Back by popular demand, our trusty AI Wrangler, Janelle Shane (previously), produces a list of art prompts for the month of Drawtober, traditionally a daily sketching challenge (see below), generated by AI. This time however the list is an homage to the early days of very tiny language models and neural networks—not gluttonously siphoned from the public internet but rather hand-feed from carefully curated data, including past exercises like heirloom apples and Halloween costumes. Predictably no fun, here is the illustration that ChatGPT came up with for today’s cue, Collide Loopstorm. Maybe it would be more perplexed by some of the others like Deathmop, Hallowy Maples or Hobbats but these must be worked in chronological order, lest one awakens the curse. Much more at the links above.
Tuesday 1 October 2024
Friday 13 September 2024
per scientiam tempestates prรฆdicere (11. 842)
star hustler (11. 839)
Via the always engrossing Web Curios, we discover this lovely calendar, almanac called Nights on Earth by Phil Mosby that gives one a preview of what astronomical wonders one might behold in the upcoming evenings, assuming clear skies and minimal light pollution, triangulated for one’s location. It strikes just the right balance of coming-attractions without being overwhelming in terms of information and telemetry, and we especially liked the timetables of the various twilights and offer to suggest an event.
Friday 10 November 2023
laterne, laterne, sonne, mond und sterne (11. 107)
In anticipation of the Feast of Saint Martin and the tradition of a lamp-lit procession, welcoming rather than ushering out the darkness and gloam of autumn formerly having roughly corresponded to the first of the month and a continuation of Halloween celebrations prior to calendar reform, we enjoyed this small sampling from a catalogue of chromolithographs of paper lantern designs from 1880 from the Tรผbingen booksellers Riethmรผller—which still sells paperware and party favours. More at the links above.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) plus Radiation Baby
two years ago: sinking nations plus Chaka Khan (1984)
three years ago: Toot, Whistle, Pluck and Boom, the US election, the Friends theme song, expecting more from America, voting irregularities plus an early edition
four years ago: an Art Nouveau printmaker, more Inktober maps, film composer Carlo Savina, a racing bar chart of the biggest musicians plus the debut of Sesame Street
five years ago: more unbuilt architecture, AI writes news copy, The 5000 Fingers of Doctor T plus a historical film lot consumed by wildfire
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ✝️, ๐, ๐, Baden-Wรผrttemberg
Sunday 5 November 2023
9x9 (11. 097)
falling for fall: an epic attempt to capture the Christian Girl Autumn aesthetic—via the morning news
paradox: NASA climate group issues a bleak warning on climate change—controversially suggesting that a reduction in aerosol pollution will accelerate warming
the hunting of the earl of rone: one individual’s quest to catalogue the folkways and traditions of the United Kingdomthey’re all good dogs: the winners of the annual world canine photography award presented—plus a bonus vocabulary term for one who is favourably disposed to dogs—via Nag on the Lake
ja-da, ja-da, ja-da, jing jing jing: a soothing 1918 jazz standard covered for decades after
mechanical turk: exposing autonomous cars’ vast human support network to maintain an illusion of safety, reliability
roll on: a clever phonophore logo for a transport and logistics company in Hong Kong
cape canaveral: a 3D animated billboard recounts the chronology of the Kennedy Space Centre
momiji tunnel: a stunning section of the Eizan railway showcases the turning foliage—via the ever excellent Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links
one year ago: the Gun Powder Plot, a Commodore accordion, more McMansion Hell plus a Wikipedia list of common fallacies
two years ago: the Saint Felix Flood (1530)
three years ago: a tri-lingual dictionary (1499), a flashpoint labour strike (1916), a sรฉance on a wet afternoon plus the Rebel Rabbit GIF
four years ago: more on Guy Fawkes, Voyager 2 leaves the Solar System, ghoulish guacamole plus Facebook’s shift to the right
five years ago: representative Shirley Chisholm, an ancient boardgame, photographer Denise Scott Brown, words for the Winter Blues plus mapping the US mid-terms
Sunday 1 October 2023
disco triceratops incident (11. 032)
Saturday 3 December 2022
phytomorphology (10. 358)
Via friend of the blog par-excellence Nag on the Lake, we are referred to a stop-motion exploration of leaf shape by Brett Foxwell, who collected, pressed and imaged over twelve thousand samples for this engaging sequence of gradual transition forms. Be sure to check out the source link to The Kid Should See This where you’ll also find their impressive holiday gift guide.
Monday 3 October 2022
tree talk (10. 192)
Via Waxy, artist Kelton Sears, employing a vertical scroll going upwards presents a GIF-driven, happy comic–reminiscent of Cordell Barker’s “The Cat Came Back”–to reflect on our aboreal friends and the way we experience the passage of time—with humour and insight.
Saturday 24 September 2022
8x8 (10. 162)
herbst: vintage Eastern Bloc matchboxes welcoming Fall
ฮฑฯฮฝฮฌฮบฮน: comedian Shari Lewis delivers One Minute Mythologies—via r/Obscure Media
wie ist dein name, mann: adapting Hamilton in German for the Hamburg stage—possibly a bit rough for those who committed the original lyrics to heart but Lin-Manuel Miranda is deeply involvedtl;dr: an AI powered tool that provides a summary of long videos—via Web Curios
wolf hall: RIP historical fiction author Hilary Mantel
not in my backyard: good luck getting anything built in Sim Nimby (see also)—again from Web Curios
voting integrity: Russian soldiers in occupied regions of Ukraine undertake door-to-door balloting in the referenda to ensure citizens choose wisely
kirie: celebrating the onset of autumn with more of the Japanese art of leave carving
Friday 12 November 2021
Thursday 11 November 2021
Saturday 16 October 2021
atlas des champignons: comestibles, suspects et vรฉnรฉneux
Unsuccessful in our foraging this year (and usually coming up with the suspect varieties, if not outright poisonous ones), we appreciated pouring over the detail and descriptions from physician, botanist and accidental chronicler of the Haitian Revolution Michel รtienne Descourtilz’ 1827 guide, lusciously illustrated with the lithographs of Auguste Cornillon. More from Public Domain Review at the link above.
Friday 1 October 2021
botober
Friday 23 October 2020
woad and madder
Courtesy of The Morning News and having only dared to ventured out to where the freshly-turned fields begin to remark on these colour-coordinated trees and their turning leaves, we quite appreciated this reflection on russet—the colour of peasants, foxes pelts and penance.
In addition to the earthy and autumnal hues, in this thorough-going essay that explores the emergent colour—where the reds of blood, fire and ochre of the Caves of Lascaux and here in the dark ruddy-orange tinge of it—through fashion, poetry and sentiment—Biron from Love’s Labour’s Lost yearning for expression “in russet yeas and honest kersey [course woollen cloth] noes” and even Oliver Cromwell preferring a “plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows over that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.” And if the author’s column rings familiar in hue and cry—it’s the happy continuation of these previous instalments of colour stories.Sunday 18 October 2020
pilzfund
H and I wandered a bit in the woods foraging for mushrooms, and while we didn’t really encounter anything that we were reasonably certain was edible and warranted collecting and later research, we found that the forest was ripening with all sorts of fungi, including Wood’s Ear (Auricularia auricula-judae—see previously and which we forgot again was safe for consumption and is widely used in China—I just don’t know about the texture and the prospect of picking one up) that was pretty widespread along the path and some more nice examples of fly agaric (Amanita muscaria, Fliegenpilz, see above).
A new variety that we had not encountered beforehand, however, were these colourful ones in the same family—sometimes referred to “verdigris agaric” called blue roundhead (Stropharia caerulea, der Grรผnblaue Trรคuschling)—the specific epithet caerulea being Latin for blue while for contemporary speakers it generally indicates a shade between azure and teal. Host trees are usually beeches (Buchen) and thrive in alkaline soils.Monday 12 October 2020
abscission
Saturday 3 October 2020
zwiebelzopf
Visiting a small harvest festival nearby held on Germany Unity Day, H and I looked for some autumn accents for the house and found several stalls selling traditional onion braids (Zwiebelzรถpfe).
Sometimes also incorporating garlic bulbs, the braids adorned craftily with dried wild flowers were not customarily only for decorative and storage, preservative purposes but moreover for the notion that the power of the talisman would stave off illness and harm from hearth and home. Right now we can all use all the help we can muster. Singly, onions were worn as amulets in medieval times to ward off the plague, and a New Year’s Eve custom (divination from onions is called cromniomancy—see also) in various regions, especially in the Erzgebirge, called for the dicing of an onion into twelve sections and sprinkling each bowl with salt to forecast the precipitation for each month of the year to come as the moisture drawn out of each section by the next morning would predict that month’s rainfall.
catagories: ๐จ๐ฟ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฑ, ๐, ๐ฝ, ๐ , Middle Ages, Saxony, Thรผringen
Tuesday 29 September 2020
9x9
patim, patam, patum: font specimens of Patufet, a typeface inspired by the Catalonian Tom Thumb
ace of cups: Summer of Love all-female band that played the Avalon Ballroom and appeared with Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead release a new double-album
leaf-peeping: Swiss fall foliage map franking privileges: Finnish studio mints climate change stamps with heat-reactive inkbackyard safari: highly detailed journal documenting encounters with wildlife—via Nag on the Lake
space 1999: scenes from the sets of the iconic British scifi series that ran from 1975 to 1977—via Messy Nessy Chic
pacomobile: a modified VW snail camper—via Things magazine
sฤlaj county: a brilliant assortment of flag redesigns for Romania’s forty-two regions to celebrate the country’s diversity
cannonball aderley: jazz record sleeves from Reagan Ray (see previously) feature the typography of the artists’ names—via Kottke
1q or the feast of the archangels
Venerating Saint Michael and companions, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel in honour of their victory of Lucifer and the rebel angels in the angelomachy, Michaelmas (previously) is observed on the penultimate day of September—in some traditions, the feast extending into the next day—and has also come to one of the four quarter dates of the financial year, kept since at least medieval times to mark when school and court terms were to commence and the accounting was due to ensure that debts and unresolved cases didn’t linger (see also) into the next season.
Though the customary hiring fairs and local elections do not necessarily adhere (the tradition is retained for the election of London’s lord mayor, just as peasants during the Middle Ages would appoint a reeve from among their peers to represent their interests to the manor) to the same calendars, this time of year—still referred to as the Michaelmas term for matriculating students in England, Scotland and Ireland and for the US Supreme Court’s and the English bar’s Inns of the Court’s fall sessions and of course it marks the end and beginning of the fiscal year for budget purposes. Asters or the Michaelmas daisy are one of the few flowering plants left at the beginning of autumn, and thus inspiring the rhyme and invocation: “Michaelmas daisies among dead weeds, bloom for Saint Michael’s valorous deeds.”
catagories: ⚖️, ๐ฎ๐ช, ๐ฑ, ๐, ๐, ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ , ๐, Middle Ages
Tuesday 22 September 2020
6x6
blocking: Ella Slack has been the Queen’s stand-in and body-double for the past three decades
grizzly ii: a previously unreleased 80s horror flick starring Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen is making its debut forty years later, via Messy Nessy Chic
life, the universe and everything: fun facts about the number forty-two, via Boing Boingwelcoming autumn: it’s decorative gourd season
the long now: hiding a ten-thousand-year clock inside a mountain (see also)
framing: Twitter issues apologies for its biased image cropping algorithm