Vogue Announces Global Model Search for 2023
Vogue is holding a worldwide search for the next generation of models. Modeling auditions are now open and anyone who wants to tryout. The iconic brand is looking for lots of diverse looks and has created an online casting portal to enable models or wanna be models from all over the world to tryout.
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Auto-Generated Junk Web Sites
I don't know if you heard the complaints about Google getting worse since 2018, or about Amazon getting worse. Some people think Google got worse at search. I think Google got worse because the web got worse. Amazon got worse because the supply side on Amazon got worse, but ultimately Amazon is to blame for incentivising the sale of more and cheaper products on its platform.
In any case, if you search something on Google, you get a lot of junk, and if you search for a specific product on Amazon, you get a lot of junk, even though the process that led to the junk is very different.
I don't subscribe to the "Dead Internet Theory", the idea that most online content is social media and that most social media is bots. I think Google search has gotten worse because a lot of content from as recently as 2018 got deleted, and a lot of web 1.0 and the blogosphere got deleted, comment sections got deleted, and content in the style of web 1.0 and the blogosphere is no longer produced. Furthermore, many links are now broken because they don't directly link to web pages, but to social media accounts and tweets that used to aggregate links.
I don't think going back to web 1.0 will help discoverability, and it probably won't be as profitable or even monetiseable to maintain a useful web 1.0 page compared to an entertaining but ephemeral YouTube channel. Going back to Web 1.0 means more long-term after-hours labour of love site maintenance, and less social media posting as a career.
Anyway, Google has gotten noticeably worse since GPT-3 and ChatGPT were made available to the general public, and many people blame content farms with language models and image synthesis for this. I am not sure. If Google had started to show users meaningless AI generated content from large content farms, that means Google has finally lost the SEO war, and Google is worse at AI/language models than fly-by-night operations whose whole business model is skimming clicks off Google.
I just don't think that's true. I think the reality is worse.
Real web sites run by real people are getting overrun by AI-generated junk, and human editors can't stop it. Real people whose job it is to generate content are increasingly turning in AI junk at their jobs.
Furthermore, even people who are setting up a web site for a local business or an online presence for their personal brand/CV are using auto-generated text.
I have seen at least two different TV commercials by web hosting and web design companies that promoted this. Are you starting your own business? Do you run a small business? A business needs a web site. With our AI-powered tools, you don't have to worry about the content of your web site. We generate it for you.
There are companies out there today, selling something that's probably a re-labelled ChatGPT or LLaMA plus Stable Diffusion to somebody who is just setting up a bicycle repair shop. All the pictures and written copy on the web presence for that repair shop will be automatically generated.
We would be living in a much better world if there was a small number of large content farms and bot operators poisoning our search results. Instead, we are living in a world where many real people are individually doing their part.
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Transformers G1 Elita One (Fan Color Model)
Elita One's first G1 cartoon appearance was in "The Search for Alpha Trion" (though a later episode, "War Dawn," showed us an earlier form for the character called Ariel). She appears briefly in vehicle mode, near the end of the episode, but Optimus Prime is in front of her and you can't see her entire car mode. A lot of fans have tried their hand at a conjectural vehicle design based on what little of her we do see.
Well, her official vehicle design, as created by Floro Dery, only recently surfaced for the first time. I tried my hand at coloring it, based on what we see in the episode, and doing a little bit of extrapolating regarding how she seems to fold up. (It's weird that her knees apparently form her trunk. I have no idea how that would work on an official Hasbro toy. But, that's the great thing about being a character designer, I suppose—your designs aren't required to work in three-dimensional space!)
Transformers G1 Orion Pax (Fan Color Model)
The G1 cartoon episode "War Dawn" told the story of Optimus Prime before he became Optimus Prime. The design for his previous form, Orion Pax (note the initials), was originally conceived by Floro Dery as a design for Ultra Magnus for The Transformers: the Movie, before being appropriated for the second-season episode instead.
Color key artist Phyllis Craig deliberately chose colors for Orion Pax that strongly evoked Optimus Prime. Orion Pax never transformed into vehicle mode in the cartoon, and his vehicle design only surfaced fairly recently. I took a guess as to what colors he probably would have been in vehicle mode, based on which robot parts seem to turn into which vehicle parts. The Floro Dery design influence is strong here; to me, his trailer reminds me a lot of Rodimus Prime.
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Okay, I'm probably over-thinking this, but there has always been something that bugged me about the design of ships like the USS Grissom and USS Cerritos: how do crew members get back and forth from the primary to secondary hulls? Is there a turboshaft that runs them past the engines? They're not using the transporters, 'cause that would be a huge waste of time and energy, right?
For all I know this has already been addressed on Star Trek: Lower Decks (which I need to sit down and watch soon), and my grumblings are moot.
(Sigh) I am over-thinking this.
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Saw a post the other day asking how P03 is able to see; my best guess is something like this.
I actually inspected P03′s 3D model for this which I don’t usually do (and then I proceeded to draw it off-model anyway. Whoops) but even outside of its hypothetical camera-vision, there’s a few other things of note:
P03 seems to have a lot of large vents (or at least things that look like some sort of ventilation/cooling). Two major ones on the chest, three on the top of the head (with potentially another on the side of its head), and one on the underside of its base (though that one might be for the hologram projection it uses to float). My best guess is that it’s because his factory is built right by the water where there would be a TON of moisture in the air. For that reason, some of them have got to be exhausts to make sure all of the air circulating in his torso is dry. That or he just overheats extremely easily I guess, but I’m leaning towards the humidity explanation (or it could be a combination of the two).
Its “eyes” are somewhere on the front of its face; whether it sees through a camera or just through the eyes on the screen via video game magic is up for debate, but it turns to face the player when they stand up so its vision probably isn’t on the sides of its head or something.
Similarly, P03 has some sort of sensitivity to touch (he reacts to Leshy’s hands gripping his monitor before Leshy says anything). I don’t think any “touch sensors” would be externally visible though.
Presumably (based on the ending to Act 3) P03′s head isn’t just a monitor, there’s vital systems in there as well (otherwise tearing its head off wouldn’t do anything to disrupt its upload/its ability to function). My best guess is that his power supply is in his chest so it would be the equivalent of just... unplugging your computer while it’s trying to preform updates.
The wire it uses to connect to the modules to update cards in Act 3 seems to come from either its neck or its torso, but in act 2 it’s very visibly on the side of the head. Granted the act 2 sprites are all pretty different from the Scrybes’ 3D models so that’s not an outlier.
The range of motion in P03′s arm seems pretty similar to a human arm; he has a ball-and-socket joint on the shoulder and a hinge joint on his elbow plus separate segments for the “wrist” and “hand”. The only thing it probably can’t do is twist its forearm.
I don’t have any idea what either of the cranks do. The head crank moves when it changes its expression so it might have something to do with its display, but the arm crank is only shown doing anything on the G0lly Uberbot hologram. My best guess is that P03 used to have a lot more built-in functions but ended up removing them in order to operate faster so a lot of the buttons and switches on it are just vestigial leftovers. (The idea of the arm crank being able to function as a hand-crank motor in a pinch is really funny though. Spin it a few times when P03 is out of power and you can generate just enough battery for it to tell you to fuck off then go back into sleep mode again).
I have no idea how the levitation works either. It’s cool and that’s why it works. No need to get more complicated than that.
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