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fineartsjournal · 3 months ago

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213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Interim - A Mad Dash

Beyond our Instagram group chat; a huge chunk of group organization takes place in our dedicated "Planning Slides" document.

Olivia had taken the reins with getting our progress and ideas jotted down; which has really helped keep us all on pace.

Alongside a timetable, these slides act as one big checklist - with sections for planning materials, room painting, and a moodboard.

We all invited friends and family to the exhibition, with an estimated 40 people checking it out at once - to which we've been informed could be on the unsafe side, as 2E Dark is not the most crowd friendly.

The room is also a little inconspicuous. Sandwiched between two studio spaces, we should aim to draw people in with wall text. There's also talks to remove the door in favor of a curtain.

On the first Tuesday of the study break, (almost) all of us met for a discussion. Written atop this note page is the 'pipeline' for getting our space primed and ready for presenting.

Two days later, we met up with Mike Bridgeman to lock in our equipment requests.

There were bundles of extension cords, a projector and three spotlights already in our space, so a lot of the borrowing would be on my end.

This was a little humbling. Turns out - I don't know much about mixing. There was an expectation that I would be practicing mixing in my own time - or in the very least learning more about it, and I watched Mike's smile quickly fade as he had to explain that there are different inputs for mono and stereo sound, and different audio jacks, too! If I wanted to play music from four different MP3 players, I'd need a very large, expensive mixer for the task! And amps are a thing that exist too! Jesus Christ.

It needed some more thought; and I have a lot to learn. From this, I started re-drafting my presentation. I was not letting go of my driving concept, but how could I adapt it?

I came up with an alternative, and emailed Mike.

Back at home, I started toying around with SM64 loops in Audacity, with the idea that I could load them onto my SP-202, and divvy the mono tracks up from there.

It's a unique challenge - create four 'songs' that can play over each other at different timing, all in the same key and timbral range.

I amassed seven loops in Audacity, and arranged them in a song format for your enjoyment.

While some of the more 'textural' sounds that came from this are worth looking at further, such things as drum beats and chord progressions quickly become a slippery slope.

The same problem forms as did back with my presentation back in Week 6 - where the processing is too clean, and the action of sampling is lost on the listener.

Instead, the loops have to be rougher. Simpler. More jarring. The SP-202 was going to be used regardless, but instead of Audacity being the middleman, the SP-202 is where the bulk of the composition takes place, and I'll load sounds right into it.

This was also the time that my group began drawing up our pamphlet. I let my creative desires get the better of me and largely left myself with designing the whole thing - however I did consult the group every step of the way, sending screenshots and drawn-ideas:

As a successor to our proposal document, I made sure to format the pages in Word, as this meant the formatting could actually transfer all the symbols over to a PDF. Microsoft Word also comes with some ancient, deep-down features that can still be used: like this palm tree border which really ups the tackiness factor.

The cat you see was picked by Ruby and I, when we were Googling 2004-2010-era cat images. This one is from 2010, and immediately struck us as representative of our shared concept.

To match the font-graphics theme, I gave the image similar treatment - using point-and-click-paths to give this clean look without any line wobbliness. I also turned the whole thing into a vector, allowing it to be infinitely scaled, like a font!

And I wonder why I'm sleep deprived.

I was battling a bit of music block at this point, but Em was a great motivator for getting my sampler back out and jumping back into it.

The workflow was straightforward. No pre-preparing samples in Audacity, just recording them straight in and going from there. Old school.

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Lethal Lava Land

Koji Kondo - Inside The Castle Walls

Koji Kondo - File Select

Recording back into audacity, I would then trim-up the tracks, loop preferred sections, and bring up the volume. No further polish from there, this was time for the SP-202 to shine.

Listening back on Time Isn't Real Strategy, copying the mono tracks into each ear and pacing them slightly didn't cut it, and the resulting sound was hollow. With the mono inputs of the mixer in mind, it was best to let that mono goodness shine.

Mike got back in touch, and the ball was rolling once more. This time, he'd acquired four MP3 players, along with a mixer, which for the meantime, was still sitting in the Block 6 recording studio.

This meetup was a godsend. My two-MP3-player-audio-split idea could work, sure, but with the power of a stereo-to-mono jack converter, using four MP3 players was possible again.

We tested on the mixer, and I got a crash course for how I'd be wiring up my project in practice. I needed four 3.5-to-3.5mm (stereo) cables, two of which he could provide. An equal amount of 3.5mm-to-6.5mm (mono) jack converters were also needed, of which I'd also need to buy another two.

Hooking one MP3 player up with this 3.5-6.5mm, stereo-to-mono array, we tested the mixer audio - which was great! The cables, jacks and all four MP3 players were provided in a Tupperware container, and I head off to Jaycar to get the rest of my equipment.

Back with the team, I locked my attention into getting the pamphlet done, first and foremost. Olivia and the others went into our newly assigned space for some mapping, as we needed a top-down view. These were their notes, along with some format planning for our pamphlet.

By this point, the first page of the pamphlet had shaped out nicely, with all subsequent pages following suit.

Following another pamphlet-making session on Word, I got back around to my sampler, and loaded up all eight pads with enough material for three whole tracks.

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Game Start

Koji Kondo - Peach's Message

Koji Kondo - Powerful Mario

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Dire, Dire Docks

In-Game Ambience, "Outside Peach's Castle"

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Cave Dungeon

Koji Kondo - Inside The Castle Walls

The text on the front of our pamphlet was tricky, as we all had a fair bit in common, but enough differences that making one big mission statement would not be easy. Olivia shared around a word document with the first draft I made, and we each had a hand in editing in/out parts that best represented our works, to which I made the final edit, which the others greenlit.

We went with the following:

"OH HI – we come from internet. It’s been around for about two decades longer than we have. In that time, it has expanded exponentially alongside the development of the devices we now glue our minds and fingertips to. We frolicked freely in these pixelated fields, while the world played catch up. Where did those good times go? It was all so fun, but how much of it was real? At best, it was a lens. At worst, a mirror. "We didn’t feel alone, but nobody else was in the room with us. It wasn’t an exclusive experience, our consciousness was part of a collective, our realities fractured and sewn back together. The emotions of self and stranger were intertwined and projected back out; and as we retrospect, simulated familiarities pull us back into the maelstrom of bygone emotions, a haze of ‘better days’ to feed into our past, present, and future. How do we get back there? "The digital age is a perpetual melancholy, the past unobtainable – but that is all the motivation we need to chase it endlessly. Each of our artworks follow memories and experiences in these real and virtual spaces; familiar motifs spoon-fed into our young minds, and the lives that are both fictional and our own. "From thereon, we are what we eat. "This is Personal Storage."

Stevee-Renee's portraits came in, and we each got to submitting our individual work profiles for adding into the pamphlet, to which I formatted like so:

I then got back into Audacity for the rest of the tracks...

…pushing through a couple late nights...

…until everything sounded just right!

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killemwithkawaii · 3 years ago

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Hiiii!, this is an idea I got thanks to a TikTok video that said "Imagine a parallel world where real people are characters from anime, videogames, etc. And your favorite character creates fanfics and fanarts about you." I can't help but imagine Fisher writing on Tumblr about the s/o lol.

Holy shit Holy Shit HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT-

Sally as a Selfshipper-

[CW: self depreciation, unreality]

>When he first sees S/O, he could swear a chorus of angels had begun to sing and had swept him right off his feet. He couldn't take his eye off of S/O for a few minutes, absolutely and undeniably smitten, before he realized what just happened and felt pretty embarrassed about it. He knows he can't set his standards for a romantic partner very high, but they should at least be real… right?

>Denial about his feelings/ 'I just think (media) is neat' ➡ Bargaining/ 'I'll just look up the wiki pages and articles about the show. Saving a few images won't hurt, right?' ➡ Depression/Anger/ 'God, I'm really in love with some pixels I am such a loser.' ➡ Gradual Acceptance/'Everyone thinks I'm a weirdo anyway this might as well happen' pipeline

>I'd bet he'd be a lurker in the selfship and f/o tags for a long time, liking a bunch of imagine posts and images of S/O but leaving his page pretty bare besides the necessary info to interact with certain blogs. He resisted posting his own content until his feelings for S/O grew too big to keep in, and he knew people in the selfshipping community would understand what he was going through.

>When posting those dreaded first few gushes didn't kill him instantly, he started posting a few times a week, and all of his content is so goddamn romantic! Lots of pining under screenshots he took of S/O, sappy poetry/songs, painstakingly selected playlists, some personally-tailored imagines and a few cute little doodles on lined paper that he did his best on and was feeling brave enough to post (because he was thinking of S/O encouraging him 💘)

>And then he would have a venty (occasionally horny) sideblog that is technically unlinked to his main but he's not good at hiding it and everyone in the community is like 'oh yeah thats his side blog we didnt think it was a secret??' Reblogs lots of angst/comfort fics, quotes about the universe and love that isn't meant to be, "At least my fictional bf/gf thinks I'm cute" posts, etc.

>Might eventually make one or two selfship friends that he DMs, but definitely has some silent mutuals that pop up in his notes.

>Has sent in a few anonymous requests to fic writers that he will not admit to. He doesn't use sign-offs, but you can always guess he requested them because he's the first to like them. His emoji use and the way he types gives him away, too.

>Says he's fine sharing S/O because he doesn't want to be 'that guy,' but he is 'that guy' and quietly blocks the selfship tags of people that also F/O them.

>Nobody IRL can know ever know about his selfshipping or his crush on S/O EVER (but his friends have a feeling. And eyes.)

>Has one (1) self-insert that is just him but without the prosthetic and mental illness and trauma (and maybe a little taller than his IRL self)

>Consumes S/Os media regularly, but prefers to do so alone so he can stare, swoon and longingly sigh in private.

>Chronic (occasionally maladaptive) f/o daydreamer

>"I'm not ''''In looooove~''''' with [media]/[S/O]!" (Said while shoving a mountain of merch into his closet)

#k.e.w.k. answers #k.e.w.k. writes #sally face imagines #sal fisher #sal fisher x reader #sal fisher x y/n #selfshipping #tw unreality #tw self deprecation #i already have a selfship AU for almost this exact scenario 🙈#edited

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austarus · 3 years ago

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Harrison Wells (Eobard Thawne) x Reader Ballistic Confrontations (3/3)

*A/N: The picture/edit/gif belongs to me!

**If you understand what I’m referencing to in the end, well the Kudos to you. You win 85 Stardollars.

***Trigger Warning: Scars from mentioned self-harm

****Please don’t forget to comment, like, and reblog. It means a lot to content creators of all kinds!

Word Count: 6397

Part 1 Part 2

Eobard said nothing. Instead, he disregarded your look as his gaze locked back onto Kara, as the Kryptonian woman threw him a hateful look. The futuristic genius did not care. His baby blue hues jumped back to where you stood before stepping away to the side tables. Now we proceed, the speedster mused to himself, picking up a scalpel and arranging his surgical tools. The stage needed to be set tonight. All the actors were in place, and he needed to complete his role. A delicate procedure, if you will. But he needed to be bought some time. Surely, Barry and the others would be back by now from Earth-X. He was, in essence, reluctant to cut up the Earth-38 Kryptonian for he held no malice towards her. She was just an unnecessary casualty in all this. And after all, if Barry Allen were to die it would be at his hands. Not on some tainted Earth at the firing range. You’re centuries late, Mr. Allen. As always.

You glared at your genius scientist for not cluing you in on whatever it is he had planned now. What was his plan? Play along until ‘Uh oh, it’s too late to turn back’ and ‘Oh, look. We’re doomed’? A grunt caught your attention, Kara was trying to break out of her restraints again. “Kara,” you whispered, now standing beside her. “Save your energy, please.” She eyed the restraints on you before taking a slow breath in. Kara wanted to throw her guts up, but she pushed back the bile caught in her throat.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“Honey, you are looking anything other than fine.”

Kara pursed her lips, feeling fatigue wash over her once more. “Where… where are the others… that were here- at the labs? Are they…?” There it was, always concerned for others when she should be concerned about herself.

“No, no they’re fine. They’re in the pipeline. Iris and Felicity-” You stopped yourself, noticing Eobard’s head snap towards you. A pang of guilt echoed in your body. “They’re being held there too,” you lied, giving her hand two small squeezes for her to indicate the lie. If he held things back from you to entertain the Earth-Xer’s with legitimate reactions, then so would you. Supergirl nodded her head subtly in understanding. You were too focused with Kara; you didn’t notice Eobard move. “You’re going to be fine; the others should be back. They wouldn’t go out just like that.” Iris, Felicity, where’s that help? Just where are you guys? You couldn’t leave if you wanted to. Not with the others lurking around. Not when there was a chance you could tip them off about Iris and Felicity, then there was Eobard. Overgirl would instantly go after him for betrayal.

“I… I really hope not. Alex-” Kara trailed off; her eyes drooping shut as her shoulders sagged. Her hand went limp in your cuffed ones.

“Kara?” You looked up to see a tube in Eobard’s hand with a syringe in it. Empty as its contents have already worked its way into Kara’s system. “What are you doing?!”

“I’ve given her a mild anesthetic,” you pursed your lips as his statement. Eobard sighed, “Not to worry, that should have her out for 30 minutes. Strong enough for a Kryptonian, but not strong enough for too long even with the red sunlight on her.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I needed to talk to you without anyone listening.” You followed how Eobard’s eyes glanced at the door. Outside stood two more Nazi guards.

“You could have just pulled me to the other room,” you whisper-yelled at him.

“No, I couldn’t have.” He crossed his arms at you, replying in his own gravely hushed tones. “I needed to keep up the image of the bad guy in front of Kara.”

“Why? Why, when she could understand that you’re not really with them? Why let her also think of you as one of those heinous monsters?”

“Because her opinion of me doesn’t matter. Not hers, not the Earth-Xers, not anyone else.” Eobard punctuated his words before taking your hands in his, placing a gentle kiss on the back of one. The intensity in his eyes never broke as he spoke once more, “Only your opinion of me matters. You matter.”

You pursed your lips, your eyes unable to leave his heated gaze. Oh, if only we weren’t in this mess. If only we had more time… Kara crossed your mind once more, the ominous thrumming noise that came from the machine that generated the red sunlight. A frown found its way onto your face. “Wait, you said 30 minutes? Shouldn’t she need time to recover from the anesthesia to be given another one?”

Eobard sighed, letting go of your hands. He crossed his arms. You weren’t going to like his answer. “No, not in this case.” Dread welled up in the pit of your stomach.

“What…”

“The General herself requested, more like ordered, me to have our Kara awake during the… transplant.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” You responded slowly. Your eye slightly twitched as anger started to consume your thoughts. You wanted nothing more than to rip your friend’s doppelganger apart.

Eobard very well sensed your feelings, he always hated putting a frown on your face or seeing you upset to this extent. “Look, I don’t want to do it either,” the speedster retorted hastily as he unfurled his arms, his hands gently grabbed your shoulders, “but I can’t defy their word especially with you around.”

“Why? Am I suddenly a liability?”

“Never, but they’ll figure something is up with you here with me. Conspiring against them. You already saw how easily Oliver-X caved to his Kara regarding who you are to me.”

Technically, that’s my own damn fault, but a calculated risk to get to Eobard. I can live with the repercussions. “But that’s technically what we’re doing on the downlow, Eo.” You echoed one of the lessons he taught you years ago. “One weakness is better than none, it can be essential to creating the downfall of another.” He had mainly told you that regarding Eilling, who hadn’t ceased to stick his nose into Eobard’s lab experiments and projects. The general had eyed you as a means to get to him, but in reality you were a strength to Eobard. Not a weakness. And the speedster very well knows you can handle your own; after all, the both of you trained constantly. Pushing each other’s limits. Though where you hesitated to kill, he compensated on that, especially in the right moment. “We can have the Dark Archer on the ropes. If anything, he’s made it evident that his wife is a liability to his rational thinking.”

A proud grin ran along his handsome face. “Exactly, my little bird. But they will hurt you, even if you can hold out against them you can’t take them both on.” Even I cannot, not with where I’m at with my speed. Not with the slight dampener they have on my suit. The potential self-destruction if removed from the emblem by my own hands, is a heavy weight on my chest. If I can get rid of them, I can defuse the detonator.

“I’m not worried about me; I’m worried about you! I can’t- I can’t be the one to lose you again.” Eobard shifted his gaze away from you. “Look it’s not going to come to that.” He knew what you were suggesting. “Ok? Worst comes to worst I cause a distraction.”

“No, over my rotting corpse.”

That sounds eerily familiar.

“We don’t have a choice, if it buys us time then I’ll be damned not to try!”

“That’s why we adapt to the situation and find alternate routes to keep off their radar. I know what I’m doing.”

“Precisely. Adapting. So let me do what I can if it comes down to it.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!” You bit back a retort at the way he raised his voice. “Just trust me.” He wasn’t asking you to.

“Kinda hard with your track record,” You deadpanned, and Eobard just rubbed his face.

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“Is that a question you seriously want me to answer?” A small cheeky smile made its way to your face. You couldn’t help but tease him right now, of all times.

Eobard huffed out a chuckle, pulling out some white surgical clothes from a drawer. Have those always been there? “Just follow my lead, ok? Whatever happens stay on their side, whatever happens to me stay with Barry and the others.” Eobard gloved his hands while the guards re-entered the medical room along with Oliver-X and Kara-X. Speak of the devil. You pursed your lips and held a stoic expression even as Kara-X sauntered to her respective gurney, smirking widely before a violent coughing fit erupts from her. You didn’t miss how Oliver-X moved towards her, yet you averted your eyes to the protruding machines the other soldiers were bringing in for the ‘necessary’ operation. Two guards held you by the arms where you stood. You swallowed thickly as everything was being sterilized and prepped.

***

Harry caught the ball once more after it ricocheted back to him. He’d been letting his frustration out on it towards the cell wall. Something didn’t feel right. He cursed himself, knowing he should have been carrying some weapon or breaching device to have gotten away from the Dark Archer. Or any intruder for the matter of this invasion. Yes, he pushed the emergency labs alarm, but he still got whacked and dragged to the pipeline. He could have done more damage to these damned Nazi’s, but he was helpless. I should have carried my gun or my pulse rifle, what was I thinking? His hand gripped tightly at the ball as regret never left his side. I should have seen this as a possible attack. It’s a simple strategy. Divide and conquer. Yet they were all too fooled, too hasty to attack to even logically see this move by the Earth-Xers.

“Wait, Thawne’s here?” Cisco’s outburst broke the Earth-2 genius out of his thoughts. Harry cracked his neck and directed his attention back to Cisco’s squabbling from the cell near him. The Wells doppelganger was getting pretty tired about hearing of Thawne. A feeling of dread picked at his insides, his thoughts going to you and what Barry had discussed vehemently earlier.

“Yeah,” Caitlin responded. “I haven’t seen or heard from her. We only briefly got a visit from Iris and Felicity not too long ago. But they didn’t know where she was either.”

“Do you think maybe she… you know?” Cisco made an implication. “I mean, does she know?”

“I don’t know,” Caitlin trailed off. “But Iris had said that she left them in the Time Vault to buy them time. Whatever that could mean.”

“Well, on the one hand, they either got to her and are holding her hostage somewhere or, on the other, she rendezvoused with Thawne and now they're going all Mengele on Kara.”

Harry rubbed his face irritably at Cisco’s words, by now you would have known. There’s a high possibility. Whether it’s from seeing Thawne face-to-face or by overhearing someone. By now, Harry’s sure, you would have made a choice. Where did you go, though?

The lights flickered in the pipeline before shutting off as Caitlin finished. A dull blue tint lit up in each individual cell as the pipeline was divulged into a dim darkness. The emergency lights were the only things on. Every person was on high alert at this point.

“Ohohoho, my girl Felicity definitely pulled that one!” Cisco chirped, making a loud clap.

Dinah tried her canary call again, but to no avail. The cell would not budge. Harry narrowed his eyes; he knew she’d try again. But Cisco had crafted these cells with Thawne cautiously for metas. Practically indestructible unless you’re a Time Wraith.

“I wouldn’t try it again if I were you.” Harry finally spoke. Dinah paused, the silence daring to be her question. “These cells are reinforced to withstand any form of meta-attacks generated within. A backup generator still supplies the power dampeners with energy to preserve the cell.” Harry looked out his cell and towards the darkness. “All we can do is wait.”

***

You took a breath, smoke and blood and electricity filled the air. Your eyes didn’t miss the rush of electricity in the distance. Red and gold, the Speedforce of the only two speedsters here. Swallowing thickly, your attention was diverted to the Waverider being chased by another. Well damn, I think someone’s having a bit too much fun. Raising an eyebrow, you watched both airborne vehicles zig-zag through the air. You hooked up your earpiece and headed for the nearest skirmish to help out. A grin plastered itself on your face when you heard Cisco on the comms arguing with Harry. I guess they’re the ones taking the Waverider for a joy ride.

You pressed the button on your communication device, “Any chance I can hop on?” You sucker punched a Nazi. “Oh, I’ve been wanting to do that all day.” Cisco laughed, weaving through the air as if he’s directing a Strike Fighter.

He’s totally Luke Skywalkering his way through this.

“Girl, where you been?”

“Let’s just say,” you huffed, generating electricity in your palm and slamming it into the chest of another soldier. “I caught some unwanted attention, and they were reluctant to release me.” In actuality, Eobard had sped you away from the Labs once Ray made a dramatic entrance to save Kara. He’d sped you to where the battle would be, at least to where the Earth-X forces would arrive from. Telling you to run and appear at an opportune moment. Meaning, go hide while the battle thickens so your disappearance doesn't bring up too many questions from your friends. “Is Iris with you?”

“Yeah, she’s in the back with Felicity, we’re still trying to maneuver in the best position possible to take down their shields.”

You breathed a sigh of relief, thinking back to her stunt with Felicity to sabotage the surgery. “So, how about that help?”

“Hmm,” Harry spoke up, pushing his glasses up. “Unless you have the capability of overloading and shutting down the entire Earth-X Waverider system without passing out, be our guest.”

“… I mean I could try.”

“No.”

You pouted, punching another soldier, this time in the nose. Someone’s particularly grumpy right now. “It’s honestly not that hard, I would just be out for a couple of days and probably on life support.” The line was quiet meaning that Harry chose to ignore your comment. Rude.

You took in a breath and reduced your being to an electrical form, traveling up some buildings to gauge the situation. Kara and Kara-X were facing off at the moment. Eobard was naturally keeping Barry busy while Oliver and Oliver-X were in an intense hand-to-hand-to-bow combat. Yeah, their fight wasn’t as impressive as the other two. You took in a breath heading back down to the fight, this time getting closer to Mick and Leo Snart, who you found to be the Earth-X resistance fighter and doppelganger to your dead ex-boyfriend.

What goes around comes around.

***

“Where were you?”

Turning back from where you sat, you sent a questioning look to Barry and pointed to yourself when no one had responded. He had specifically prompted you with the question. The look in his hazel-green eyes were distant as he leaned against the front of the Cortex desks. You recognized that look from a few years ago. The silence in the Cortex was sliced amongst the team. DeVoe was still out there, scheming. Some stopped what they were doing to gauge what would happen, others (mainly Harry) kept working away but inclined an ear in case either of you were to do something rash.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, (Y/N). You’re not that dumb.”

“Excuse me.” You narrowed your eyes at the scarlet speedster.

“Barry,” Iris whispered to him, but he shook her off as he folded his arms.

“Where were you after you left Iris and Felicity?”

Ah, of course he wouldn’t miss that. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse.

“I went to go buy them some time.”

“Buy them some time or buy yourself some time? To see Eobard.”

Your heart hammered tightly in your chest, but you made no move to indicate what you had done. In a sense, you did both. You protected Iris and Felicity while keeping Eobard company.

“Why would I want to see someone who’s allied themselves to a Nazi regime on a different Earth, Barr?”

“Why wouldn’t you do anything to see the one you once loved?”

“Are you talking about me,” you tilted your head to the side, taunting him now, “or yourself?” You referenced the events that happened last year. Barry was more than aware of what you were indicating. Flashpoint. Savitar. Iris’ predicted death, HR’s sacrifice, his time remnant’s downfall. But you’ve been wanting to add kerosene to the flames. “Are you referring to your mom,” you turned your head to Iris, “or to Iris?” If looks could kill, you would have been reduced to ashes under Barry’s gaze. Cisco put down his tools and Caitlin glanced at her friends from where she sat beside Iris. Harry capped his marker but turned his eyes towards you. “Like I said, I caught some unwanted attention, and they were reluctant to release me. How is that any different from the others getting stuck in the pipeline?”

“You left Iris to defend herself.”

“Oh my god! Barry!” You rolled your eyes at his statement, deflecting your own questions. “Iris this, Iris that. Iris is a big girl with nearly perfect marksmanship as Harry. She’s more than capable of taking care of herself. I know that. She knows that. The same goes for Felicity as well. But do you know that?” Divide them, fester the idea of unreliability between those two. After all, it’s because of Barry’s decisions for Iris that everyone gets screwed over. It’s one of the reasons for the resentment and bitterness that grows within you. Only they can be happy, no one else can.

“You left Iris and Felicity while this place was crawling with Earth-Xers just to see Thawne!”

“Fucking prove it, you dickbag,” you screamed back at him, “if you’re so certain. Prove it, because contrary to your belief, I was fighting beside you and everyone else that day in the city once I managed to escape. Ask Cisco and Harry. Ask Sara. Hell, even ask Mick and Leo.”

Barry shook his head with a cruel smile, “Do you wanna know how I know?” The speedster took out his phone and started it up, showing the screen of your location. “Careful what you wish for.” Dread gripped your heart as Barry chuckled to himself. “That’s right. I chipped you, that night I pushed you against the doorframe before leaving for the warehouse fight. I chipped you. I already had Thawne chipped earlier that night. On his suit, when I landed a few hits on him. He doesn’t know or… not until recently.” Barry did a search for any pings, but there were none except for yours. “You asked me for proof, here it is.” He slid his fingers on the screen showing a timestamp and your location pinged with Eobard’s at the labs.

“This means nothing.”

“It means everything!” Barry stepped closer to you, anger in his wake. “You left us for him.”

“Yet I still fought with you guys because it was the right thing to do regardless of how I feel for him. You don’t understand nor will you want to understand. You’d rather label us as 100% on the wrong side without acknowledging that we can dwell in a gray area. The world isn’t just black and white, Barry. Or have you forgotten about your own morally gray decisions?”

Sparks crackled in the air, whether it was from you or Barry, no one could tell. Harry took a subtle step towards you from where he stood at the glass board a few feet beside you. He was the only one that can calm you down from this, maybe Iris too, but most definitely he himself. But Harry wasn’t quick enough because the Cortex monitors went haywire while the room darkened. You and Barry were nowhere in the room.

“Barry!” Iris screamed a second after he had sped you away.

***

Eobard raked a hand through his dark locks, analyzing the future article again. He fiddled with his rightful Reverse Flash emblem in his hands, his fingers tracing over the single lightning bolt. It took the genius a full day to extract the SS emblem from his suit, but with your help he was able to detonate it a safe distance away in some open fields. While the people of Central City slept and you had assured Eobard that the Labs were vacant, the speedster had rushed into his old office and compiled all the documents he needed to keep out of Barry’s hands. He’s honestly surprised Team Flash hadn’t rifled thus far into the records he kept. The only things missing were speed theories and the equation escalation to the Speed Formula. Although, he had solved that issue for Barry two years ago when he had traveled back in time for an answer on getting faster.

Still such a naïve child, not at all like the Flash from my future. Arranging some papers together on his new office desk, without meaning to Eobard had knocked over a picture frame. The breaking of glass caught his attention, craning his neck to see the fallen frame. The frame held a picture of you and him from before the Particle Accelerator exploded around Christmas. Before you had known his secret. But now the frame was adorned with a fierce crack through you. Eobard’s mouth went dry, knowing that superstitions were just superstitions, but he couldn’t exactly place the rush of fear welling in his body.

“Gideon, pull up (Y/N)’s location.” Eobard pulled his glasses off smoothly as the AI did as told. She was at the labs. “Access the live feed cameras.” Gideon pulled up holo-images 8x8 of what seemed to be a further escalating scene between you and Barry through STAR Labs. Gritting his teeth, Eobard summoned his suit and launched himself forward into it. The Negative Speedforce fueled by his anger and hate pumped dangerously in his veins.

Barry Allen will regret the day he dared to lay a hand on you.

***

“You’re a traitor!”

“Speak for yourself.” You grunted against the wall, your electric blade dissipating in your hand. It was getting harder to breathe, to keep up with his movements. With speedsters, you preferred long-range combat, but you had to make due at times. “You’re the one who betrayed everyone first for your own selfish desires. Flashpoint, the cause of so much pain and misery. In the end, there was so much collateral damage, and you were the cause of so many lives lost.”

“Flashpoint should have wiped you away. You should have been thankful. We helped you,” Barry fumed, pressing his forearm harder against your throat. “We stood by you.”

“They stood by me.” You tried channeling your electricity, even to siphon off a lick of his in order to produce a dagger, but to no avail. Only sparks flickered from the tips of your fingers, “You couldn’t stand the sight of me when you brought me in.” You had no grievances towards anyone else other than Barry. Not Iris, not Caitlin, not Joe, not Cisco. Certainly not Ralph simply because he’s new. And not towards Harry and Jesse. Iris and Caitlin were the two people who kept you the most grounded to the world for they understood the loss of a loved one and the process of moving on.

“You’re damn right I couldn’t. I was wrong to have let you stay around after Iris and Caitlin rehabilitated you.”

“That wasn’t your decision to make, now, was it?”

“You’re a monster just like Thawne. You’re not a hero.”

You simply spit blood in Barry’s face. “I’m neither thief nor hero.” You were kind of enjoying pushing his buttons, releasing all those pent-up emotions and frustration over the years. Wiping his face clean with his sleeve, the speedster sped you out of the room, throwing punches and kicks at you. He had run you through the entirety of STAR Labs. You siphoned off passing energy from computers and lightbulbs to throw at him Palpatine-style when there was distance between you two, but there was only so much you could do in your current condition. You were getting tired; you couldn’t keep up. Every burst of electricity that burned him had drained you. Blood continued to trickle from the side of your face and sweat glistened on your skin. You healed fast, but he healed much faster.

“Barry, stop! You’re going to kill her.” Iris shouted with a gun in her hand, the others piling into the room. Cisco threw a wave blast at Barry and Frost aimed a couple of icicles his way, but the speedster had dodged them. The scarlet speedster tossed you to the ground like a bag of peanuts before turning to the others. You skidded to the side, breathing in deeply then coughed up some blood into your fist. Blood continued to trickle from the side of your face and sweat glistened on your skin. You could feel your cheek swell as well as an ache form in your chest, maybe a few cracked ribs. Could potentially puncture your lungs if this didn’t end soon.

“And why shouldn’t I? For all we know, she could be spying on us for Thawne.”

“Barry killing her won’t solve anything,” Harry shot at him with his pulse rifle to create some distance between you two before training it on you. “It’ll just make things worse.” You met his eyes, and you could see the disappointment in them. A tinge of guilt hit you, but you pushed past it as you stood on unsteady feet. Your body felt like it was made of lead, but you continued on. If this is how things are to be, then so be it.. You leaned against the wall, cradling your damaged ribcage, as Harry continued. “Regardless of her actions, she did keep Iris and Felicity safe in her own way, she still stood by us.” You were finding it extremely hard to breathe, to stay conscious. Your breathing slowed, the noise in the room between Team Flash was reduced to murmuring to your ears. Did I burst an eardrum too?

“Are you kidding me, Wells? How can you say that when-”

You blinked before collapsing onto the ground, a streak of red had filled your vision. Eobard pinned Barry to the wall, his hand squeezing at his throat while red hot anger filled his vision. “Good to see you again so soon, Flash,” the yellow speedster drawled with a rough grin in his distorted voice. “It seems like you overstepped your boundaries.” Eobard kicked Barry in the ribs and landed a few speed punches, the scarlet speedster already exhausted from his fight with you. “Isn’t this position nostalgic?” Barry was clawing at Eobard’s firm grip, suspending the young hero in the air against the wall as he had done years ago.

“I- had a feeling... you’d show up, Thawne,”

Licking your bloodied lips, you groaned as you leaned up with hoarseness in your voice, “Eo, don’t.” The man in yellow stopped, slowly turning his quaking gaze towards you. You held his gaze for as long as you could get the message through to him. “Enough.” Eobard retracted a fist that was to make contact on Barry’s face, but not before squeezing the scarlet speedsters throat tightly and throwing him towards the upper part of the speed lab. Eobard took off his cowl and generated his speed to be by your side, eyeing every cut and bruise on your broken skin. Your eyes drooped shut when he brushed the back of his gloved hand against your unwounded cheek. His eyes softened, but his insides clenched. Iris and Caitlin had run to where Barry laid while Harry and Cisco monitored Eobard with caution as he gently scooped you in his strong arms.

Standing up with your limp form, the speedster disregarded Cisco, yet glared coldly at his supposed doppelganger. The future genius then turned to them and spoke, “My love for her is what stopped me this time. Next time,” his eyes landed on Barry, “you won’t be so lucky. Lay a hand on her again and I won’t hesitate to end your miserable life, Flash.” His eyes flashed red as they met Barry’s for the last time before taking his leave in a wake of red electricity.

***

Eobard stopped his vibrational intimidation once he made it to your temporary home, Gideon had already prepared the necessary diagnostic tests that would need to be conducted to assess your health. Laying you on the gurney gently, he kissed your forehead before proceeding. The speedster had cleaned you up, replacing your burnt clothes and scrubbing the dried remnants of blood on your skin. His heart shattered. His blood turned to ice. Eobard’s baby blues scanned every part of your marred skin. Lines that tallied up right after another, scars that were too stubborn to heal correctly as if trying to serve as a reminder. Eobard’s mouth had dried as his thumb made featherlight touches before injecting the needle into the correct vein. The speedster opened his mouth and closed it, but he could not register any other emotion other than anger and guilt. His thoughts funneled fluidly, emphasizing that one certain cause that led to this escalation. His death had been the cost of your mental and physical state.

Never again. The speedster peppered kisses along your arms as all the implied images ran through his mind. A tear slipped out. It fell from his face onto the scarred tissue. My love. He needed to get back to work. With classical music dancing in the background, Eobard conducted a blood transfusion in order to replace the blood you had lost as well as administering IV fluids. He had to steal the materials from a hospital nearby in Keystone. They won’t be missing it.

“According to my current readings, copious amounts of stress have been exuded onto her heart allowing her to retain a constant distressed state.” Gideon rattled on as Eobard sat next to you with a sleeve rolled up. He glanced over at you as the AI continued. “The X-ray scans have also been completed. She’s suffering trauma in her ribcage, a few cracked ribs, however none are broken. CT results also conclude a mild concussion.”

She’s lucky her lungs hadn’t been punctured. His hate for Barry Allen grew with every second that you laid unconscious.

“How long until a full recovery?”

“Physically it could take up to 3-6 weeks regarding her ribs. The mild concussion will take approximately almost a week and a half. Her heart might take longer. Therefore, she must avoid extraneous activity.”

“Such as using her powers and so on.”

“Yes. Shall I assist you with anything else today, Professor Thawne?”

Eobard ran his fingers over his lips before taking his glasses off and throwing them onto the side of a nearby table. “Keep tabs on Barry Allen’s movements, I want to be alerted if he comes near Keystone or has any intention of it.” The AI nodded before shuttering away into the plinth. Yes, the speedster had been smart to chip him, something Eobard had easily gotten rid of. But to chip you as well, Thawne cursed himself for not seeing it coming. Too preoccupied with the timeline and it’s malleability. “Hopefully DeVoe will keep him away long enough.”

***

Your eyelids felt like they had been cemented shut, the stinging smell of antiseptic slapped you right in the face. Am I dead or in a hospital? A groan left your lips, your throat dry as a desert and craving any drips of water. I hope I’m not in a hospital, I hate those places. The nice thing was that a light wasn’t blinding you, at the very least not piercing through the darkness supplied by your shut eyelids. It was oddly soothing. Your mind finally processed the dull ache residing in your bones, the softness beneath you and the slight chill in the air. Maybe I am dead. Taking one slow breath in, your blood vessels throbbed louder with each fluid pumped through and the humming of machines finally registered to your ears. You didn’t want to open your eyes; you were content with just laying here.

“…” You frowned, the sound of mumbling coming to you. Who was that? “Gi… ru-… I-.” Death, perhaps? You twitched your fingers, a numb sensation set in both your arms. If I’m dead, how can I still feel? It took a moment for your brain to catch you up on how you’d been reduced to such a state. Barry… killed me? No, that’s- Eo was… You shakily formed a fist only to feel something cool against your skin. Felt like another hand. Not bony. Maybe Death gave the appearance of a human for us to pass.

“Mm,” you tried clearing your throat, but it hurt each time, inducing a coughing fit. Blinking wearily, you looked around, your vision blurry until it settled on the being the hand had belonged to. “Mm, I…”

“Shh,” the deep voice cooed. You could hear much more clearly now but couldn’t make out the image of the being. “I have some water for you,” you felt a straw tap your lips. “Drink up.”

Why is Death being so kind to me? I thought Death was swift. You drank a sip at a time before pulling back and shutting your eyes once more. The somatosensory neurons on your arms brushed against some coarse material. A blanket? That same cool touch caressed your cheek. You blinked your eyes open a few times, dizziness ensnaring your mind, but your eyes met icy blue ones. “Eo?”

“I’m here,” he whispered in a gentle tone, standing up from where he sat next to you.

“I’m not dead.”

“No, you’re very much alive”

“Barry, he…”

“I’ve dealt with him. He won’t ever hurt you again.” You watched as he kissed your bandaged hands, each finger receiving a kiss. Cracking your neck, your realized he had changed you into fresh clothes. The scent of faint lavender hung onto the fabric.

“How long was I out?”

“Two weeks.”

It hurt your head when your eyes bugged out. You patted your temples lightly. “Two weeks? What- I-I need to get back. They were going to confront DeVoe. Harry and-”

“No,” Eobard pressed his palm against your shoulder when you tried to sit up abruptly, “You need to rest. Screw Team Flash. For once, just let them be so you can recover.” The speedster did not ask for what had happened to you, knowing the implications in his mind were too strong to be false. Rather, he’d make sure it would not occur a second time

“It’s not that simple, Eo.”

“It really is,” the yellow speedster sighed to himself, rubbing his face. You gestured to the water, and he handed the cup to you. “You’re in no condition to go back there, not after what happened. Your powers and your fight did a number on you. I-…. Your heart stopped a couple of times.” You almost choked on your sip. “I had to jumpstart your heart and keep it going.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For worrying you.” For being a liability that Barry can use.

“Don’t. This,” he gestured with his hands between you and him, “is not something to apologize for. Ever. If anything, it was smart of him to use you for bait as I had used Iris and Eddie.” You pressed your lips into a thin line as your mind started to wander.

“So, we wait?”

Eobard nodded as you ran a hand through you knotted hair. Need to brush that out asap. “We wait until it’s time to strike.”

“Until it’s time for you to strike. I’m remaining neutral in whatever it is between you and Barry in the future. Even if he might not see it that way.” Tipping the scales, balancing good and evil natures in the forces of the world. That’s what He told me my role in the multiverse is along with...

“I know, my love.” I don’t know how to break this to her. “But until then, rest.” If I ask her to come with me, would what I orchestrate then work?

“Eobard.”

“Hm?” Eobard knew he needed to go back to sort a few things out. Chances of getting caught were roughly 30-70, but not zero.

You shifted over to make room for him, patted the spot next to you. “Stay.”

Or would she become collateral damage?

“Always.” The speedster leaned down to kiss your lips before moving in beside you. You laid your head on his chest, minding the slight tremors of pain. Eobard kissed the top of your head and you shut your eyes. You’d go to the ends of the multiverse for him, but you’d also protect your friends. Being at odds with Barry wouldn’t stop you. He just needed to learn to live with your choices as everyone else has had to live with his.

Eobard’s mind ran through every scenario, deciding it’s best to tell you what he intends to do. He’d rather you decide for yourself what to do. The negative speedster respected the position you held onto. Neutrality wasn’t always an easy feat, but he admired your devotion towards him and the ones you love. Eobard was just selfish enough to only want and care for you. He didn’t need anyone else. He certainly didn’t need camaraderie. Tomorrow, he’d tell you. Tomorrow, he’d make sure to take the first step towards ensuring the future.

Betrayal is a fickle thing, Barry Allen. A lesson you will learn again.

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

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On Space Art by Xin Liu & Xin Wang

Xin Liu, Orbit Weaver, 2017. Production still of artist's performance during a parabolic flight. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Steve Boxell.

During the prolonged lockdown that defined much of 2020, the Xinjiang-born, New York-based artist and engineer Xin Liu juggled multiple roles. These included participating in a volunteering network that supplied PPE to medical workers in dire need of protection against Covid-19; designing an indie game, Sleepwalk (2020), which reflected on the conditions of confinement and hyper-connectivity; engineering a series of hypnotic sound experiences with her partner Gershon Dublon titled The Wandering Mind (2020), which guides the dreams of a sleeping audience with source materials organized by an AI system; and live-streaming an ambient soundscape recorded on Whitehead Island, off the coast of Maine, for the Camden International Film Festival.1

As the Arts Curator at MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and an artist who makes work for exhibition spaces, film festivals, and astronautical conferences, Liu’s ongoing fascination with space as a medium and destination for new art has seen her send a wisdom tooth into outer space, cultivate potato seeds that had travelled to the International Space Station, and imagine weightlessness as an intimate, “body-opening” condition. In this interview, we spoke about the past lives and expansive futures of Space Art, her unique mixture of academic and identitarian backgrounds, and the creative strategies of innovation and resistance while working at the juncture of art and technology.

Xin Wang: You’ve recently been referred to as a “famous space artist” in a panel discussion poster, which suggests that this is a solidified genre.

Xin Liu: It is a genre! If you google “Space Art,” there’s a Wikipedia page that defines it, though it’s very much about visual artists depicting the vision of space exploration, like images of Martian colonies, weightlessness, spaceships, etc. It was also called Astronomical Art, with notable artists such as Chesley Bonestell. These artists really tried to define the aesthetics of space, which even changed the way we would later color actual scientific images captured through different telescopes. Even now, if you look at NASA’s art programs, that’s still basically the main concept. Slowly it diverged into art in space, or art that uses space and environmental textures for creation, experimentation, and storytelling.

For me, Space Art conceptually connects more to Land Art in the seventies; the questions they were asking—regarding spatial-temporal dimensions and the way we engage with geological transformation—are more related. However, there is this jump in the Space Art medium from astronomical paintings right away to “art in space.” It is a gap in our understanding of Space Art; in my position as the Space Art curator at MIT, I have made sure to take into account Land Art, science fiction, and so on, in lectures.

XW: What questions do you want to ask with your Space Art?

XL: First of all, the duality in our perception of the world: being a human being walking, eating, sleeping, drinking, and laughing on this planet; and on the other hand, knowing that we exist on a gigantic rock spinning around another hot rock in endless space. The epistemological jump is exciting but also problematic when we distance one from the other. People talk about science versus culture as if they are the polar opposites. I’m trying to reconcile the two views of the world and find places to live in-between. My other interest has more to do with the body, our sensations, our death, and the cycles of life and materials.

XW: Your works have always struck me as poetic—you sent one of your wisdom teeth into space in Living Distance (2019), which was inspired by childhood folktales and executed with robust engineering. But the whole debate around the idea that culture and science are antithetical has a long history. Susan Sontag wrote about it in the sixties, for example; what are you seeing in terms of new manifestations of, and challenges to, that tension?

XL: The philosopher Yuk Hui has proposed the concept of cosmotechnics, which argues that science and technology aren’t objective but are born of human cultures. One of my current projects, Unearthing Futures, is a collaboration with the Peruvian artist Lucia Monge, the International Potato Center in Lima, and the International Space Station (ISS).2 We are interested in potato history as human history; native to Peru, the potato’s journey becoming one of the most widely grown crops in the world mirrors colonial history. As we set foot and grow crops beyond the earth bond, one option here is to engineer the perfect potato that survives all conditions, while the other is to trust the possibilities of biodiversity, where a consortium of diverse species that are mutually dependent yields a higher chance of survival in extreme environments. Both are questions of science and technology, but at the same time they reflect philosophies—ones about how we survive.

We selected six varieties of native Peruvian potatoes with different characteristics, sent the potato seeds to the ISS to spend a month in microgravity, and exposed them to environment stressors such as radiation. The project has not grown potatoes in space, but it’s a significant step to understanding how environmental stressors affect thesis seeds. Having harvested the first generation in our respective studios, we plan to grow multiple generations and increase the numbers that we can process. Maybe in the fourth or fifth generation we can cook them and use them in workshops that involve the general public (we are working with public elementary schools in Portland) to think about the possibilities of food and agriculture in space exploration. Space potatoes are the protagonists in our stories and would facilitate these dialogues.

XW: When we were reviewing proposals for Sojourner 2020, an open call for artworks to be sent into low earth orbit by the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, there were equally visible tendencies to flatten the crossover between art and technology into very gimmicky projects. In your position as both curator and artist working in this increasingly hyped juncture of art and tech, what are some of your goals and challenges?

XL: With the dropping costs of space launches and privatization, we are entering the New Space Age. Space Art is truly at the frontier now (no pun intended). There are many amazing art practitioners I’ve been able to invite to MIT and imagine together what this practice can be. The artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis, for example, created The Moon Goose Colony, where she trained geese on planetary science and different flight patterns to prepare them for the Moon.3 She even incubated and hatched the eggs herself. In 42-The Large Meteor T-R-A-P (2014), she uses electronic magnetic devices to guide the movement of meteorites, which can be viewed as a planetary defense system. In fact, the first planetary defense systems launched by NASA (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test) this past year also had to do with devices latching onto the meteorites to change their course of movement. I really like projects that are ambitious, beautifully executed, and which explore scientific possibilities as well as artistic ones. Unapologetically inserting yourself into other domains is also something I’m passionate about.

XW: What are some examples of such insertions?

XL: I recently had a conversation with the researcher Weng Jia, who looked into the detailed history of weather satellites beyond the pragmatics of weather forecast—itself a form of weather control that generates state power. It’s important to understand that history, but at the same time we can ask, as cultural producers, what now? We can either involve public engagement and sign petitions to request open access, or we can learn from the hackers—there are so many amateur enthusiasts who eavesdrop on state-owned radio signals, and through listening we are able to understand so much already. During the pandemic, my partner Gershon Dublon and I have tinkered with software-defined radio. Using just a tiny, 20-dollar USB dongle with an antenna we built from our clothing wires, we could receive the signals from retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites as they pass through the sky.

Even before the pandemic, my partner was looking into personal monitoring of air traffic, as most aircrafts have to broadcast their locations after reaching 18,000 ft. This was a fun plane-tracking activity at home. But later on we were put in touch with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, who were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline encroaching their territories. They were being illegally harassed and even sprayed with unknown chemicals by aircraft flying over their encampment, but couldn’t track the perpetrators. We helped them set up the aforementioned system using a computer, a 20-dollar dongle, and electrical metal wires, with which they were actually able to “see,” ID, and track the aircraft. Using that data and US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the water protectors were able to pursue their harassers and hold them accountable. Is it art practice? I think it’s important and exciting to examine the “wall”; there’s no wall that’s perfect—there are always cracks. You can find things between the breaks and slowly percolate, and, in a way, take back those powers—I found those processes most exciting.

XW: I think this is a powerful approach that counters the general pessimism towards big tech, technocratic states, and surveillance to the point that people don’t even want to think about the possibilities of cracks.

XL: But that’s a facade, and I don’t know who marvelously crafted it. A lot of these things, such as the radio, are not so complicated. Given a week and the internet, most people can figure it out; it’s not rocket science. You know who is most interested in amateur radio nowadays? The fifty-plus generation, sometimes grandpas. There is a big community in Staten Island in New York. However, in the arts, these systems and disciplines are rendered unfathomable, which prohibits further investigation. That’s the problem.

XW: When you were speaking about “the cracks in the wall” earlier, I had a very dark thought—in the future, planetary warfare will look drastically different and be much more deadly than the wars currently taking place on Earth.

XL: Future wars may not be quite so physical as we imagine—the virus is a powerful model for what could happen. It shows how fragile and resilient humans are; cyberattack, trade wars, geoengineering manipulation of nature—these are all struggles on different planetary scales, and we have to constantly self-educate as citizens and decode what the decision makers are actually saying.

XW: You received your undergraduate training at Tsinghua University, which is known for its rigorous focus on scientific training and as a place that has groomed many of China’s top technocratic leaders. It’s also considered the Chinese counterpart of MIT, where you completed a graduate program. How do those experiences compare and inform your trajectory?

XL: When I was in Tsinghua, I studied mathematics, physics, and mechanical engineering; my degree was in precision instruments. Nowadays I still practice them in my sculpture in its manufacturing and fabricating processes. It’s a craft. I later went to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), not because I wanted to be an artist, but out of a sad realization. In China, we separated art and science education since high school, and my liberal arts education was limited.

It was a selfish desire to study fine arts after college just to become a “complete” human being. I am very grateful that my parents didn’t disapprove this decision. At the time I told myself that I’d probably still end up working for Google and Microsoft; I had interned at both places during graduate school, thinking that’s how I would make a living eventually. But those two years were transformative and gave me an absolutely new way of looking at the world. Even graduating with an MFA from RISD, I still couldn’t commit a hundred percent to being a professional artist, as it is really difficult financially. I’m a practical immigrant. I had to figure out a way to stay in the country and feed myself. Then I went to MIT, because it was fully funded and I had the luxury to do research; after another two years in school, I decided that I wanted to work freely, and “artist” is the title that offers the most freedom.

XW: Do you still believe that?

XL: I do. If you tell people you are an artist, whatever you do doesn’t surprise them as much. It’s harder to talk about sending a tooth to space as a physicist.

XW: I’m struck by the way you describe gravity as a “momentum of feelings” on your website.

XL: That’s something I was thinking about when I first experienced weightlessness in 2017, during a parabolic flight. The plane literally free-falls in the sky, and in reference to the cabin, everything inside the plane is weightless. I had a bit of a performance background in dance. The experience was shocking: there was no “free from gravity”—gravity is always there. It was just everything falling together. The experience was less about me floating or flying than about the ground beneath me dropping. It’s not liberating in the way that you are accelerating and going up, which is what we associate with space exploration probably, but rather a kind of letting-go and descending. It was an eye-opening—body-opening—experience for me, and a bitter-sweet moment as well.

XW: Speaking of bodies and embodiment, do you find this excessive attention to—often performances of—an artist’s identity shows up more or less or differently for you, given the curious juncture of disciplines and identities you inhabit?

XL: It depends on who is seeing me. The tech aspect of me can seem alarming to people who are used to traditional practices, and in the so-called media/tech/science art world, gender might manifest more. The audience decides who I am. My name reads as gender-neutral in both English and Chinese. Sometimes people assume I’m a man initially, because I’m working with technology; but a bit more engagement with the work might compel one to realize that I could be a woman, because of the way I deal with technology. Still deeper into it, you might realize I’m Asian.

Another interesting aspect comes from the fact that I don’t just participate in art events; I also present my works at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), where it’s just pleasing to see my portrait—that of a young Asian woman—next to attendees that are largely from different demographics. And I enjoy that—inserting myself in different systems. It’s not just gender, but also geographic. I am an outlier in many ways—I went to a military-affiliated high school, so the instinct to fit in was strong growing up. But here, as people of color and women, we naturally stand out and have more identities. It could be tiring but it’s also our power—meaning that we can potentially empathize with more people. People like you and me—when we talk about America in a positive light in China or criticize the Chinese government, we are perceived as brainwashed by Western liberalism; but when we talk about Chinese companies like WeChat positively here, or the effective Covid-19 responses and technological innovations in China, we’d be considered brainwashed in the other direction too.

XW: I always feel that exposure to different systems of brainwash leads to utmost clarity. What do you think the future of space art will be, or what you hope it could be like?

XL: I think it will mature like digital art, bio art, internet art, AR/VR art—all these sub-domains. I read extensively on space policies, which obviously figure prominently on many nation states’ agendas. At the IAC conference in 2020, eight national space agencies just signed the Artemis Accords, which is an international agreement on the principles for corporations and civil explorations for the moon, Mars, comets, and asteroids. Particularly notable is the encouragement and protection for private entities to participate in the future of space exploration, and its effect on commercial activities will be significant; even the ISS is going through a commercialization process already. Space will become more commercial and privatized; it will engender more conversations and force us to be involved and investigate the industry.

XW: What’s your favorite Space Art piece?

XL: I was struck by Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1985) when I first knew about it. I have been (and am still) confined in my apartment due to the pandemic. It is the absolute desire to break the ceiling and get out. Though both are heading towards outer space, the Soviet campaign in space exploration and a personal desire to leave, to be free, cannot be more different. In fact, one is defeating the other.

_____________________

Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang/China) is an artist and engineer. She is the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab, a member of New INC in New Museum, and a studio resident in Queens Museum. She is also an artist-in-residence in SETI Institute and the recipient of numerous awards and residencies.

Xin Wang is a curator and art historian based in New York. She is currently planning an exhibition that explores Asian Futurisms for The Museum of Chinese in America, New York. While pursuing her PhD in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she’s also been conducting a series of public zoom webinars on topics of technology, new media, and Asian American perspectives for the Whitney Museum of American Art since spring 2020.

Source: https://www.art-agenda.com/features/372727/on-space-art

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stuck-in-hawkins · 5 years ago

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Of Boredom and Makeup

Fic request for @willbyersbowlcutisgay :)))

Will laid down, his headphones plugged into his stereo, listening to the ethereal strings of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” weave together a story in his mind. He was close to an idea for a drawing. He was getting a general idea of various pictures, but he didn’t have the thread to bind them together. Something to make a coherent plot. It didn’t matter if people couldn’t see the whole story from one painting. He needed to know it first.

This drawing assignment was the only thing left to do. The suspension for fighting would last the week, but the work had been done, at least for him. The remainder of his days would likely be spent tutoring El. She was wicked smart, particularily in science and math, but years in a lab hadn’t taught her the subtleties of the English language. The party had tried to catch her up, taking turns tutoring her in one subject or another. Now, it was just Will, Jonathan, and Joyce.

Most of yesterday had been spent trying to help her with the workload. But she got easily frustrated and it had been a trying day. Today, they were taking a break. Will heard the crackle of the record as the brass in the song faded and listened as the sounds escalated and welcomed him to the machine. An idea crawling out, haunting images from the movie Metropolis, pipelines and steam turning into a creature with an open mouth consuming, feasting.

He felt a shadow on his face. He opened his eyes and saw El standing over him.

He gasped and threw off his headphones. “Jesus, El!”

She seemed surprised by his reaction and immediately apologetic. Will forgot sometimes how childlike she really was.

He softened his tone, “Is everything alright?”

She held up the Walkman he let her borrow. “Out of batteries.”

“Oh. Crap. Okay. We’ll have to get some next time we go to the store.” He popped it open and saw she was listening to the David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. A smile lit up his face. “Do you like it?”

El nodded.

Will took the tape out. “Do you want to listen to it in my room?”

El brightened at the idea, “Sure.”

He pressed the stop button, moved the needle off record, and took his headphones out. He put the tape in the bottom section of the stereo that played cassettes and hit play. The room filled with a dance between the piano and Bowie’s vocals. Will’s grin hadn’t faded. He got his sketchbook out at his desk.

“I’m gonna draw for a bit. You can bring whatever you want in here.”

El got the magazines, mirror, and make up bag from her room. She set herself up on the floor. Will saw this out of the corner of his eye and stifled a sigh. Just when he had thought they had something in common, he’d been reminded of how different they really were.

He couldn’t understand her. She had so many conflicting things. She was this total badass but also sensitive like a child and then she’d do totally girly things that just drove him crazy. What did Mike even see in her?

And there was a pang, like a string out of tune. There it was. The underlying reason for it all. Will hadn’t put words to it. He didn’t want to. There would be so much to admit. So many ugly words he didn’t want to face. He pulled out his charcoal and blackened his fingers in the tactile material. He let himself get absorbed in the motions, the values, the dark shadows and gradients.

He didn’t bring his head up until he heard the click of the tape. He realized it was probably close to lunchtime. “Hey El,” he turned, “Do you want something to-”

But he didn’t finish. He couldn’t. Because when she’d turned, he saw the face of Ziggy Stardust. Perfectly rendered. The golden sun on her forehead, the red and gold on her eyes fading as they spread off her lids and into her bone structure. His mouth hung open.

“Does it look okay?” She asked.

He couldn’t fathom it. She was every bit the badass he had thought. And holy shit. She actually WAS artistic. She could draw little more than stick figures, it had been a creative outlet that had been stolen from her as a child, and she got much too frustrated with her lack of progress to try at all. But, at putting on colored powder, she was a Van Gogh and Will admired her for it.

He realized he hadn’t said anything. “El… that’s amazing. How did you do that?”

She held up a picture from a magazine: The Rolling Stones.

“Just from the picture? No tutorial or anything?”

She shook her head. “Just the picture.”

“That’s incredible.”

She beamed.

“Umm.. Are you hungry?” He asked.

She nodded. He scrubbed the charcoal from his hands in the kitchen and made them both PB&J. But he couldn’t get an idea out of his head. It was embarrassing and he didn’t want to say it. He didn’t want to ask. After lunch she grabbed a stack of napkins.

Will tilted his head. “What are you doing?”

“Wiping it off.”

“What?! But you just finished! You’re not going to keep it on?”

“I wanna try the other one.”

Will straightened. “The one with the lightning bolt?”

She nodded. Will looked at the clock. They had a while before anyone came home. Long enough to… No. No. It was ridiculous to even think it.

There was an intense internal struggle. But the idea of looking in the mirror and seeing Bowie looking back at him was too strong. “Youcoulduseme,” he blurted.

Her eyebrows wrinkled in confusion. “What?”

Will averted his eyes, “You can use me. For the makeup.”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise.

Will shook his head, looking away. “I don’t like make up or anything. But you worked so hard on that. And it looks incredible. It would be like washing artwork down the drain. And it’s only because it’s Ziggy Stardust. I was thinking of being him for Halloween, anyway.”

He stopped his ramblings, feeling like he was blabbering to an empty room. When he looked back at El, she was practically glowing, “It’s artwork?”

Will nodded. “Of course.”

She turned back still beaming. He followed her to the bedroom. A knot suddenly settling in his stomach. All the things people would say if they saw. But who was there to see? It was less that others would see, it was that he would know what they’d say. That maybe all those things they said would be right. What if he enjoyed it? Would that make him the fairy everyone thought he was?

He sat down in front of El and looked at the magazine with David Bowie’s visage looking back. He wondered if Bowie was ever called that. What if he’d listened to them? How much of his art would he have cut himself off from? How much expression would he have silenced? The thought was strong enough to ward off his worries. The negative words still chattered, but he mentally told them to piss off.

El picked up her palette and brush. She held the colors up to his face and looked back at the picture. Will watched her work. She laid out all the cast off make up given to her by Nancy and began selecting her colors, moving them in front of Will. She held out her hand to Will and he looked at her curiously.

She said, “I need your hand. To try the colors.”

“Oh!” He gave her his hand and she picked up a shimmery white and applied it to the back of his hand. Her touch was warm and delicate as she held his hand. He thought the sensation of the brush would tickle, but it didn’t. It just felt nice. He relaxed while she doused his hand in eyeshadow. Once she was satisfied with the color selection, she moved onto his face.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

He did and felt his nerves ripple as she touched the brush to his cheeks. He wasn’t used to his face being touched. He realized how much trust this required and wondered if that was why girl friendships were so different than guy ones. They had an open trust. Not that he didn’t trust his friends. But it was different. If any one of the guys in their party sat down with his eyes closed, there was a 50/50 chance someone would fart or burp in their face. It just was that way and Will had never questioned it. But this was so… gentle.

He felt like a canvas and it was a strange experience. It involved a lot of waiting. But the experience was overall pleasant and he didn’t want it to end. At least until she got to the eyes.

“Stop squinting.” She said, annoyed.

He opened a eye. “It’s kind of hard when-”

“Close them!”

He shut his eye again. “When you are putting something directly on my eye. It’s instinct to squint.”

“Raise your eyebrows and you won’t squint.”

Will tried and forced himself to keep his eyelids taut.

When she got to his forehead, she clipped his bangs with bobby pins to the top of his head. Having his hair touched just about put him to sleep. He found himself wishing that it wasn’t just something assigned to girls. He wished that guys had been allowed to do that stuff too, instead of having to wait for a haircut to have such affection to be bestowed. He wondered if it was wrong to question that though.

Her hands left his face and he opened his eyes. She looked him over and nodded. “I think… it’s done.”

Will sat up, excited and also a little nervous. “Can I look?”

She nodded. He took his time getting to the mirror. Will worried that he might look ridiculous. Maybe it had all been a trick and his trust a slap in the face. But when he got to the mirror and saw Ziggy staring back, he felt stinging at the back of his eyes. He couldn’t help it.

The trademark lightning bolt was striking across his face and the red glow flowing from his eyes seemed like some power had washed over him. He felt stronger. He felt powerful, like he had something no one could take away. In that moment, he loved the person he was, wholly and completely. The makeup was a mask, but it reflected more of himself than he’d ever let show. In that moment he accepted himself exactly as he was.

He knew the moment was fleeting and he’d go back to facing the demons in his mind. He’d have to hear his mental record play the same discouraging songs about his shortcomings, his flaws, the things that made him believe he was broken. But right now, none of it mattered. In this moment, he knew he was stronger than all that.

“It’s perfect.” He said. He looked back at El in her Bowie make up and a thought popped into his head of her being his fairy godmother. And he chuckled. He felt happy and ridiculous and overwhelmingly grateful. He wrapped his arms around her without a second thought.

The affection surprised her and a warm smiled nestled into her cheeks. She leaned her head on his shoulder into the embrace, thankful to finally have a brother.

They played as many Bowie albums as they could while Will worked on a new drawing. This one was filled to the brim with color. He used colored pencils for general outlines of his own silhouette and filled it with color from his chalk pastels. He drew bright streams of sun that broke through clouds, which looked like the nebulas he’d seen in his astronomy books. There were streaks of lightning going to the edges of the paper. He hoped it conveyed the strength he had felt, the beauty of the moment he’d seen in the mirror. He’d have to ask Jonathan when he got home. El wasn’t one for interpreting artwork but she was enthralled at watching his creative process.

They didn’t take the makeup off until after both Jonathan and Joyce got back. Joyce insisted that Jonathan take their picture. When the pictures were developed, El kept one on her vanity and Will kept one in his drawer. He’d take it out on dark moments when the inner monologue got too loud, when he needed to remember his own strength. Sometimes it worked, but not always. When it didn’t, he knew he could go into El’s room and he’d let her practice her craft on him.

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wiremagazine · 4 years ago

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MIGHTY KINGS: THE FABULOUS DUO BEHIND RICK AND THE GRIFFOPOTAMUS LAUNCH THEIR OWN MERCHANDISE LINE

By Martin Moore | Photos provided by Rick Twombley & Griff King

Over 700,000 followers, on multiple platforms including Instagram, tune into the adventures on Rick and The Griffopotamus, where Rick Twombley and his hubby Griff King project the splendid wonder of a real-life, loving, gay couple while also addressing important themes such as heteronormativity and masc vs. fem.

"Rick and the Griffopotamus are not for everyone," Griff concedes, "but a lot of people seem to connect to what we do, and those are the people we do it for."

Just in time for summer, the duo unveiled their newest venture, the Two Kings Unlimited (a combination of their last names) online retailer that features exclusive Rick and Griff merchandise including pajama onesies, erotic playing cards, a coffee table book and their line of phallic sex toys – molded from the real things. We spoke with the guys from their Atlanta home.

Martin Moore: I just watched your rendition of Mary Poppins' "The Cover is Not the Book" on your YouTube channel. It's incredible! Rick Twombley: Oh, nice! That is such a fun song, but also extremely challenging. Especially Griff's part toward the end – a total tongue twister and so fast! We practiced it on a drive from Miami to Orlando, had it on repeat for about four hours, but eventually got it. We really wanted to do it because it's not only a great, positive song, but one we can identify with. People often assume a lot about us just off what they see online, so "The Cover is Not the Book" is a good reminder that perception is not reality.

MM: Are you, two big burly men, into show tunes? Griff King: Absolutely! Rick was a professional stage performer for nearly twenty years, with a degree in dance and musical theater. He worked on Broadway, with Cirque du Soleil, Disney and more. I grew up watching movie musicals and Disney with my mom. You'd be hard-pressed to name a musical we don't know every lyric from.

MM: You guys really seem to have fun together. Is that what makes your relationship work so well? RT: It doesn't hurt! If you're going to spend the rest of your life with someone, you need to be able to be dorks, let loose, and bond over common interests. It's a great stress-reliever.

MM: What other crazy hijinks do you get into when you're together? GK: We love spending time with our close friends, hiking, movie nights, and hosting dinners. Rick is a killer chef! We love to go out dancing, but we're equally happy cuddling on the couch on a Saturday night with our cats, Willow and Ripley.

MM: Who wears the crown in the relationship? GK: In our relationship, we both have strengths where one wears it more than the other. As far as managing our business, Rick is better suited. He's more organized, business-minded, and has a ridiculously good eye for details.

MM: Whose idea was it to launch your wildly popular social page, Rick and the Griffopotamus? RT: The idea for starting a joint social media actually came from our friends, especially after Griff's rendition of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from The Little Mermaid went viral on Facebook.

MM: Was the idea to make the page a brand? GK: The original motivation wasn't necessarily to be a brand, but just to create a stage to entertain. Even with our sexier posts, we try to incorporate humor, creativity, fun, and a bit of tongue-in-cheek fantasy. RT: The branding and business side came later when we realized just how much people were wanting to take that journey with us. We started getting requests for calendars and other items.

MM: Are the sex toys your best sellers? RT: Our sex toy line has now sold out five times! New stock is always coming. We also had a line of onesies designed which are absolutely fantastic and available for pre-order. Calendars and an erotic playing card deck based on a series of photos we did on Instagram are also in production.

MM: Tell us about the coffee table book. GK: That's the project we are most excited about! It is an erotic coffee table book, very much inspired by Madonna's "Sex" book from the '90s. We spent the past year traveling to shoot with some legendary photographers like Mike Ruiz, Michael Stokes, and Mack Sturgis. They all captured some extremely mind-blowing and highly NSFW images that we can't wait to share!

MM: What are your world-dominating goals for Two Kings Unlimited? RT: The sky's the limit, really. We have our merchandising and other major projects in the pipeline. We're continuing to grow our social media platforms, and we'll continue to push boundaries and show the reality that a genuine, fun-loving married couple can also be sexual beings who are not ashamed about celebrating and showcasing the erotic elements of their relationship. GK: We try our best to be role models by living our lives very unapologetically, transparently, and with a huge love of adventure. We want to inspire people who feel trapped or pressured to conform to societal expectations to do the same, embrace their inherent power, and not be shoved into the boxes that society wants them to fit into.

Visit TwoKingsUnlimited.com. Follow on Instagram at Rick_and_the_Griffopotamus.

This was originally published in Wire Magazine Issue 8.2020

#wire magazine #wiremag.com #wire #miami #miami beach #south beach #sobe #fort lauderdale #wynwood #wilton manors #gay #lgbt #lgbtq #husbands #love is love #married #kings #mighty

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darylelockhart · 2 years ago

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AI can produce prize-winning art, but it still can’t compete with human creativity

AI artists. Ascannio / Alamy Stock Photo

by Joseph Early,University of Southampton.

People consider creativity to be inherently human. However, artificial intelligence (AI) has reached the stage where it can be creative as well.

A recent competition attracted anger from artists after it awarded a prize to an artwork created by an AI model known as Midjourney. And such software is now freely available thanks to the release of a similar model called Stable Diffusion, which is the most efficient of its kind to date.

Unions of creative practitioners such as Stop AI Stealing the Show have for some time been raising concerns about the use of AI in creative fields. But could AI actually replace human artists?

Various artworks of robots, drawn by AI. Image created by the author (using Stable Diffusion). Author provided

These new AI models can produce endless possibilities. Each image of the robots shown above are unique, yet are generated by Stable Diffusion from similar user requests.

There are two ways to use these AI artists: write a short text prompt, or provide an image alongside the prompt to give more guidance. From a 14-word prompt, I was able to generate several logo ideas for a made-up company that delivers fruit. In just under 20 minutes. On my mid-range laptop.

A design for a fresh fruit company that delivers quickly, Logo, High Contrast, Polyvinyl – the prompt that I used to get Stable Diffusion to make these images.

As you can see from the results above, Stable Diffusion struggles to create art involving words. And some of the fruit are a bit funky.

Yet there is no way I could have produced anything remotely like this without using AI or employing the help of a graphic designer. I couldn’t have created the robot pictures myself either.

The potential of this technology hasn’t gone unnoticed - the startup responsible for Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, is targeting a US$1 billion (£900 million) investment evaluation. But these AI models are beginning to have an impact in the real world, as seen with the prize-winning Midjourney picture. Indeed where AI really excels is producing pieces of fine art that combine different elements and styles.

Yet while AI may do most of the legwork for you, using these models still requires skill. Sometimes a prompt doesn’t generate quite the image that you wanted. Or the AI can be used alongside other tools, only making up a small part of a larger pipeline.

And generating fine art is different to producing digital designs. Stable Diffusion is better at drawing landscapes than logos.

Why Stable Diffusion is a game changer

AI models are typically trained to create art using a dataset containing a staggering 5.85 billion images. This vast amount of data is needed so the AI can learn about image content and artistic concepts. And it takes a very long time to process.

For Stable Diffusion, it took 150,000 hours (just over 17 years) of processor time. However, this can reduced to less than a month of real time by training in parallel on large compute clusters (collections of powerful computers that act a single device).

Stability AI also provides an online tool called DreamStudio that allows you to use its AI model at a cost of around US$0.01 per image. In comparison, to use competitor OpenAI’s art model, DALL·E 2, the cost is over ten times that.

Both methods use the same underlying approach, known as a diffusion model computer program, which learns to create new images by looking at lots of existing images. However, Stable Diffusion has a lower computational cost, meaning it requires less time to train, and uses less energy.

Plus, you can’t actually download and run OpenAI’s model yourself, only interact with it via a website. Stable Diffusion, meanwhile, is an open-source project that anyone can play around with. So it enjoys the benefit of rapid development by the online coding community, such as improvements to the models, user-guides, integration with other tools. This has already been happening in the weeks after Stable Diffusion’s release in August 2022.

The future of art?

While vast improvements have been made in the last five years, there are still things that AI art models struggle with. Words in their artworks are recognisable but often gibberish. Similarly, AI struggles to render human hands.

AI art models still struggle to draw hands correctly. Image created by the author using Stable Diffusion.

There’s also the obvious constraint that these models can only produce digital art. They can’t work with oils or pastels like people can. In the way that vinyl has made a comeback, technology may initially create a swing towards a new form, but over time people always seem to circle back to the original form with the highest quality.

Ultimately, as previous research has found, AI models in their current form are more likely to act as new tools for artists than as digital replacements for creative humans. For example, the AI could generate a range of images to serve as a starting point, which can then be selected from and improved by a human artist.

This combines the strengths of AI art models (rapid iteration and creation of images) with the strengths of human artists (a vision for the piece of art and overcoming the problems with AI models). This is especially true in the case of commissioned art when a specific output is needed. AI on its own is unlikely to produce what you need.

However, there is still a danger for creatives. Digital artists who choose not to use AI may be left behind, unable to keep up with the rapid iteration and lower costs of AI-enhanced artists.

#science #featured #artificial intelligence #art #AI #technology

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kylo-ren-has-an-8pack · 6 years ago

Note

Do you mind my asking about what moodboards are in the pipeline? I've been thinking about what to request, but I don't want to bombard you with something you get all the time or are already working on!

Sure! Thank you for this ask anon! Its a few that are unique so I’m waiting to either get higher quality images or better ideas.

- Kylux/Gingerpilot + Bioshock AU- Jeff Goldblum ship from Buckaroo Banzai- Hotel Artemis + Hotel Interior Aesthetic

Also look up my tags “my moodboards” or “au addicted” in my blog search bar. I think you can also search “masterlist” and see a huge list that I’ve finished and posted.

As for ideas, Im game for lots of things. most ships for the sequels are fun to try. I love most things Poe, Kylo, or Hux. I’ll dabble in most ships, femme/slash or het, but dont care for Damerey or the prequel ships much for some reason. Im interested in Jyn or Krennic ships for Rogue One lately. I havent done almost any of RO ships other than a Galennic one. I almost never get femslash requests. I love rare pairs and crossovers (already did jurassic park gingerpilot au’s) I also do mcu, jurassic park/world, ready player one etc. Does that help? 🤣

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hydrus · 6 years ago

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Version 324

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I had a great week. The downloader overhaul is almost done.

pixiv

Just as Pixiv recently moved their art pages to a new phone-friendly, dynamically drawn format, they are now moving their regular artist gallery results to the same system. If your username isn't switched over yet, it likely will be in the coming week.

The change breaks our old html parser, so I have written a new downloader and json api parser. The way their internal api works is unusual and over-complicated, so I had to write a couple of small new tools to get it to work. However, it does seem to work again.

All of your subscriptions and downloaders will try to switch over to the new downloader automatically, but some might not handle it quite right, in which case you will have to go into edit subscriptions and update their gallery manually. You'll get a popup on updating to remind you of this, and if any don't line up right automatically, the subs will notify you when they next run. The api gives all content--illustrations, manga, ugoira, everything--so there unfortunately isn't a simple way to refine to just one content type as we previously could. But it does neatly deliver everything in just one request, so artist searching is now incredibly faster.

Let me know if pixiv gives any more trouble. Now we can parse their json, we might be able to reintroduce the arbitrary tag search, which broke some time ago due to the same move to javascript galleries.

twitter

In a similar theme, given our fully developed parser and pipeline, I have now wangled a twitter username search! It should be added to your downloader list on update. It is a bit hacky and may be ultimately fragile if they change something their end, but it otherwise works great. It discounts retweets and fetches 19/20 tweets per gallery 'page' fetch. You should be able to set up subscriptions and everything, although I generally recommend you go at it slowly until we know this new parser works well. BTW: I think twitter only 'browses' 3200 tweets in the past, anyway. Note that tweets with no images will be 'ignored', so any typical twitter search will end up with a lot of 'Ig' results--this is normal. Also, if the account ever retweets more than 20 times in a row, the search will stop there, due to how the clientside pipeline works (it'll think that page is empty).

Again, let me know how this works for you. This is some fun new stuff for hydrus, and I am interested to see where it does well and badly.

misc

In order to be less annoying, the 'do you want to run idle jobs?' on shutdown dialog will now only ask at most once per day! You can edit the time unit under options->maintenance and processing.

Under options->connection, you can now change max total network jobs globally and per domain. The defaults are 15 and 3. I don't recommend you increase them unless you know what you are doing, but if you want a slower/more cautious client, please do set them lower.

The new advanced downloader ui has a bunch of quality of life improvements, mostly related to the handling of example parseable data.

full list

downloaders:

after adding some small new parser tools, wrote a new pixiv downloader that should work with their new dynamic gallery's api. it fetches all an artist's work in one page. some existing pixiv download components will be renamed and detached from your existing subs and downloaders. your existing subs may switch over to the correct pixiv downloader automatically, or you may need to manually set them (you'll get a popup to remind you).

wrote a twitter username lookup downloader. it should skip retweets. it is a bit hacky, so it may collapse if they change something small with their internal javascript api. it fetches 19-20 tweets per 'page', so if the account has 20 rts in a row, it'll likely stop searching there. also, afaik, twitter browsing only works back 3200 tweets or so. I recommend proceeding slowly.

added a simple gelbooru 0.1.11 file page parser to the defaults. it won't link to anything by default, but it is there if you want to put together some booru.org stuff

you can now set your default/favourite download source under options->downloading

misc:

the 'do idle work on shutdown' system will now only ask/run once per x time units (including if you say no to the ask dialog). x is one day by default, but can be set in 'maintenance and processing'

added 'max jobs' and 'max jobs per domain' to options->connection. defaults remain 15 and 3

the colour selection buttons across the program now have a right-click menu to import/export #FF0000 hex codes from/to the clipboard

tag namespace colours and namespace rendering options are moved from 'colours' and 'tags' options pages to 'tag summaries', which is renamed to 'tag presentation'

the Lain import dropper now supports pngs with single gugs, url classes, or parsers--not just fully packaged downloaders

fixed an issue where trying to remove a selection of files from the duplicate system (through the advanced duplicates menu) would only apply to the first pair of files

improved some error reporting related to too-long filenames on import

improved error handling for the folder-scanning stage in import folders--now, when it runs into an error, it will preserve its details better, notify the user better, and safely auto-pause the import folder

png export auto-filenames will now be sanitized of \, /, :, *-type OS-path-invalid characters as appropriate as the dialog loads

the 'loading subs' popup message should appear more reliably (after 1s delay) if the first subs are big and loading slow

fixed the 'fullscreen switch' hover window button for the duplicate filter

deleted some old hydrus session management code and db table

some other things that I lost track of. I think it was mostly some little dialog fixes :/

advanced downloader stuff:

the test panel on pageparser edit panels now has a 'post pre-parsing conversion' notebook page that shows the given example data after the pre-parsing conversion has occurred, including error information if it failed. it has a summary size/guessed type description and copy and refresh buttons.

the 'raw data' copy/fetch/paste buttons and description are moved down to the raw data page

the pageparser now passes up this post-conversion example data to sub-objects, so they now start with the correctly converted example data

the subsidiarypageparser edit panel now also has a notebook page, also with brief description and copy/refresh buttons, that summarises the raw separated data

the subsidiary page parser now passes up the first post to its sub-objects, so they now start with a single post's example data

content parsers can now sort the strings their formulae get back. you can sort strict lexicographic or the new human-friendly sort that does numbers properly, and of course you can go ascending or descending--if you can get the ids of what you want but they are in the wrong order, you can now easily fix it!

some json dict parsing code now iterates through dict keys lexicographically ascending by default. unfortunately, due to how the python json parser I use works, there isn't a way to process dict items in the original order

the json parsing formula now uses a string match when searching for dictionary keys, so you can now match multiple keys here (as in the pixiv illusts|manga fix). existing dictionary key look-ups will be converted to 'fixed' string matches

the json parsing formula can now get the content type 'dictionary keys', which will fetch all the text keys in the dictionary/Object, if the api designer happens to have put useful data in there, wew

formulae now remove newlines from their parsed texts before they are sent to the StringMatch! so, if you are grabbing some multi-line html and want to test for 'Posted: ' somewhere in that mess, it is now easy.

next week

After slaughtering my downloader overhaul megajob of redundant and completed issues (bringing my total todo from 1568 down to 1471!), I only have 15 jobs left to go. It is mostly some quality of life stuff and refreshing some out of date help. I should be able to clear most of them out next week, and the last few can be folded into normal work.

So I am now planning the login manager. After talking with several users over the past few weeks, I think it will be fundamentally very simple, supporting any basic user/pass web form, and will relegate complicated situations to some kind of improved browser cookies.txt import workflow. I suspect it will take 3-4 weeks to hash out, and then I will be taking four weeks to update to python 3, and then I am a free agent again. So, absent any big problems, please expect the 'next big thing to work on poll' to go up around the end of October, and for me to get going on that next big thing at the end of November. I don't want to finalise what goes on the poll yet, but I'll open up a full discussion as the login manager finishes.

#release

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foxgambling694 · 3 years ago

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Unity With Python

⚡️ A very fast, simple, and general inter-process communication example between Unity3D C# and Python, using ZeroMQ.

PS. It looks slow in the GIF above because I put a delay of one second between each message so that you can see itworking.

Python for Unity facilitates Unity's interaction with various media and entertainment industry applications and ensures that you can integrate Unity into a broader production pipeline seamlessly. Potential benefits of using Python in your Unity project include: Automating scene and sequence assembly in the context of using Unity as a real-time.

The other neat part is that Unity3D can produce binaries for all major platforms. This includes Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS, and otherx. So not only does this add 3D capabilities to Python, but it also includes multi-platform support. The build process itself is simple and directed by the game engine itself.

Core Pillars

very fast — ZeroMQ is a networking library that allows you to send huge amount of data from server to client in a short period of time. I’m talking about casually sending/receiving 10,000 requests per second.

simple — You don’t have to explicitly open and bind a socket or know anything about low-level networking.

general — You can use this to send/receive any kind of data request. You can send image, video, text, JSON, file, or whatever you want. In this example, we are sending text.

inter-process — The communication is done inside the same machine. Which means very low-latency.

Introduction

Have you ever tried to communicate C# code in Unity3D with Python before but could not find a satisfying solution?

Have you ever tried implementing communication protocol using file read/write and found out that it’s a stupid approach?

Have you ever tried communicating using Web HTTP request and found out that it’s stupidly slow and high latency?

Have you ever tried communicating using socket/TCP/UDP stuff, but it feels like you are reinventing the wheel and youare becoming a network engineer?

Have you ever tried to communicate by emulating a serial port, and found out that it’s not how cool guys do work?

Have you ever tried to send Unity input to python and do some scientific work (maybe even machine learning task)and return the output to Unity?

Have you ever tried to build a .dll from python or even rewrite everything in C# because you don’t know how tocommunicate between python and C# processes?

Have you ever tried to embed IronPython or Python.NET inside Unity but it doesn’t allow you to install youramazing external python libraries? (And its minimal power is pretty ridiculous compared to your external python)

Have you ever tried to export a TensorFlow Protobuf Graph (Deep learning model) and use TensorFlowSharp orOpenCVForUnity to import the graph inside Unity because you want to use the model to predict stuff in Unity, but itdoesn’t allow you to use/utilize your new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti, and it’s also hard to code?

Tried MLAgents, anyone?

If you answer Yes to any of these questions but it seems you have found no solutions,then this repository is definitely for you!(If you answered Yes to all questions, you and me are brothers! 😏)

A complex calculation (based on the data received from Unity) is performed in python and it produces a result (action); The result (action) is sent back via TCP to Unity. The character performs the action corresponding to the result. Steps 1-4 are repeated until infinity (unless the client or server stops). I used Keras in Python to design a neural network calculating something like a noise-reducing-function. It works pretty good so far, and now I want to use this network to clean the data inside a Unity-Project of mine. I would not have thought that this could be so difficult.

I’ve tried a lot. With a lot of searching on the internet, I’ve found no solutions that is simple, fast, and generalenough that I can apply to any kind of communication between Python and Unity3D. All I’ve done in the past were simplya hack to either get my scientific computation work in Unity instead of python, or communicate between the processes painfully.

Until I found ZeroMQ approach from this repository(and some head scratching).

Solution Explanation

I’ve built a request-reply pattern of ZeroMQ where Python (server) replies whenever Unity (client) requestsa service from Python.

https://foxgambling694.tumblr.com/post/658010901333606400/visual-studio-c-programming. The idea is to create a separate thread inside Unity that will send a request to python, receive a reply and log the replyto the console.

Getting Started

Clone this repository using git clone https://github.com/off99555/Unity3D-Python-Communication.git command.

Open UnityProject (its dll files are targeting .NET 4.x version) and run Assets/NetMQExample/Scenes/SampleScene.

Run python file PythonFiles/server.py using command python server.py on a command prompt.

You should start seeing messages being logged inside Unity and the command prompt.

Specifically, Unity will send request with a message Hello 10 times, and Python will simply reply World 10 times.There is a one second sleep between each reply on the server (to simulate long processing time of the request).

Please read the comments inside PythonFiles/server.py and UnityProject/Assets/NetMQExample/Scripts/ and you willunderstand everything more deeply.

The most important thing is that you should follow the 4 getting started steps first. Don’t skip it! ❣️

After you’ve understood most of the stuff but it’s not advanced enough, you should consult the officialØMQ - The Guide.

Requirements

PyZMQ is the Python bindings for ZeroMQ. You can install it usingpip install pyzmq command or see more installation options here orhere.

NetMQ is a native C# port of ZeroMQ. Normally you need to install this usingNuGet package manager inside Visual Studio when you want to build a .NET application, or you could install using.NET CLI. But for this repository here, you don’t need to do any of the installation because we’ve already includedAsyncIO.dll and NetMQ.dll for you inside UnityProject/Assets/NetMQExample/Plugins/ directory.If you want to build your own dll files, please take a look atthis issue.

Known Issues

Based on this issue, the NetMQ implementation is not working nicely with Unity. If you create more than one ZeroMQ client in Unity, the Unity editor will freeze.

Troubleshooting

While both server and client are running and communicating fine, I kill the server process, restart the server, then both server and client seem to not be communicating anymore. Why don’t they continue communicating? Is this a bug?

No, this is the expected behavior of ZeroMQ because of the simplicity of the code. It’s mentioned in the guidehere. If you want to make the code better, which is notthe focus of this example, you can learn more about ZeroMQ as suggested in the screenshot below.

The problem is that when you restart the server, the server won’t reconnect to the old client anymore. You have to restart the client also.

Disclaimer

This repository is designed to be a minimal learning resource for getting started. It’s not a fully working high-level package.After you understand the example, my job is done.

Most of the code are just copies from the official ZeroMQ tutorial. I try to make this as simple to grasp as possible,so I only log the message to the console and nothing fancy. This is to minimize the unnecessary learning curve.

TODO

Add a complicated example of how to use it for real

Show how to do this with SocketIO. SocketIO is another approach I found very viable and stable. I use BestHTTP package in Unity for SocketIO client and use python-socketio as SocketIO server. And it does not have the issue of making Unity editor freezes.

Download GitHub for Unity 1.4.0

Our latest release, install manually

Download from Unity Asset Store

Download and install via Unity

By downloading, you agree to the Terms and Conditions.

Free and open source

Is onenote good on ipad. The extension is completely open source. Fix or report bugs. Build the features you need. Be a part of future GitHub for Unity releases.

Ditch the command line

View your project history, experiment in branches, craft a commit from your changes, and push your code to GitHub without leaving Unity.

Stay in sync with your team

Collaborate with other developers, pull down recent changes, and lock files to avoid troublesome merge conflicts.

Authentication and Initialization with GitHub

GitHub authentication is embedded in Unity, including 2FA. And with a click of a button, you can quickly initialize your game’s repository.

Use the GitHub for Unity Extension

Get off of the command line and work exclusively within Unity by downloading and installing the GitHub package!

Download

Unity With Python

Reach out to the GitHub for Unity team

Do you have questions? Feature ideas? Just want to chat with the team? Reach out to us on GitHub by opening a new issue, or by joining one of the chats listed in the project README. You can also email us at [email protected], or tweet at @GitHubUnity

Discuss

Python Unity3d

Code the GitHub for Unity Extension

Contribute to this open source project by reporting or resolving issues or forking the repository to add your own features!

Contribute

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years ago

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Washington DC Police Allegedly Offered $100,000 to Hackers to Stop Leak

The cybercriminals who hacked and attempted to extort the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department have now published what they claim are screenshots of their conversation with the police. Motherboard has not independently verified the specific conversation but the materials released by the hacking group thus far have proven to be legitimate.

In the screenshots, hackers with the Babuk ransomware group attempt to convince the police to pay up, or else they will leak all the data they stole. The negotiations broke when the person on the police side of the conversation offered $100,000, instead of the $4 million the hackers asked for.

"Our final proposal is an offer to pay $100,000 to prevent the release of the stolen data. If this offer is not acceptable, then it seems our conversation is complete. I think we both understand the consequences of not reaching an agreement. We are OK with that outcome," the police said, according to the screenshot of the alleged conversation.

The hackers apparently did not like the offer.

"This is unacceptable from our side. Follow our web-site at midnight," the hackers responded on Monday. After communications seemingly broke down, Babuk started leaking confidential and highly sensitive personal information of MPD officers.

The MPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The hacking group could not be reached for comment.

A screenshot of the alleged conversation between the MPD and the Babuk ransomware gang. (Image: Motherboard)

The hackers are clearly still trying to get the police to pay, by posting conversations and hacked files in a seeming attempt to pressure them. The screenshots and files already leaked highlight just how bad the problem of ransomware can be.

Over the weekend, another group of hackers forced Colonial Pipeline, the largest provider of gas in the East Coast, to shut down the pipeline out of precaution after the hackers broke into the company's IT network.. That hack and the panic associated with it have resulted in a gas buying panic and the incident has been highly politicized.

"I was surprised that the cops even offered $100,000 because I know the FBI totally discourages paying the ransom," Chuong Dong, a computer science student at Georgia Tech who has done research on Babuk, said in an online chat. "On the other hand, I think they really tried to lowball Babuk. Back when I first researched the group in January, they love to make accommodations for victims. But I think we all know what kind of information they hold (and how sensitive it is), so $100,000 is not a good price for negotiation unfortunately."

Do you have knowledge of the inner workings of Babuk or another ransomware gang? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, lorenzofb on Wickr, OTR chat at [email protected], or email [email protected]

Dong said that the police perhaps did not think Babuk would actually dump highly sensitive information.

"Babuk clearly has the upper hand and if this keeps happening, I think we’ll see a lot more sensitive info on police on their leak site," Dong said.

At the end of April Bakuk, announced that it had hacked the MPD and was waiting for the police offer to stop the leak of 250 gigabytes of data that they had allegedly stolen from their servers. In recent times, ransomware gangs like Babuk or Cl0p have adopted a hybrid model of ransomware: hack the target and lock their files, but steal the files first so they can use the threat of leaking the stolen data to extort more money from the victim.

The MPD is just the latest in a long string of victims. Their time may be running out to contain the damage, but the hackers appear to be still willing to hold off in hopes of getting some money.

In the latest post on their dark web site, where they dumped screenshots of the alleged conversation with the police, the hackers wrote: "You still have the ability to stop it."

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

Washington DC Police Allegedly Offered $100,000 to Hackers to Stop Leak syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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michaelandy101-blog · 4 years ago

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Are Blogs Lifeless in 2021? We Requested 10 Advertising and marketing Consultants

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/are-blogs-dead-in-2021-we-asked-10-marketing-experts/

Are Blogs Lifeless in 2021? We Requested 10 Advertising and marketing Consultants

It appears all of us have an obsession with killing issues off.

Each couple of years, we revisit one thing and place it on the chopping block. Within the new millennium, we had the Y2K computer scare. In 2012, we feared the world would end and we might all simply poof. When expertise took a extra essential function in our lives, we assumed all print publications would go bankrupt. Now, with the rise of video and podcasts, it is running a blog’s flip to really feel the warmth.

I reached out to entrepreneurs with backgrounds in product marketing, web optimization, YouTube, podcasting, and extra and requested them, “Are Blogs useless? ” Here is what they stated.

Are blogs useless?

In response to entrepreneurs, not even shut. Blogs proceed to be extraordinarily useful for lead era, model consciousness, and web optimization. And so they’re nonetheless fashionable amongst customers. A 2020 HubSpot research discovered that 60% of individuals learn a weblog at the least as soon as per week. So, blogs will not be out of entrepreneurs’ toolbox anytime quickly.

In all equity, this query surrounding blogs will not be with out cause. Google Developments exhibits that within the final 5 years, the curiosity in blogs has steadily declined worldwide.

Image Source

Within the U.S. inside the identical five-year span, podcasts have risen in reputation and surpassed blogs in searches.

Image Source

Nevertheless, entrepreneurs nonetheless contemplate running a blog a high marketing channel. Ross Simmonds, a B2B marketer and the founding father of the content material marketing company Basis, says running a blog has helped his purchasers triple their visitors and speed up their gross sales shut charges.

“At Foundation, blogging with intent has helped us generate millions of dollars in the pipeline for both us and our clients,” says Simmonds. “It’s also armed us with the ability to elevate our brand’s position in the market and, most importantly, truly help others in our industry learn and unlock new opportunities.”

With that stated, the running a blog panorama has modified over time. Lisa Toner, director of content material at HubSpot, says it is not sufficient to simply have a weblog these days.

“You need to consistently create content that is more valuable than your competition’s content. You need to be an SEO expert to get your articles ranking on page one of Google, and you need a distribution strategy to promote your content across all the channels your audience likes to consume content on,” says Toner. “It’s a lot more complex to win at blogging now, but if you can master it, it’s worth the investment.”

Transparency is an even bigger duty, particularly as social justice turns into more important to consumers.

“You need to think about how people see your brand compared to your competition. Everyone has their own unique selling position (USP) and what they want to put forward, but what users do is compare,” says Sandra Mpouma, head of digital marketing at RationalFX. “So, in terms of business strategy, create loyalty, trust, [and] be transparent and competitive, which is very important nowadays.”

Blogs vs. Different Advertising and marketing Channels

Now that different content material marketing channels – particularly video and podcasting – have surpassed blogs, will blogs quickly change into redundant? Effectively, all of it relies on the person personas you are focusing on. However at the same time as different platforms develop, blogs nonetheless provide many benefits.

“Podcasting is not without its own set of limitations. There are plenty of discoverability and audience growth challenges. At this point, blogs have a pretty well-dusted playbook for scaling. That’s not true for podcasts,” says Matthew Brown, senior podcast producer at HubSpot. “A company can use its likely limited resources to invest in a blog that will basically give consistent, easily measurable, and reliable performance. Blogs also have a direct line to the company’s bottom dollar, podcasts do not.”

Nelson Chacon, principal marketing supervisor for YouTube at HubSpot, highlights that there isn’t any cause to decide on between two platforms in case your workforce has the bandwidth to deal with each. If it aligns along with your person personas, you possibly can have interaction your viewers from a number of angles.

“Creating a blog constructed of articles around the benefits of your product will be helpful. Having a video showcasing its use or how to install it would be beneficial for your audience,” says Chacon. “Home Depot has carried out a incredible job of doing this. Whereas they inform and educate their prospects on their merchandise, additionally they add a fast ‘how-to’ for the extra educated one that simply wants a brief reply defined in a video.”

As for social media, Annabelle Nyst, a senior content material strategist who focuses on social media initiatives at HubSpot, says it is onerous to match it to blogs as every platform serves totally different functions.

“Social content doesn’t always have the shelf life or the discoverability of blog posts,” says Nyst. “It’s more about consistently meeting your audience where they are, in the right moments, engaging with them one-on-one, and establishing trust via community building.”

She provides that social media may be an effective way to amplify your weblog posts. And vice versa, weblog posts can function inspiration for social content material. If utilizing each, Nyst recommends pulling probably the most compelling factors out of your weblog posts, creating social-first content material, and utilizing it to drive visitors again to your weblog.

With all that stated, blogs do not come with out their disadvantages. AJ Beltis, a content material and acquisition supervisor at HubSpot, mentions the excessive drop-off charges typically seen in weblog posts.

“Blogs lack the interactivity that many crave due to its nature as written content,” says Beltis. “This challenges blog writers to hook their readers in a few short sentences without having the benefit of special effects or audio engineers available to their video and podcast creating counterparts.”

What it typically comes all the way down to is your model targets and which channels will enable you meet them. Podcasts, for instance, are higher for branding whereas blogs serve higher for top-of-the-funnel engagement.

“Blog posts are an acquisition juggernaut. There’s a clear path that any seasoned marketer can follow. Podcasts, however, best serve as a brand opportunity,” says Brown. “You wouldn’t measure a series of blog posts on their brand uplift ability, just like you wouldn’t measure a podcast show’s lead generation. That is unless you like gray hairs and a serious lack of sleep.”

Why Blogs are Nonetheless Impactful

From an funding perspective, blogs could also be a greater long-term funding for lead era.

“I could spend $200K to hire a full-time writer, SEO expert, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist to work on my blog. By combining those skill sets, I’m going to be able to create a blog that drives organic traffic to my website and converts it into leads for my business all year long,” says Toner. “Or, I could put the same $200K into an advertising campaign and maybe get a couple thousand leads over the course of the ad campaign. But once the campaign ends, so does my lead flow.”

Toner provides that almost all of HubSpot’s blog-generated leads come from older weblog posts. Which means running a blog is usually a nice lead supply lengthy after posts are printed. Aja Frost, who leads the English web optimization workforce at HubSpot, echoes this sentiment.

“Organic traffic is more important than ever. Unlike paid traffic, which stops coming in the second your budget runs out, organic traffic is mostly self-sustaining after you’ve put in the time and effort to create a blog post,” she says.

She provides that almost all content material administration programs (CMS) have web optimization instruments built-in into their platforms, which makes it simpler to optimize your posts.

Running a blog may also be useful in shaping a model’s product positioning.

“Blogs are still one of the best channels we have to create narratives around our product,” says HubSpot Product Advertising and marketing Supervisor Alex Girard. “They offer us the opportunity to address trends we see in the market, how those trends impact the reader, and how our product might be able to help them meet that trend successfully. They’re also great for telling customer success stories.”

He provides that when utilizing your weblog to market your product, the content material would not must be promotional. If you set up your self as a thought chief and acquire belief out of your viewers, they may organically look into your services and products.

With that stated, it should take greater than good content material to have a profitable weblog.

“Growth without a goal isn’t going to help your business – if 10,000 people are reading your blog, but none of them fit your persona, that’s not going to do anything for your company,” says HubSpot’s Senior Weblog Supervisor Karla Cook. “Focus on something attainable, like generating new contacts, and make sure every post you’re putting out has that goal in mind.”

She provides that one of many largest errors manufacturers make is creating content material just for folks on the decision-making stage. With so many levels between studying a weblog and making a purchase order, entrepreneurs ought to have posts geared at customers in each stage with corresponding presents. Be taught extra about that by means of HubSpot’s business blogging course.

From an web optimization perspective, manufacturers may additionally wrestle with producing visitors as a result of they’re considering weblog first, hyperlink constructing second.

“What I often notice is that marketers see ‘blogging’ and ‘link building’ as two different disciplines. First, they write the blog posts, then they think about how to earn backlinks to them,” says Irina Nica, a senior marketing supervisor at HubSpot who works on product consciousness by means of outreach initiatives. “Instead, they should include linkable assets into their regular content calendar, alongside other types of articles that are maybe designed for generating organic or social media traffic.”

Regardless of the numerous advantages we have gone over, running a blog is not at all times one of the best technique for each model. Why? Effectively, what in case your very best person persona would not learn blogs? What if they like emails as an alternative?

“Some brands have great email communication and workflows where they provide people with downloadable offers where they don’t have to go somewhere else to get the information, it’s just in their inbox straight away,” says Mpouma. “You don’t necessarily need a blog as long as you’re offering something in exchange. I think the blog has always been that: Offer something for free in exchange for that user interaction.”

So, in that case, blogs would not precisely be useless, extra so irrelevant.

Why Advertising and marketing Is not Lifeless

issues from a broader perspective, blogs are simply an extension of marketing. Some have recommended that marketing is useless, which makes entrepreneurs like me surprise if there’s one thing we do not know.

Primarily based on current knowledge, marketing continues to be influential. And that applies to each conventional methods and digital initiatives. Statista reported that in 2019, content material marketing generated over $42 billion in income worldwide.

“There’s a reason why Nike and McDonalds continue to invest millions every month in marketing even though they’re already household names. There’s a reason why the top musicians and artists still do promotion prior to their latest album release,” says Simmonds. “Marketing isn’t to be seen as just an expense. It’s an investment. And if you make an investment that is rooted in a strategic plan — that investment should return dividends for years (maybe decades) to come.”

The important thing takeaway is that whereas not all marketing techniques work for each model, it is unlikely that blogs will cease being useful to manufacturers within the foreseeable future. So for now, blogs, you possibly can relaxation and step off the chopping block.

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#General

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hydrus · 6 years ago

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Version 318

youtube

windows

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os x

app

tar.gz

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tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had a great week. I caught up on more small stuff and put some more work into the new gallery downloaders.

downloaders

Unfortunately, tumblr decided to kill their 'raw' url access this week. There is not a lot of firm word from tumblr on the issue, but there is some scattered conversation around, and it seems it is dead and not to return. Whatever the ultimate reason for this, it broke our tumblr downloader, so v318 has an updated tumblr parser to fetch the 1280px versions of urls. I have also taken the opportunity to switch the tumblr 'gallery' parser over to the new system, so the tumblr downloader now fetches and associates neater 'post urls' for its file import objects rather than raw file urls and adds 'creator' tags. However, because of the URL changes, your tumblr subscriptions will hence hit their 'periodic' file limits and likely redownload some 1280px versions of files you already have in raw--if this affects you heavily, you might want to pause your tumblr subs before you update and carefully experiment and curate what happens after you are working again in v318. Note that some artists (like lmsketch) attach a lot of images to their posts, so if your periodic limit were 100--and that 100 now means 'posts' instead of file urls--you are potentially talking a lot of files that are going to be redownloaded! Again, I recommend heavy tumblr subscribers pause before update and maybe consider recreating their tumblr subs from scratch with an initial file limit of 10 or so.

The multi-gallery download page has some more improvements this week. I've fixed an issue where the sub-downloaders on the same page were unintentionally all sharing some bandwidth rules with each other. Multi-galleries also now have an 'added' column. And the 'pause' ⏸ and 'stop' ⏹ characters used in the lists on the multi- pages are now editable, also under options->downloading, for those who have trouble viewing this unicode.

I have also made the 'only get a gallery page every x seconds' option global to the whole program (it was previously per-downloader). Being able to create twenty new whateverbooru queries at once with a single click of the paste button is powerful and great, but it also meant spamming servers with many heavy gallery requests all at once, so now all downloaders share the same slot that comes up every x seconds. The delay option is under options->downloading. I recommend 15s for downloaders and 5s for subscriptions. Let's see how 'global' works, and if it is an annoying bottleneck, I will see about making it per-domain.

Subscriptions now auto-compact whenever they sync. This means they delete old fully processed URLs they no longer need to calculate file velocity just to keep them running snappy. You shouldn't notice any change except maybe a faster-loading 'manage subscriptions' dialog.

A couple of unusual data problems meant that xbooru and gelbooru were not searching well in the new system. I have fixed these, so if you got affected by this, please rerun your queries and let me know if you still have any problems. I also added gallery parsers for rule34.paheal and mishimmie (the paheal update should finally fix the 'paheal gets gallery urls in file results' issue!). Advanced users might like to refer to the gelbooru situation (and tumblr and artstation api gallery url classes) to look at url classes's new 'next gallery page' component, which lets you define an easy logical way to predict the next gallery page from a recognised gallery url and now acts as a fallback if the gallery parser cannot find one (as is usually the case with api results!).

full list

downloaders:

extended url classes to support 'next gallery page' generation--a fallback that predicts next gallery page url if the parser cannot provide it (as is often the case with APIs and unreliable next-page-url galleries such as gelbooru)

integrated this new next page generation into new gallery processing pipeline

updated gelbooru, tumblr api and artstation gallery api url classes to support the new next gallery page business

fixed the url class for xbooru, which wasn't recognising gallery urls correctly

wrote new gallery parsers for rule34.paheal and mishimmie (which are both shimmie but have slightly different gallery layout). this should finally solve the 'one paheal gallery url is being parsed into the file list per page' problem

'fixed' the tumblr parser to fetch the 1280px url (tumblr killed the raw url trick this past week)

misc text/status fixes

wrote a gallery parser for tumblr that fetches the actual tumblr post urls and hence uses the new tumblr post parser naturally! (tumblr post urls are now more neatly associated as 'known urls' on files!)

note that as the tumblr downloader now produces different kinds of urls, your tumblr subs will hit your periodic limits the next time they run. they will also re-download any 1280px files that are different to the previously fetched raws due to the above raw change (protip: keep your subscription periodic file limits low)

cut the 'periodic limit' subscription warning popup down to a much simpler statement and moved the accompanying help to a new help button on the edit sub panel

multi-gallery pages now have an 'added' column like multi-watchers

the new 'pause' ⏸ and 'stop' ⏹ characters shown in the multi-downloader pages are now customisable under options->downloading (some users had trouble with the unicode)

the watcher now shows the 'stop character' if checking is 404/DEAD

fixed an issue where the new gallery imports on the same multi-page were all sharing the same identifier for their ephemeral 'downloader instance' bandwidth tracker, which meant they were all sharing the same '100rqs per 5mins' etc... rules

the page and subscription downloader 'gallery page delay' is now program-wide (since both these things can run in mass parallel). let's see how it goes, maybe we'll move it to per-site

subscription queries now auto-compact on sync! this means that surplus old urls will be removed from their caches, keeping the whole object lean and quick to load/save

gallery logs now also compact! they will remove anything older than twice the current death velocity, but always keep the newest 25 regardless of age

misc:

the top-right hover window will now always appear--previously, it would only pop up if the client had some ratings services, but this window now handles urls

harmonised 'known urls' view/copy menu to a single code location and added sorted url class labels to entries (which should reduce direct-file-url misclicks)

greatly sped up manage tags dialogs initial calculation of possible actions on a tag alteration event, particularly when the dialog holds 10k+ tags

greatly sped up the second half of this process, when the action choice is applied to the manage tag dialog's current media list

the buttons on the manage tags dialog action popup dialog will now only show a max of 25 rows on their tooltips

some larger->smaller selection events on large pages with many tags should be significantly faster

subscription popups should now 'blank' their network job controls when not working (rather than leaving them on the old job, and without flickery-ly removing the job control completely)

the file cache and gallery log summary controls now have ... ellipsized texts to reduce their max width

fixed an issue where larger 'overriding bandwidth' status wait times would sometimes show instead of legit regular smaller bandwidth wait times

removed a now-superfluous layer of buffering in the thumbnail grid drawing pipeline--it seems to have removed some slight lag/flicker

I may have fixed the issue where a handful of thumbs will sometimes remain undrawn after several fast scrolling events

gave the some-linux-flavours infinitely-expanding popup message problem another pass. there _should_ be an explicit reasonable max width on the thing now

added a 'html5lib not found!' notification to the network->downloaders menu if this library is missing (mostly for users running from source)

help->about now states if lz4 is present

gave 'running from source' help page another pass, including info on running a virtual environment

in file lookup scripts, the full file content now supports string transformations--if this is set to occur, the file will be sent as an addition POST parameter and the content-type set to 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'. this is a temp fix to see if we can get whatanime.ga working, and may see some more work

if the free space on the db dir partition is < 500MB, the program will not boot

if the free space on the db dir partition is < 1GB, the client will not sync repositories

on boot the client can now attempt to auto-heal a missing local_hashes table. it will give an appropriate error message

misc post-importing-cleanup refactoring

next week

I still have a few more small things I want to catch up on, but it isn't so urgent now, so I'd like to get started on the new 'searcher' object, which will be the final component of the downloader overhaul (it will convert the initial 'samus_aran' search phrase into an initialised search url). I feel good about it and may have some test ui for advanced users to play with by v319.

#release

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