Modern Movies: The Dark Ages

I've been having a lot of trouble watching movies, and some TV shows, these days. Part of that is due to my eyes lacking enough rods to give me proper vision in dim light, but that's only part. I've talked about this with my family and friends and they agree that a lot of what their watching is darker than it used to be. 

The New York Times has a feature article (gift link) about this. It starts with a reference to the recent movie, The Devil Wears Prada 2. 

“The heartbreaking story of a woman who can no longer afford lamps in her office,” read one viral post, showing Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly of yore alongside a screenshot from the new dimly-lit trailer. “So did we just forget how to light movies?” asked another, above bright images from the 2006 film beside shadowy, shrouded shots from the sequel. Noting that the sequel employs the same director and cinematographer as the original, one poster lamented “that isn’t a skill issue it’s a choice. So why DO new movies insist on looking like that. Absolutely lifeless.”

That's someting I noticed when I saw Project Hail Mary recently; it was dim, even in the IMAX format. But there are other things going on. 

The article goes on to reference a YouTube video titled 'Why Movies Just Don't Feel 'Real' Any More" by Tom van der Linden. It's a bit on the nerdy side but I highly recommended. He talks about the various factors influencing the look of modern movies and makes some very incisive points, including the lack of depth-of-field in many shots. 

 

From the Times: 

For van der Linden, the blurry-background conundrum is exacerbated by “fake-looking C.G.I. elements.” He pointed to 2025’s “Jurassic World Rebirth”: Compared to the technically-jankier but actually-superior “Jurassic Park” (1993), the latest installment’s backgrounds are constantly out of focus. The environments — even in scenes shot on location — are rendered “faker” through digital visual effects that undermine the world-building. “Subconsciously, I’m not registering that landscape as a real place, and that detracts from the reality of the movie as a whole,” he said.

I've watched the video and found it quite illuminating (pun intended). It's definitely worth half and hour of your time, though it may make you a lot more ciritical about what you're seeing on screen.  

 

 

Featured Links - April 8, 2026

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A choppy bay

• The Next Coup Attempt. "And How to Stop It." An unsettling post from historian Timothy Snyder. 
• The Artemis Earth photo is incredible – but the one thing that nobody is telling you about it will blow your mind. 'The famous "Hello, World" photo by astronaut Reid Wiseman isn’t quite what you think.' I didn't figure it out until I read the article.
• How to Find Thunderbird Profile Location in Windows 11, 10, 8, 8.1, 7. I needed to figure this out because Thunderbird moved the profile folder on my wife's laptop and my backup program couldn't find it. This is a useful article for anyone using Thunderbird on Windows.
• The Lancet: Long COVID and Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Disease. "A recent study (see PLoS Med.: Association Between COVID-19 Vaccination and Sudden Death in Apparently Healthy Younger Individuals) found no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in young healthy adults, but they did find a strong link between recent COVID infection and an increased risk of sudden cardiac death." 
• Data Centres Are on Track to Wreck the Planet. Can We Stop Them? "They will guzzle more water and power than the world can afford—for an AI video of your cat as an astronaut."
• Any USB drive or cable you plug in might be a silent killer. "As if we didn’t already have enough malware to worry about, malicious hackers and state-sponsored cybercrime teams are turning ordinary-looking USB drives and cables into weapons that can infect or fry — within a single second — any computer or electronic component you plug them into."
• Experiments refute dark matter claim. "The results of her analysis, which have excluded the dark matter explanation with greater confidence, were published in Physics Review Letters ...". 
• Canadian couple shows how a $40 weekly food budget is possible. "Michelle Nijdam, 31, has been gaining a following online after she started sharing how she sticks to a strict $160 monthly budget (or $40 weekly budget) while living in Vancouver — one of the most expensive cities in Canada. On her YouTube channel, @MichellesHomemaking, she talks about the ups and downs of having a tight budget while sharing some handy tips."
• Gambling on War and Death. "Polymarket allows anonymous accounts to bet on everything — but with increasing attention to war. Will a tanker be seized? When will the next drone strike occur? Gamblers can even look at maps of Ukrainian villages and play the odds on which neighbourhood of innocent civilians will be hit. It is literally about making a killing on killing. And it is also about manipulating the market in frightening ways."
• The 51st State Fantasy Is Over: How King Charles and Mark Carney Put An End To Trump's Desire To Invade Canada. "How Trump’s annexation campaign collapsed against 200 years of history, one king, and a prime minister who played the long game."
• Art UK. "Connecting you to art. Art UK is a unique digital experience that connects everyone with the UK's public art collections. We digitally unite one million artworks from 3,500 institutions – museums, libraries, town halls, hospitals – as well as public art in our streets such as sculptures and murals."
• Why U.S. Gatling Guns Are Not Stopping Iran’s Shahed Drones. "In any discussion of drone defense, Gatling-type guns are often presented as a trump card. These rapid-fire weapons, originally developed to defend U.S. warships against sea-skimming missiles, can easily down bigger and faster threats than a 120 mph Shahed drone. On paper they look devastatingly effective, and news reports speak enthusiastically of their “shredding Iranian drones.” But they are not a magic wand to make all drones disappear, and some Shaheds are getting through."
• America forgot how to make a classified nuclear warhead ingredient. "The U.S. government forgot how to make a classified component of its own nuclear warheads, then spent $92 million figuring it out again. The material is called Fogbank, and almost everything about it is classified — its composition, its purpose, and how it's manufactured." Just think of all the money they could have saved if they'd had a documentation library,

Featured Links - September 9, 2025

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Some backyard flowers

• Setting Type. "Exploring book cover layout from the illustrator's perspective." An article by the great cover artist, Michael Whelan. 
  
• 20 Years of "Being Poor". A post by John Scalzi reflecting on one of his most-read posts that sadly is still relevant. 
• Who Is Mark Carney, Really? "We hired the guy with the best résumé. He’s now using power in ways few other prime ministers have dared." I am concerned about his stance on environmental matters. 
• Why Does the Right Reject Progress? "The perverse push to make America miserable again." A post by economist Paul Krugman, that ties into the next article. 
• Science Under Siege: A Talk With Peter Hotez and Michael Mann. "Lysenko comes to America. Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened."
• The More Astronomers Watch Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, the Weirder It Gets. No, it's not an alien probe, but it is strange. 

Featured Links - July 29, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. This post is (mostly) politics-free.

A farm north of Oshawa

• I started using NotebookLM with Microsoft Word and I’m not going back. I could have used this in my last job. 
• The Painter of the Right. "Thomas Kinkade’s paintings show conservatives a world they have already won." Unfortunately, the documentary mentioned in the article doesn't appear to be available for streaming. 
• Remembering Descent, the once-popular, fully 3D 6DOF shooter. "Descent is a big part of gaming history, but not many people talk about it." 
• The death of the projection booth. "As movie theatres adapt new technology for screenings, the art of feeding film through a projector is fading to black."
• 12 Fresh Tomato Pasta Recipes We Can’t Stop Making. Our garden looks like it will produce a bumper crop of tomatoes this year, so I'm looking forward to trying some of these recipes.
• I took my e-book library back from Amazon with this self-hosted app. "BookLore turns ebook chaos into a modern, streamlined library you control completely." I might try this. I'm finding the Kindle app on my iPad Mini almost unusable for managing my books because the Collections view won't show a collection's contents in a list format. 
• Social media is dead – here’s what comes next. "A new information ecosystem is on the rise, featuring closer connections, cosy media and worker-owned websites, writes Annalee Newitz."
• Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97. "A mathematician by training, he acquired a devoted following with songs that set sardonic lyrics to music that was often maddeningly cheerful." Noted with sadness. 

Featured Links - July 7, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

A hydrangea in our backyard

• 745 km from civilization: Exploring North America's most isolated road. "Quebec's Trans-Taiga Road ends at a point so remote that a broken tire might require an emergency plane landing to deliver a replacement." This definitely not a trip I will be making. 
• The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding. "The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding and autocratization, in particular in the U.S." This may be useful to more than scholars. 
• “This Plane Just Did the Impossible”: Historic Supersonic Flight Silences the Sky with Zero Sonic Boom for First Time Ever. "The aviation industry witnessed a monumental breakthrough on February 10, 2025, as Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 aircraft accomplished what many experts deemed impossible. Flying over the Mojave Desert at speeds exceeding the sound barrier, the aircraft achieved something unprecedented in aviation history: supersonic flight without generating a sonic boom. This revolutionary achievement has opened new possibilities for the future of air travel." 
• A London Dentist Just Cracked a Geometric Code in Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. "A hidden triangle in the vitruvian man could finally explain one of da Vinci's greatest works."
• A Runestone That May Be North America’s Oldest Turns Up in a Canada Forest. "Researchers spent years quietly studying a stone carved with 255 runes and the image of a boat found in Ontario. Now, revealing the stone’s existence, they’re asking the public for help."
• Bogged down (gift link). "Ireland’s peat trade fuels conflict with Europe over climate and conservation." Excellent and well illustrated article. 
• Why Pasta Tastes Better at Restaurants, According to a Former Line Cook. "No need to reach for more salt or even fat to achieve restaurant-quality pasta at home; instead, follow these simple yet effective steps for perfect pasta." I have yet to cook the perfect pasta meal, but I will keep trying.
• Britain’s Three Week Failure to Fix Stranded F-35 in India Provides an Opportunity For Russia’s Su-57 Stealth Fighter. I think it would be a very good thing if Canada scrapped plans to buy any F-35s, 

Featured Links - November 18, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The marina waiting for winter

How to Stay Covid Safe When in Hospital. "A guide to navigating the risk of hospital acquired Covid - as well as how to manage overall risk of nosocomial infections and hospital derived complications." Reading this article may save your life.

Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges Hall discusses Norman Rockwell's famous painting. "Ruby Bridges became a civil rights icon when she was 6. Yet she didn't realize it for decades. The world knows her as the little girl in Norman Rockwell's famous 1963 painting, The Problem We All Live With, a black child being escorted to a white New Orleans school by federal marshals."

What Is RSS? If you aren't using an RSS reader, you're online life is a lot more complicated than it needs to be. I use Feedly and would have a hard time living without it.

In Memoriam: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928–2024. Kurtz was the co-inventor of BASIC, arguably the most influential computer language. It was the second one I learned, after encountering FORTRAN in university.

Half-Life 2 remaster drops; no word on Half-Life 3. "Half-Life 2 RTX, a remaster of the original game featuring all kinds of fancy, cutting-edge graphics tech, has been revealed in full force and looks absolutely beautiful." I can't wait to play this! It's too bad there's no release date yet.

Trump Claims a Mandate, But He’s Wrong And It Will Cost Him. "Trump is already overreaching, giving Democrats a clear opening."

The Ghosts of John Tanton. "Today’s contentious immigration debate is the construct of one man’s effort to halt overpopulation, brace for climate change and preserve “European” culture. Now climate change is amplifying environmental concerns that have always run through the white supremacy and the anti-immigration movements. Experts warn that extremists who seize on global warming to justify violence are part of a far right trend to reclaim environmentalism as their own."

Featured Links - August 26, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The east marina

• They don't make readers like they used to. Author Charles Stross on how culture, readers, and fandom, have changed over the last 50 years. (Charlie's blog may take a while to load but it's worth the wait). 
• Scientists Discover “Spatial Grammar” in DNA: Breakthrough Could Rewrite Genetics Textbooks. "The research could reshape scientists’ understanding of gene regulation and how genetic variations may influence gene expression in development or disease."
• Going Medieval. "Medieval History, Pop Culture, Swearing." A blog from author Elanor Janega. 
• The surprising science of coffee and its effect on both body and mind (archive.ph link). "The latest research on caffeine reveals why coffee and decaf can be so good for your health, but energy drinks can be lethal."
• Open Source Game Clones. "This site tries to gather open-source or source-available remakes of great old games in one place. "
• How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche. "More than 100 million people visit the retailer for their groceries — and gas and TVs and gold bars and pet coffins — but saving money may not be the only motive." We shop at Costco and would find it very hard to do without it.
• That time Roosevelt vacationed in northern Ontario. "History enthusiast Jason Marcon brings us back to Roosevelt’s fishing trip in this part of the province at the height of WWII." Despite growing up in northern Ontario, I never heard of this. It would have made a wonderful history class in high school. 
• Inside Boeing’s factory lapses that led to the Alaska Air blowout. A major piece of journalism from the Seattle Times. Seriously good reporting on an important topic.

Featured Links - August 6, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Cover for Torus 3 by Taral Wayne

• Taral Wayne (1951-2024). A tribute to the late Toronto fanartist from Mike Glyer at File 770. Taral provided several covers to my fanzine, Torus, when I was publishing it in the late 1980s. His cover for Torus 3 is above. 
• The Indomitable Covid Virus. An overview of where we stand with the current COVID wave (it's getting worse) and vaccine development (the research is promising but the development is far too slow). 
• Consensus.app. This is an AI-powered search engine that gets its answers solely from published scientific research. It looks like it will be very useful for certain search topics. Find out more about it in the Cool Tools newsletter.
• More of America’s homeless are clocking into jobs each day. 'Homelessness, already at a record high last year, appears to be worsening among workers." It's happening here in Canada too.
• The missing introduction to A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown. The book will be published later this month. Brown says: "This is the most personal work I have written, a distillation of a lifetime of outdoor exploration, reading, and living into a manifesto for rethinking how we live in the world and care for it—and for each other."
• How I learned to use my PC with a broken wrist. "After fracturing my wrist in a recent fall, I had to figure out how to use the accessibility features built into Windows to work and write."
• Surprising element found in traces of Tycho Brahe’s alchemy lab confounds scientists. "While Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is best known for his celestial discoveries made in the 16th century — before the invention of the telescope — he was also an alchemist who brewed secret medicines for elite clients. But what exactly Brahe worked on in his alchemical laboratory, located beneath his castle residence and observatory called Uraniborg, has be
  en something of a historical enigma."
• Mad Magazine at the Norman Rockwell Museum. "I visited the fantastic exhibit about Mad Magazine at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Its collection of Mad original art and artifacts is absolutely amazing." I would love to see this exhibition. I wonder if it will be travelling to other galleries?
• Take your dog on a "sniff walk". "I recently learned how important sniffing is for dogs, and it's changed my entire approach to dog walking for the better!" Our dog is a small dog, close to the ground, and spends most of her time outdoors on "walks" sniffing everything she can get close to. It obviously matters to her a lot more than to us.

Visit Group of Seven sites in Northern Ontario

The Group of Seven were an important and influential school of Canadian landscape artists. They aren't particularly well known outside of Canada, though that is changing, but in Canada, they are THE artists that people will mention if you ask them to name a Canadian artist. And for good reason too; their paintings are lovely.

Overlooking Lake Superior

They travelled extensively, especially in Ontario, and many of their paintings are of scenes in Northern Ontario and around Sault Ste. Marie where I grew up.

Here's a site created by Sault Tourism that allows you to view some of the locations that they made famous and get information about how you can visit the area to see those sites in person. I highly recommend doing so; the Sault is a great place to visit and the scenery of Algoma is awe inspiring. 

Featured Links - March 11, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Birds on the lake

• Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power (gift link). "AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up."
• Dune: Part Two Asks Questions That the Original Never Dared. "Denis Villeneuve's new Dune film alters the arcs of key characters, but not everyone gets such careful treatment." This article echoes my feelings about the movie. 
• ‘The feelings are still there’: A disinformation expert on the legacy of the ‘Freedom Convoy’. "TVO Today speaks with University of Maryland researcher Caroline Orr Bueno about conspiracies, Russian influence, and why the convoy is part of a longer-term movement."
• Babylon 5 Was the Ultimate Exercise in Plotting vs. Pantsing. "With a possible reboot on the horizon, let's take a look back at what made the classic series so profoundly unique." Babylon 5 is still my favourite science fiction TV series. I do hope Straczynski gets to do his reboot.
• Losing Ice. "The trillions of tons of ice that moderates our climate is melting away." We could have ice-free Arctic winters before the end of the decade. This will have major effects on climate and the environment.
• The uncomfortable reality of life on Earth after we breach 1.5°C. (archive.ph link). "Passing 1.5°C of global warming isn't just a political disaster, it will have dire consequences for us all, as those living on the front line already know."
• Conscious AI Is the Second-Scariest Kind. "A cutting-edge theory of mind suggests a new type of doomsday scenario." The article is by Peter Watts, one of the best SF writers around, and whose stories are widely read in the AI development community.
• The Artist Who Visited 'Dune' and 'The Most Important Science Fiction Art Ever Created'. An appreciation of John Schoenherr's wonderful art for the Analog serialization of Dune with many illustrations. 
• US prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022, officials say. "In late 2022, the US began “preparing rigorously” for Russia potentially striking Ukraine with a nuclear weapon, in what would have been the first nuclear attack in war since the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly eighty years before, two senior administration officials told CNN."

Featured Links - July 17, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Downtown Port Hope

Sorry, Elon: Chinese Company Becomes the World's First to Launch Methane Rocket to Orbit. "The Zhuque-2 rocket beat other methalox-fueled rockets, such as SpaceX's Starship, to orbit."

When Norman Rockwell Got Woke: The Story Behind 'The Problem We All Live With'. "In the 1960s, America's most famous artist defiantly transformed himself from an inadvertent white supremacist into a radical civil rights activist."

‘Heart-stopping’: censored pages of history of Elizabeth I reappear after 400 years. "British Library uses new technique to uncover passages of Camden’s Annals, the first official account of Elizabeth’s reign." 

The Top 14 Android Secret Security Codes You Need to Know. "Looking for the best Android secret codes and hacks? Here are the top USSD codes to sharpen your smartphone's security and privacy." I've had an Android phone for more than a decade, and I didn't know about these codes.

Potential Setback for Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin as Rocket Engine Explodes in Test. "The company's BE-4 engine is meant to power ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket, the inaugural flight of which has already been delayed several times."

Stunning Wet Bulb Temperature Update. "The Danger Zone is Far Lower Than We Thought." This is important to know considering the extreme hot weather that many of us have been experiencing.

Microsoft Announces a New Default Font, Aptos. It's about time; I dislike Calibri.

Featured Links - January 30, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

CJ relaxing on Saturday night

• The Mystery of the Dune Font. "Putting a name to the typeface that defined the visual identity of the science fiction series and its author, Frank Herbert"
• Long COVID Has Never Been Taken Seriously. Here’s Where It Left Us. "I’m 28 and one of many disabled from the pandemic. We need a public health plan for this." Even if you're not into typography, it's worth looking at for the many illustrations and cover scans.
• The Specter of 2016: McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America. "We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves."
• Rare Giacometti chandelier bought for £250 in London may sell for £7m. "Piece acquired by English painter in antiques shop in 1960s has been confirmed as lost work by Swiss sculptor."
• PSA: Don’t make the same mistake I did of fully relying on Chrome’s Tab Groups just yet. "Saving groups for later is "broken", despite the presence of a save button."
• Dutch meteorologists say Musk's Starlink network disrupts weather forecasting. "Meteorologists are very concerned about the rate at which Elon Musk is expanding his Starlink satellite network. The rapidly expanding network, with new users every day, is disrupting satellite measurements that are indispensable for accurate weather forecasts, Ad Stoffelen of the Dutch meteorological institute KNMI told NU.nl."
• Dancing on the World’s Thin Crust: On the MIT Press’s Radium Age Series. More books in the MIT Press's wonderful series of reprints of early 20th-century science fiction and fantasy.
• The Champlain Sea. "Canada is known for many large bodies of water. Great Slave Lake, Lake Winnipeg and, of course, the Great Lakes. There was one lake though, that was so large, it was called a sea. While portions of it still exists, the sea itself is long gone. That sea shaped Canada, long before any cities appeared on the landscape."

A Group of Seven Adventure

No, this isn't about some new Marvel project. The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian artists, prominent in the early 20th century, who came to epitomize Canadian landscape art. Although loosely based in Toronto, many of their best-known paintings were of scenes from Northern Ontario.

A Group of Seven Adventure shows locations from Thunder Bay to Toronto where they painted some of their pictures. It would make a wonderful drive, assuming you have a few days to do it slowly and take in the scenery.  

Here's a picture I took many years ago of one of the sites mentioned in the article, Pancake Bay.

Pancake Bay

Featured Links - December 19, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

Swans on Frenchman's Bay

• What Is QAnon? No One Told You THIS About Conspiracy 2022. Here's a long article that explains what QAnon is and what its adherents believe. 
• Severe COVID could cause markers of old age in the brain. "Key genes that are active in the brains of older people are also active in the brains of people who developed serious COVID-19."
• On Joining Mastodon. "From my vast experience of three weeks, a guide to diving in" from journalism professor Jeff Jarvis. This is one of the best articles I've seen so far on how to get set up on Mastodon. 
• The best science images of 2022. "An almighty eruption, the cosmos remastered, swirling cells and more."
• Try Canva Docs — a new way to write visually. "Canva Docs is an intriguing new alternative to Google Docs. Along with text it lets you stick almost anything inside a document — slides, graphics, photos, and videos. Launched yesterday, Dec 7, it’s already more versatile than GDocs, Word and other traditional writing tools, though it has some limitations."
• Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2022. "Our reviewers each picked their top contenders for the best books of the year, ranging from glittering alternate history to meditative hopepunk, and elegiac science fiction to apocalyptic horror. We’ve got blood magicians, multiverse prophets, elven detectives, and much more."
• Brains, Braun, or Both: What Drove the Creation of Modern Dog Breeds. "Genetic variants associated with brain development help distinguish breeds designed for different physical tasks, a new study reports."
 

Norman Rockwell's Political Art

I've always liked Norman Rockwell's art ever since encountering it on the covers of Saturday Evening Post when I was young. I know he is sometimes regarded as bland and "just an illustrator" but if you take a closer look at his art, there's much more to it than that.

Here's a YouTube video that looks at some of his political art (yes, he did some political paintings). I found it quite fascinating. 

Norman Rockwell is known for his paintings which, many people will say, are far from daring. Some will say that they’re outright boring. He illustrated the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, a very popular magazine during the first half of the century. His art was made to be as “mass-market” as possible, which is why it’s unsurprisingly apolitical and uncontroversial. Yet, Rockwell has done political paintings and social commentary and, in this video, we’ll take a look at two projects of his which had a political undertone: The Four Freedoms series (with notably Freedom From Want) during WWII and The Problem We All Live With, which depicts the story of Ruby Bridges during the New Orleans Desegregation Crisis in 1960.

 

AI Imaging Tech Will Change Everything

Pardon the hyperbole in the title, but in this case, I think it's justified.

In the last few months, I've been hearing more and more about a new AI-based imaging technology (known as imaging synthesis modelling or ISM). You may have heard of programs like DALL-E 2 or Midjourney or seen some of the images that people have created using them. For example, here's a cat picture created by SF author John Scalzi using Midjourney.  

Cat by John Scalzi using Midjourney

As I person with no artistic talent other than photography, I find this quite impressive. 

Now there's a new ISM tool called Stable Diffusion that is getting a lot of notice because it's open source and can be run on a moderately powerful home PC (my son's gaming rig would have no trouble running it). And because it's open source, people are finding all sorts of interesting uses for it. Ars Technica has published a long article that looks at what Stable Diffusion can do, what people are using it for now, where it might go in the future, and some of the implications. Some of them are rather disquieting.

As hinted at above, Stable Diffusion's public release has raised alarm bells among people who fear its cultural and economic impact. Unlike DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion's training data (the "weights") are available for anyone to use without any hard restrictions. The official Stable Diffusion release (and DreamStudio) includes automatic "NSFW" filters (nudity) and an invisible tracking watermark embedded in the images, but these restrictions can easily be circumvented in the open source code. This means Stable Diffusion can be used to create images that OpenAI currently blocks with DALL-E 2: propaganda, violent imagery, pornography, images that potentially violate corporate copyright, celebrity deepfakes, and more. In fact, there are already some private Discord servers dedicated to pornographic output from the model.

But wait. There's more!

The synthesis technology used by tools like Stable Diffusion isn't limited to just images. People are already working on adapting it to video. 

 Stable Diffusion and other models are already starting to take on dynamic video generation and manipulation, so expect photorealistic video generation via text prompts before too long. From there, it's logical to extend these capabilities to audio and music, real-time video games, and 3D VR experiences. Soon, advanced AI may do most of the creative heavy lifting with just a few suggestions. Imagine unlimited entertainment generated in real-time, on demand. "I expect it to be fully multi-modal," said Mostaque, "So you can create anything you can imagine, like the Star Trek holodeck experience."

ISMs are also a dramatic form of image compression: Stable Diffusion takes hundreds of millions of images and squeezes knowledge about them into a 4.2GB weights file. With the correct seed and settings, certain generated images can be reproduced deterministically. One could imagine using a variation of this technology in the future to compress, say, an 8K feature film into a few megabytes of text. Once that's the case, anyone could compose their own feature films that way as well. The implications of this technology are only just beginning to be explored, so it may take us in wild new directions we can't foresee at the moment

Hold on to your hats, folks. To paraphrase Al Jolson: "You ain't seen nothin' yet."

Featured Links - July 29, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A peaceful afternoon at the Topsail Island marina

• A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon. "Through these illustrations, I hope to commemorate the complexity of the Aztec Pantheon, make the academic research more accessible, and show how this civilization is still alive in our global culture. With luck, they will also help you see this society with the wonderment of your inner child’s eyes, just like I did all those years ago."
• Why the Arctic Is Warming 4 Times as Fast as the Rest of Earth. "The loss of sea ice is exposing darker waters, which absorb more of the sun’s energy. It’s a devastating feedback loop with major consequences for the planet."
• ‘There’s no one long Covid’: Experts struggle to make sense of the continuing mystery. "A group of virologists gathered to ask and answer questions about what causes long Covid, how to predict who gets it, and how to treat it."
• The unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images — the alt text descriptions. "A team in Baltimore was responsible for the words that made the stunning photos accessible to everyone."
• Best Practices for Graphics in Modern Publishing Pipelines. "The following best practices for creating and publishing graphics are application-agnostic and can be done in everything from open source software to top-flight, tools-integrated component content management systems."
• Could machine learning fuel a reproducibility crisis in science? "‘Data leakage’ threatens the reliability of machine-learning use across disciplines, researchers warn."
• Tonga Eruption Filled The Atmosphere With Water, Potentially Damaging The Ozone Layer. It could also contribute to global warming over the next decade.

Syd Barrett the Artist

Syd Barrett is best known for being one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, but he was also a very talented artist. Here's a short video of some of his art. I was vaguely aware that he was an artist as well as a musician but had no idea he was as good as this video demonstrates.

 

Featured Links - June 28, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Astronomers Radically Reimagine the Making of the Planets. "Observations of faraway worlds have forced a near-total rewrite of the story of our solar system."
• Rarely Seen Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien Portray a Lush ‘Lord of the Rings’ Landscape. "The Tolkien Estate recently published a trove of rare, unpublished art by the famed fantasy author on its website."
• Monkeypox Has Undergone “Accelerated Evolution”, Mutating At Unprecedented Rates. "The ongoing monkeypox outbreak is unprecedented. This research could help to explain why."
• Covid hasn’t given up all its secrets. Here are 6 mysteries experts hope to unravel. Two years into the pandemic, there is still a lot to learn about the virus.
• The 100 Most Popular Emojis Explained. "There are so many emojis, it can be difficult to know what they all mean. Here are the most popular emojis explained."
• State of CSS 2022. "Web styling features of today and tomorrow, as seen at Google IO 2022, plus some extras."
• America Is Sliding Into the Long Pandemic Defeat. "In the face of government inaction, the country’s best chance at keeping the crisis from spiraling relies on everyone to keep caring." Another essential read from Ed Yong.

Public Domain Art from Artvee

If you're a regular gallery or museum goer, you may want to check out Artvee, a site for viewing and downloading public-domain art. You can browse by category (for example, landscapes), movement, culture, or artist, or view curated collections. The collection of NASA Visions of the Future posters is one that I especially liked.

Given that all the art is in the public domain, you won't find much by current or 20th-century artists, but there's certainly enough here to keep you browsing for hours.