At 42° North, I do believe we’re rather much north of the northern horse latitudes but on this drear January day, Lake Michigan was putting on a good imitation of a languid ocean.
At 42° North, the sun still rises in January but never quite makes it out of bed.
Photos by Roman.
Photo / Graphic by Roman.
A life performed before
Entities that were never there
Regardless of Shrödinger
I’m here
Yip
Open AI and Director Jordan Clarke tell a story about an AI who wanted to be famous:
On the video’s Vimeo page, Clarke writes:
A story about an A.I. that wanted to be famous, also written and performed by an A.I. (paraphrased and edited with liberties from a human). Visualized by a human (me), flipping the norm of what we see in the AI-driven art world today. Special thanks to Amie Bennett for letting me bounce off all my ideas, Adam Kirschner for his nft bro performance, and Des Hume for his awesome music as well as featuring a track from the Midnight.
it’s nonsense! nonsense i tell you: utter bunkum!
the force fields are fully engaged
to send any and all
circling a wormhole drain
around a realm of imagination
where nothing and everything
is down the drain
including the drain
Photo / graphic by Roman.
From these imprisoning shadows.
A rustling creak creeps above
From a dread dimly seen
Thrills a chill of loosened bowels.
You really don’t want to know…
–Yip
Photo by Roman.
Photo by Roman.
Is that a cheap trick? It may not be precisely the same image that I posted several weeks ago but here again is a gas burner gussied-up as something far more dramatic and fanciful.
To be fair, sometimes doing this can be fun. Label a what-am-i-looking-at and the suggestion pops to the top amid a cloud of alternate possibilities, almost like a chord.
Did this do that for you? Well, whatever turns you on… I do like the image, as mundane as it may be. But twice may be too much and aliens too obvious.
Whatever. My alternate idea, discussing my humble opinion on the future prospects for human space travel, would have been seriously depressing.
Though maybe as fanciful.
People say we’ll muddle through but in truth we muddle ’till we’re through.
Photo by Roman.
Come to think of it, “waiting for the other shoe” to drop might be an apt description of this past year of 2022. I don’t mean to be discouraging, but waiting for the other shoe might well be a summary for the entire decade of the 2020s: the next plague, the next big storm, the next economic tailspin, the next big / little / escalating war, the next lying politician, the next wave of refugees whether from abroad or from home…
Whatever. May you have a happy 2023 anyway and if it’s not all happy then have it as happy as you can.
My first reaction upon seeing this shoe was not so globally dim. Rather I wondered about the story of how this shoe came to dangle. As the shoe shows no sign of wear, I wondered if the parents could really afford to have their child lose the shoes or whether the shoe display was in some way aspirational, to be someone who can discard shoes without a twinge in the pocketbook. Or was it a case of school yard bullying? Or maybe a disappointed package thief?
I’ll never know and you’ll never know but you can tell my state of mind by what comes to it… The world is an inkblot.
If this visage seems familiar, there are some possible reasons you’re not wrong. One is that I have indeed posted this very concrete lion some years ago, not to be confused with the lion I posted a few months ago. Another reason might be that you’ve seen a concrete lion very much like this one as a drinking fountain in Chicago’s iconic Water Tower at Chicago and Michigan. I’m not sure that these are identical but I do remember encountering the drinking fountain in the tower and thinking: “Oh!” But I could be wrong. Still, once upon a time, in the 1930s and 1940s most probably, this stone lion was also a fountain. And since it hasn’t been a fountain for a very long time, it is indeed wintertime for kitty.
So what brings forth this stone feline today? Well, as an image it has possibilities and one that I wanted to try was turning the photo into something resembling a sketch.
Yip Abides 