages you will find as logos plastered on clothing (just look at /r/streetwearstartup). Aesthetics trump all in my mind.But here's the catch-- I don't even like my hat aesthetics now. Hell, I don't even like my hat type all all, forget the design printed on it. So I've essentially checkmated myself because I can't even evolve my brand because I got into this to not have a fucking brand at all! Aesthetics, aesthetics, aesthetics, right? Well that really helped out when my tastes naturally evolved away from a seemingly unsaturated and uncapitalized hat niche towards liking hats of a totally different breed and saturated in the market. And I have no desire to make my clothing brand into a lifestyle brand that "means something" like Neff, Supreme, Volcom, and the other lifestyle streetwear brands out there. At this point, I'm also super detached from my main demographic I'm trying to sell to-- skaters, teenage punks, and potheads. Closest thing I ever was to those when I started the hat company at 16 was a teenage punk. Today, I'm so much more interested in making money (legally and safely), achieving financial freedom to travel the world and do whatever I want. I feel like an adult now and not a teenage punk who'd want to wear the hats I design. It feels like I hedged $5k and 2 years on a short-lived phase of my life.Here's the weird part: I only started having serious doubts about my hat business after I got my first store sales. I had one period of serious doubt after my first store sale about a few weeks ago which caused me to start a second backup venture with shopify dropshipping. After my second store sale I'm having this second period of doubt right now. It doesn't help that for each yes I inevitably get many no's which erodes my already low confidence in my products. The closer I get to the end of the tunnel, the more clearly I see the end game and the less I like. At heart, I'm an opportunist and an entrepreneur first, not a fashion designer. I'm not Shaun Neff of Neff or James Jebbia of Supreme, engrossed in the cultural intricacies surrounding their brand (skateboarding, streetwear, punk/hiphop culture). I'm a businessman, focused on money first and anything else second. I feel like I'm in an industry of cultural snobs, none of which resonates with me so I can't resonate with them. If I go forward, I feel like my attempts will be like Hillary Clinton desperately trying to appeal to young voters-- forced, ingenuine, and ultimately failing. Making money and growing a business gives me so much more of a thrill and feeling of being alive than designing hats and connecting to some "lifestyle." I can trudge forward with cold calls and getting IG influencers but all the sales material I've ever read said to be 100% convinced/in love with what you're selling. I'm at 3/10 convinced. Maybe if I become rich again and I have a lot of money, I'll be back in the same abundant mentality I was in 2015 and somehow like my hats again. A long shot.The other option is that I just throw it all away, accept defeat that this is not the business I'm meant to succeed at, store/sell my hats for $2 a piece, and throw away $5k and 2 years of work, ALBEIT keeping the skills I've obtained. I can go into doing internet marketing or social media management for clients (I already have one that pays me $300/mo, long story). But what if I just focus 100% on cold calling more, get into 7 stores, and then get into regional chains? I've read the book The Dip and it talks about when to give up. What if I'm just throwing this all away at the last moment before victory? What if I just pump myself up to 10/10 enthusiasm while selling, get into more stores, get into chains, and make an assload of money? My first priority right now is making money, and my hat business could potentially make me a lot of money if I somehow fake it til I make it. Somehow I'd have to build a brand over clothing I'm not fully in love with but can make me a lot of money because other people like it. God it's such a messed up situation. I wish I had never gotten involved in this and somehow did internet marketing instead two years ago, but here I am now and I must make a move with the position I have.I'm not necessarily giving up on my hat company yet. But what do you guys think? Rarely do I feel lost but right now I am. What would you do in my situation?EDIT (from the comments): As to demand, there's demand for the product, similar products (like the original I bought) have been designed for years. I just feel like I can't design them or do the niche anymore because I'm personally no longer interested in the product as my tastes have evolved. For example, I used to eat a ton of chili all the time last year, but now I don't eat any chili and just eat a ton of pasta with alfredo sauce because that's what I like. Doing my niche feels like becoming a world class chili chef because I can be the best, losing interest in chili and not really eating it except for taste-testing/quality purposes, and then eating alfredo sauce pasta on the downlow. People still want to eat chili whether I'm the world class chef making it or some other lesser chef is making it. The ultimate question is do I be the world class chili chef if I can't even enjoy my own chili and is it even possible for my chili quality not to suffer as a result?

[camerawhore-aimeemccallum]

SOI

Theme

I have chosen the theme “Undifferentiated”, by the sixth week of pregnancy the sexual glands are undifferentiated between male and female. This is something that inspired Matthew Barney, which is where I discovered it. He bases his characters on this stage in life making them have no sex. I find the idea of someone having no sex really fascinating, because it defines us in a huge way. It defines our whole personality even when we are in the womb, something that Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye talk about is once the sex is discovered by parents they create hopes and dreams for their child, which the child can hear and feels it has to live up to. This creates a feeling of being trapped that is most commonly recognised in woman who feel trapped in a man’s body, and men who feel trapped in a woman’s body. Also by looking at Porridge and Jaye I discovered their feeling of becoming one person, I’m thinking of it in the way that when a male and female come together it would counteract the sex.

 I feel this theme will allow me to explore many possible outcomes. Erasing sex from two people that have already declared our sex’s, so disguising that and acting against it will create some interesting ideas of conflict, but coming together as one will allow for more visual responses aswell. For initial responses I will be using Photoshop, makeup to cover hair as I feel that is an aesthetic that helps us define our sex and personality. Video and performance will also be on my mind especially, because my theme is about the human body.

Source and Resource

I plan to start with visual responses, which will most likely be in all the medias that I have previously mentioned. I have asked my boyfriend to help as he is a male and I am a female and we both identify as that. I plan to look at how our bodies can be combined, but also how I can disguise the sex on both of us. I think my idea to work with makeup might be difficult, but for initial responses it will be good to experiment with both dramatic but also more realistic, like bald caps and concealing the eyebrows because I feel hair is something that really defines each sex.

I was influenced by Matthew Barney, and Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye. Matthew Barney based his characters on the stage of pregnancy where the sex is undifferentiated. The Pandrogeny project by P-Orridge and Jaye is a series where both artists have become a couple, but feel so close they feel like they want to almost be one another. Instead of creating a child they have created a third entity, not involving sex, which neither of them seem to identify with. The third entity is a better version of both of them, “two parts of a new beginning” that they are taking on themselves through cosmetic surgery and therapy. I find this project really interesting and mesmerising because of the commitment they have for one another and for the project, I find there is always a sense of doubt, like we can’t fully trust in case we get hurt, but here they just let go of all of that. Becoming one has influenced me to think about intertwining two bodies to almost create a character who is neither sex.

Techniques and Processes

I will be locating my information from artist’s websites, the Internet and the library. So far I have only used the Internet, but hopefully once I am back at college I will be able to have a quick look at the library. The techniques I will use are video, performance, photography, special effects makeup and Photoshop. I think these are relevant to my theme because they allow me to use the body as part of the artwork, which is of course significant because of interest in the male and female form and how that can become one and on their own be disguised. All the materials and equipment I own or can, sourced from the A.V room. The equipment I will need is a camera, special effects makeup and software which I have decided to buy, because it seems like I might have to do a lot of work at home. I will also need my boyfriend’s help, which he is always willing to give but it means I will have to work around his schedule as well as mine.

Timescale

I feel this time around will be a lot more difficult than usual. At my work my assistant manager has left, so I have been asked to work more because I’m the hardest worker. This will hopefully be fixed as soon as possible but for now I will be working from home and attending college as often as I can. To help with situation I have started to add work into my timeline and my own personal diary, which I have not done before but will allow me to make sure I am staying on top of everything. I have also once again left a lot of time to develop my final piece. I find this allows me to have a much better outcome instead of finishing a project having to start a new one and develop the last one. Of course there is always room for improvement but it does allow for a more successful final artwork. 

Timeline

Working days will include what I can do from the intentions of the week.

Week 1 9th-15th January

·      Monday-Wednesday: Working

·      Thursday: Research, SOI

·      Friday: Working

·      Saturday-Sunday Afternoons: Finish SOI and Visual Response with James.

Week 2 16th-22nd January

·      Monday: SOI First Draft Due. Working but in the afternoon Visual Response with James and try blocking out eyebrows on myself.

·      Tuesday-Thursday: College (Finally). Work on visual responses for research, a trip to the library for any other influences and hopefully have a chat with Jennie or Alan about project and UCAS. Wednesday: GROUP CRIT, remember to take notes and evaluate after.

·      Friday: Working

·      Saturday: Any visual responses that needed James included could be done today.

·      Sunday: Glasgow Digital Portfolio Hand In

·      ALL WEEK: Work on Digital Portfolio

·      Thursday night could be trying out the bald caps or at the weekend so James can be included.

Week 3 23rd-29th January

·      Monday: College, final day for research and visual responses. I should be able to pick a couple of ideas to develop for Thursday.

·      Tuesday-Wednesday Working

·      Thursday: College start developing your ideas, plans for if you need James included or make props or costumes.

·      Friday-Saturday: Working

·      FINISH DIGITAL PORTFOLIO’S FOR ALL UNI’S, (this could be done after work)

Week 4 30th-5th February

·      Development week, develop costumes, visuals, props. I need to make sure to be thinking about presentation, don’t have to be reinforcing it, but make sure it’s being considered.

·      Tuesday: Edinburgh Digital Portfolio Hand In.

Week 5 6th-12th February

·      Monday 6th: Second Draft of SOI Due

·      Tuesday 7th: Group Crit, remember to take notes for a better evaluation. Do an evaluation today and start working on what was suggested.

·      Wednesday-Sunday Final Week for development. I should be able to see which idea is most successful and once decided I should be able to write an evaluation so that I can react to it on Monday.

Week 6 13th-19th February

·      Monday start final piece. I need to write a plan including work and James’ schedule. This will allow me to know when I can get photos taken or film or possibly perform.

·      Tuesday-Friday Work on costumes, location, props. Remember to think about presentation and quality of the artwork.

·      Saturday-Sunday: Start filming/photographing if possible.

Week 7 20th-26th February

·      Filming/Photograph. Final Crit is next week and I want to be ready. Get Photography and Filming done by the start of the week and have the rest of the week to evaluate and develop before the final crit. I should also have considered or know what I want to do for presentation.

·      Leave the weekend to prepare for crit and film or photograph again if needed.

Week 8 27th-5th March

·      Monday: depending on work schedule this could be filming and photographing day.

·      Tuesday Final Crit, remember to take notes and evaluate afterwards.

·      Wednesday-Sunday: react to what was said at crits and develop the final piece. The weekend or next week could be when I decide to film and this week could be the remaking or costumes or making of new costumes.

Week 9 6th-12th March

·      Definitely should have a final artwork at the beginning of this week and for the end of the week I should have tried the artwork in all situations suited for the artwork this will help with presentation. Finally I should document and do my final evaluation for hand in on Monday!

13th March; HAND IN

 Evaluation

 I will be considering the conceptual quality of the idea, the presentation, including where it should be presented, how, why, etc. I will also consider the quality of the artwork, could the photo have been taken on a better background, could the video be edited better and so on. Usually when writing an evaluation, I know exactly what can be improved, so I don’t really need a list but these are things I like to remind myself about as I sometimes slack in presentation. I will be doing evaluations as often as possible especially at the end of the week or after a crit. These are usually the best times because it allows for another opinion where something that I might have not thought about has been brought up. I must remember to take notes during crits as they really help.

 SWOT

Strengths

·      I am working with a theme that I am comfortable with. My last project was a theme I wasn’t used to, so by realising it is okay to be influenced by one broad theme and not everything that ever existed, is okay.

·      I am working in a media that I enjoy and feel comfortable with. I also experimented in the last project, trying to create an installation/sculpture for my final piece instead of following my gut which is often performance or digital work.

·      My organisation skills will definitely be coming into play here, but I am enthusiastic and a hard worker, so I’m not failing now!

Weaknesses

·      Presentation is something I have struggled with before, because it always comes as a last thought, but it is so important and I did a lot better at paying more attention to it in the last project, so this time I will improve even more.

·      It’s very easy to leave things until the last minute, but I think with the right organisation skills I will be fine.

·      Remembering to evaluate. I always remember after a crit, but I want to do it more often as it really helps improve my project and final art work.

Opportunities

·      This project gives me the opportunity to explore a new idea, I feel it has some great influence behind it and I really enjoy working with the themes of sex, gender and relationship.

·      More costume and character will be coming into play and that’s always a great opportunity, because of the stories they can have, which could develop into a series at some point in the future.

·      An opportunity to try more performance and maybe hosting a small audience.

Threats

·      Work is definitely a threat for this project, but hopefully my organisation and enthusiasm for this project will soar.

·      I think trying to do things on my own causes me quite a lot of problems, for example it would be easier to have someone taking photos than set up a tripod. Because I work with nudity a lot I find it awkward to ask for help for photography etc, but I’m sure they would be more understanding.

[we-future-first]

The Coming Age of Imaginative Machines: If you aren't following the rise of synthetic media, the 2020s will hit you like a digital blitzkrieg

The faces on the left were created by a GAN in 2014; on the right are ones made in 2018.

Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues gave the world generative adversarial networks (GANs) five years ago, way back in 2014. They did so with fuzzy and ethereal black & white images of human faces, all generated by computers. This wasn't the start of synthetic media by far, but it did supercharge the field. Ever since, the realm of neural network-powered AI creativity has repeatedly kissed mainstream attention. Yet synthetic media is still largely unknown. Certain memetic-boosted applications such as deepfakes and This Person Does Not Exist notwithstanding, it's safe to assume the average person is unaware that contemporary artificial intelligence is capable of some fleeting level of "imagination."

Media synthesis is an inevitable development in our progress towards artificial general intelligence, the first and truest sign of symbolic understanding in machines (though by far not the thing itself--- rather the organization of proteins and sugars to create the rudimentary structure of what will someday become the cells of AGI). This is due to the rise of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Popular misconceptions presume synthetic media present no new developments we've not had since the 1990s, yet what separates media synthesis from mere manipulation, retouching, and scripts is the modicum of intelligence required to accomplish these tasks. The difference between Photoshop and neural network-based deepfakes is the equivalent to the difference between building a house with power tools and employing a utility robot to use those power tools to build the house for you.

Succinctly, media synthesis is the first tangible sign of automation that most people will experience.

Public perception of synthetic media shall steadily grow and likely degenerate into a nadir of acceptance as more people become aware of the power of these artificial neural networks without being offered realistic debate or solutions as to how to deal with them. They've simply come too quickly for us to prepare for, hence the seemingly hasty reaction of certain groups like OpenAI in regards to releasing new AI models.

Already, we see frightened reactions to the likes of DeepNudes, an app which was made solely to strip women in images down to their bare bodies without their consent. The potential for abuse (especially for pedophilic purposes) is self-evident. We are plunging headlong into a new era so quickly that we are unaware of just what we are getting ourselves into. But just what are we getting into?

Well, I have some thoughts.

I want to start with the field most people are at least somewhat aware of: deepfakes. We all have an idea of what deepfakes can do: the "purest" definition is taking one's face replacing it with another, presumably in a video. The less exact definition is to take some aspect of a person in a video and edit it to be different. There's even deepfakes for audio, such as changing one's voice or putting words in their mouth. Most famously, this was done to Joe Rogan.

I, like most others, first discovered deepfakes in late 2017 around the time I had an "epiphany" on media synthesis as a whole. Just in those two years, the entire field has seen extraordinary progress. I realized then that we were on the cusp of an extreme flourishing of art, except that art would be largely-to-almost entirely machine generated. But along with it would come a flourishing of distrust, fake news, fake reality bubbles, and "ultracultural memes". Ever since, I've felt the need to evangelize media synthesis, whether to tell others of a coming renaissance or to warn them to be wary of what they see.

This is because, over the past two years, I realized that many people's idea of what media synthesis is really stops at deepfakes, or they only view new development through the lens of deepfakes. The reason why I came up with "media" synthesis is because I genuinely couldn't pin down any one creative/data-based field AI wasn't going to affect. It wasn't just faces. It wasn't just bodies. It wasn't just voice. It wasn't just pictures of ethereal swirling dogs. It wasn't just transferring day to night. It wasn't just turning a piano into a harpsichord. It wasn't just generating short stories and fake news. It wasn't just procedurally generated gameplay. It was all of the above and much more. And it's coming so fast that I fear we aren't prepared, both for the tech and the consequences.

Indeed, in many discussions I've seen (and engaged in) since then, there's always several people who have a virulent reaction against the prospect neural networks can do any of this at all, or at least that it'll get better enough to the point it will affect artists, creators, and laborers. Even though we're already seeing the effects in the modeling industry alone.

Look at this gif. Looks like a bunch of models bleeding into and out of each other, right? Actually, no one here is real. They're all neural network-generated people.

Neural networks can generate full human figures, and altering their appearance and clothing is a matter of changing a few parameters or feeding an image into the data set. Changing the clothes of someone in a picture is as easy as clicking on the piece you wish you change and swapping it with any of your choice (or result in the personal wearing no clothes at all). A similar scenario applies for make-up. This is not like an old online dress-up flash game where the models must be meticulously crafted by an art designer or programmer— simply give the ANN something to work with, and it will figure out all the rest. You needn't even show it every angle or every lighting condition, for it will use commonsense to figure these out as well. Such has been possible since at least 2017, though only with recent GPU advancements has it become possible for someone to run such programs in real time.

The unfortunate side effect is that the amateur modeling industry will be vaporized. Extremely little will be left, and the few who do remain are promoted entirely because they are fleshy & real human beings. Professional models will survive for longer, but there will be little new blood joining their ranks. As such, it remains to be seen whether news and blogs speak loudly of the sudden, unexpected automation of what was once seen as a safe and human-centric industry or if this goes ignored and under-reported— after all, the news used to speak of automation in terms of physical, humanoid robots taking the jobs of factory workers, fast-food burger flippers, and truck drivers, occupations that are still in existence en masse due to slower-than-expected roll outs of robotics and a continued lack of general AI.

We needn't have general AI to replace those jobs that can be replicated by disembodied digital agents. And the sudden decline & disappearance of models will be the first widespread sign of this.

Actually, I have an hypothesis for this: media synthesis is one of the first signs that we're making progress towards artificial general intelligence.

Now don't misunderstand me. No neural network that can generate media is AGI or anything close. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that what we can see as being media synthesis is evidence that we've put ourselves on the right track. We never should've thought that we could get to AGI without also developing synthetic media technology.

What do you know about imagination?

As recently as five years ago, the concept of "creative machines" was cast off as impossible— or at the very least, improbable for decades. Indeed, the phrase remains an oxymoron in the minds of most. Perhaps they are right. Creativity implies agency and desire to create. All machines today lack their own agency. Yet we bear witness to the rise of computer programs that imagine and "dream" in ways not dissimilar to humankind.

Though lacking agency, this still meets the definition of imagination.

To reduce it to its most fundamental ingredients: Imagination = experience + abstraction + prediction. To get creativity, you need only add "drive". Presuming that we fail to create artificial general intelligence in the next ten years (an easy thing to assume because it's unlikely we will achieve fully generalized AI even in the next thirty), we still possess computers capable of the former three ingredients.

Someone who lives on a flat island and who has never seen a mountain before can learn to picture what one might be by using what they know of rocks and cumulonimbus clouds, making an abstract guess to cross the two, and then predicting what such a "rock cloud" might look like. This is the root of imagination.

As Descartes noted, even the strongest of imagined sensations is duller than the dullest physical one, so this image in the person's head is only clear to them in a fleeting way. Nevertheless, it's still there. Through great artistic skills, the person can learn to express this mental image through artistic means. In all but the most skilled, it will not be a pure 1-to-1 realization due to the fuzziness of our minds, but in the case of expressive art, it doesn't need to be.

Computers lack this fleeting ethereality of imagination completely. Once one creates something, it can give you the uncorrupted output.

Right now, this makes for wonderful tools and apps that many play around with online and on our phones.

But extrapolating this to the near future results in us coming face to face many heavy questions, and not just of the "can't trust what you see variety."

Because think about it.

If I'm a musical artist and I release an album, what if I accidentally recorded a song that's too close to an AI-generated track (all because AI generated literally every combination of notes?) Or, conversely, what if I have to watch as people take my music and alter it? I may feel strongly about it, but yet the music has its notes changed, its lyrics changed, my own voice changed, until it might as well be an entirely different artist making that music. Many won't mind, but many will.

I trust my mother's voice, as many do. So imagine a phisher managing to steal her voice, running it through a speech synthesis network, and then calling me asking me for my social security number. Or maybe I work at a big corporation, and while we're secure, we still recognize each other's voice, only to learn that someone stole millions of dollars from us because they stole the CEO's voice and used to to wire cash to a pirate's account.

Imagine going online and at least 70% of the "people" you encounter are bots. They're extremely coherent, and they have profile images of what looks to be real people. And who knows, you may even forge an e-friendship with some of them because they seem to share your interests. Then it turns out they're just bundles of code.

Oh, and those bot-people are also infesting social media and forums in the millions, creating and destroying trends and memes without much human input. Even if the mainstream news sites don't latch on at first, bot-created and bot-run news sites will happily kick it off for them. The news is supposed to report on major events, global and local. Even if the news is honest and telling the truth, how can they truly verify something like this, especially when it seems to be gaining so much traction and humans inevitably do get involved? Remember "Bowsette" from last year? Imagine if that was actually pushed entirely by bots until humans saw what looked like a happenin' kind of meme and joined in? That could be every year or perhaps even every month in the 2020s onwards.

Likewise, imagine you're listening to a pop song in one country, but then you go to another country and it's the exact same song but most of the lyrics have changed to be more suitable for their culture. That sort of cultural spread could stop... or it could be supercharged if audiences don't take to it and pirate songs/change them and share them at their own leisure.

Or maybe it's a good time to mention how commissioned artists are screwed? Commission work boards are already a race to the bottom— if a job says it pays three cents per word to write an article, you'd better list your going rate as 2 cents per word, and then inevitably the asking rate in general becomes 2 cents per word, and so on and so forth. That whole business might be over within five to ten years if you aren't already extremely established. Because if machines can mimic any art style or writing style (and then exaggerate & alter it to find some better version people like more), you'd have to really be tech-illiterate or very pro-human to want non-machine commissions.

And to go back to deepfakes and deep nudes, imagine the paratypical creep who takes children and puts them into sexual situations, any sexual situation they desire thanks to AI-generated images and video. It doesn't matter who, and it doesn't have to be real children either. It could even be themselves as a child if they still have the reference or use a de-aging algorithm on their face. It's squicky and disgusting to think about, but it's also inevitable and probably has already happened.

And my god, it just keeps going on and on. I can't do this justice, even with 40,000 characters to work with. The future we're about to enter is so wild, so extreme that I almost feel scared for humanity. It's not some far off date in the 22nd century. It's literally going to start happening within the next five years. We're going to see it emerge before our very eyes on this and other subreddits.

I'll end this post with some more examples.

Nvidia's new AI can turn any primitive sketch into a photorealistic masterpiece. You can even play with this yourself here.

Waifu Synthesis- real time generative anime, because obviously.

Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models | This GAN can animate any face GIF, supercharging deepfakes & media synthesis

Talk to Transformer | Feed a prompt into GPT-2 and receive some text. As of 9/29/2019, this uses the 774M parameter version of GPT-2, which is still weaker than the 1.5B parameter "full" version."

Text samples generated by Nvidia's Megatron-LM (GPT-2-8.3b). Vastly superior to what you see in Talk to Transformer, even if it had the "full" model.

Facebook's AI can convert one singer's voice into another | The team claims that their model was able to learn to convert between singers from just 5-30 minutes of their singing voices, thanks in part to an innovative training scheme and data augmentation technique. as a prototype for shifting vocalists or vocalist genders or anything of that sort.

TimbreTron for changing instrumentation in music. Here, you can see a neural network shift entire instruments and pitches of those new instruments. It might only be a couple more years until you could run The Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" through, say, Slayer and get an actual song out of it.

AI generated album covers for when you want to give the result of that change its own album.

Neural Color Transfer Between Images [From 2017], showing how we might alter photographs to create entirely different moods and textures.

Scammer Successfully Deepfaked CEO's Voice To Fool Underling Into Transferring $243,000

"Experts: Spy used AI-generated face to connect with targets" [GAN faces for fake LinkedIn profiles]

This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist | This blog written entirely by AI is fully in the uncanny valley.

Chinese Gaming Giant NetEase Leverages AI to Create 3D Game Characters from Selfies | This method has already been used over one million times by Chinese gamers.

"Deep learning based super resolution, without using a GAN" [perceptual loss-based upscaling with transfer learning & progressive scaling], or in other words, "ENHANCE!"

Expert: AI-generated music is a "total legal clusterf*ck" | I've thought about this. Future music generation means that all IPs are open, any new music can be created from any old band no matter what those estates may want, and AI-generated music exists in a legal tesseract of answerless questions

And there's just a ridiculous amount more.

My subreddit, /r/MediaSynthesis, is filled with these sorts of stories going back to January of 2018. I've definitely heard of people come away in shock, dazed and confused, after reading through it. And no wonder.

submitted by /u/Yuli-Ban [link] [comments] source https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/daxcpx/the_coming_age_of_imaginative_machines_if_you/

[zeebirdskingdom]

In this modern era, people are so addicted to social platforms that they even can’t imagine to spend a day without using them.  Especially the young generation of Pakistan is so tilted towards short videos uploaded by Vloggers on youtube and facebook. We can say that YouTube is the new TV for the youth. Some Vloggers of Pakistan are influencing the Pakistani youth to the great extent with their charismatic performances. In recent years, we have seen a few vloggers pop up on the Pakistani YouTube. By filming themselves on a daily or weekly basis, they have won so many hearts. Today, we are going to discuss the top 5 Vloggers of Pakistan in this post. People really like subscribing them in order to see their latest videos uploaded by these Vloggers. These Vloggers create unique content and share with the audience. Because of their different and exclusive content, they have now so many followers on the social media platforms. Top 5 Youtube Vloggers of Pakistan to Follow In this modern era, people are so addicted to social platforms that they even can’t imagine to spend a day without using them.  Especially the young generation of Pakistan is so tilted towards short videos uploaded by Vloggers on youtube and facebook. We can say that YouTube is the new TV for the youth. Some Vloggers of Pakistan are influencing the Pakistani youth to the great extent with their charismatic performances. In recent years, we have seen a few vloggers pop up on the Pakistani YouTube. By filming themselves on a daily or weekly basis, they have won so many hearts. Today, we are going to discuss the top 5 Vloggers of Pakistan in this post. People really like subscribing them in order to see their latest videos uploaded by these Vloggers. These Vloggers create unique content and share with the audience. Because of their different and exclusive content, they have now so many followers on the social media platforms. Irfan Junejo is one of the top vloggers of Pakistan. He has established himself as a content creator. His vlogs are so simple and nice. The simplicity and his ability to share his content in such a brief manner have raised his fan following. He has started his career as an ordinary vlogger, with a camera and recording of a 3-minute video in his room. He said in a statement that: “Personally, I am sure of my ideas now, a basic idea with good execution can go viral and its number one example is Lyari video; a basic idea from Patari and zero planning led me to Lyari to make a successful video that got really popular on YouTube.” He is a remarkable vlogger and shares great moments of his life with his followers. His dedication and tireless efforts help him to gain 20k subscribers in 8 months only. Umar Khan aka UKhano: UKhano is one of the most popular Vloggers in Pakistan. He has a strong portfolio in graphic design due to photoshop skills. His amazing traveling Vlogs made him popular in a very short span. He has also gained the attention of the public just because of his unique video editing skills. Bilal Khan: The guy who shines with so much talent. He is an actor, sing/songwriter, and vlogger. His vlogs show the average people behind the scenes of celebrity lives.  In his Vlogs, we get to see almost one new celebrity. Zaid Ali: Zaid Ali makes parodies and comedy videos. He gained popularity from his hilarious YouTube and Facebook videos.  Zaid never fails to make us laugh or have us almost peeing our pants.  His videos are so family-friendly and amazing. He no doubt knows how to keep his audience entertained.

[wtfallonauthor-blog]

I recently watched season one of Amazon Prime series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I found hilarious and thoroughly entertaining. I don’t watch a lot of comedies—I find the writing is better on serious shows that also happen to be funny. However, I found The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to be the perfect blend of plot and humor. SPOILER WARNING: This review contains spoilers for season one.

As a creative person, I noticed the show, while entertaining, also offered many truths to be learned about pursuing a career in the arts. Now, the show is set in 1958, and there are obviously hundreds of things that are different about pursuing a career in show business, or other creative pursuits, today. Social media. The internet. Society. Stupid people going viral and stealing my spotlight. And not just people. I mean, a rat dragging a piece of pizza down the street can go viral but I can’t get 100 claps on Medium? Anyway….

This show revealed so many epiphanies about pursuing a creative career that are still true today. Here are 4 funny (okay, some are not so funny) epiphanies I learned about the creative life from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: 

Lesson 1: If at first you succeed, fail, fail again. The main character, Midge, embarks on a career in comedy after her husband, a would-be comedian himself, leaves her for his secretary. She—Midge, not the secretary—gets drunk and goesto the  humble nightclub where he performed earlier to collect a pyrex dish she used to bribe the club’s manager for a good time slot. While there, she wanders up on stage and drunkenly explains her very bad evening to the audience, who finds her hilarious. Later, the nightclub’s scheduler, Suzie—one of my favorite supporting characters ever—offers to manage Midge’s comedy career. Midge has a few more good shows, then some not-so-good shows, after which she decides to quit. She later realizes she wants to keep performing.

As a writer, I want to quit pretty much all the time. I’d probably be a lot happier if I did. It occurred to me a few months ago that if I’d known just how much work there is in writing—not just the writing, but the editing, the rewriting���I probably would not have started. I’d have a lot less stress and a lot more time to sit on my ass and watch Amazon Prime, that’s for sure. Hell, I might even have time to vacuum my room twice a year instead of once. But I probably wouldn’t, because I don’t care. Anyway….

But I don’t quit. I keep failing. I try to learn something from my failures. On the show, Midge goes to comedy clubs, watches the most successful comedians, takes diligent notes. Then she tries to apply what she learns to her own writing. She figures out what works for her, what doesn’t, how long to ride the laughs, how to plan her show instead of just rambling and hoping something funny comes out.

This can be applied to other creative pursuits. I read a lot, and have always read a lot, but now I really try to notice how my favorite authors do things. How do they explain back story so seamlessly you don’t even notice, instead of just making a big infodump on page one? How do they explain a fictional world without spending three pages on the scenery? How do they disseminate a large amount of info in snappy dialogue?

When I think I figure it out, I try to do these things myself. It doesn’t always work. I’m still learning, and more importantly, still failing.

Lesson 2: The more privilege you have, the better.

This one sucks, because privilege isn’t usually something you can gain through hard work, and you can’t buy it on Amazon, either. It would be nice if pursuing a creative career was equally easy—or hard—for everyone. But that’s not how the world works. It wasn’t in 1958, and it isn’t today.

In trying to improve her act, Midge finds an ad in an entertainment magazine and hires a guy to help her. She tells him a few things about her act, and he tells her he can write five minutes of material for $15. Now, that’s a pretty cheap rate today, but back in 1958 it would have been pretty expensive.

Can everyone afford to hire a script writer, or an editor, or a cover designer, or whoever they need to help hone their craft? Can we all afford to take acting classes or singing lessons or improv classes? No. Midge lives with her decently well-off parents after her husband leaves and her father-in-law kicks her out. She seems to have some cash left over from the marriage as well, and could probably sell some of their nicer items if need be. She gets a job at the department store so she can buy a television for her room. If she wants to spend fifteen dollars on a script writer (who turns out to be a scammer), she can do so without thinking too hard about it. She can also call her husband and get $200 for bail after being arrested for swearing and flashing her boobs during a show. That shows a tremendous amount of privilege not everyone has. (Money, of course, is only one of many kinds of privilege.)

The one benefit to not having money privilege is that it somewhat protects you from lesson #3….

Lesson 3: Scammers are everywhere.

The best thing to do is ignore them, or be unable to afford them in the first place.

There is no area of show business in which you’ll fail to find grifters promising fame and fortune for a price. Midge meets one when she hires the script writer, who gives everyone the same tired jokes for “$15 for five minutes.” Hollywood is full of acting coaches, voice lessons, etc. who aren’t worth the money. There are, of course, people who are worth the money. Good luck figuring out the difference!

Unless, of course, you have no money to spend on classes in the first place. That’s a surefire way to avoid getting ripped off. It’s also a surefire way to spend all your time working five jobs, leaving you with little time to write, go to auditions, paint, or whatever.

In the publishing world, there used to be a thing called vanity presses, where you paid them to print your book. Today, thanks to the magic of Amazon—aside from Prime, I mean—you no longer need a vanity press to self-publish. Anyone can publish anything on Amazon. Now, some people take the time to learn Photoshop and make their own covers. Some edit and format their own books. These things are time-consuming and not every writer is a cover designer. Not to mention, it’s a really good idea to have at least one other person besides yourself edit your book because it’s hard to do all your own editing.

So there is a genuine need for these services. However, many vanity presses have morphed into “self-publishing services” firms that charge an exorbitant amount of money to edit, design covers, and promote self-published books. Some packages run into the thousands. Again, the way to avoid this nightmare is to either A) do a whole lot of research or B) Just be too broke to pay for any of it anyway.

If you are in the market, read reviews, inspect the company’s website thoroughly, check its ranking, do a search to see what people are saying about it on social media, etc. Also quiz friends who have purchased such services about what they paid to make sure your price is reasonable. In general, avoid spending money if at all possible.

Lesson 4: Trolls Are Everywhere

Every performer gets heckled, but Midge gets a lot of heckling from guys who think women can’t be funny. And say so. It would be nice if we could write this off as a backwards view common in the 1950’s. Sadly, it’s also a backwards view some people still have today in the 21st century. In 2007, there was even a Vanity Fair article in which Christopher Hitchens attempted to mansplain why women aren’t funny. (Apparently, we never evolved this skill because we already appeal to men, and obvs., that’s the only reason for anyone to be funny!)

Midge learns to handle hecklers with aplomb. When an audience member calls her a bitch, she puts her hands on her hips and says, “Who told you?” The audience laughs, and the heckling loser is forgotten. She’s funny, he’s not. It’s a great scene.

Of course today, it’s not just hecklers at shows. There’s the morass of social media, and the evolution of hecklers into what we call “trolls.” (Also known as “hecklers who hide behind computer screens.”) Trolls are happy to attack women, minorities, people who disagree with them politically, and pretty much anyone they don’t like because, I don’t know, it’s Tuesday. As long as you have a big following, of course—for some reason, trolls rarely seem to take offense at people who have, like, 3 followers. Could it be they’re desperate for attention? Or just jealous of anyone who’s even slightly more successful? Anyway…

If you’re going to have a creative career, you’re going to need social media, and if you manage to get a decent following, you’re going to have to deal with the trolls.

I follow a lot of my favorite writers on Twitter, including one who was accused of “ruining science fiction.” Which is pretty bizarre. I mean, it’s one thing not to like an author’s books. I’ve read or tried to read lots of books that just weren’t for me. But the idea that any one author can ruin an entire genre by writing a book you don’t like is pretty fucking ridiculous. (Of course, this particular troll was also upset because the author supports things like diversity in the genre.)

So a few days ago, the writer posted a screenshot about his ruination of an entire fiction genre, with an addendum about how he’s made a lot of money in royalties lately, and “ruining science fiction” is apparently really profitable. It is now my goal in life to ruin science fiction…okay, make it ruinier…and also ruin satire. NOW I know why I’m broke—I haven’t worked hard enough at ruining things!

Of course, if you don’t have the time or desire to personally respond to every troll, there’s another option: Just block and ignore the haters. This advice is easier to give than take. I know I shouldn’t engage with trolls, but, well, sometimes I can’t resist. If you can’t either, at least try to find a clever way to do it, instead of sinking to their level.

One last thing…

So, those are the 4 funny epiphanies I learned from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Before I conclude my review of season one (love it, you should watch it if you haven’t already), I’m going to leave you with some epiphanies I had watching the first two episodes of season 2:

My new favorite quote from any TV show ever: “My goal is money. I don’t have any and I want some.” Suzie, who speaks for me and my goals as well.

Also, I wish my parents would go to Paris, rekindle whatever romantic feelings they must have once had for each other (which I REALLY don’t want to think about), and leave me alone in their house. I’d be so much happier.

Forcing students to take four semesters of a foreign language is just a way greedy colleges make money, because after four semesters of French I still need subtitles when characters speak French. I want a refund from my university.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish watching season 2 and see what other great epiphanies I can find. Hey, the idea for my next novel would be great….

V. R. Craft is the author of Stupid Humans, a thought-provoking science fiction book series that asks the question, “What if all the intelligent humans abandoned Earth—and we’re what’s left?” Her first political satire book, Fail to the Chief, will be released soon.

  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s 4 Funny Epiphanies for Every Creative I recently watched season one of Amazon Prime series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I found hilarious and thoroughly entertaining.

[letergh]

Hundred Eyes Mural (2017)

Full title: 13 Reasons Why We Should Have [A] Hundred Eyes

Last May 2017, “Hundred Eyes” was the title for the Transformers & Catalysts Youth Camp. Inspired from the Netflix series “Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes” and “13 Reasons Why”, the youth camp was aimed to help the youth to be more aware of the different viewpoints regarding the people, challenges, and events they face on a daily basis.

During the camp, we gathered thirteen (13) statements (reasons) from them expressing why the youth of today needs to have a hundred eyes to face the world. As part of the program and design team, I was assigned to conceptualize and layout an 18.9ftx6ft mural with the 13 statements to be painted with the Transformers & Catalysts youth members.

If that’s all the time you have today, thank you for coming here! :) Hahaha, but if you want to see the unattractive-but-hopefully-satisfying work-in-progress shots, come along with me as I go through the whole process once again!

Before we go, let me share a little background information on Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes and 13 Reasons Why.  

Li Jinbao “Hundred Eyes” is a blind monk in service to Kublai Khan. He killed Kublai Khan’s soldiers and because of this, he got Kublai Khan’s attention. Kublai Khan imprisoned him and was set with the task of training Marco Polo in the beginning of the series. Li Jinbao is blind yet very skilled within the martial art of Kung Fu. 

“Years ago, you took my eyes. Today I give you the rest of me.” - Li Jinbao “Hundred Eyes” to Kublai Khan

13 Reasons Why is an American teen drama series developed for Netflix, based on the 2007 novel by Jay Asher. The series revolves around seventeen year old high school student, Clay Jensen, and his deceased female friend Hannah Baker, who has committed suicide after failing to cope with the culture, gossip and lack of support from her friends and her school. A box of cassette tapes recorded by Hannah in the lead up to her suicide detail thirteen reasons why she ended her life. (Yep, this is from Wikipedia.) Here we go.

“A lot of people are so used to just seeing the outcome of work. They never see the side of work you go through to produce the outcome.” – Michael Jackson

I like viewing other people’s WIP posts/progress shots because it makes me feel at ease that they’re not magicians and that there’s a whole process before they achieved the final version of what they’re doing. Reading “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon has enlightened me to take people behind the scenes and share more of what I do and to not worry about everything to be perfect, “what matters is the process.”

Here’s the Bahaghari wall before the mural:

I thought I can do all of the layout and at the same time handle editing a digital version because I planned on projecting and tracing the design on the wall. I learned this from #TheScribbleWithUsMural2017 by Ink Scribbler and I figured it made the work a whole lot easier.

It did not. HAHAHA In the middle of making layouts, sketching, erasing, drinking coffee and Pinterest-ing, I realized how much work was needed to be done and that I am not capable of doing this all by myself. And so I got help from a few promising young artists from church who are into calligraphy/lettering (Hi Abi, Patrick, Yenry and Migz!) and asked them to layout a few statements. Here are their works:

I imitated their layout and proceeded to do the drafts which are then scanned and edited on Photoshop/Illustrator. Have a look at the messy scanned stuff

Here’s a gif of the digital layout. To track progress, photos below were being sent to one of our youth leaders for approval and direction.

Below are the final sketches on the wall as a mock-up and was just put there to see how it would most likely turn out.

More editing, revising, digitizing and coffee happened and the final version was done. Here’s a gif to see the progress:

Some of the WIP shots I’ve shared on Instagram stories:

Huge thanks to all my good friends who supported and helped in making this mural a reality! I was too anxious to share about this because I got too stressed out with the amount of work needed to be done, the deadline and how I thought I was alone in all this–I didn’t understand then that I had to love the process. Shout out to all the people who went with me to buy paint, to eat, and to my family who fetched me every night. HAHAHA. Tatiana Manaois said in a song “You don’t always have to be strong all by yourself, it’s okay to ask for help.”  :)

I didn’t want to post about this and make it seem like I’m taking all the credit when in reality it’s a collaborative effort. God is so good and I am blessed and so grateful that I am a part of a community such as this one. I had fun painting this mural, even though it took months from start to finish, I hope I get to do more of these in the future!

If you’re still with me, thank you for reading this far. To God be the glory!

There have been questions as to why it’s a hexagon, and why is it formed like a chemical compound. Is it about chemistry? Well… um… no, it’s not a chemical compound. It’s based on the font Cube 02™ aaaand I’ll probably explain the logo in another post, probably on Behance or something idk we’ll seeeee! 

If you have a plain boring wall you’d like to paint a mural on, send me a message here, on Instagram (@lettergh) or via email gretelannehurano@gmail.com! 

[nchyinotes]

How to launch an independent magazine, by Delayed Gratification

February 22 2018

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-to-launch-an-independent-magazine-22nd-february-2018-tickets-40937174190?aff=es2

In this class you will:

-Learn how to turn your magazine idea into reality

-Find out how to identify a successful editorial niche

-Understand the nuts and bolts of commissioning writers and designers

-See how to pull together a winning subscription, distribution and marketing plan

-Discover how to survive and thrive beyond the first year

You will leave with a good insight into the independent publishing industry and a strong idea of how to set about launching an independent magazine.

 Thoughts: I actually found this event on eventbrite a few months before it happened, sent it to my friend who I knew would be interested (hi Ayesha!) and then forgot about it. Then the day before, she asks if I want to go because her friend cancelled so she had an extra ticket, so I ended up going with her haha. I’ve always been vaguely interested in starting a magazine, and was actually the co-editor of an online art magazine aaaages ago with my online friend (hi Angela!), but was never really serious about it. While some of this information was not new for me (a lot of it overlapped with your typical entrepreneurship/startup advice, ie. finding a niche), the advice that was specific to launching indie magazines (logistics and business aspects) was very useful and interesting, and I really appreciated the numbers they threw in from their own business. Overall, was a very fun and honest look at the business, and the organisers were super friendly. Also left with a free copy of Delayed Gratification (their mag), which was cool to read.

  EDITED NOTES

 Introduction

Met early 20s in dubai, journalism students, working as time out editors, learnt how to make print mags together / fell in love with it

Went in different directions, and then all ended up back in london at 30

Just over 7 years now

Named independent magazine editors of the year 2017

Most independent magazines are losing if not hemorrhaging money - lots of vanity projects, made as a shop front for creative agencies.

Attrition rate is extraordinary. Intense desire to make them, but the number that make it past issue 2 / 3 is very low.

Lower barriers to entry than ever before - people are used to them, a lot more need for them (solace in print from digital world) + tools are there + there are all these places to sell them now (mag culture!)

Bad news: will probably break your heart, high failure rate, odds are against you, difficult economic model to make work, are not immune to pressures in mainstream press (but don’t face: massive debt built up in 80s/90s for rapid expansion, pensions liabilities, offices)

Were dreamers + journalists: novices at nuts and bolts of making money/funding

90% of success is turning up - determination to keep going even in early years

Maybe expand into documentaries / books in the future

Key lessons

1) you probably shouldn’t launch an independent magazine - sink which you pour your money, dreams, hopes

Brainstorm: Why do indie mags fail?

Not thinking about how you pay for issue 2 → run out of cash v quickly (where frequency comes into it, ie. weekly)

Just getting visibility: Hard to find your audience - with so much competition, etc

Often have expertise in one area, but lack expertise in another function that’s vital to bringing product to market

Content burn out, esp. If you make big commitments (launch with huge interview etc) - second album syndrome? Not to create too many structures that need to be filled in early days.

2) ^ can be overcome with a niche - you need a niche

Fat brad magazine

Terrible people magazine

Slightly foxed, nutmeg (scottish football periodical), mc1r (only about redheads)

Their niche: slow journalism, something to champion

What it did for them:

issue 1 cover was by obama’s hope poster artist (+ issue 5, limited edition posters, interview = all for free)

Content by Interviews (henry kissinger, etc) + writers - because it resonated with them, wanted to support it = can use those people’s credibility to add to theirs

Coverage + press: something to talk about (today program on radio 4: one 6 minute interview got them ~400 subscriptions = able to be condensed and easily explained/summed up)

Could have been slightly more bullish about fast news in the start, should you be worried about alienation??

Brainstorm: A name and niche

Colors magazine - activism & protest issue

Trend (mindfulness) vs Niche

Helps to sort of person we appeal to, what need am i filling that hasn’t been filled, what is my spin

Need to be passionate (committed, reason without a doubt), not egotistical, believe in your idea, ask for help a lot, honest

3) you need to think about the business

Beyond issue 1, what it is to run a magazine business (VAT returns, subscription systems, fb ads)

Frequency & cost

Weekly or monthly is really really fast. Always easier to go from quarterly down, because it shows you’re getting better, etc (awks if you have to go the other way).

Issue 1: 12 pounds, issue 2: 10 pounds.

When setting price for individual issue, what would you charge for a year’s subscriptions? You want to offer subscribers an appealing discount (that you’re not losing on each subscription)

Christmas is key for the indie mag industry - big burst of subscriptions as gifts. So don’t launch in jan or feb lol, christmas run is key, be well established for this! 50+% this year was from last 5 weeks of sales

Don’t launch in summer - nobody gets subscriptions then, more newstands then

Print, digital, or both?

People don’t want to pay for digital issues, not that captivated by complicated stuff you can do on there.

You have to charge VAT + pay percentage to platform for digital copies

People expect to pay less for digital copies

But there are some digital projects that are fascinating - de correspondent (similar premise, crowdfunded, purely digital in dutch, really collaborative / self contained digital ecosystem. / community driven)

Physicality - You can get people to pay for a physical / tangible object that they just don’t for digital, they have relationships with them.

Latterly (weekly newsletter, after building huge online audience for free, now printed publication)

^ merits of this?? Passion project more bc of time sink??

Subscriptions vs newsstand

Subscription systems

Gocardless (pay direct debits)

Chargebee - portal

V difficult to make money out of newsstand sales - 50% of the cover price, 3-6 months after mags are sold, and they generally only sell 60% of the ones you’ve sent them. Treated as marketing for subscriptions.

Not difficult to set them up

In London / UK: Ra&Olly, MMS, Smiths (difficult + unresponsive + dont fulfill, but have a stranglehold on mags in country)

Paid: gold star media (get you in to salons, hotels, airport lounges, etc)

Is your magazine one that a company would like to support? Team up because they really like it

Customer

Site sales: shopify

Fulfilment: newsstand

Adjust your expectations

4) take subscriptions!!

Newsstands are hard

It’s money upfront, will help with print bills, cash flow, etc

Community building

More chances for someone to like someone

Alternatives: Kickstarter, indiegogo (to test out if appetite is there)

Subscription renewals / Direct debits ?

Do not build your business model around advertising, it’s so diffused + competitive, can’t do trackability on print issues

No ads > bad ads

Corporate work - if you prove you can make mags, you can make them for other people too

Magazine as a broader way of selling your skill set

plan for issue 2/3/4 already + worst case scenarios

5) you need to make something special

Making your magazine:

Commissioning editorial content

There are a lot of really good writers out there desperate to work for you

Draw up a commissioning form - rights and responsibilities, deadlines, etc

Approach writers that you like - tell about mag & ask them to pitch OR give them a story and ask them to write it

Longer form + freedom

Always pay! You have a contract, leverage, etc

Editorial pagination * av word count * word rate = commission

First: 10p/word

Now: 25p/word

Industry average: 30p/word

Interviews / verbatim interviews: with an expert in the subject. Get it without having to pay a word rate, take what you need from it, may tighten it up for free anyway when you send it back for approval  

Ask people who just brought out a book

Finding a designer - they expect a very carefully designed product

Don’t be afraid to let things evolve - keep moving/changing things around

First issue is not going to be perfect, important thing is that it exists

Look at magazines / things you like + get in touch with them

Have your favorite designer create a template (or a regular design) for you - easier for recent grads etc to follow, at a cheaper price

Design software: considerable expense

Indesign, photoshop - creative suite, expensive monthly. Worth looking at older versions (old DVDs on ebay - work with designer to save it down a version)

Pagination (80-100), size (delayed gratification is too big/wide to fit through most letterboxes, something smaller / standard sizes are better), GSM (cyclical trends), binding (perfect bound, saddle stitch / staples are much cheaper)

Costs of the last issue, excl. Wages (which has come up a huge amount, 7-8k in the beginning bc lots in house and paying less) : 23.8k pounds

West ale ?? printers company

Approach the printers

The only thing that’s going to push your price up is if its special paper they have to order 4 u

You’ll get inundated with calls once you start up

You want a printer that will work around you (missed deadlines or changes post-proof stage)

6) you need to tell people about your mag

Brainstorm: how are you going to get noticed?

Making waves - Print someone controversial, getting into mainstream press

Power of positivity vs negativity (attract passionately negative people? In emails? Lol. prepare yourself for backlash)

Collaborating with influencers / people with followings / associations that make sense / endorsement (within the niche) - genuine

Loving print means embracing digital - lots of new people come from digital content

Weekly newsletter : manageable amount of content, keep engaging (mailchimp), moving people through the marketing funnel

Events - sense of community, benefit for subscribers.

Free is not recommended. Commitment.

Indie mag community - swap inserts in different titles/issues/newsletters, nicer fit, more interest

Podcasts

Questions

Usually print about 1000 copies of issue 1

Issue 0 - proof of concept (rarely done in indie mags)

Limited run projects - must be pitched to advertisers / subscribers before hand as such (will probz break ur heart at issue 6)