Amsterdam-based designer Robert van Embricqs wanted a new desk that let “the user to fold that desk away when work is over” and created a now-viral piece that seamlessly transforms from office to artwork.
“Flow Wall Desk” features flush vertical slats that twist and unfold into a tabletop.
Find the desk and other modular designs in van Embricqs’ shop, and follow his work on Instagram. (via Hyperallergic)
I had a great time meeting many of the voice actors for a bunch of famous Valve games at PAX Seattle. Most them were/are Seattle locals and still work extensively in the area. Here were some of the getting started resources they mentioned during their talks (and some of them teach at these locations too) for those interesting in becoming a voice actor:
If you want to read some epic nut-ball theories that put the average tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to shame, you don’t need to go much further than the average Stanley Kubrick movie analyst.
There’s a lot of modern movie critics out there that believe that movies can mean whatever you want them to mean – and boy do people make some tenuous connections. While relativist interpretations are the most popular logical fallacy in our post-truth world, I would argue that approach is nonsense – and now we have a little more proof from a director most often cited by critics as supporting their nutty interpretations.
Stanley Kubrick’s movies are often multilayered and difficult to comprehend, but it turns out he absolutely did have a message for each of these movies. He does, however, say that he is reluctant to reveal his interpretation: “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas, they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized, one feels it.” That part I very much get. The experience of something is far different than logically thinking about it.
So what were his intended meanings?
The meaning of the ending of 2001 – This one is NOT hard to interpret. Why? Because Arthur C Clarke wrote the book the movie was made from and very clearly lays out what is going on visually. Personally, I think a lot of the reason the movie 2001 was so confusing was due to effects limitations Kubrick struggled under. I bet we could re-do the gate transport sequence today and make it much more amazing and clear what’s going on. But anyway, here’s what Kubrick said about the ending of 2001:
“The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities — creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form, and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.
“And they choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture, deliberately so inaccurate, because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty but weren’t quite sure, just as we aren’t quite sure what to do in zoos, with animals, to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. And anyway, when they get finished with them, as happens in so many myths, of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being sent back to Earth. You know, transformed and made into some sort of superman. And we have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is a pattern of a great deal of mythology. And that was what we’re trying to suggest.”
The ending of the Shining:
“Well, it was supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle where he is part of the hotel’s history. Just as in the men’s room when he’s talking to the ghost of the former caretaker who says to him, ‘You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here.’ One is merely suggesting some kind of endless cycle of evil reincarnation, and also — well, that’s it. Again, it’s the sort of thing that I think is better left unexplained, but since you asked me, I’m trying to explain.”
But you don’t have to take my word for it, we have it recorded from Kubrick’s own lips:
Links:
It appears someone has leaked a massive Valve asset repository. This is probably the biggest leak since the 2003 source code leak for Halflife (git). Instead of source code, this time it appears to be a massive package of used, prototype, early, and discarded assets for Team Fortress 2, Portal, Halflife, Counterstrike, and several other big Valve games.
Right now there is a big discussion going on at the VCC (Valve Cut Content) community discord server. They’re finding all kinds of crazy things in there, like prototype Counterstrike maps, female TF2 characters, and even some partially completed levels like this TF2 rocket-jump training map:
Update: It appears folks are now re-packaging the newly discovered maps:
HowToGeek has a wonderful little introduction on how to start write your first Stable Diffusion prompts.
Update 02-2023: Here’s 10 really amazing resources to help you to generate really great prompts and art.
They start with some simple AI image generation and move on to more and more complex examples that includes a brief introduction to some key parameters, changing and including broader image sources, and then generating various famous artistic styles.
They finish out the intro with some links to help you learn more:
Links:
Remember old-school movies that were damaged, in black in white, and everyone ran around at 2x speed? With AI processing, they can fix many of those problems. Olden Days youtube channel has a number of great restored videos like this.
Amazing to see that when fixed, this looks just like a snowball fight one might see today – proving that we aren’t all that different from the people of our past as we’d like to think.
These restoration techniques have come a long way in just a few years.
Other links:
Here’s some great links to find interesting and fun things in Portland.
Summer events:
Tilt-shift photography is how you create the illusion of looking upon a miniature world. Done first with special lenses, now it’s easily done in software like Photoshop.
Someone recently tried this with drone footage of Portland and came out pretty well
Early cartoon animators at Warner Brothers of the 50’s were considered part of the golden age of American animation. As it turns out, the animators were often pretty astounding, well versed, well trained, and groundbreaking artists in their own right. They often make references to many famous and popular styles of art.
The Looney Tunes Background Instagram account has a fantastic collection of these backgrounds. I find browsing the minimalist backgrounds from the cartoons reminds me a lot of one of my favorite painters Edward Hopper. And there’s a good reason for that.
The Gaze digs into these backgrounds and does a fantastic job covering the art and artists that inspired these liminal/minimalists backgrounds such as: Edward Hopper, De Chirico, Rockwell Kent, Salvador Dali, and David Hockney.
He points out the fantastic set of design rules developed by Maurice Noble. Noble started at Disney which focused on realism. They even used rotoscoping to get movement as perfect as possible. Noble went the opposite direction when he left and joined Warner Brothers. He created a new set of design rules where the background art becomes part of the distorted and comical setup for each scene. He’s probably most famous for What’s Opera Doc? in which Elmer Fudd hunts Bugs Bunny in an lampooned opera. Hawley Pratt, Robert Gribbroek, Paul Julian, Richard Thomas and many others contributed to these fantastic artistic developments at Warner Brothers as well.
Give this video a look to see more.
Disney published this paper about using AI to digitally age and de-age actors in a fraction of the time it usually takes for normal frame-by-frame manual aging techniques used today.
FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background. Using synthetically generated training data is a method that’s been utilized for things like training self-driving cars to handle situations that aren’t easily reproducible.
The age changes are then added/merge onto the face. It appears this approach fixes a lot of the issues common in this kind of approach: facial identity loss, poor resolution, and unstable results across subsequent video frames. It does have some issues with greying hair and aging very young actors, but produces results better than techniques used just a few years ago (not that the bar was very hard to beat).
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