Daub

For very long documents Word can be very difficult to maintain. Anything that requires you first write in simple text and then compiles is preferred. I tried Skrivenr, but found it old, clunky, buggy and poorly designed. I was far more productive in LaTex, but encountered problems when converting to Word (which most publishers prefer). Sure I tried Pandoc, but maintaining flow between versions of my book was a small hell.

In the end, I believe that there is no easy solution.

Typst has excellent collaboration tools. Both Typst and Overleaf do not support Doc export, but pdf to doc is relatively easy.

As a university lecturer, I have interviewed many people… academics and admins. I have taught in many S E Asian universities and multi-lingualism is the norm, with English assumed to be the ‘Lingua franca’. Almost everyone I interview claims to have ‘excellent’ skills in written and spoken English. Almost none of them could produce so much as a single paragraph of English that did not burn my eyes.

Prior to starting writing my first book, I had already accumulated some experience in academic writing. I thought it would be a doddle. I can honestly say that it was one of the most demanding experiences of my life.

The worst thing is the degree to which I was blind to my own shortcomings… just like all those people I interviewed.

Moral of the story… "writing is easy; you just stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead" (Gene Fowler).

> So the country bands were aware of the new style of jazz but most people had never actually heard any and had to play what they imagined jazz to be, mostly based off verbal descriptions.

This I find fascinating. Misunderstandings (i.e. partial or third hand accounts) of ‘exotic’ art forms have played a vital part in the development of western art: Picasso ‘misunderstood’ African art to produce Cubism. William Blake ‘misunderstood’ Michelangelo to produce his etchings. Van Gogh ‘misunderstood’ Japanese prints to produce his paintings.

Well I would avoid my father’s meathod if I were you. It did not work.

I am now a teacher, and the task you describe got me thinking. It would be tempting to teach the association of letters with their related visual patterns of dash/dots. However, a 10 year old might do better if they learned the sound-forms of the letters as discrete entities, in the same way that they leaned the shape-form of the alphabet.

Little mentioned is the fact that the three crumb brothers had two sisters. Neither of them agreed to take part in the movie, and very little is known about them.

Nope. It's all gone. Bless you dad.

My father, who was almost certainly autistic, would try to teach me morse code by whistling all his conversations with me. This would go on for days without spoken communication.

Are there any images of this tunic anywhere? These articles/papers seem always shy of sharing the money shot with their readers.

> So the point of looking "painterly" is that it looks like the art was done manually by a craftsman

I think the core issue is the difference between the digital and the analog as mediums. My understanding is that the computor is not a medium in the real sense. Rather (for the most part) it is a meta-medium: a medium that impersonates other mediums. It impersonates the photographers darkroom, a typewriter, a movie editing station etc.

TFA describes a more effective way to impersonate. It is no more a replacement of a painting than a photograph of my wife is a replacement of my wife.

> But as that gets more common, there will be added value in doing whatever they can't do, because only that will look truly human.

Here I would agree. Standing in front of a real painting is an entirely different experience to looking at a digital emulation of a painting on a screen. My new problem as an art teacher is that I find myself talking to students who claim to have seen the work of (for example) Michelangelo, yet I know they have never visited Italy.

As a painter, most of the technical details are lost on me, though I get the gist.

Looking at the results, it seems that the author defines a base color (green for the leaves) and moves up and down in brightness using what amounts to a multiplication for the shadows and an add for the lights. The result feels a bit harsh and unnatural.

I would suggest that he also plays a bit with the hue values.

1. That he darkens the lights but moves the green towards yellow.

2. That he lightens the darks, but moves the green towards blue.

Thanks

Prtty much echoing what you said, in this video Cecila McGough, who has schizophrenia, talks about how important it is that people don't do anything to confirm her hallucinations.

https://youtu.be/7csXfSRXmZ0?si=GT6zn_Sytcfw011H

> Good engineers understand the stakeholders’ needs…

In my experience, this can take two very different forms:

1. Being observant of a stakeholder’s stated needs.

2. Being confident enough to tell a stakeholder what their needs should be.

On a pedantic note, I would prefer the term ‘effective’ engineer to ‘good’ engineer. The later sounds like a judgment on their moral character.

Didn’t he also say "ni"?

The literature of creativity rakes playfulness very seriously. It is playfulness that creates productive association between two apparently disparate elements. Playfulness evolved in the mammalian brain precisely for the purpose of learning new things.

The author of TFA is right to position it at the beginning of the creative process. When the fun is over, skills, craftsmanship and problem solving need to take over before the final outcome becomes real.

> Anyhow, in my late aunt's case, her central vision was useless long before her peripheral vision could give out. So she learned, somehow, to do things like read her smartphone using only her peripheral vision.

All I can say is wow.

Is this research not stating the obvious?

As a painter I would differentiate background from foreground by decreasing its saturation, lightness and hue local contrast, softening edges, decreasing neighboring regional contrast and Lessing its average color values in relation to the foreground. Painters have been doing this for hundreds of years.

For those interested in speculative manifestos, I give you the manifesto of the International Necronautical Society;

http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html

Key points:

- Death as Space: The manifesto asserts that "death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit."

- Beauty and Death: It posits that there is no beauty without the presence of death, emphasizing its immanence in life.

Of TFA, I love its spirit. Speculative thinkers are easy to deride, and are guaranteed to be more likely wrong than right. However, I believe that speculation has an important function: to map the fuzzy bounds of a domain.

> "Not enough people know who Kurt Vonnegut is”

Barnes and Noble can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut [1]

[1] Vonnegut, Kurt. "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death". Delacorte Press, 1969. p147

Agreed. Maybe better: ‘Poor Perception of Friendship Inhibits the Ability to Promote Behavioral Change’.

A very cool one-man project. My friend who runs a game production company generates meshes in Luma Genie and then makes the high Rez textures and normal maps in stableprojectorz.

One of my favorite movies is ‘Night of the Hunter’. It was critically crucified to the point where the director (Charles Laughton) never directed another movie. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that this was a loss to humanity and culture. Of course now, all critics are desperate to broadcast its brilliance.

Rumble Fish (Mickey Rourke before he got swole) and One From the Heart were both thoroughly enjoyable… but also both curate’s eggs.

Able Gance’s 7 hour epic Napoleon (1927) employed split screen projection, superimposition, location shooting, super-close up…. All unheard of at the time. But the advantage he had was that cinema was not yet ‘invented’. That would not happen till Hollywood streamlined production and (importantly) consumption. This was effectively Fords assembly-line ethos applied to art. In contrast, Gance believed cinema has the same potential for depth as literature.

Coppola has always had a desire to re-invent cinema. He tried and failed with the digital production techniques of ‘One From the Heart’, though much of what he introduced presaged techniques that are common nowadays.

With Megopolis he seems to be trying to re-invent the form. I believe that is a folly. The form of Cinema is now pretty much fixed in stone. Reinventing it would likely be as successful as reinventing the chair. You might produce something that ‘works’. But people would be unlikely to accept it.

You may appreciate the following anecdote about Picasso. He was offered a lot of money to make a sculpture entirely in hold. His response was ‘Great! I will paint it black!’.

Top tips….

Using a digital brush on its own can be extremely limiting. Digital paint is inherently flat and lifeless. Textured brushes can help, but not much. I would recommend employing natural textures via blend modes. The best blend mode for passing textures from one image to another is overlay. In this way the texture of a photo of a rusty surface may be passed onto a painting of a rock. Essentially painting with textures... or photo-bashing.

Here is a walk through I did for my students…

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/photoshop-p...

Happy to answer any questions.

In addition to teaching digital painting I also teach 3d. What you describe is completely correct and something I would emulate using Blenders BSDF shader. This would emulate real world materiality, but my point is that color is the lest of the key properties of a metal. For the most part, the Colour would derive from environment reflections, which would all be tinted with ‘gold color’.

I teach digital painting. You would be surprised how many students ask how to achieve ‘the color gold’. One of the qualifiers of physical paint (as opposed to digital paint) is, not surprisingly, its materiality. Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride. I have to remind myself that for some of them the very first experience of painting was on an iPad.

Of TFA, it is no surprise that he was greatly influenced by Byzantine mosaics. Both are supremely decorative, flat and strongly symmetrical.

From my experience, my main criticism of research in the field of computer vision is that most of it is 'meh'. In a university that focused on security research, I saw mountains of research into detection/recognition, yet most of it offered no more than slightly different ways of doing the same old thing.

I also saw: a head of design school insisting that they and their spouse were credited on all student and staff movies, the same person insisting that massive amounts of school cash be spent promoting their solo exhibition that no one other than students attended, a chair of research who insisted they were given an authorship role on all published output in the school, labs being instituted and teaching hires brought in to support a senior admin's research interested (despite them not having any published output in this area), research ideas stolen from undergrad students and given to PhD students... I could go on all day.

If anyone is interested in how things got like this, you might start with Margret Thatcher. It was she who was the first to insist that funding of universities be tied to research. Given the state of British research in those days it was a reasonable decision, but it produced a climate where quantity is valued over quality and true 'impact'.

Very nice to see this, especially in relation to Apple design.

I use the similarity between the work of Dieter Rams and Apple's Jonathan Ives to illustrate the difference between homage, appropriation and 'ripping off'. I am cagey about where I stand on Ives but the students come to their own opinions.