Music Friday

Check out little baby Robert Smith in this concert. THE CURE Apeldoorn, Netherlands 18 Jul 1980 FULL CONCERT

Overlook Porch Fest 2023

Fun little day of music going on here in Portland this Sunday. If you are in the area check it out. I’m playing at 1pm somewhere on this map ;)

Life before cellphones

Little write up where the author talks to people about what they did before cell phones and the internet. One story I have is one of my band was playing with someone in their 20s and they were asking what it was like to play music in the 90s. To them, it was this magical time where you could play a show shitty, get wasted out in public, do all sorts of stupid shit and it was gone the next day. And it was. To them, every show, every time they go out, they have to be ON because everything is recorded. Fuck up one show, and thats all the exists about you. Get drunk and pass out at the bar? That’s the image every saves of you on their damn phones. They were literally getting teary eyed hearing us talk about what hellions we were in bands back then. Anyways, get off my porch.

“Recently, a number of my younger coworkers expressed shock that I was able to complete a master’s degree while I held a full-time job. It was easy: I worked at a literary agency during the day, I got off work at 5 p.m., and I studied at night. The key was that this was just after the turn of the millennium. “But what would you do when you had work emails?” these coworkers asked. “I didn’t get work emails,” I said. “I barely had the internet in my apartment.”

“Sean: We really would just drive to someone’s house and see what they were doing. You and a couple people would be in the car and you’d be like, “Let’s go by Brian and Mike’s.”

Matt: Either we’d made plans or we’d just go to the same few places. During the week it was the Front Page in Dupont and GG Flips, or on Thursdays or Fridays it was Lulu’s on M Street. Someone I knew would be there.

Sean: There were only six places you’d go and someone would be there. Birds and La Poubelle, across from the Scientology Celebrity Centre. And then like four other places.”

Sally: Sometimes you’d do a 30, 45-minute call with someone. That’s a big part of your night.

Dan: You’d tuck the phone under your chin while you wandered the apartment.

Matt: If you couldn’t find the handset, you’d push a button on the base so it beeped.

Nicole: I was definitely a phone person. I could stay on the phone with a friend while we were both doing chores, whatever.

Sally: Now, if someone calls me on the phone, I’m like, “How violent of you to call me.”

If I could go back in time and blow up the internet before it started, I totally would. The movie would paint me as a villian trying to destroy this amazing, world saving technology. But actually I am from the future with the whole, “You know not what you have wrought!” dialog lines. LOL, yeah, too much coffee this morning I guess…

Oceanside quick study

Just a rough edit of a snap from Oceanside, Oregon. Working on an iPad is still garbage in 2023 FWIW…

Make Your Renders Unnecessarily Complicated

This is some funny stuff if you know anything about CG or render engines.

I did a lens in Octane once following a tut and it was an interesting experiment. This person goes way next level though.

The results are pretty interesting as well.

Good lord, AI is now in Squarespace.

“Write a paragraph about digital versus film photography using dark humor.” The web is gonna be nothing but this shit in under 2 months.

“Film versus digital photography - a battle as old as time itself, or at least as old as film and digital cameras. It's like that eternal struggle between black and white movies and Technicolor marvels. Film photography, with its pretentiousness and hipster vibes, making every snapshot look like a vintage masterpiece. You know you're in the presence of a true artist when they whip out their clunky film camera and start mumbling about the joy of waiting weeks to get their photos developed. On the other hand, digital photography is like a shameless selfie addict on Instagram, snapping away without a care in the world. Instant gratification, baby! Who needs soul and depth when you can slap on a filter, call it art, and gather a hundred likes before lunch? So, take your pick - the slow, "real" art of film or the instantaneous, self-gratifying world of digital. Both will capture your memories, but only one will make you look superior while doing it.”

Updates and all of that

Yeesh, been a busy summer out the gate. Bunch of music projects going on, lots of interesting work and doing a personal project as well. So not a lot of time to spare ATM. As always, I have a bunch of portfolio updates I wanna add but can’t find the time, lol. Anyways, here is a shot from a shoot I went on last Sunday.

And have some music as well!

The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

Annnnd it begins. AI trained on AI spins out and becomes totally worthless. That, plus the internet being flooded with AI generated content will be interesting.

“Specifically looking at probability distributions for text-to-text and image-to-image AI generative models, the researchers concluded that “learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse — a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution … this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning.

“Over time, mistakes in generated data compound and ultimately force models that learn from generated data to misperceive reality even further,” wrote one of the paper’s leading authors, Ilia Shumailov, in an email to VentureBeat. “We were surprised to observe how quickly model collapse happens: Models can rapidly forget most of the original data from which they initially learned.”

In other words: as an AI training model is exposed to more AI-generated data, it performs worse over time, producing more errors in the responses and content it generates, and producing far less non-erroneous variety in its responses. “

Oli Kellett-Cross Road Blues

Some really nice cityscapes here by Oli Kellett. Nice use of lighting.

Update time

Sometimes the little updates make it all better ;)

New Personal Project: Deliberate Acts of Stillness

Just finished up a personal photography project I started in May in Yachats, Oregon called, “Deliberate Acts of Stillness”. I series of Landscapes I made while down there trying to explore some different photographic techniques. Links to here on the Site and on Behance.

Photoshop Beta

So we have been testing the crap out of the new AI stuff in the Photoshop Beta and there is some pretty interesting stuff going on for sure. The “Remove” tool is the biggest improvement since the Healing Brush was introduced, what almost 20 years ago now?

This is just the first swipe. While not perfect, it’s getting us like 80% of the way there.

The new AI fill was just added this AM and I just went to extend the BG of an AI image I generated for a recording of one of my bands. While it’s mostly screaming jibberish, it’s a start and could give us something to poke and prod around with. Need more testing and I need more coffee.

Between this and getting AI running in Houdini, there is some very interesting times ahead for sure. Getting that all set up is the next “Tinker Time” for me for sure.

Can you find the wolves?

“SCORSESE: I’m old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time. Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.” He was 83. At the time, I said, “What does he mean?” Now I know what he means.”

Testing new photo technique

Trying out some different techniques with a ND filter. Starting to wrap my head around it a little better.

New Stuff!

Holy crap, would you look at that, I finally got around to adding more stuff to the portfolio today. Thanks to the client who pushed out to EOD, you know who you are, LOL!