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
Overdive Media pulled their app for PC Windows 10/11 in February 23, 2022. Unfortunately, their new app, Libby, doesn’t allow you to actually download and listen to the mp3’s on your Windows desktop.
I seemed to have 2 copies of the app and they do seem to still work as of Dec 2022.
Download links:
ODMediaConsoleSetup.msi version 3.6.0 – Copyright 2016 Overdrive, Inc.
ODMediaConsoleSetup.msi version 3.2.0 from software.informer
Links:
John Carmack has quit Meta and their Meta VR efforts. I think that this is a perfect example of how visionary people get sucked in and are often ill equipped to the workings of large corporate machinations. The very things that make big corporations hugely successful (ability to work at scale, massive market share, highly disciplined and tracked execution) can ultimately be the reason they struggle with prototype development, innovation, or innovative people.
Some clues are in some of the interesting things Carmack says,
Carmack complained that it has been a “struggle” for him to influence Meta’s overall direction and that he’s “wearied of the fight.” Despite his high-ranking “consulting CTO / executive advisor” title, Carmack complained that he is “evidently not persuasive enough” to change Meta’s VR efforts for the better.
“We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this,” he wrote. “I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”
There he talked about his internal efforts to push for the development of a “super cheap, super lightweight” Meta VR headset that could come in at “$250 and 250 grams.” Instead, Meta has put its recent VR hardware efforts behind the heavily overdesigned and $1,500 Quest Pro. In his October keynote Carmack told Meta that “the basic usability of Quest really does need to get better” and that “our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy… We need to make it a whole lot better… much, much faster to get into.”
I think Carmack is a skunkworks technical leader. He’s used to working with a small team of extremely talented engineers on rapid development of extraordinary projects. Skunkworks and vision projects like this get crushed when you try to scale too quickly to dozens of interconnected teams. Instead, one must develop the solid core of the idea and prove it 100% – then scale to production. If you try to scale without 100% coherent vision and the issues sorted out, you’ll end up bleeding money, vision, and worst of all: time and energy switching direction. I think that’s why he feels exhausted and only sees people being 50% effective.
It’s the common case of agility vs scale. Big organizations with skilled but compartmentalized development teams often fail slowly after wasting tons of people’s time. Not because they are bad teams, but because they are often given delivery goals and usually do not have the power to switch direction on their own or often see the bigger picture to ensure the solution works properly across groups. This costs a lot in money, management time, and possibly reworks. Instead of one person failing, approaching the lead with alternatives and then re-thinking the approach at a higher level, the team continues to try to meet the goal without the ability to see the bigger picture or make better wholistic changes.
Anyway – the article is a fascinating read.
My favorite is at 2:10 when he is confused catching his own tail.
Catching a duck is a very entertaining folk game in the festive life of Hanoi people. If you go to festivals in Hanoi in the days after the Lunar New Year, you will probably have the opportunity to participate in this game. https://hanoidiscover.com/
Reminds me of our local county fair chicken drop contest.
Mike Schmidt is the current Portland DA. He, much like San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, was elected on a platform of justice reform policies to reduce incarceration, bail, and alternatives to prosecution and sentencing. However, he was heavily criticized for mismanagement of the office, dramatic increases in crime, and insensitivity to victims (especially sexual assault victims his office dismissed). Ultimately voters chose to remove him from office by a recall.
So how has Schmidt done? Not so well. In fact, almost identically as bad.
First off, his office has been decimated with 13 lawyers leaving during the first nine months of 2022 when he took over. Most damning are seven of whom were women who wrote extremely pointed letters:
Just like other cities that banked heavily on reform candidates, Portland has experienced dramatic upticks in crime. Portland is no different; but is dramatically worse than national averages. Almost all crimes have doubled in just 2 years. Particularly bad is the fact murders, disproportionately of people of color, have doubled until Portland’s per-capita murder rate is higher than Boston or San Francisco. The increased deaths of minorities in 2020 and 2021 now outstrips those killed by police in total over the last decade each year with 2022 shaping up to be even worse.
Reform apologists try to explain this as simply the result of the pandemic, but most other countries have seen a decrease in crime during covid. The answer is not simple and there are probably multiple factors. Still, one has to wonder when your city increases at double the rate of the national averages.
That might be excusable except he has had almost no success on any of his reform efforts. Combine that with such disasters from his leadership like this, and there is solid reason for Schmidt to be concerned:
Articles:
Titanic: Honor and Glory is an independent project to re-create the RMS Titanic with unprecedented historical accuracy.
While still in development, here’s a 1 hour video demonstrating the current state walking around many different parts of the ship.
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).
Links:
It’s hard to believe The Matrix was released over 20 years ago (March 1999). Keanu Reeves encounters 3 teens who never saw the movie and he tries to explain it to them.
The teenage girl gives a response that reveals a lot about the idea of what truth is to many people today – and maybe why we are having so much trouble today with fake news. Do we even really care what the truth is if it makes us happy?
There is lots of self-styled experts and activists using the phrase ‘speaking your truth’ – especially for those who have experienced a trauma or unfair conditions. Unfortunately, like this blog writer/’thought leader’, he says this terrifying assertion when dealing with others:
Truth is not about being right. Truth is about how we feel and what is real for us.
He then goes on to say that even if you make mistakes and hurt others – as long as you’re speaking ‘your truth’ – this is ok. This is the most anti-science, anti-intellectual, and downright horrifyingly dangerous things I think anyone can say for several reasons. I understand where this blog writer, and many others are coming from. What if I can say this idea of ‘my truth’ is dangerously wrong but that we can completely validate people’s experiences, yet also not throw out truth everything depends on?
Saying to ‘Speak your truth’ and ‘Truth is how we feel’ is profoundly anti-scientific and anti-justice. This idea says my impression is actual truth. It is a stance that ultimately denies we can understand or have any real impact in our world.
Justice in the world depends on determining actual facts of a case and then correcting wrongs. What if our courts were simply based on what anyone felt at any one time? Yet, this is exactly what is said by ‘Truth is about how we feel and what is real for us.’ Imagine what a court trial like that would look like.
Going further, all scientific thought as well as technological and medical progress depends on the idea that the universe operates by principles that are inherent in themselves – outside of our thoughts or feelings about them. Just ‘feeling’ that my car won’t run out of gas without refilling it, that time should stop spinning so I can sleep in an extra hour, or that eating grass should taste like pizza won’t make it so. In fact, that’s the kind of nonsense that children believe. Science and our very existence depends on the workings of everything from atoms, to electricity, to medicines we take, the safety of buildings, safe food cooking temperatures, to planetary orbits all follow provable and objective truths that exist outside ourselves. If any of those things depended on anyone’s feelings – then we’d be doomed. Unless of course you wish to admit to a God in whom the whole universe IS all held in place…
‘My truth’ also flatly denies decades of psychology and social science that proves there are objectively better and worse ways for we as individuals and society as a whole to act and behave. Science, government policy/laws, and TED talks are based on the notion that we CAN understand causes of problems and then can make changes and know they will solve them. There are great and proven ways to handle conflict, disagreements, addiction, violence, racism, and all manner of interactions we have with each other.
Worse, this logic of ‘my truth is truth’ can be used to control others. It tells others they cannot engage in reasoned discourse or argue. After all, my feelings tell me this is true – so it is true. Some holding this view go further and attack anyone that attempts to debate or talk about root causes or alternative ideas or interpretations. It’s a dangerous form of manipulation and gaslighting that invalidates anyone else’s viewpoint and makes mine the only true one.
Without real truth we can all agree on, this idea essentially makes us powerless to our feelings or even someone else’s feelings – which brings us to the next even more horrifying problem.
If what is right and TRUE is simply what any individual feels – what if I am wrong? There is no recourse. You are completely justified in just about any amount of action as long as it matches my feelings. But what if you are wrong? It’s very easy to be wrong:
This really gets bad when we disagree. What happens when you make me angry? What happens when you wrong or hurt me? What if I’m angry enough to kill you? Or kill everyone like you? Everyone with that skin color, race, religion, political party, or where you’re from? We’ve had governments and people like this in the past. Without the ability to talk about the objective truth of our actions outside our personal feelings – we end up following cult-like leaders that massage and manipulate our feelings, purge anyone who asks questions or simply makes them disappear – literally.
Living like this, we become completely helpless to our feelings and those that know how to manipulate them. I firmly believe we are seeing that kind political leader on both ends of the political spectrum gaining traction. Unless we have a return to reasoned argument and turn away from outrage (which is a very powerful form of anti-intellectualism), we are headed to the same blunders that have brought about the horrors of 20th century wars and genocides. We need MORE people thinking and acting with their minds – not their feelings alone.
Instead, what I wish people would say instead is that your feelings and perspectives are VALID but not necessarily TRUTH. And even if they are true, it doesn’t mean I should react in the same way in all cases. The first stages of being an adult is being able to name, claim, and own your feelings. Our feelings are real and valid – but they are only the IMPRESSION we have to what is going on. They alone are not truth. Anyone that has children or sees them interact understands they have lots of incorrect impressions and feelings about the world. What we teach children is to take the next step – using their mind to control their actions so it is fair and right for everyone. Even towards people they don’t like. Ultimately, saying that our feelings are truth is to act like a child. It’s anti-intellectual, it’s anti-science, it’s dangerous, and it’s wrong.
Instead, we can think of it another way and preserve both our feelings and our intellect. Just like a scientist, our feelings are like hypotheses. They seem to be pointing something out (this is fun, this food is delicious, this is unfair, this hurt me), but then we need to use our MIND to figure out if those impression are actually what’s going on. Further, we then need to think even harder about what we need to do about them. Science can absolutely help us with the second two parts – because even our social interactions have patterns for better/worse ways of behaving.
This is what makes us uniquely human. The fact we can use the wholeness of ourselves. We have feelings to help us empathize and connect with others, then a mind that we can use to figure out what is the best responses for us and others. Without that, we act like children – just reacting to our impressions and feelings. We become easily manipulated and lead astray by anyone that can appease our feelings or tell us what we want to hear.
Like Flannery O’Conner noted decades ago, “tenderness leads to the gas chambers”.