Month: January 2023

“(famous)”

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.

The Mother Ship Arrives

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.

Waiting for the Other Shoe

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.