#my vector is also free with attribution

[jaysehasnograce]

Hannigram graphic I made for @averywritesthings for Christmas!

(Please CLICK for not complete shit resolution because Tumblr is terrible!)

Blood drip vector base from Textures4Photoshop here (but edited/manipulated and painted by me)

Skeleton mosaic vector from goncalocamboa on DeviantArt here

Hannibal table display vector from JayseHasNoGrace here

[isobug]

Wilderic Symbol

Requested by anon, a symbol for Wilderic!

I wanted to use multiple different aspects of nature in this, so there's a leaf, a sun motif, and a tree ( which was made by simply stacking the "tail" of the Mars symbol together. )

The only part of the symbol that I do not own is the leaf symbol which was made by Font Awesome and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license!

I don't claim to have made it and the only change I made was making the inside of the leaf squared-off instead of rounded-off, to match with the rest of the symbol. You can find the relevant attribution links in the post source, because Tumblr hates external links.

This symbol is free to use by anyone anywhere. I also don't claim to have coined Wilderic or made either of the flags used here. You can find the .SVG / Vector image file at the source link, which links to my Deviantart ( isobug )

Taglist - @radiomogai, @revenant-coining

[glitchphotography]

Writing a short addendum of action steps to my “You Don’t Hate AI Art, You Hate Capitalism” essay that I posted yesterday and including some AI photographs made with DALLE2 of Capybaras helping a union drive. These outputs were all based off of original photos I took of Capybaras in Ipaussu, Sao Paulo, in 2019. Let’s start with some advice for illustrators and commercial artists who are worried about AI ruining their lives.

UNIONIZE YOUR WORKPLACE! Seriously, your bosses are the ones out to get you, not the AIs or AI artists. Unions are the best way to prevent outsourcing to AIs.

UNIONIZE WITH OTHER FREELANCERS! This is harder to accomplish, but freelancer unions do exist and there should be more of them. (Side note: many artists who will be affected have the privilege to work in highly gatekept cultural industries that, in the US, discriminate against POC, immigrants, Queer people, Disabled people, etc. They are also mostly based in the Global North and they don’t hire many experimental new media artists, so keep in mind, this aint my battle lol)

Opt-out of Stable Diffusion V3! If your work is showing up on the “Have  I been Trained“ website, you can opt out of future AI model releases through this link: https://haveibeentrained.com/

Learn about new media histories and experimental processes! The art world is changing fast and visual arts don’t all revolve around representational illustration and commercial imaging. Expanding your craft is a matter of adaptation and survival. We new media artists have been messing with AIs for almost a decade now and this whole hysteria makes a lot of you sound brand new.

Train AI models using your own works and let everyone make derivatives. This is the classic “dont beat em, join em” approach and I think it’s awesome. It makes you seem generous and not like some boomer screaming “muh copyrights” into the void. Here’s a tutorial on how to train Stable Diffusion on your own set of images .

Now for some broad structural solutions, because these calls for AI Art Bans are giving strong “Disco Sucks” vibes:

AI’s should be treated as public infrastructure and thereby socialized or nationalized.  No private company should own AI systems or vectors of information. AIs should be open source and free for all to learn and use. 

Commercial applications of AIs should be strictly regulated. Not just because biases and misuse of sexualized images are rampant, but because private ownership of AI will lead to more socio-economic inequalities.

Generative Image AI Services should be paying royalties to artists. If you want your favorite illustrator to get those royalties, go pressure OpenAI and MidJourney directly. They have records of all their prompts and are making bank. What people don’t know is that when these services came out, they had atrocious licensing restrictions where they owned the prompts and images AI Artists were creating, but community pressure made them cave in. Now AI Artists own the outputs while granting a nonexclusive license to the AI corps (much how social media platforms operate).

Finally here’s some advice for digital artists working with AI:

Artists should fully disclose if their works include AI-generated imagery, especially if it’s the main visual. Many exhibiting artists use terms like “Collaboration with AI” to describe their art and that’s a good practice, because it really is a collaboration with a computer. (Side note: China is making it a law that all AI-generated media have a watermark or disclaimer and I think that’s a fair approach).

Artists should attribute the other artists they reference in their prompts, especially if they are relying on a living, working artist’s aesthetic for their output. Many AI Artists will mash-up several references, like cyberpunk + lisa frank + ansel adams + raphael painting, and tho i personally wouldnt fault an artist for not disclosing these references, since they are all canonical, I think its commendable for AI Artists to share their prompts along with their visual work.

It is unethical to take raw outputs based off of a single living, working artist and in order to commercialize a whole unattributed series of derivative works based off their aesthetic. But I think there are caveats if you are working within a legitimate conceptual framework and you attribute the artist you referenced. Also if you are remixing your artistic reference in your own workflow, you are protected by Fair Use and that’s ok. The best way to tell the difference if someone is using AI in unethical ways is to consider that person’s entire body of work. Are they appropriating in an interesting way? Is there a concept or politics behind their appropriation? Is AI Art all they seem to do? Art history has been driven by appropriation and that’s not going to change. 

Consider whether your AI Art punches up or punches down! Sure, go ahead and rip off the damien hirsts and jeff koons of the world. But if you are a white dude making japonaiserie or chinoiserie, or outputs based off of Black hip-hop culture, you should reconsider your approach. That FKN Meka thing is a perfect example of white guy owners creating a fake AI rapper using lyrics ghostwritten by Black rappers. That shit is gross and evil. Keep in mind that evaluating cultural appropriation requires an understanding of colonialism and racial capitalism.

[jcmarchi]

10+ Excellent Web Design Tools & Resources to Use in 2024 - Web Design Ledger

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10+ Excellent Web Design Tools & Resources to Use in 2024 - Web Design Ledger

It’s a New Year, but one thing hasn’t changed. The number of web design resources and tools just keeps on increasing. That’s a good thing. But it does make it that much more difficult to find a theme, plugin, or resource you really have a need for if you are to stay abreast of or leapfrog the competition.

We are in a position to make your search easier. Much easier in fact. We reviewed and tested web design tools & resources we believe many users, designers, and developers have a genuine need for. The types we believe to be essential, and that you will see in our final list of 15 are:

website builders for building landing pages and multiple-page websites quickly, easily, and without any need for coding.

WordPress plugins that can incorporate potentially game-changing functionalities, that are challenging to design, into websites.

WordPress themes for building complex and high-conversion rate websites and online stores.

Vector illustrations that can give a website a whimsical or entertaining aspect.

font identifiers to identify and provide access information to a “must have” font or fonts.

A majority of the web design resources and tools in the following list have a free or trial version:

What are a few of the important attributes these Excellent Web Design Tools & Resources for Designers and Agencies share?

They look premium. There is something about a top tool or resource that makes you wish you had acquired it a long time ago, e.g., how enjoyable it is to use.

They are intuitive. From signing up, to downloading, using, cancelling, and anything in between, everything needed is placed precisely where it should be.

They add real value. They facilitate getting more and higher paid assignments by helping you deliver web design projects faster, making your final deliverables more attractive, or both.

15 best web design Tools & Resources for Designers and Agencies

To help you in your research, we’ve included top features, customer average grade on non-biased platforms such as Trustpilot, Capterra or WordPress.org, and client feedback.

Ready? Then let’s get started. 

1. Brizy Builder™

Brizy is the best website builder for Agencies, Designers, and anyone else in need of a White Label solution.

Brizy’s top feature is without a doubt its 100% customizable White Label solution that allows its users to add their own branding, including the builder name, builder logo, domain URL, support link, about link, and project subdomain.

Brizy Builder’s library of demo/template/prebuilt websites is also highly popular with its users. Soulful and Cuisine is one of the 5 most downloaded pre-built websites. It is attractive and inspirational, and while it provides an ideal foundation for a restaurant or bistro, the layout can be used for other service-oriented website types as well.

There’s more to like as well. New users quickly become aware of Brizy’s intuitiveness, and their ability to edit any type of content in place. Many competing builders force their users to create their content in a disjointed sidebar. That’s not the case with Brizy.

Customer Average Grade: 4.6/5 on Trustpilot

Client Feedback: “I am amazed by my experience with Brizy. The tool is easy to use, and the support is one of the best I have ever experienced. Fast replies and my contact really went the extra mile in helping me solve my problem. I can only recommend Brizy to everyone who’s looking to build their own website”!

Instant Support Materials:  Documentation, Brizy Academy, Useful Blog Posts and YouTube videos

View the Builder 

2. Trafft – Booking Software

 The Best Free Scheduling Online Software Solution for Business Owners.

Flexibility is always important when selecting a theme or plugin. The top feature of this software solution is the ability to operate in a wide range of languages because of its powerful Multilingual Notifications System.

This user favorite:

facilitates the effective management of appointments and events using email, SMS and/or WhatsApp messages.

keeps users informed about the status of appointments or events.

offers custom notifications that enable users to tailor alerts for specific services or events.

The library of prebuilt websites also plays a significant role in making working with Trafft a pleasant experience. The Career Mastery Coaching prebuilt website illustrates what an effective event booking system might look like.

Key features users notice once they start using Trafft include easy backend and frontend interface navigation and the power the customization options bring to the table.

Web developers and digital design agencies can be expected to be more than pleased to discover that Trafft offers a White Label option.

Customer Average Grade: 5 stars on Capterra

Client Feedback:  “ I love that Trafft has so much included – and that you can customize literally everything, including the email & SMS notification wording (which is a big deal for me since I like communications to be in my brand voice).”

Support Materials:  Trafft’s ticketing system. Support manual, YouTube videos, social media, and email.

View the Booking Solution

3. wpDataTables -The Best Tables & Charts WordPress Table Plugin

 wpDataTables offers an ideal solution for businesses and individuals who need to create tables and charts.

The wpDataTable plugin’s top feature, its Multiple Database Connections capability, represents a data management breakthrough by empowering every table to become a data hub that can pull information from different databases or servers.

By simplifying data management tasks, wpDataTables allows its users to create custom, responsive, easily editable tables and charts with ease.  A bookseller could probably put this Responsive Catalog Table with Books to good use.

Features new wpDataTables users will discover include:

an abundance of useful functionality wrapped in an intuitive package.

the ability to adroitly manage complicated data structures.

wpDataTables also supports separate connections for working with specialized database systems and features chart engines for displaying data for marketing, financial, and environmental uses.

Customer Average Grade: 4.5/5 pm WprdPress.org

Client Feedback: “WpDataTables is an excellent WordPress Plugin. What you are able to accomplish with this plugin is nothing short of amazing. Their support is even better! Highly, highly recommend using this product and supporting this company.

I have tried different utilities for creating charts out of a series of CSV files I use for weather data, but it has been a hassle until I discovered wpDataTables which does exactly what I need. Very user friendly and versatile. And it also understands that there are other standards for date, decimal, and time apart from the Americas.”

Instant Support Materials:  Support manual, the Facebook community, and YouTube videos

View wpDataTables

4. Uncode – Creative & WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Uncode is the #1 WordPress and WooCommerce theme for creatives, professional designers, and agencies looking for an ideal solution for any project.

While Uncode’s ensemble of website building tools and options would seem to more than justify its popularity, most of its users say the demo library is its #1 feature. The demos not only exhibit exceptional attention to detail but have proven to be excellent sources of inspiration as well.

Uncode’s classic Web Experiences is one of the 5 most downloaded  demos. Just imagine what you could do with it.

New users are impressed with the value inherent in Uncode’s demos and wireframes, the level of customization, and the top-notch customer support.

Uncode’s principal users are:

Agencies and Freelancers, because of the multitude of options that cover the needs of every customer or client.

Shop creators, who can easily make effective use of Uncode’s advanced WooCommerce features.

Customer Average Grade: 4.89/5

Client Feedback: “I have used Uncode on 6+ websites now, and it’s absolutely my go-to theme! The features, quality, and customer support are outstanding. The developers do an incredible job of keeping the theme up to date and stable, constantly implementing new features and optimizing the theme. A solid product with great documentation and responsive support team. Kudos!”

Instant Support Materials:  Support manual, Facebook groups, YouTube videos

Purchase the Theme

5. LayerSlider – Best WordPress Slider Builder Plugin

 LayerSlider, the top-rated WordPress slider plugin, empowers web designers to effortlessly enhance websites and make them truly shine.

LayerSlider’s scroll effect has emerged as its top feature. You can find it prominently displayed in the recent batch of full-size hero scene and whole website templates. Scroll through the Flavor Factory pre-built web page and see how easy it can be to use LayerSlider to help capture and engage visitors.

LayerSlider easily accommodates a range of uses, from creating simple sliders or slideshows to sprucing up your site with captivating animated content.

Newer users appreciate:

LayerSlider’s customizable interface that suggests the plugin was created specifically for their use only.

easy access to millions of stock photos and videos plus other integrated online services.

the Project Editor that ensures that what you need is right where you need it.

LayerSlider also really shines when there is a need to create content for marketing purposes. Marketers are impressed with the mind-blowing effects that can be incorporated into their popups and banners.

Client Feedback: “A fantastic slider plugin with regular updates to make sure compatibility is never a problem. Keep up the amazing work!”

Support Materials:  Product manual, In-editor help, support tickets, and email.

Preview LayerSlider

6. Amelia – WordPress Booking Plugin for Appointments and Events

 Amelia is the best WordPress plugin for Agencies and Businesses in need of a streamlined booking solution.

The automated notifications system is Amelia’s top feature. Users could tell you how easy it was to categorize and position appointments as pending, approved, cancelled, rejected, or rescheduled. Special notices such as upcoming events or birthday congratulations can also be forwarded via the notifications system to assist clients and enhance their loyalty.

Amelia offers a number of templates that can be customized to help businesses grow. Yoga Studio is a notable example of how a template can be put to use to advertise a business.

Those new to Amelia could tell you about:

the ease of navigation they discovered, the innovativeness exhibited in the backend and frontend interfaces, and its functionality and user-friendly design.

the value its transparent pricing policy offers.

the extent of the customization options.

The Amelia plugin offers an ideal booking solution for service-oriented businesses including those specializing in ticket sales and/or events. Programming agencies and developers could also profit from having Amelia in their design toolkits.

Customer Average Grade: 4.8 on Capterra

Client Feedback: “Great plugin, I have tested similar, but Amelia seems to be the best for my site, I have many customers through the site, and everybody is satisfied with this appointment system. Sometimes there are a few bugs but quickly corrected through regular updates. Globally very good notation.”

Instant Support Materials:  YouTube videos, Discord Group, and Support Manual

View Amelia

7. WhatFontIs

The most powerful and  accurate free font identifier.

This tool’s top feature is its accuracy. WhatFontis users have a 90%+ chance of finding whatever free or licensed font they want identified.

No other system can claim that accuracy, and most of them charge a fee for whatever service they provide. It is worth noting that the ability of WhatFontis to identify a given font correctly can be compromised if the quality of the submitted image is subpar, and that is what accounts for some of the roughly 10% of missed identifications.

WhatFontis can do what it does best in part because of its database of 990K+ free and commercial fonts. This is nearly 5 times as many fonts as that attributed to the nearest competitor.

Whether the goal is to identify a specific font sent by a client, or simply because it is attractive, a customer wants to know what it is and where to find it. A search can be conducted for a font regardless of its publisher, producer, or foundry.

The process is as easy as can be.

Upload a clean font image.

In response, an AI-powered search engine identifies the font and as many as 60 close neighbors.

Links are provided that show where a free font can be downloaded or where a commercial font can be purchased.

Note: Cursive font letters must be separated before being submitted.

Client Feedback: “I came across this website courtesy Google search, used their services successfully; and today I find out it’s on product hunt! If you are ‘driven’ by the need to discover what font ‘that person/ company’ uses, then this should be your go-to solution site. For most of us it would be a once in a blue moon need, except for the professionals.”

Types of Instant Support Materials: User Forum

View WhatFontis

8. Slider Revolution – More than just a WordPress Slider

 Slider Revolution is the best WordPress plugin for Designers, Web Developers and anyone seeking a way to create jaw-dropping animated sliders.

This plugin’s top feature is the ability it gives to its users to visually create stunning animated effects for WordPress.

The Slider Revolution plugin is not limited to creating sliders. It can be used to:

create stunning home pages that immediately engage its visitors.

create portfolios that will be viewed a second, or third, time because of the method of presentation.

design eye-catching sections anywhere on a website.

A stroll through Slider Revolution’s library of 250+ templates may be all that’s necessary if you need a little inspiration to get started. These templates have been 100% optimized for different screen configurations and feature special effects you won’t see on most websites. The Woodworking Website template for example, makes clever use of the hover effect to highlight both text and images. The layout itself can be used for a wide variety of website types or niches.

The Slider Revolution plugin is tailor made for individual web designers and developers, web shops, and small agencies.

Customer Average Grade: 4.6/5 on Trustpilot

Client Feedback: “I absolutely love the Slider Revolution. It does wonders for my projects. I am super excited about all of the templates that are ready for use. Their support has been incredible”.

Instant Support Materials:  Support Manual, YouTube videos

View the Plugin

9. Getillustrations – Creative Stock Illustrations Library

The best resource for designers who are looking for top quality illustrations with terrific attention to detail.

Getillustrations’ top feature is three things in one; 21,500+ vector illustrations, free updates for one year, and new illustrations added every week. In other words, once you get started, good things keep coming your way!

You will have 40+ nicely arranged categories to select from. Most categories have several hundred illustrations, a few have more than 1,000.

These illustrations appeal to clients ranging from students and businesses to designers and developers. You’ll find pencil and basic ink illustrations, several 3D illustration categories, and fitness, logistics, and ecology illustrations to name but a few, and since they are exclusive to Getillustrations you will have an edge over those using other stock illustration resources.

You can purchase illustrations by the pack if you choose to. The Motion Illustrations pack is one of the larger ones with 1,090 vector web illustrations at latest count .These Motion illustrations feature a diverse range of themes, each of which makes a statement.

Client Feedback: “I really like the different styles available in this library. I used it to illustrate some of my blog posts. Since you get vector files, you can also recolor them to have them match your brand and product identity!”

Support Materials:  Vector stock illustrations in .Ai .Figma .PNG and .SVG

View Getillustrations Offerings

10. Mobirise AI Website Builder

The best tool for creating and downloading full page websites using prompt commands only.

The Mobirise AI website builder is a revolutionary tool that uses intelligent algorithms to generate beautiful websites. Its top feature enables its user to generate a website using a single prompt.

The super-intuitive single prompt interface makes Mobirise AI an ideal choice for anyone looking for a simplistic yet efficient design approach.

Describe in detail what your site is all about, and this AI website builder will take your data and through the use of intelligent algorithms auto-generate a basic layout.

Once that is accomplished you can use prompts to customize style, colors, fonts, etc., and edit pre-generated content to suit your needs.

When you have the beautiful, optimized for Google and mobile devices website you want you can launch it with a single prompt.

Note: Even though Mobirise AI does much of the work, you retain full ownership of your website.

Client Feedback: “The AI website builder was astonishingly intuitive. What I appreciated the most was the seamless drag-and-drop interface which allowed me to position elements anywhere on my site. The AI’s design recommendations saved me hours of second-guessing my layout choices. Not to mention, the automatic SEO feature was a godsend–it optimized my site without me having to learn the complex ins and outs.”

Instant Support Materials:  Support Manual, User Forum, YouTube Videos

View the AI Website Builder

11. XStore – Best WooCommerce WordPress Theme

XStore is the best WooCommerce theme for anyone looking to quickly build a high-converting online store.

XStore is obviously tailored for use by shop owners and prospective shop owners who seek an online presence. While the selection of ready-made stores (pre-built websites) has always been highly popular, the recently introduced selection of Sales Booster features has emerged as the top favorite.

New users soon come to appreciate the Builders Panel and the intuitive XStore Control Panel, both of which give them the store-building and customization flexibility needed to create the custom store they envision.

They also like the solid start XStore’s pre-built websites make possible. The layout of the Marseille prebuilt website is an excellent example of why it’s possible for a novice to get a store up in running in a few hours.

XStore doesn’t stop there. Its users have instant access to the powerful family of Single Product, Checkout, Cart, Archive Products, and 404 Page Builders; all favorites of shop owners.

Customer Average Grade: 4.87/5

Client Feedback: “I love this theme! There’s a wider learning curve to go through before getting a hang of the features, but the overall versatility and aesthetic factor is excellent.”

Instant Support Materials:  Support Manual, YouTube videos

Buy the Theme

12. Blocksy – Premium WooCommerce WordPress theme

Blocksy is the best free WordPress theme for building attractive, lightweight websites in 2024.

There doesn’t appear to be much about Blocksy that its users don’t love. Consequently, when it comes to identifying this premium WooCommerce WordPress theme’s top feature, there’ s a 4-way tie.

Blocksy’s footer and header builders are super-user friendly.

Gutenberg support ensures top performance.

Developers love the advanced hooks and display conditions.

Everyone appreciates seamless WooCommerce integration together with its associated features.

And on top of it all, Blocksy is free!

Several of the things new users quickly recognize is that Blocksy:

uses the latest web technologies.

provides exceptional performance.

integrates easily with the most popular plugins.

Cosmetic is a beautiful, meticulously crafted starter site with a pleasant design that lets products take center stage. While centered on beauty products, its layout can be used for a wide variety of website niches. Cosmetic is one of the 5 most commonly used starter sites.

Customer Average Grade: 5/5 on WordPress.org

Client Feedback: “Blocksy is fast and light, responsive and beautiful. Blocksy has nothing superfluous and has everything you need. I love Blocksy, and Blocksy loves me.”

Instant Support Materials:  A readily accessible Documentation Section, Support Manual, YouTube videos. Facebook Group

View Blocksy 

13. Total WordPress Theme

 Total is the best WordPress theme for web designers and developers seeking the flexibility required to design from-scratch.

Total’s top feature is its seemingly unlimited flexibility. Its assortment of design tools and options makes it a Swiss Army knife of website design and is one reason its name is so appropriate. A well-deserved reputation for amazing support also tends to set Total apart.

Not long after becoming acquainted with Total, its users could tell you about a number of things they discovered and like including the fact that:

Total has settings for everything, tons of page building options, a font manager, custom post types, and more.

Total is speed optimized.

Total provides dynamic templates for posts and archives.

Total’s pre-built website collection is another favorite. Synergy’s minimalistic design lends itself to a wide range of uses and is one of the 5 most widely used pre-built websites.

Total is tailored for beginners, developers, and DIYers. Advanced designers like Total as well, and for all intents and purposes, anyone else will too.

Customer Average Grade: 4.86/5

Client Feedback: “I have been using Total for several years now for several (10+) websites. Out of the box it’s already a great theme and very well documented. Some websites required specific functionality and so far, there was nothing I couldn’t provide. If I can’t figure it out myself, support is always willing to help. I don’t need another theme anymore.”

Instant Support Materials: Support Manual

View the Theme

14. Essential Grid – WordPress Gallery Plugin

Essential Grid is the best WordPress Gallery Plugin for businesses who want to capture visitors’ attention with breathtaking galleries.

Essential Grid is the best WordPress Gallery Plugin for anyone who wants to create a unique, attention-getting gallery.

Essential Grid’s library of 50+ unique grid skins is its top feature and is what this WordPress gallery plugin is all about. Why these skins are such a favorite is easy to see. Most web designers and developers would not want to have to take the time to create a gallery from scratch and the grid skins offer an excellent alternative approach.

In addition to making it easier to create a gallery layout you want, it’s also possible you’ll come across a grid skin layout you haven’t even thought possible and can’t wait to put into use.  The YouTube Playlist layout for example shows how the hover effect can transform a seemingly run-of-the-mill gallery into a real attention getter.

Essential Grid’s users will tell you how much of a time saver this plugin can be, and how effective it is at helping them organize their content streams.

Customer Average Grade: 4.7/5 on Trustpilot

Client Feedback: “I have to say that the level of support I received is definitely one of the best I have ever experienced. Big thumbs up!”

Instant Support Materials:   Support manual and YouTube videos

View Essential Grid 

15. WoodMart – WordPress WooCommerce Theme

WoodMart is the best WooCommerce theme for niche ecommerce design.

Just a glance at the WoodMart website is enough to grab your attention. Woodmart’s top feature, super-realism, pops right out at you. The custom layouts for shop, cart, and checkout pages are so well done that it’s easy to forget where you are and start window shopping.

There is plenty more to about WoodMart too, for example:

A multiplicity of available design options.

Easy customization to fit the brand.

The time-saving Theme Settings Search and Theme Settings Performance Optimization features.

Widely used “Frequently Bought Together”, “Dynamic Discounts”, and social integrations options.

WoodMart also has a White Label option.

Finding the most popular demos isn’t easy since most of them enjoy lots of usage.  WoodMart Organic Baby Clothes is one of the 5 most downloaded demos.

Customer Average Grade: 4.93/5

Client Feedback: “This theme is perfect. It has all the options you can imagine and tooltips to help you understand what you are about to change. It’s fast out of the box and makes a great use of Elementor. Great responsive design.”

Instant Support Materials:  Support Manual and YouTube Videos

View the Theme

*******

Do you see one or more web design resources and tools you would like to add to your toolkit? It would certainly be easier than having to sift through hundreds on your own. That is why we did the vetting process for you. You still will want to preview those that interest you and try them out if possible. The free ones are of course for the taking.

What will you be looking for? These 15 excellent web design tools & resources have several characteristics in common. Characteristics that are necessary to be considered as “best-in-class”. Those characteristics are as follows.

Plugins, themes, and resources are easy to install or set up and are user friendly.

They give your website an edge in terms of design, functionality, or visitor appeal; or all three.

Customer support is friendly, fast, and competent.

They allow you to test the product for free. Or give you enough information to ensure that won’t end up feeling like the product you purchased is markedly different from the one you saw advertised.

Check out any or all of the 15 best web design tools and resources you believe you could put to good use.  Test them out if you can and either add them to your toolkit or write them off.

Are you done? Not really. Since there are many new web design tools & resources coming into the marketplace every day, some of which might offer greater opportunities, your search will never really end.

[literaticat]

I have a writing adjacent q for you, probs a bit random: I watched an 'entrepreneur' who demonstrated how to write books using chatGPT, then run the text through another AI to 'humanize' the language. Copy-paste and From there he published the books on Amazon. Is that plagiarism?

(SORRY IN ADVANCE this is super long. If you want to read the ENTIRE answer, that includes WHY AI is not a viable method of replacing authors, click the "Keep Reading" thing at the bottom!)

I mean, people throw up all kinds of trash to make money on Amazon. Plenty of people sell entirely BLANK books on Amazon, with covers they made on Canva. If there's a market for it -- OK. I wouldn't call those people writers, and I wouldn't want to work with them or anything, and I can't imagine they are really making THAT much money, but... whatever, I guess. It doesn't affect me or my books or regular publishers any more than a kid running a lemonade stand affects the bottom line of Minute Maid.

Questions of quality aside, you can't copyright IMAGES that are made by AI, but text seems a bit more ambiguous and that's something that I'm sure courts will be taking up soon enough if they aren't already. Meantime, that's a problem in terms of publishing, because anyone else could publish the same thing, and you wouldn't have a leg to stand on, nor would you be able to make money off things like movie rights, etc, because you don't own the copyright to the work.

(And further - - if it becomes settled law that AI generated text can't be copyrighted, but you decided Ethics Be Damned and registered for copyright anyway, how would the US Copyright Office KNOW? I have zero idea. It feels like a minefield of lawsuits waiting to happen.)

Questions of quality, copyright and ethics aside : IS IT plagiarism? I.... still have no idea. I've asked client and resident AI expert Martha Brockenbrough, whose YA nonfiction about AI is coming out next year and is called FUTURE TENSE: HOW WE MADE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HOW IT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING. She says:

"It’s not plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking passages from the work of another writer wholesale without attribution (or, if not wholesale, for the most part). ChatGPT has been trained on trillions of words on the internet. Yes, many of those were copyrighted. Tech bros don’t care! They gots to innovate! To move fast and break things! To have bad haircuts!

It is deeply icky, though."

More from Martha, below:

"Someday, AI will probably write passable novels. That day is not yet here, and the people who think it is have bad taste. The people using Sudowrite as support are producing crappy work. I tried Sudowrite. It is … incredibly limited if you want to write any sort of imaginative work at all. Honestly, this will seem FINE to a lot of readers who don’t to pay more than $2.99 for a book and haven’t seemed to realize you can check them out for free at the library. Those people are not keeping us afloat.

AI is not yet doing good long-form fiction. It can’t handle the complexity.

Think of AI as a pattern-recognition engine and producer. If you train an algorithm with lots of data (e.g. the entire fetid ocean that is the Internet), then it will be able to reproduce the patterns in language it has encountered. This is all math. “The” often precedes “end,” and so the vector connecting those things will be short. “The” and “of” don’t go together often. So there would be a longer vector between those words. 

Stories also follow patterns. It’s not just the relationships between words, but also the shapes of sentences, scenes, and plot and character arcs. AI can reproduce those, to a certain extent. Because it doesn’t know what it’s doing (and in this way, is less capable than a mountain of monkeys), it has a hard time keeping things straight. What did the character say on page 1? The AI won’t yet remember that on page 365. Someday, it might. 

Novels are incredibly complex pieces of work. So are picture books—they do all that work in just a few words. AI can ape this complexity. But what makes novels and PBs good on an artistic level isn’t just adherence to a pattern. It’s an understanding of how to evoke human emotion—how to create an authentic emotional experience with paper and ink. 

Mediocre writing might be technically accurate, but no one is going to care about it. No one is going to have that deeply emotional experience that is the point of reading a story. 

Mediocre is what AI is most likely going to generate—in part because of how it’s trained. If you’re trained on a million novels and you want to generate something like a novel, the output is going to be the mathematical average of that in many ways. What makes humans interesting is their differences. Not how well they conform to the model of “human.” I played with a bunch of stories on different text generators, and invariably, the ending was based on a sort of coming together of “both sides.” That might work better for some genres than others, but in general, the failure to create endings that are both satisfying AND surprising is inevitable when the algorithms aren’t capable of measuring anything beyond the math behind the patterns on the page. There is the emotion in the reader, and that is something that isn’t being measured in this process.

There’s a reason for this. AI doesn’t feel—although I guarantee you that at some point, you will think you’re chatting with a sentient being. Humans make emotional attachments like whoa, and to me, this is one of the most dangerous things about chatbots, and it has been the case since the first one was coded in the 1960s. The chatbot doesn’t care back.

There is a branch of AI called “affective computing” that intends to measure and simulate human emotion, and I suppose you could craft an AI novel and then have focus group of humans read it and then adjust based on their reactions, and with that, you might approach the complexity a human writer can produce. 

Does this sound like fun to you? Does it sound useful? Does it sound like it will break down barriers for all sorts of storytellers? Or does it sound like a grotesque process foisted upon us by people who don’t want to do the actual work of writing and instead want to reap the rewards, which they assume to be bigger than they actually are. 

Technology has replaced all sorts of labor, and writers and artists aren’t a special class of human beings who should have immunity to this. But what problem is being solved by outsourcing this labor to machines? Creating art is good for human beings. No one is exploited by it. No one is seriously injured or killed on the job doing it. It doesn’t pollute. We can’t shut down stuff like ChatGPT, which wasn’t created to write novels. It was created to generate text, and without being explicitly trained, it also figured out how to code. People will use the tool for whatever end they want, and it’s really up to consumers to decide whether they want to buy something from a machine or a human being. What’s it gonna be, pals? Tang or orange juice? 

I know what I want."

[amanita-cynth]

Welcome to yet another WIP intro, except I'm actually nearly 80k words down on this one and it's my focus for now, so. Buckle up for eight slides of Electrum Heart info.

Rest of the slides under the cut, there will be image IDs/transcripts as well as attributions at the end.

[ID: A grey, slightly textured background with simple vector images of ruined buildings at the bottom. Large text reads Electrum Heart, and in smaller text under it reads, Begrudging allies to best friends to "I can't live without you" in the post-apocalypse, but one's an android. In brackets, also they fuck up fascists. To the left is a radioactive symbol, to the right is a code box with a heart encased in curly brackets.]

[ID: Large text at the top says Premise, with an outline of a nuclear mushroom cloud to the left and a blocky vector of a robot toy to the right. Text under it reads, A prototype of the next generation of androids wakes after years in stasis to a new world and little working knowledge of it. While its new companion-slash-handler attempts to teach it the new world and the two grow closer, its unfinished programming starts to grate against the new data, the knowledge that it might be the only android still beholden to its programming, and the escalating political situation of the consolidating powers surrounding the city…]

[ID: Large text at top reads, Follow them to exciting locations such as. Text underneath is bulletpointed and each has a simple outline image near it. The underground android city of Baltia, with a handheld radio. A literal Waffle House, with an open sign. Piles of irradiated scrap metal and rubble, with a gas mask. The strange hideaway house of an eccentric tech billionaire lesbian, with code with an image of a screwdriver in it. About three outposts of bandits and Neo-Nazi raiders, with a knife. A bar. Just a bar. With a beer stein. And the battleground between the USPS (yes, the one you're thinking of} and Neo-Nazis near a reservoir, with three bullets.]

[ID: Large text at top reads Kevin "Kev" Monaco, with mirrored simple images of blue and white spanners each side. Bullet points below and to the left read, Grumpy loner Scrapper. Has secrets and doesn't want them out, would suck if he picked up a droid made for detecting - oh, wait. Absolute shithead but has a soft side and actual morals.

[ID: Large text at top reads MB800-01 "Eights", with mirrored simple images of yellow microchips each side. Bullet points below and to the left read, Naive baby that is also capable of killing six men in two seconds. Somehow both a blank slate and sassy out of the gate. The moral core of the duo, despite being a literal killing machine.

[ID: Large text at top reads Lili, with mirrored simple images of grey screwdrivers each side. Bullet points below and to the left read, Mysterious loner that even the other Scrappers don't really know. Nobody's quite sure who she's trading with or what her motivations are. Hard to read. Always seems to show up right on time to help them out.

[ID: Large text at top reads Bonus Scrappers, with mirrored simple images of white and blue gears each side.

[ID: Large text at top reads Bonus Bots, with mirrored simple images of yellow and white images comprised of half a brain and half a gear each side.

Attributions: Picrew is Ultimate Friend's Face Maker by lunevani

Engineering vectors designed by studiogstock on Freepik

Destroyed city vector designed by upklyak on Freepik

All other icons free from Smashicons

[theestervashti]

"The Mock Up." From Esther 9: 14-15.

We cannot end the war in Gaza or Lebanon or the West Bank or Iran without a long-term plan. The same is true in Russia, in Africa, in America where there are a plethora of short term crises to swat at, but no long-term vision. We say democracy is being threatened, but the truth is democracy is the threat. Every four to six years, the fit hits the shan and nothing good comes of it.

The Jewish people are not free yet, they haven't survived the combined multi-vector assault mode of the Mormons long enough to know what freedom really is. But we do have an edict from ancient times and a blessing from Jesus, who gave us a glowing recommendation, and these we have never had before, so if we do what the Torah says and make a plan, one that addresses everything and then we follow it, the Esther Torah says we shall have the plunder. But not without a plan. The Rab calls the onest of this plan Adar, "to open the eyes":

"The verb אדר ('adar) means to be superior or majestic (or literally: wide). Noun אדר ('eder) means glory or magnificence, or may refer to a wide cloak. Adjective אדיר ('addir) means majestic. Noun אדרת ('aderet) means glory.

The verb הדר (hadar) means to honor, adorn or glorify. Noun הדר (heder) means splendor or glory. Noun הדר (hadar) means ornament, splendor or honor. Noun הדרה (hadara) means adornment or glory."

14 So the king commanded that this be done. An edict was issued in Susa, and they impaled the ten sons of Haman. 

15 The Jews in Susa came together on the fourteenth day of the month of Adar, and they put to death in Susa three hundred men, but they did not lay their hands on the plunder.

v. 14: They impaled the ten sons. Impaling means "hung up". We are attached, for example to having a Republican Party and a Kremlin and climate change problems but these are dispensable. They are not legally required and the second they caused us all trouble they should have been dealt with.

The verb תלא (tala') occurs only in 2 Samuel 21:12 (conspicuously displaying of the remains of Saul and Jonathan) and Deuteronomy 28:66 (one's own life hung on conspicuous display). This verb also appears to occur in Hosea 11:7, in the difficult statement "My people are hung on backsliding...". This verb is either a plain Hebrew variant of the next verb or it is an Aramaic version of it.

I like the next part, the part about killing through asphyxia, a good death for pedophiles if you ask me:

"The verb תלה (tala) also means to hang or display conspicuously and occurs all over the Semitic language spectrum. It's used for totems and regalia (Isaiah 22:24), common use vessels (Ezekiel 15:3), protective or ornamental armor (Song of Solomon 4:4, Ezekiel 27:10), harps on willows (Psalm 137:2) or the earth on nothing (Job 26:7).

But our verb is also quite often used for people who found themselves accursed, subsequently executed and finally publicly displayed (2 Samuel 21:12, Joshua 8:29, 10:26). This display occurred mostly on trees since trees are excellent natural bill boards, which led to the general rule that whoever hung on a tree probably did that because he was accursed (Deuteronomy 21:22-23, Galatians 3:13; and "cursed who hangs on a tree" has nothing to do with the tree or with any magical or imprecatory powers attributed to the tree; hanging from a tree was the result of being accursed, not the cause of it).

Execution by hanging does not seem to have happened in the Hebrew world, but it did in Egypt (Genesis 40:22), Persia (Esther 2:23) and the Roman empire (Matthew 27:35). This old world hanging was usually a form of impalement and was not designed to break one's neck or choke one to death relatively speedily but rather to torture and display the victim at length as a deterrent. The Babylonians appear to have hung people by their hands, which would lead to death by asphyxia, as does crucifixion (Lamentations 5:12)."

The Torah requires propaganda that runs against the grain of corruption when it is found. We cannot hope and pray the God of gods and Light of Lights will show His face one day and make things right, that is the job of the men in uniform and where the fuck are they?

They are being hidden by bullshit crap about "complex cases" and sealed records that is where. People are dead, more are going to die. Criminals are responsible, that's not all that complicated.

The Number is 4340, דגם‎, "the mock up, the model, the pattern."

The pattern is the key. The world accepted a pattern of misbehavior towards women, gays, blax, Jewish, Latin, and Muslim people without question, then started all these complex cases and let organized crime engage in widespread criminal acts against them.

If we read the Torah, we need to perform Ararat, "reverse the curse" and change the pattern.

v. 15: They came together. That's always nice. The Number is 8903, ףטאֶפֶס‎ג‎, fatapesg, "open a chicken's egg."

[trixybobbitt]

AI generated art is theft, do you have to have an AI Art Profile picture?? It really bums me out ):

Yes, I was using an AI profile portrait. It was one of those early photo style edits from before the AI art stuff really blew up. The photo it was based on was of me and taken by me. Still, I recognize that it is inexcusable laziness and complicit in theft almost certainly committed when the AI was trained. It was a placeholder which is overdue for replacement. This new vaguely heart shaped icon is one I created myself with a freeware vector art program called Inkscape for use in my book. It is based on a heart shape which I think is old enough that no one is quite sure where it's use started. It's also meant to resemble a pen nib. Pen nib shapes are largely functional and whether you would judge their origin in Roman ruled Britain in the 40s AD, or Egyptian reed pens far before then, those are both a bit past the copyright cutoff Mickey is staring down. I don't think I can get any more theft-free than that and still use a standardized web image format. I could be wrong. Posting publicly on the internet is an efficient way to be corrected and learn. I think I'll add some genderqueer colors to it after I'm done writing this. While the genderqueer flag was designed by Marilyn Roxie, it's covered by Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License so I think I can use it without taking food from the mouths of creators. I also own commissioned cover art, which I did not draw, but I own the reproduction and modification rights. If I wanted to use that for a bit more color, do I credit Angrboda in my profile, or a pinned post? Do I post the artist's legal name to avoid confusion with the norse goddess? Is it enough that tineye will reveal its origin? I haven't seen anyone else posting citations for their avatars, so I do not know the appropriate convention. I'm not sure what is enough. I also love the art of simz, but I have not commissioned a piece from them. Is there a way to use their art in an avatar without bumming you or other folks out? Is it enough if I'm a contributor to their patreon?

In addition, I've probably used one or two Felix Argyles in my few 'original' content posts which were not illustrated by Shin'ichirō Ōtsuka, and some backgrounds which may not have been either stock, meme template, or from recognizable intellectual properties. (I made a few of them while drunk-posting on a friend's couch, and probably didn't click through my google image search to check.) I'm not sure if they represent fair use, but I don't think you were raising a legal complaint, just feeling bummed about art friends struggling to commoditize their creativity in a capitalist society that is predatory toward small business, so I'm not sure what to do to cheer you up. ☺

[madameriasims4]

Delicate Leaves Wallpaper Set

BGC Each package comes with the colors shown in the main image selectively paired with the EA wood tones present in the original wallpapers. To keep the swatch count from getting ridiculous, I didn't pair every color with every wood tone, choosing to remove swatches that clashed, and then using the KonMari method to remove swatches that did not spark joy.

This set comes in six packages. You can pick and choose any of them, or download them all at once from the MadameRiaDelicateLeavesWallSet zip file.

Download Link and Info Below the Cut!

MadameRiaDelicateLeavesWallCM: Shown in the main image, made to match the base game crown molding wallpapers like Striped Splendor. There are three different wood tones and a total of 60 swatches. MadameRiaDelicateLeavesWallPaneling: Shown in the second image, made to match the base game paneling wallpapers. There are three different wood tones and a total of 60 swatches. MadameRiaDelicateLeavesWallRoM: Shown in the third image, made to match the Realm of Magic wallpaper, Enchanting Dainty Daisy. There are six different wood tones and a total of 65 swatches. MadameRiaDelicateLeavesWallVampiresV1: Shown in the fourth image, made to match the Vampires wallpaper Vertical Bat Motif. There are four different wood tones, and a total of 75 swatches. There is one wood tone from the Vampires wallpaper that I did not use, because the EA version is inconsistent across wall heights. MadameRiaDelicateLeavesWallVampiresV2: Shown in the fifth image, made to match the Vampires wallpapers like Narrow Victorian Wall Pattern. There are five different wood tones, and a total of 80 swatches. MadameRiaDelicateLeavesWallVampiresV2Shiny: Shown in the sixth image, made to match the Vampires wallpapers like Narrow Victorian Wall Pattern. There are five different wood tones, and a total of 80 swatches. This version is shiny! The color palette is a mix of the Historian Palette by SerendipitySims, the Duskwood Palette by Sleepyheadsims, and some colors taken from the Realm of Magic and Vampires packs. My initial aim with the palette was to serve all my moody, broody goth/occult sims living in their Victorian mansions, but I tried to include some lighter and neutral colors as well! Still, I've worked on this set for so long that I might have lost perspective- is 80 swatches too many? I made the pattern from a design element resource (see attribution), and I decided to color the pattern to suit each wood tone. So, for the dark wood tones, the pattern is also generally dark, and for the really light wood tones I went with a white pattern. For the other wood tones, I played around with warm tones for the pattern, in the gold-bronze area. All of this means that this wallpaper set took forever because I deliberated on 280 individual swatches. Also, I had to clean up all the exported wood textures. But now that all of that work has been done, I have a bunch of wood textures to play with... to make more wallpaper sets!

Check out my other wall set, (Delicate Damask) here!

Download (Patreon) Always free, no ads. Attribution: Background vector created by rawpixel.com - www.freepik.com

[friendsim2]

New Years FAQ

🎊Happy New Years!

As we're moving closer to our first release, we here at Friendsim 2 wanted answer a few questions that have been floating around about our game!

Q: Who's Running this?

Friendsim 2 is being developed by @StudioJuneGames, which is a loose collective of creators representing a wide range of backgrounds and identities.

Our director (and lead writer, programmer, and social media woman) is Jonaya Riley (@JonayaRiley on Twitter)!

Q: Is this a commercial game?

Absolutely not!

This is a 100% free fan project, and all assets are licensed under the CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, meaning they will always be free for everyone to use for *non-commercial* projects!

Who's working on FS2?

A: We have a team of around 40 artists, 30 voice actors, six writers, and a dozen musicians!

That includes everyone from veteran contributors on official projects (including folks from literally every official HS project!) to non-Homestucks!

Q: What are the details on the voice acting?

Voice acting is being provided by a diverse selection of voice actors, both professional and semi-professional, under the direction of Anna Marcus (@acMusic27 on Twitter)!

Q: How are you paying artists?

Our director was fortunate enough to have inherited and saved some money to help compensate our artists and voice actors.

She wanted to help support the artists working on this project however possible!

Q: How is it on STEAM?!

Steam and Itch.io are both platforms for distributing content and, legally speaking, aren't distinct in that regard - but we wanted playing the game to be the easiest possible experience for everyone!

Q: Thoughts on the Official Content?

Everyone on the team has their own feelings, but the core reason for this game existing is due to how much Hiveswap - especially Friendsim - means to our director and so many people on the team!

Q: What about What Pumpkin?

It's our hope that WP recognizes the wide range of fandom creativity and effort that this project represents - a lot of us really respect the work they've done, and this project is intended to continue that legacy!

Q: What's the story?

The basic story continues the narrative of Friendsim and Pesterquest, picking up with MSPAR deciding to return to Alternia to retrieve their friends from Friendsim.

Things do not go as expected!

Q: What happens to my favorite character?

You'll find out! We've spent a lot of time making sure that the characters are handled in ways that're both coherent and satisfying!

We can't promise everyone a happy ending, but we think that the outcomes will at least feel right.

Q: Are the assets original to Friendsim 2?

You bet! Everything from the sprites to the music to every line of writing are 100% new assets, and the game's programming, UI, and design are brand-new!

Q: Okay, but that logo looks... familiar

It's a high-res vector interpretation of the original Friendsim logo, with some tweaks and changes. We wanted to match the look and feel of the original game, while also expanding on it!

Q: Should I even play the official games?

Absolutely!!!

Not only is our game a sequel to both Friendsim and Pesterquest, but all of the games have a ton of work put into them and you should absolutely support the artists that worked on them!

Q: Why are you doing this?

Hiveswap means a lot to us, and we love these characters.

We think it's unlikely we'll get a Friendsim/Pesterquest sequel from What Pumpkin, so we decided to put together a team and do it ourselves!

Q: Can I financially support the project?

If you want to offer financial support, we suggest donating to the individual artists involved or commissioning work from them!

We credit individual artists on posts, and the game itself will include links to their social media!

Q: Can I contribute?

Unfortunately we don't have any openings for contributors at this time, but if we do need additional help we'll be posting updates to our Twitter account!

Q: Can I support the developers?

Just spread the word, follow us here on Twitter, all that good stuff!

Also, follow our studio Twitter (@StudioJuneGames) and keep an eye out for future, non-Homestuck projects after Friendsim 2 is complete!

Seeing the enthusiasm and support for this project has been a humbling and amazing experience!

This is a fandom that means a lot to all of us, and we hope we make something great for you all!

-Jonaya (Director/lead writer, Friendsim 2)

If anyone has any additional questions about our project or its development, feel free to send our director asks here on our tumblr!

[heartlessconviction]

Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory. Pleasantly surprised however not worth £60

So I’ve beaten Melody of Memory and I’ll be the first to say, it surprises me just how fun this game is. I am not fond of Rhythm games to begin with and as you may already know I am exceedingly critical when it pertains to the KH series as a whole. I think most of the games are flawed in a game design and mechanical standpoint. And I’ll be bold enough to say the series has been getting progressively worse since KH2FM dropped in 2007. Re:Mind redeemed KH3 somewhat yet we are 11 patches in and Guard is still fucking broken so you be the judge there.  There really isn’t much I can say since the gameplay really doesn’t have any level of depth towards it, you hit the notes on time with the beat essentially. You have a melee attack which is placed onto the 2 bumpers and one face button, you need all 3 since at some point you will need to hit notes simultaneously. The most depth you will get is in the Gliding and avoiding attacks, upon the track some heartless will try to hit you and by jumping over these it counts as a beat in any given song, you will also need to utilize the jump since certain heartless can only be hit whilst in the air. At parts in a song you will also need to glide and manouver your character into green notes, but the same basic rule of thumb applies here.  Later in the game you will come across deep dives and boss fights, which force you to also use the analogue stick to hit notes, but at the end of the day you are just tackling a song. The amvs that play are pretty scripted and in these segments they can become extremely distracting as the notes tend to blend in with the video in the background. This only applies to the Deep Dives and the boss fights, but it can become a pain in the arse when you miss a note due to a white flash lingering within the video and it tricks you to press the button a tad early.  In terms of story the game is pretty bareboned, I will say this now. If you are playing this game strictly for the story and you have no interest in the Rhythm game genre. Save yourself 60 dollars, the new story content is held towards the end of the 8 hour campaign, for the rest of it Kairi is pretty much summarizing the events of the Xehanort Saga. Poorly I might add as so much context is stripped away from these summaries. If this is your first KH game, do not go into this expecting to understand the events of the previous Saga. These summaries are designed to pad out game time, they do not serve as passable representations of the last 15 years of the series.  There are far more effecient ways to experience the story as a newcomer via The Story So Far HD Collection Bundle. MoM fails heavily in this regard. {I’m not going to go into depth on the new Story content as this isn’t a spoiler review or anything.} In terms of playable characters you have 4 teams, consisting of 12 characters as a whole. A Sonic Heroes predicament, all of the characters function the same and whatever miniscule difference they have is strictly cosmetic. At some point in a few worlds you will have guest characters with you, but again they function the same.  A disappointing aspect of this Team System is that the Team Members are locked and with no ways to customize them, perhaps mods for the Switch will fix this. However for the base game each member is locked into a particular team, so you are unable to change them around.  For example you cannot put Sora, Roxas and Xion within the same team. I do not understand why this hasn’t been included as timeline plotholes cannot be used as an excuse, as you can face any of the bosses with any of the teams. So you could have Team Days face off against KH1 Ansem. Admitingly its a small omittance since the teams are merely cosmetic. Yet as we know cosmetics whilst insignicant to the gameplay itself does hold merit to a games content and overall value when it pertains to replayability and customizability.  Teams and Team Members:  Team Classic: Sora, Donald and Goofy Team Days: Roxas, Axel and Xion Team 3D: Riku and Dream Eaters Team BBS: Aqua, Ventus and Terra The song selection is something I adore and hate at the same time, you have classics such as:  Sanctuary Simple and Clean The 13th Dialema The other Promise Another Side/Another Story {Deep Dive} Vector To the Heavens Even One-Winged Angel makes an apperance. Yet there is a shocking absence of KH3 representation, you have Let it go and a few other songs. {Around 8 in total}  But considering the fact I actually prefer a lot of the KH3 variations of the songs its disappointing they didn’t make the cut. Especially the masterpieces from the Re:Mind DLC. Above all of that for a lot of the songs they use the original PS2 renditions rather than the remastered variations from the HD remixes which... Why? They are inferior in comparison imo.  Even so, Let it Go in japanese is fire.  As a whole this game surprised me, but I do not think for a second that its worth the 60 quid asking price. Its amazing to have a homage to all of these amazing tunes from the series thus far, nevertheless for the story content whilst it isn’t as halve arsed as Re:Coded. Its not enough to justify the price tag. Rhythm games are not for everybody and that is perfectly fine, people aren’t getting upset because KH has a Rhythm game. They take issue with the fact lore is locked behind the paywall, and yes whilst you can just watch the cutscenes on youtube like most of us do with Union cross and Dark Road, it just isn’t the same experience that you would get from experiencing the cutscenes yourself after a tough challenge. If this game was 30, which I whole heartedly believe it should have been. I would be a tad warmer in my critique.  Unfortunately that isn’t the case, from a gameplay standpoint this is truly a quality product. Its just overpriced, now if they included the KH3 songs and the Re:Mind songs within the base product maybe that would shift my stance, however I have a suspicion they are going to try and milk those for DLC. If not great but it just feels like something Square would do at this point. No Simple and Clean Ray of Hope Mix is not included. Yeah, it baffles me as well.  The conclusion in which I will sign off with is this. Despite my feelings on the games price tag, It has succeded in fundamentally changing the approach in which I listen to music going forth. Upon playing this overtime my brain slowly started to recognize the patterns and began to pick up on the subtle nuances that the majority of these songs contain. Small features of a particular track you wouldn’t even think about on a casual listen can be indispensible in building up to the grander narrative of a song, the slightest of mistakes can cause the melody as a whole to fall flat and this was something I had to come to grips with and adapt to when going for the full chains.  Even now when I listen to songs in my free time, these small details are easier to notice and I feel that I am presented with a whole new experience with some of my favourite Songs. It is like I am truly experiencing them for the first time once more and that is something I will forever attribute to this game. 

[hunterwire889]

Font Awesome Drupal 8

In addition, with over 2x widgets integrated, building content is never easier. BuildPro theme apply the latest web technologies: Drupal 8.7.x, Bootstrap 3, SASS, HTML5, CSS3, Font Awesome 4 Features. Compatible with Drupal 8.7.x; 5 Homepages Demo; Drag & Drop Block Builder –. Use Font Awesome how you want: via our CDN, Download Font Awesome to host yourself, or install the latest via npm. We've got component packages and CSS-processors too. With Way More on the Way! We're not done yet. Native app support, more category packs, desktop subsetter, duotone icons, and more are in the hopper.

I'm currently working on a Drupal build where I'd like users to be able to easily add icons to menu items through the UI. Enter FontAwesome, the scalable vector icon font that leverages the power of CSS. That in combo with the infamous Menu Attributes module allows users to add custom classes to Drupal menu items via the Menu edit interface on a per menu item basis. This is ideal for what we need to accomplish.

Install Menu Attributes

First, grab the Menu Attributes module and enable it either via Drush or download and enable it via the modules admin page. Once you enable Menu Attributes, visit /admin/structure/menu/settings and be sure that the 'Classes' attribute is enabled. Now, you'll see this as a text field for any given menu item when editing those.

Get Font Awesome

Download Drupal 8

Now, we need to add Font Awesome and for the sake of this tutorial, I'll use the CDN version which we can add to our theme using a preprocess function. As aways, unless you're building a custom module, add the preprocess function to your theme's template.php file or create one if you don't have one already. For my preprocess function, I can use hook_preprocess_html with drupal_add_css.

Be sure to replace MYTHEME with the actual machine_name of your theme and clear cache. If all went well, you'll now have Font awesome available to use. Note, you can also download Font Awesome and self-host it as an alternative to the CDN version.

Add the Icon Classes

The next step is to add some icon classes to your menu items via the Menu Attributes classes field. To see what icons are available to you, refer to the Font Awesome 'Cheat Sheet' on their site. I'll add a 'home' icon next to my home link so I simply edit the home link and add this to the classes field typically located at /admin/structure/menu/manage/main-menu:

Style away

Above, the first fa instantiates Font Awesome and fa-home selects your icon. This will need a bit of theming and I found a few caveats as well. Since the class is added to your menu's 'a' link, you'll want to define your font for the menu link itself and for the icon which gets added via a CSS 'before' class. So if your menu id is primary-nav, you can do this:

Font Awesome Drupal 8th

The finished menu with Font Awesome Icons

One issue I ran in to was that Firefox had trouble rendering the icons from the CDN and it's a documented issue apparently. To solve this, you may need to define Font Awesome in your theme's CSS via the @font-face attribute with an absolute path to the CDN -- that solved it for me. Beyond this, you can style and color as needed all the while using CSS. That's pretty much all you need to do so as you can see it makes it trivial for users to add their own icons to menus.

Font Awesome Menu Icon Drupal 8

Resources

Font Awesome Drupal 8 Free

Tags

[technicallyunabashedbouquet]

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Master NumPy Library for Data Analysis in Python in 10 Minutes

Learn and Become a Master of one of the most used Python tools for Data Analysis.

Introduction:-

NumPy is a python library used for working with arrays.It also has functions for working in domain of linear algebra, fourier transform, and matrices.It is an open source project and you can use it freely. NumPy stands for Numerical Python.

NumPy — Ndarray Object

The most important object defined in NumPy is an N-dimensional array type called ndarray. It describes the collection of items of the same type. Items in the collection can be accessed using a zero-based index.Every item in an ndarray takes the same size of block in the memory.

Each element in ndarray is an object of data-type object (called dtype).Any item extracted from ndarray object (by slicing) is represented by a Python object of one of array scalar types.

The following diagram shows a relationship between ndarray, data type object (dtype) and array scalar type −

It creates an ndarray from any object exposing array interface, or from any method that returns an array.

numpy.array(object, dtype = None, copy = True, order = None, subok = False, ndmin = 0)

The above constructor takes the following parameters −

Object :- Any object exposing the array interface method returns an array, or any (nested) sequence.

Dtype : — Desired data type of array, optional.

Copy :- Optional. By default (true), the object is copied.

Order :- C (row major) or F (column major) or A (any) (default).

Subok :- By default, returned array forced to be a base class array. If true, sub-classes passed through.

ndmin :- Specifies minimum dimensions of resultant array.

Operations on Numpy Array

In this blog, we’ll walk through using NumPy to analyze data on wine quality. The data contains information on various attributes of wines, such as pH and fixed acidity, along with a quality score between 0 and 10 for each wine. The quality score is the average of at least 3 human taste testers. As we learn how to work with NumPy, we’ll try to figure out more about the perceived quality of wine.

The data was downloaded from the winequality-red.csv, and is available here. file, which we’ll be using throughout this tutorial:

Lists Of Lists for CSV Data

Before using NumPy, we’ll first try to work with the data using Python and the csv package. We can read in the file using the csv.reader object, which will allow us to read in and split up all the content from the ssv file.

In the below code, we:

Import the csv library.

Open the winequality-red.csv file.

With the file open, create a new csv.reader object.

Pass in the keyword argument delimiter=";" to make sure that the records are split up on the semicolon character instead of the default comma character.

Call the list type to get all the rows from the file.

Assign the result to wines.

We can check the number of rows and columns in our data using the shape property of NumPy arrays:

Indexing NumPy Arrays

Let’s select the element at row 3 and column 4. In the below code, we pass in the index 2 as the row index, and the index 3 as the column index. This retrieves the value from the fourth column of the third row:

1-Dimensional NumPy Arrays

So far, we’ve worked with 2-dimensional arrays, such as wines. However, NumPy is a package for working with multidimensional arrays. One of the most common types of multidimensional arrays is the 1-dimensional array, or vector.

1.Just like a list of lists is analogous to a 2-dimensional array, a single list is analogous to a 1-dimensional array. If we slice wines and only retrieve the third row, we get a 1-dimensional array:

2. We can retrieve individual elements from third_wine using a single index. The below code will display the second item in third_wine:

3. Most NumPy functions that we’ve worked with, such as numpy.random.rand, can be used with multidimensional arrays. Here’s how we’d use numpy.random.rand to generate a random vector:

After successfully reading our dataset and learning about List, Indexing, & 1D array in NumPy we can start performing the operation on it.

The first element of each row is the fixed acidity, the second is the volatile ,acidity, and so on. We can find the average quality of the wines. The below code will:

Extract the last element from each row after the header row.

Convert each extracted element to a float.

Assign all the extracted elements to the list qualities.

Divide the sum of all the elements in qualities by the total number of elements in qualities to the get the mean.

NumPy Array Methods

In addition to the common mathematical operations, NumPy also has several methods that you can use for more complex calculations on arrays. An example of this is the numpy.ndarray.sum method. This finds the sum of all the elements in an array by default:

2. Sum of alcohol content in all sample red wines

NumPy Array Comparisons

We get a Boolean array that tells us which of the wines have a quality rating greater than 5. We can do something similar with the other operators. For instance, we can see if any wines have a quality rating equal to 10:

3. select wines having pH content > 5

Subsetting

We select only the rows where high_Quality contains a True value, and all of the columns. This subsetting makes it simple to filter arrays for certain criteria. For example, we can look for wines with a lot of alcohol and high quality. In order to specify multiple conditions, we have to place each condition in parentheses, and separate conditions with an ampersand (&):

4. Select only wines where sulphates >10 and alcohol >7

5. select wine having pH greater than mean pH

We have seen what NumPy is, and some of its most basic uses. In the following posts we will see more complex functionalities and dig deeper into the workings of this fantastic library!

To check it out follow me on tumblr, and stay tuned!

That is all, I hope you liked the post. Feel Free to follow me on tumblr

Also, you can take a look at my other posts on Data Science and Machine Learning here. Have a good read!

[ladyhistorypod]

Episode 5: Is a Woman’s Place Really in the Kitchen?

Sources:

Amelia Simmons

The Atlantic

Connecticut History

Michigan State University Libraries

Smithsonian Magazine

Further Viewing: Amelia Simmons’ Thanksgiving Dinner – YouTube

Buwei Yang Chao

“Chinese linguist, phonologist, composer and author: oral history transcript / and related material, 1974-1977”

Chowhound

Brown University

Brown University (YouTube)

Open Recipes Openly Arrived At: Mrs Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945) and the Translation of Chinese Food

Chow Chop Suey: Food and Chinese American Journey (book by Anne Mendleson)

New York Times

Mary Mallon

Annals of Gastroenterology

History Channel

National Geographic

Smithsonian Magazine

Discover Magazine

Attributions:

Drum Roll

Stove Clicks

Food Vectors

Click below for a full text transcript of the episode!

Alana: I hit my step count for the first time in quarantine today because I was walking all up and down northwest Washington DC looking for brisket five days before Rosh Hashanah. By the time this comes out we’ll be well past Rosh Hashanah, we’ll be like into Yom Kippur kind of area.

Lexi: Yeah. We will.

Alana: But oh my god. I'm so tired. I'm not used to doing that much walking… but… all over… But I found one! I found one.

Lexi: Where’d you find it?

Alana: Trader Joe’s.

Lexi: Of course!

Alana: Trader Joe's, man. I looked at the farmer’s market but they were sold out and that was really sad because obviously…

Lexi: People probably preordered to the farmer’s market.

Alana: That's the thing I only thought about it like Thursday, and the preorders needed to be in by Wednesday.

Lexi: Ooooh.

Alana: So… walking all around northwest Washington. I checked the farmer’s market stand to be like oh maybe they brought extra and I went early like I get there at 10:30 now and they were sold out.

Haley: It’s kind of like Thanksgiving for it, like where you have to preorder your turkey or ham. And I'm kind of terrified for that moment because I'm hosting Thanksgiving. But I need like an eight to ten pound turkey, nothing like– I’ve seen thirty pound turkeys when I was researching this. Like how big is a brisket?

Alana: It depends. The brisket that I got was three pounds. Three point one pounds.

Haley: And that's it for you or for like others?

Alana: It's for me and for my extended quarantine household. Shout out to Maureen and Paul, I don't know if they're listening to this episode but they said they were gonna listen to the first two, so… 

Lexi: But you can make a lot of brisket if you want to.

Alana: Oh yeah, I'm gonna make all of it. It reheats really well.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History; the good the bad and the ugly ladies you missed in history class. I'm in the virtual studio with my spice wife Lexi. Lexi, do you want to explain how we got spice married?

Lexi: Well for one we're both really spicy people, um, so that's got to be the first reason. When you put two spicy people together equals a spicy marriage. But no what happened was I was moving out of DC and I had a collection of spices because I love spices and I needed someone to take my spices so Alana took them. And then the other day Alana was cooking and talking about all the spices she uses and it happened to be a combination of the spices from both spice cabinets so it was a spice marriage.

Alana: We shared our spice assets.

Lexi: And hopefully someday we will live together, and our spices can stay together forever.

Alana: Someday.

Lexi: Or they'll expire. But spices last a long time. 

Alana: Spices last a while. Also here, “here” in air quotes is Haley. Haley, do you have a favorite dish to cook?

Haley: I love making anything with mashed potatoes. I really like find it just calming to peel potatoes and then chop them up and then watch them boil. I like those like specific steps I can go through.

Alana: I’m inviting you to help me make latkes because that's the worst part. This has been a very Alana is Jewish episode already but I'm inviting you to make latkes with me so that you can peel all the potatoes because I hate doing that.

Haley: I've never had a latke before so I don't know how much help I’ll be.

Alana: Didn’t you live in New York?

Haley: Latkes have eggs. I've never had a latke sans eggs, so.

Alana: I’ll find a way. For you I will find a way to make latkes sans eggs. And I'm Alana and my friends call me a Trader Ho because I grocery shop almost exclusively at Trader Joe's.

(Haley laughing)

Lexi: Which friends are that?

Alana: My internet friends. My sunshines.

Haley: I was like… we don't call you that. You have other friends?

Lexi: You have friends that aren’t us?

Lexi: Okay so the theme today is cooking and because of this theme I would like to dedicate this episode to my great grandmother Eleanor Delucia, who we called Nana most of us call Nana. But the reason I would like to dedicate it to her is because she spent a hundred years of life cooking and living through history and so I think it's very fitting that this episode would be dedicated to her. And because of that I want to ask you guys if there's any family recipes that are weird or unique to your family.

Alana: Yes I do have a very special recipe, actually I have a couple, from my Grandma Louise. I recently started– oh my god Alana’s going to be Jewish on main again– I started making challah every week from scratch and I'm using my grandmother's recipe that is so incredibly complicated. And like you– you have to boil water, but you can't boil water too much, like it has to be exactly 110 degrees when you use it. And then you have to rise the bread– like rise the dough at exactly 90 degrees, and it's so complicated and so I've started using that recipe and I'm crushing it. I’m crushing it. It was my first time making challah by myself and I used this recipe that was super complicated and I nailed it. I nailed it. And then the other one is, I started making a potato zucchini soup and– like when I was a teenager. And I made it for my grandparents at their house once and my grandmother was like “you know what would give this a really beautiful green color is if you left–” like you peel the zucchini but if you leave the peel in the bowl– not in the bowl, in the pot while all of the vegetables are cooking together, the soup will be more green. And it'll be like– the color will be more pronounced and– oh my god, she was so right. And so now that's like how I make it. So those are my fun family stories.

Lexi: That's so beautiful.

Haley: I don't think we have like a distinct recipe or sets of recipes. We will cook Cuban or Persian food. And I've noticed with my mom and myself since we're both like lazy, lazy beans, we’ll take the complicated recipe, like Alana was saying, with all the ingredients, all the different measurements, what you have it, and just make it into a Crockpot friendly, or like one pot friendly recipe, versus making it a three hour long process. Because so many times I’m like I really want Persian food and it wasn't until a few months ago where a Persian restaurant opened down the street from me. And every time I open like one of my marked Pinterest tabs it would be like eight to ten different ingredients that I could not get at my local supermarket. And then thirty plus steps, culminating into three to four hours of cooking, which I just do not have, especially writing a thesis at the moment.

Lexi: I think for my family it's a dessert heavy situation, like on both sides. My mom's family has these German rollout cookies that we make for Christmas, sometimes other holidays– we made little George Washingtons for my graduation party, which was cute, but they're just flat cookies. And then on my Italian family’s side, the thing that we do at weddings as we have a table where all the aunties bring cookies and then it's like a place of privilege or pride to be the best auntie with the best cookies for the wedding, which is really cute. So I think cookies are a big deal in my family.

Alana: Cookies are– are a big deal in my family too, and I find it– like, my grandmother died three years ago… just over three years ago– and I find like, making cookies so spiritual. That I'm like this is something that we used to do together. It's one of my favorite pictures of like little baby Alana and Grandma Louise and she's teaching me how to use a cookie cutter and it’s so cute.

Haley: Okay I have to amend mine because we've brought up desserts. Like I just said probably five minutes ago I'm real allergic to eggs so my Christmas like cookies all egg free, or like before we could do the– the substitutes were oreos like dipped in chocolate. But my birthday cake was a homemade Rice Krispies treat like cake. My mom would just make like a ginormous one and like decorate it. So all my– just because like what were you gonna do with a child that couldn’t eat her own birthday cake? That's just sad and depressing. So my mom basically was like we're gonna have a Rice Krispy treat or we're going to have ice cream cake. So that– I guess that is heavily unique for my family.

Lexi: So cookbooks emerged as a status symbol, and in 15th and 16th century Europe, cookbooks were filled with recipes from palaces and courts and they were favored by kings and queens. And the wealthy loyal followers acquired these cookbooks as a sign of their devotion, eating like royalty… it brought them closer to being royalty. Gradually, as access to print books became more common and literacy rates rose, cookbooks became a staple in households all around Europe. But one cookbook in particular changed the way a nation ate. And that’s the cookbook we're gonna talk about today. In the year 1796, Amelia Simmons wrote the United States of America's first ever cookbook. In doing so, she forever changed cookbooks, shaping a future in which cookbooks were used by people from all walks of life. Amelia’s book was called “American Cookery, or, The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables.”

Alana: Can you spell that?

Lexi: V-I-A-N-D-S. 

Alana: I hate French.

Lexi: It was published by Hudson and Goodwin in Hartford, Connecticut. While it was not the first cookbook printed in America, it was the first one written by an American. It was a unique cookbook. It was distinguished from its British counterparts for its attention to more practical methods of cooking and it provided recipes that can make large quantities of food for families on tight budgets. When I say large quantities, I mean the ingredients were prepared in huge, huge quantities. One of her cake recipes called for two pounds of butter. Amelia also believed in saving time, and one of her recipes called for the person making the recipe to milk a cow directly into the mixture. Amelia's cookbook resonated so successfully with America's home cooks that it was reprinted for thirty five years after its initial publication. Amelia's recipes may not be as commonplace in American households as they were during her lifetime, but they are a great resource for analyzing and understanding how food and language are related in history. Some of them you use terms became commonplace in American language such as calling pancakes slapjacks, referring to lard and butter as shortening, coining the Americanization of the Dutch word “Koekje”– I might have said that wrong– which would eventually become the word “cookie.” She actually spelled it like C-O-O-K-Y not I-E like we spell it today. Her legacy continues in her home state of Connecticut, where her recipe for “Election Cake”– a floury bread cake baked in large quantities– became a common after-voting snack for Connecticut's residents and remains relevant today. Plus, Amelia’s recipes let historical chefs recreate and taste recipes, experiencing the history of America through the flavor of food people the past preferred. And, so I guess in summary, Amelia kind of started the whole trend of American cookbook culture. She established the means by which American women make their food– and American people in general I guess not just women– but at the time she definitely was writing as a woman for other women because the recipes were so practical and focused on how a mother might cook for their kids or wife might cook for their husband or how you might cook for a family so definitely she was a woman writing for women but I really think it’s an interesting and fascinating story that she created the first cookbook, and it was a woman who did it, and that's really really cool.

Alana: I like how you said like cookbooks were status symbols and I'm thinking about cleaning out my grandmother's kitchen and there were just like cabinets full of cookbooks and I'm like oh, hello, yes, I am the aristocracy.

Haley: I actually have a question about the cookbooks, Lex, cuz I couldn’t find this in my research. But could you find like what constitutes as a long time for being an in-print cookbook.

Lexi: So, nothing I read said like thirty five– because because thirty five years was how long hers was printed for.

Haley: Right.

Lexi: Nothing said that that was the longest or that that was normal. It was notable but it wasn't a record. So…

Haley: Right.

Lexi: You know. I don't know exactly how long recipes last, but when you think about how trends change so much and how we don’t really eat things today that my grandma used to cook at dinner parties in the seventies. I'm sure cookbooks don't last that long and when we think about Amelia's methods and then we think about what people ate even in the mid-1800s it was totally different already, so even fifty sixty years later so. Yeah.

Haley: That’s the exact train of thought I was using because I've noticed when I was just researching different women to see who I wanted to dive into, a lot of the cookbooks if they weren’t out for those like thirty year chunks, it was revisions. Every few years here's a revised copy. And that's like a thing in our academic world as well where new trends happen, new events happen. And recipes and also just work needs to be updated. So I like that like the thirty years but also that she's just still relevant.

Lexi: Yeah. So we don't know that much about her. Like, all we know is that she was an orphan and that's literally it. We don't know about her personal life, we just know that she wrote this book. There's no other records of her in any way. Yeah, and there's actually a Youtuber I'd like to shout out named I believe it's Townsend's I think that's how you say it– it's like the word “town” and the word “end”– who does these recipes that Amelia put in the book. And he does other historical recipes too, and other historical videos but if you want to see an entire playlist of Amelia's Thanksgiving dinner recipes check out that channel.

Haley: Well that's a great segue into my gal because we're gonna keep going on the cookbook train and also kind of I want to say revolutionizing the American kitchen, in a sense, but we're going to do with Chinese food now. Not necessarily like the American food, which I got from Amelia, sensing it’s more of a not necessarily British take but American classics.

Lexi: Establishing American classics.

Haley: There we go. Yep, that's awesome. So I'm going to preface this, I calling–

Lexi: Something I forgot to say on that, she used like corn and stuff which was not available in Britain so… 

Haley: Oh, I love that. That's. So good for what I'm gonna be talking about. So she is Dr. Buwei Yang Chao. And I'm gonna do a little side note: I’m not going to be pronouncing these Chinese words, phrases, whatchahaveits, correctly because I do not speak Chinese. And yes, you heard it, Doctor. But don't worry we'll get into that. Born in 1889 in Nanjing, China Buwei was a Chinese-American physician and writer but most recognizable as a person who brought us, as Americans, potstickers, stir fry, and essentially the first cookbook of Chinese-American food. Before we begin, I just want to go over what potstickers are because I didn't know what potstickers were and I'll get into that more but potstickers are type of Chinese dumpling usually with a crescent shape, pan fried on one side, simmered in some sort of broth. And full disclosure part of the reason why I didn't know what potstickers were because I've only had them from Trader Joe's. I.E. that whole egg thing coming back in. So back to Dr. Buwei. As a female doctor in China, she did have a Japanese training as a surgeon and gynecologist and she actually pioneered the use of birth control for women in China which blew my mind. I was reading like a New York Times article and got into a whole wormhole of this doctor’s just life and bam, coming out with pioneering in birth control and medicine of that nature. And she definitely had a mix of Chinese medicine and then also like Western school medicine because a lot of the Western schools were in Asia so she got the mix of both. And she was credited with that sense of bringing Western medicine to China as one of like the first females to do it. And a lot of the time, her medical like knowledge was noted as quote “new style” and also as a side note I believe that in her entry exam essay it was about women's education, which I thought was really cool. Like how educating women was a good and powerful thing. And I only found that only one article so it might not be true, but I'm praying that it is true because I was just so baller to go into med school with your entry essay being about women's education and like the right that women have to be educated at such a professional level. So why did I bring this all up, because come on Haley we're here to talk about food. Well, while she was in Japan and studying at Tokyo Women's Medical College, she started cooking her own meals because she didn't enjoy the Japanese cuisine. It just didn't sit right with her. Totally different, she wanted the comfort of home and since Japan didn't have–

Alana: Raw fish? I’m with her. I’m with her. I don’t do the raw fish.

Haley: Exactly. Like if we went to Italy and for me, the eggs in all those pastas, I would be going out, buying my own pasta, making my own carbonara, sans eggs. Totally natural. But Japan, kind of like what Lexi was getting to, Japan didn’t have all the traditional ingredients, so she would modify her traditional Chinese recipes to fit in with what she could get from the Japanese markets. And when she returned to China in 1919, she opened the Sen Ren Hospital, and after a few more years, marriage, blossoming career, she was offered to teach at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thus we get into her time in the U.S. And her and her husband like there are a couple of years where they go back and forth teaching, practicing medicine, living their life. So when she was writing or just before she was writing her first cookbook which is “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” and that came out in 1945. She would try and test out her food. This was also often in the U. S. so with ingredients that her readers would have, and she added these elements to her everyday cooking. So this wasn't like “I'm going to write this cookbook for people to buy it and make money off of it but not use it myself.” She fully invested, saying “look, if I'm gonna produce something for people to read, I have to use it in my everyday cooking. I have to live by this.” which I really respect. So in a history perspective, 1945 was the tail end of World War II, and for writing cookbooks– writing cookbooks takes years to do. If you saw the movie “Julie and Julia” you kind of get a glimpse of that, where you first write about the outline, what you want to cook. You want to have appetizers, mains, and desserts. And then you get it to the publisher, they say “cool, do these work?” You test and test and test, just years and years and honestly I could be totally getting this timeline wrong. This is just my preliminary knowledge. So 1940s, we’re in World War II, it was also a difficult time for cooking and food in general in the United States because not just having the native Chinese cultural food that she was used to, and now she had to supplement in the U. S., they’re are also going through food shortages and kind of restrictions from food stamps and just what was available during World War II. So she really used some innovative and creative thinking when writing this masterpiece of hers. And a lot of it also came from, just the New York World's Fair happened in 1939, and I don't think this had a direct impact on her writing the cookbook but I think it had an impact on her selling a cookbook and becoming like this wide sensation because that World's Fair was about showcasing food from around the world and pushing having new cuisine in US culture. And then a few years later, we have this cookbook about Chinese food. And on overall note, Buwei’s cookbook was not the first Chinese cookbook in the U. S. in terms of being published in English, but it was more the first that was universally understood in the sense of getting the food, understanding the writing and measurements, it was very comprehensive and accessible to a wide audience. This OG cookbook in 1945 “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” also had expanded editions in 1949, 1956, and 1968. So what I was asking Lexi before, she kind of kept up with the words, terms, recipes, and just… I tried to find some of the cookbooks but all of them are out of print at this point. Regardless, it brought new terms and techniques to US kitchens and over two hundred different recipes which included terms, ingredients, techniques, tools, but also like etiquette. So how to use chopsticks, what are the polite ways you should be eating dumplings vs fried rice; which I thought was really cool, and I tried to look through like the two cookbooks I had in my apartment and I couldn't find anything where it was like “here's the etiquette you should use.” Granted, they were more US based cookbooks, it wasn't one targeted for a certain cuisine. And she also acknowledged the help from her husband and daughter, Rulan. She would cook and her daughter would write down in English, usually translated from Chinese to English. So if I may dazzle you with a quote from– I believe this is from The New York Times– and also just culmination of an audio source that I found. It was like an interview and I saw– there's just so many, so many things of her using like this quote and a mo– mashup of this quote: “I am ashamed to have written this book. First, because I am a doctor and ought to be practicing instead of cooking. Secondly, because I didn’t write this book. The way I didn’t was like this. I speak little English and write less. So I cooked my dishes in Chinese, my daughter Rulan put my Chinese into English.” And this quote has so many variations, but it's basically saying that she can't take full credit because she was still a doctor, she couldn't necessarily write in English the way that US publications wanted her to, and she needed a lot of help, which is so fair for any cookbook or any writing source. And I just thought that was amazing. Like I kept finding clips and even when people were kind of telling her story years later, we're saying like she was ashamed to like have written this cookbook and taken away from her medical studies. But also values how great of an impact this cookbook had on the U.S. Now you know how I said that she coined the term stir fry and potstickers. Well it's because “cha’ao” and “guotie”– again, we don't speak Chinese, please don't come after me– really didn't have English translations. Like the term Chinese food is really just like a US word. It's not something that's used in China. You can't– you won't go to China and just be like “I want the Chinese food. I'm going to Chinese food restaurant it's because the way Chinese food is broken up in China is regionally so they they don't group it up as one whole country as we do and how someone of this cookbook does it's very specific to where you are in China and it's not a representation of the country as a whole like unit but for this cookbook and us as Americans we just say Chinese food and that's again coming back to what is available in each region so for the US and for this cookbook this is what's available in the U. S. not what's in available in northern versus southern China and there are a ton of other words that were in this book that didn't even stick in our English macular so like that's what is really interesting trying to find a copy but alas I couldn't find one online because I feel like if we re read this we wouldn't understand as shafts not just like with the vernacular but just the way it was written and the way some of the food kind of was presented she also just to wrap everything up she wrote two more books afterwards of how to order in each Chinese and then another autobiography called an autobiography of Chinese women put into English by her husband your friend child so she still just fantastic amazing woman like this blew my mind especially being in San Francisco that's my story of Dr. Buwei.

Alana: So I am going to be talking about Mary Mallon, and there has been a lot of talk about her recently and we'll get to why she's been in the news. So she was born on September 23rd, which is my mom's birthday and also yesterday on the day this comes out, in 1869 in a poor area of Ireland called the Cookstown in County Tyrone. And I am like a little bit familiar with Irish geography, like I know the names of some counties in the Republic of Ireland. Like we've talked about County Mayo, we talked about County Cork, County Kildare, if you know it then you know it. And I was like I've never heard of County Tyrone and I know there are like twenty-eight counties in the Republic of Ireland but– so I was curious, I was like where is that. It's actually in Northern Ireland so it's technically in the U.K. So Mary Mallon immigrated to New York City as a teenager in 1883 or 1884, about then. And she starts working as a cook, around the turn of the twentieth century and she is famous for her peach ice cream. In 1906, she was hired as a chef for the family of Charles Warren, who was a banker in 1906 so they have cash cash. And they go on vacation in Oyster Bay and Mary comes with them to be their chef. Several members of the Warren family contract typhoid over those couple weeks. And typhoid is considered at the time a poor people's disease, because you contract it mostly from contaminated water. Imagine thinking that like, only rich people deserve clean water. Like call me a socialist, but I really think that everyone should have access to clean water. And Warren’s landlord is concerned about being able to rent the property the next summer because there was this outbreak. And so he has hired a sanitation engineer named George Soper, and he's been an expert in tracing the outbreaks, and he tests all the pipes, and he tests everything. There's nothing. So he focuses on Mary. Turns out, several other families that Mary had worked for have also had typhoid outbreaks. And this is where, listeners if you haven't guessed, Mary Mallon becomes… Lexi put in a drum roll here please…

(Drum roll)

Speaker 1: Typhoid Mary. I can see Haley like laughing in her Zoom but they’re on mute so that's fun. So George Soper goes after her. Asks for samples of everything and she chases him out of her kitchen with a fork. Like a– like a barbecue, two pronged fork. Not like a… like a dinner fork.

Lexi: I have a tiny fork are you scared of me?

Alana: Like a FORK. So he returns with cops to have her arrested. And Mary hides under a floor board, but some of her dress is caught. And so they find her, and they arrest her and they force her into quarantine for three years on North Brother Island, which is a quarantine facility– a little dot of an island in the East River near the Bronx. She is tested up and down for typhoid and they all come back positive for salmonella typhi, which is the bacteria that causes typhoid. But she has no symptoms. She's the picture of health. She is released in 1910 on the condition to never cook again. In 1915, there is a typhoid outbreak at Sloan Maternity Hospital in Manhattan. And the health department is called, and the hospital is just like how– like, we’re a hospital, everything is so sanitary, how did this happen? And the health department says who… who's doing your cooking? And the nurse– the nurses are just like “oh, this lovely Irish immigrant. Her name is Mary Brown.” She had changed her name to keep working as a cook. And that sounds kind of like irresponsible, but what else could she do? She had no other skills, she's not married, she originally immigrated with her aunt and uncle but they've died, and she's an Irish immigrant during a time of very high anti-Irish sentiments. She really didn't have another choice. But they catch her, and they forced her back into quarantine for the rest of her life. They’re… say that she could have had a gallbladder removal surgery and they would have let her go, but she didn't want it. And I was like why wouldn’t she want it? But also, the doctors imprisoned her, essentially. And she even referred to herself in a letter to her lawyer as “the kidnapped woman”. So I do kind of understand why she'd say no. And then she died in 1938 of a stroke. And only nine people attended her funeral, which– this is another like Alana’s Jewish kind of thing but I'm like “that's not even a Minyan how are you going to do anything??” Lexi is rolling her eyes at me. But in pop culture she is demonized, she's the butt of jokes and cartoons. But there are other asymptomatic carriers at this point, all over the country and even in New York. So I think she is demonized particularly because she's a woman, particularly because she is unmarried, and particularly because she's an Irish immigrant at a time of anti-Irish-ism. I don't know if that's a word. But she's been in the news recently. A lot of my sources are from like June. People talking about Typhoid Mary because… talking about asymptomatic carriers and being super spreaders. 

Lexi: I think that's so fascinating how people are tying her story into our current situation.

Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at leading history pond our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on lady history pot dot tumblr dot com if you like the show leave us a review or tell your friends and if you don't like the show keep yourself our logo is by Alexia Ibarra you can find her on Instagram and Twitter at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me garage band and Amelia Earhart; Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us, next time, on Lady History.

Haley: Next week on Lady History, we're talking about our suffragists. Women's right to vote and remember everyone, register to vote please and thank you.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Haley: I really don't understand eggs on a fundamental level.

[emilyorj]

Week 11 Lecture Research & Reflection

Emerging technology and design, generative design and machine learning.

This lecture I found particularly interesting. There was a large focus on emerging technology and its relationship with design. Andy and Karen mentioned generative design, parametric design, A.I. design, machine learning and robotics and design.

Most of the discussed works push boundaries. I like how art can be created from visualising data and transforming information into imagery. Andy and Karen raised interesting questions such as how much of your design is done by you? Or is it the tools which do it for you?

I picked a few areas I wanted to do deeper research on:

F.A.T Lab (Free Art and Technology LAb)

In the lecture, projects such as the Eyewriter and QR hobocodes was mentioned. These projects were both involved with Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) as Andy touched on. F.A.T. Lab is an organisation dedicated to enriching the public domain. It was founded in 2007 by Evan Roth and James Powderly, also associated with Graffiti Research Lab. Their network of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians are committed to supporting open values and the public domain. 

Their website was http://fffff.at/. I genuinely thought that I was on the wrong website or got redirected to some spam but that’s really their website!! Sadly, I found that they actually closed as of August 1, 2015. But their website is still online as an archive. 

I have huge respect for all those involved in the group, and very fond memories of the laughs we’ve had and things we’ve built (hopefully some of this will continue under different banners). The excitement of F.A.T. closing is in seeing what its former members will do next.

P.S. @NBC…. 8 years and really no complaints about the logo??!! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

-Post by Evan Roth, found on their website: http://fffff.at/

As mentioned in the lecture, they worked on some amazing projects such as the Eyewriter. F.A.T. Labs, along with OpenFrameworks, the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group teamed up with TEMPTONE. Tempt1 is a LA graffiti writer, publister and activist who was diagnosed with ALS in 2003. He is nearly completely paralysed except for his eyes. The Eyewriter is a low-cost, open source eye-tracking technology which allows Tempt1 to draw using just his eyes.

Another project was QR_STENCILER and QR_HOBO_CODES. This is what Golan Levin posted on http://fffff.at/ about it: 

golan

Yep, it’s a QR code stencil generator! The F.A.T. Lab is pleased to present QR_STENCILER, a free, fully-automated utility which converts QR codes into vector-based stencil patterns suitable for laser-cutting. Additionally, we present QR_HOBO_CODES, a series of one hundred QR stencil designs which, covertly marked in urban spaces, may be used to warn people about danger or clue them into good situations. The QR_STENCILER and the QR_HOBO_CODES join the Adjustable Pie Chart Stencil in our suite of homebrew "infoviz graffiti" tools for locative and situated information display.

I really love how F.A.T. is is dedicated to the public domain and releasing open-source software. Anybody is free to distribute, remix, and modify QR_STENCILER, so long as they share and provide attribution to FFFFF.AT. "he 100 QR_HOBO_CODES and their respective stencils are hereby dedicated to the public domain.”

Golan levin intrigued me as well and I did a bit of research on him. I watched this interesting TED talk he did: https://www.ted.com/talks/golan_levin_art_that_looks_back_at_you?language=en#t-6790. He is a hybrid of an artist and an engineer. Both my sister and my dad are in the engineering field and I’ve always considered us to be in completely different/opposite fields. However, thinking about it more, technology connects engineering and design. They can work together to create fascinating works just like Golan Levin. You can find more of his projects here: http://www.flong.com/projects/. I personally like ‘Eyecode’ and ‘Footfalls.’ 

Generative Adversarial Network (GANs) 

Ok so, GANs was something I knew nothing about but became veryyy interesting to me after researching it a bit more. 

Definition (more-so for my purposes than yours): Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are algorithmic architectures that use two neural networks, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”) in order to generate new, synthetic instances of data that can pass for real data. They are used widely in image generation, video generation and voice generation.

I read up on how the actual algorithm works but it was like a different language to me and I really didn’t quite understand the jargon. 

Different applications and potential uses of GANs:

Fashion, art and advertising

Science

Medicine

Video games 

Design 

Age face photographs to show how an individual's appearance might change with age

A GAN model called Speech2Face can reconstruct an image of a person's face after listening to their voice

In the lecture, Karen and Andy mentioned thispersondoesnotexist.com which was created by Uber engineer Phillip Wang. He used the software called StyleGAN, a GAN for producing an unlimited number of portraits of fake human faces. It’s important to be wary of the potential evil purposes of this technology. This type of image synthesis can lead to the production of fake, possibly incriminating, photographs and videos. People can also use realistic photos of nonexistent people to create fake social media profiles. Scary stuff. 

Sources:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/moviebarcodes-interview

https://pathmind.com/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan

http://www.eyewriter.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StyleGAN

https://transmediale.de/free-art-and-technology-lab-ft-lab

http://fffff.at/qr-stenciler-and-qr-hobo-codes/

https://pathmind.com/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StyleGAN

Images:

https://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/4804610224/the-lord-of-the-rings-trilogy-2001-2003-prints

http://www.eyewriter.org/

http://fffff.at/qr-stenciler-and-qr-hobo-codes/