Looptober

A modular synth case with yellow, red and green patch cables. The modules on the left side are different shades of grey, the ones on the right are coloured cyan, blue and purple. The case has a label "NiftyCase" in a retro-modernist typeface

I am doing Looptober again this year. Last year I used it as an opportunity to clean up my SuperCollider toolkit. This year I've been trying to use the modular synths as much as possible but I'm still at the stage where getting started takes fifteen minutes of faffing around …

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The Gnostics were wack

What system of ideas which you first encountered indirectly through artists you admired was the most disappointing when you got to actually know about it? For me it's Gnosticism.

Me, aged 21: Wow, Philip K Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Octavio Paz and Sonic Youth are all into the …

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Sunday links

A line drawing with the caption 'GARTER: someone who advertises or repairs dots in the sea. The drawing depicts a boat floating in the ocean next to a large disc, with a person on the boat holding a ladder descending to the disc. Other discs float in the water in the distance.
A version of the first image without the caption in which the outlines have been crudely coloured in with a graphics editor. Choppy waves and four fluffy white clouds have been added.
An image generated by the StableDiffusion system using the second image as a prompt. The image now has a pleasing brushtstroke texture and the boat seems to be a speedboat with two indistinct figures.
An image generated by the StableDiffusion system using a darkened and desaturated version of the second image as a prompt. This one is moodier and the red disc has a kind of yellow ruffled skirt and a yellow boss in the middle. The human figure in the boat is considerably larger and better defined, although their face is blurry

Ranjit commented on my drawing of Glossatory's definition of GARTER: "I find this one particularly evocative! Please do an oil painting next" so I colourised the original and fed it to StableDiffusion with different degrees of desaturation, and the prompt text "A man in a green boat holds a ladder …

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StableDiffusion and Saturday links

AI-generated image from the prompt: Engraving in the style of Albrecht Dürer of a frog playing the banjo. The frog's face is messed up and the banjo seems to have two bodies but otherwise it's surprisingly good
AI-generated image from the prompt: Engraving in the style of Albrecht Dürer of a frog playing the banjo. The background is green and this frog is a happy little guy
AI-generated image from the prompt: Fresco by Giotto of an allegory of machine learning, depicting a seated figure in pink robes holding a sort of rectangular frame with spiky brass figures and appearing to talk to a second standing figure in pink robes
AI-generated image from the prompt: a lion crossed with a tiger but bred for its skills in magic, coolest animal ever, pencil drawing, it's a high-quality pencil drawing of a male lion with tiger's stripes looking directly at the viewer

A blog post about the latest image generator, StableDiffusion, which coins the term 'AI veganism' for the the ethical case against using this sort of thing, which I think is a poor analogy even by the standards of tech bloggers.

There's a public beta here. Unlike DALL-E the source code …

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