vanlife

Packing their customised Volkswagen T4 with only the bare necessities, a duo from south east England took off for the continent and turned their motorised dream home into a six-year long roadtrip. They’ve documented their adventures in a guide book and travelogue called The Rolling Home—happily in its third printing—and just because they’ve settled back in Cornwall, they’ve not lost the taste for the nomadic life and still live in their van.

beyond the uncanny valley of the dolls or playable-character

Neural networks have trained themselves, dreaming themselves from an age of nightmare to a liminal, lucid slumber, to produce absolutely convincing, authentic-looking images of people that only exist in the machine’s circuitry.
Second generation applications of learning software are already outpacing human engineering by crafting their own versions and this visage-generator works as good as it does by bouncing ideas off of a parallel, adversarial programme constantly critiquing its choices and adjusting accordingly. Visit Sploid at the link up top for a video demonstration which includes entire computer-created environments—although not uncanny like a mannequin any longer, the results and transformations are still eerie and different than the transitional figures of the face-morphing sequence of Michael Jackson’s 1991 single “Black or White,” who had a warmth in their slipping away.  There’s something a touch dejected, I think and it’s different that the impermanence of a dream since one dreams of those one knows or remembers, in watching these characters glide past that seem surpassingly real yet are a chance configuration that may never be grounded as existing in any sense.

black tuesday

Thanks to our faithful chronicler, the good Doctor Caligari, that among other things, this date marks the anniversary of the US stock market crash in 1929 that had ripples across the globe and made possible the unthinkable, a second act to the Great War—the war to end them all. Speculation in the exchanges had been promoted to all and sundry and participation and was nearly universal as was leverage and exposure against a heady backdrop of utopian peerage that made hold-outs and outliers appear irresponsible and social misfits and ensured brokerage a sure bet—until all of a sudden it wasn’t and desperate efforts to reverse the sell-off failed. For those subsequent times when the bottom has threatened to fall out of world economies, safety protocols have been put in place but I wonder what sort of tolerance and strain come into play amongst all this automation and inscrutable programming. As I reflect on this question, it is also the day in Western Europe that in the small hours of Sunday morning an hour is stolen from us. And while we’d potentially be facing the sore tasking of resetting several dozen antique clocks, the reality is that all the vital systems are automated and though the change was a noticeable annoyance, there wasn’t anything that absolutely needed changing. Beyond a biannual reminder to check one’s smoke-detectors (the two in my apartment will silently summon service personnel to change their batteries, if need be), I wonder what else synchronicity is robbing us of and how this degree of mechanization has removed the human element from our economic model and other things.

eigenvectors

We’d previously encountered and were delighted with the imaginative fusion of the found-object as the anchoring artefact of a composition but had not seen the entire gallery of the brilliant Christopher Niemann gathered into a single portfolio before. Via the equally brilliant Everlasting Blört, these sketches might inspire some abstract and effort-added, breakfast table pareidolia in you the reader.

sexy sexy dombie sexy cat

For those still undecided on a Halloween costume, one can always repair to a neural network, we discover via Fancy Notions, for last-minute consultation.
Naturally robots were not prepared for this highly idiosyncratic task but soon became more authoritarian. Ranging from Sexy DVORAK keyboard to suggesting in later iterations that one aspire to be a Starfleet Shark or Mario Lander or the Statue of Pizza or the Twin Spider Mermaid the sub-routine seems to be learning. Check out more recommendations at the links above and see if you find your inspiration.

eau la la

To impart a bit of public luxury, the city of Paris is expanding its campaign of effervescent water (eau pétillante) fountains and will soon be installing at least one public convenience in each of the twenty arrondissements.
Though more subdued and functional than the historic Wallace drinking fountains that are scattered throughout the City of Lights (so called for being the first metropolis to be illuminated by night) the new ones are a modern complement to those iconic symbols of Paris cast by sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg at the behest of the eponymous philanthropist, Sir Richard Wallace, to make these watering places to supplement the utilities destroyed by the Franco-Prussian War and make drinking water as safe a beverage of choice so people weren’t expected to repair to alcohol, like since the Dark Ages when booze was the only non-lethal thing to imbibe, a little carbonation goes a long way. Expatriate Wallace gladly credited France with all his good fortune and wanted to repay his adopted home with every honour but also was sort of a teetotaler. It is hoped that this nudge will reduce plastic bottle use plus the need to shuffle bottled water around the world. Despite the off-putting news recently that there was a trace of Legionnaires’ Disease causing bacteria in my apartment building’s plumbing but it was immediately redressed, I’d gladly too drink water from the tap, so long as it was sparkling.