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Out and in

Book of hours, Flanders c. 1485

Kraków, MNK 3025 I, p. 469-470

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Rino Kitano (Japanese, contemporary) - Homesick, 2017

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Chicago Tribune, Illinois, April 26, 1935

#a very good illustration

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best email-list-archive-resurrection covid19 update so far

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School that doesn't speak Spanish: "How do we talk to parents who speak Spanish?"

M.A. in Curriculum & Instruction, ESL emphasis, University of Wyoming

“Improving English Learner Family Engagement by Creating an English Learner Family Liaison Position”

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nothing gets my snippy reactionary going faster than calls for a diet that “eliminates sugars”

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surprising no one my spotify-top Kelela song of the year is

#music #lmk #take me apart #kelela

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The Kiss, by Gustav Klimt: Cat Version

Illustration by Inna Ruda

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Loy Allen Bowlin: The Original Rhinestone Cowboy.

Bowlin was an outsider artist who decorated his home and himself, including his dentures, in rhinestones. After his death in 1995, his home was nearly demolished, but was saved at the last minute and put in an art center in Wisconsin.

Here’s a great bio of The Original Rhinestone Cowboy.

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What is the opposite of guacamole?

Last week I attempted to illustrate some neural net-generated racehorses by turning to another neural net - this time, one that generates images, called BigGAN.

Using Joel Simon’s ganbreeder.app interface, I’m able to see what BigGAN can generate for any of ~1000 categories of objects. Not finding a category for “racehorse”, I decided to use the nearest thing I could find, “horse cart”. Which, um.

But ganbreeder makes it easy to combine multiple categories - if “horse cart” is one point in space and “great grey owl” is another point in space, when you travel on a straight line between them, the horse carts gradually grow feathers and owl faces, ending in something that sort of resembles an owl.

[left: 100% horse cart. middle: 50% horse cart, 50% owl. right: 100% grey owl]

Ganbreeder also allows you to travel AWAY from a destination. So I can start at “horse cart” and then try to remove some of the cartness by deliberately traveling in the exact opposite direction of “shopping cart”. Sure enough, the image morphs into a furry four-legged creature with no more sign of wheels.

[left: 100% horse cart. right: 75% horse cart and -75% shopping cart. bottom: tried to make the face less doglike by also subtracting some dog. success??]

What this also means is that I can take any category of thing and generate its opposite. For example, I can set “guacamole” to -100%, inverting every component that makes it up. It’s kind of like burrowing directly through the earth’s core to find out what’s on the exact opposite side of the planet.

Here’s what’s opposite of guacamole: this tower, this mysterious cloaked figure.

this thing, I regret to inform you, is the opposite of “jeans”

Now, this is just a single neural net’s strange idea of what an opposite is, basically “do exactly the opposite of what you would do to generate a picture of jeans”. If they retrained the neural net on the same data, random fluctuations in the training process might make the opposites look a lot different. But often the opposites have a sort of logic to them. The opposite of tiny indoor things tend to be large landscapes. The opposite of organic things tend to be geometric ones. 

Here’s the opposite of “stingray”:

The opposite of “birdhouse” is, rather pleasingly, some kind of cat.

The opposite of “drilling platform” is this leafy green creature.

And the opposite of “eggnog” is a terrifying sight to behold.

You can make your own abominations and opposites with ganbreeder.app!

Bonus content: more weird opposites!

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We are multiple generations now with no experience with strikes, and I see a lot of confused, well meaning people who want to help but don’t know strike etiquette.

1. Never cross a picket line of striking workers.

2. Never purchase or take free goods from a company who’s workers are striking

3. Honk to support strikers if you drive by a picket line.

4. Join strikers on the picket line even if it’s not your strike, but follow their directions and defer to them while there.

5. Say “that’s great, the strike is working, the company should negotiate with their workers” whenever someone complains about profits lost, inconveniences or other worker-phobic rhetoric. Always turn it back on the company, who has all the power and money.

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the ultimate Gay Experience™ is seeing another gay person in public but not knowing how to make it obvious to them that you’re a fellow gay without letting everyone else also know that you’re gay so you just stare until they get creeped out and probably think you’re just really homophobic or something

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Some of my favourite masks by Magnhild Kennedy aka Damselfrau for your viewing pleasure. Which is your favourite? Would you wear one?  . . . #beautifulbizarremagazine #artmagazine #mask #artisanfashion #handmade #darkfashion #damselfrau #mignhildkennedy #wearablart