Phil’s Newsletter #43

Bruised egotist

Previously on Phil’s Newsletter: We discussed generated adversarial networks (GANs) and Jess wrote about some Beatles tracks I picked.

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This week’s guest on OpenCV Weekly was Arnaud Bastide of Team Rocfort in OpenCV AI Competition 2021. They built a system to track and identify cows in the field, and have plans to include health monitoring and other smart features using AI. Next week: Joseph Nelson (no relation) returns with “What is Active Learning, and Why Does It Work?”

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You know that episode of Futurama where they’re randomly skipping forward in time? I feel like it was just Thursday. The brain fog and tiredness are unrelenting. I mention this only because I know I am not the only one feeling sleepy at noon and hiding it ain’t helping anyone.

Couple days ago I banged the ever-loving shit out of my wrist while slipping and falling on my way to the bathroom because my floor was too clean. I am never mopping again:

This is partly why the newsletter is late this week. Maintaining a full-time work schedule as a freelancer is already difficult, but this feels just awful today. Hard to type, hard to make coffee, hard to do a lot of stuff…. but we’ve got deadlines, folks.

I did an interview for the Craft of Code podcast last week, talking about RetroStrange TV which is our streaming TV channel, and LOFI SCIFI, the old time radio channel we run. Unsure when it will drop, but I’ll definitely let you know.

A truck full of flammable chemicals caught fire on the Bay Bridge on Thursday. It’s wildfire season, and so my air purifier was already in the orange before I even got out of bed. Once the fog abandoned us it flipped to purple, apparently the worst air quality color, and hasn’t much left that grim state since. Pray for mojo.

Night GANllery

Of course, because I have Brian Problems, I started another project with the GAN process we were talking about last week. This one is based on one of my favorite TV shows, Night Gallery. The GIF above is based on the episode “Little Black Bag.” I can practically hear the creepy-as-hell Gil Mellé theme playing.

Unlike the Twilight Zone, which I will entertain exactly zero ill notions about, Night Gallery was a bit hit and miss but has a delightful veneer of 1970s smarm wiped all over it. It (mostly) rules, and Rod Serling was a golden god. Later seasons of the show kinda fell off as the studio took power away from Mr. Serling, but even the bad ones are kind of fun, or at least kind of stupid. Follow the thread on Twitter to see new Night Gallery GANs as I create and post ‘em.

The Monster Association, Meeting Five

Meeting Five of my weirdzo audio-visual project THE MONSTER ASSOCIATION is now available on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube. This one is a little less abstract than the others but also more bleepy. Next time is going to be a little more… monster-y. Prepare yourself, mortal.

Divergent League Baseball Signup Sheet

The next season of Divergent League Baseball, the atemporal fantasy baseball league where we simulate past seasons and allow trades between teams is starting soon! Go sign up to manage a team.

The Good Links

This is a short week, we have too much work to do. But the good links are here for you.

• I was recently made aware of The Carpenters’ 1978 Star-Wars-adjacent cash-in TV special “Space Encounters” and now you have to know about it too

• Just when 2021 couldn’t be more ridiculous, “The Co-Founder Of Snopes Wrote Dozens Of Plagiarized Articles For The Fact-Checking Site”

• ‘NULL’ is a special kind of thing with computers- it doesn’t mean 0, it means ‘nothing.’ Security researcher Joseph Tartaro got ‘NULL’ as a personalized license plate, and it put him through hell

• I’m always fascinated by art-making-art, like this sequence of notes that draws a MIDI synthesizer with a MIDI synthesizer

• Phil bait alert: “Pro Wrestlers Forehead Scars [thread]” You don’t have to tell me twice

• Parker Molloy writes about something I’ve been thinking about recently- The Holiday Inn Express-ification of public discourse. Why do we fake expertise on the internet?

• All Elite Wrestling is in Chicago tonight (8/20), and the internet is losing their minds at the prospect of Chicago’s own CM Punk becoming All Elite after 10 years away from the ring. This might be the biggest pop in history.

• Speaking of surprising returns: Behold The Raspberry Pi BeBox (Not familiar with BeOS? Sit under the learning tree)

• Spatial computing news: Intel says it’s “winding down” the RealSense camera business but will keep selling stereo cameras for the time being. Good news for some of the smaller players in the space

• Painting VR is a great-looking painting… simulator? for VR as the name implies. It’s getting multiplayer support soon

• OnlyFans becomes the latest platform to turn against the sex work that made them millions of dollars, and is banning sexual content starting in October. Worst Halloween ever

• Mike Richards has resigned from the Jeopardy hosting job he hired himself to do after people found his shitty, unfunny, bigoted podcast

• Finally, in news that will surprise nobody who has ever worked in games or 3D spaces at all: Turns Out The Hardest Part of Making a Game is...Everything

See you next week. Same bat time same bat channel.

— Phil

Wizard Tower Gamma, South of Market, San Francisco, California, United States of America, Earth

08.20.2021