An AI journey to create a glass hotdog
I made some glass hotdogs.
A glass hotdog
First off, hotdog is one word. I need to remember that because every time I type the word, I 2nd guess myself about whether it should be “hot dog” (as in, a dog that is hot?) or “hotdog” (as in, the thing you eat).
Secondly, have you ever seen a glass hotdog? I haven’t. I’ve seen glass window decorations with a drawn hotdog over them, but I’m talking about a full-on glass object shaped like a transparent hotdog. I needed one recently and so I asked AI to make one. I won’t give away where these are from, but I was thinking that it’s possible I’ve been the only person in the world to ever as a computer for this type of abomination.
An early glass hotdog that wasn’t quite glass or hotdog.
None of these are perfect, and some of them are downright weird, but the path to understanding how a machine thinks of both a hotdog and glass object is truly the transformative journey. I felt like I learned a new type of language syntax or something.
Enjoy this collection of glass and glass-like objects shaped like hotdogs.
The world of Portland graffiti
The good guys and bad guys of the Portland graffiti world.
Graffiti artist GIMER has been in the news lately because after many years of dodging the authorities, he’s been caught and arrested. The Portland police say he was caught after new evidence emerged from a video interview he did with CHAOSTOWN last year in which GIMER, whose real name is James S. Fischel, was shown giving a tour of his stash house. There are some rumors that the CHAOSTOWN creators were responsible for giving information over to authorities, but obviously none of that is verified by anybody for now.
But since the police themselves referenced the video shown above, it’s safe to say that CHAOSTOWN isn’t gonna land any new interviews with graffiti artists for a while.
Video of an early demo version of The Sims
Watch this very early demo of The Sims from 1998.
The Sims is being celebrated at Metafilter today and they’ve unearthed this video from 1998 showing an early demo version of the game. I spent countless hours playing the original The Sims when it came out. I had bootlegged the game on IRC channels (yes, I am that old) in many parts over an internet connection that probably wasn’t any faster than 56kbps. It was such a fun game of design and torture, with seemingly endless possibilities of life trajectories at the click of the mouse.
The first version of The Sims, released in 2000, was surprisingly not that different from this 1998 demo version. Pretty cool to see it in such an early development phase.
DOOM running on Apple Lightning to HDMI dongle
A developer has ported DOOM to run on a Lightning to HDMI adapter.
This might be the most unusual place I’ve seen DOOM ported to, even after that incredible DOOM port on a PDF. Because of Apple’s walled-garden approach to chip designs, a lot of their peripherals also contain SoC (system on chip) designs that basically allow verified code to be injected and run. Normally this is very locked down but somebody hacked the Lightning to HDMI dongle to run DOOM.
Thanks MacRumors!
Cow and Pen by Megan Abbott
My cats :D
My friend Megan Abbott illustrated my two cats, Cowcat and Pen, as a wonderful Christmas gift. :)
KID PK on the New Jersey water tower
Revisiting my photos of the KID PK graffiti on the water tower next to the New Jersey Turnpike.
I was watching this video on the mystery of KID PK graffiti when I saw my own photo of the iconic graffiti water tower location in the video. I figured if they were going to steal my image, I may as well add a couple more to the mix.
I remember stopping on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike a few years back to capture this tower with my telephoto lens. There’s not much room on the edges so trucks are often zooming by at highway speeds — quite dangerous if I remember correctly.
The tower was demolished not too long ago and today the location of the tower is a massive Modway warehouse facility. If you go to 40°16'40.7"N 74°30'12.5"W on Google Maps or Google Earth you can likely go back in history and see the tower preserved digitally.
My original image which can be seen in the beginning of the video above.
Here’s drone footage of the water tower getting demolished.
Hanksy’s Trump Turd
Donald Trump in his original form.
Putting this on the internet so it lasts forever.
Stimulation Clicker revisited
I won the Stimulation Clicker game.
I had some downtime yesterday and decided to play Neal’s Stimulation Clicker browser game to the very, very end.
It took some time, and in the end I was way overstimulated, but the effort was well worth it. Yes, you too can get your game to look like the image here in this post!