A fascinating concept. (Thanks for the suggestion, Mom!) Ever wonder how we ended up with so many different styles of letters? Open any text editor, email client or design app and you will immediately be bombarded with a buffet of typographic choices. Serif or sans serif? Display or text? Classical or contemporary? Formal or casual?…
I really hate that little sparkly icon which reminds me of all the human labor that was stolen to create a product that enriches the tech barons while contributing to the environmental destruction of the planet. I absolutely to NOT want to ask my book questions. I’m reading a book precisely because I want to…
More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context or doing favors for advertisers. Less than a third believe reporters correct their errors, confirm facts before reporting them, gather information from multiple sources or…
Anyone seen “Hamnet”? I was not too impressed by “Shakespeare in Love,” which perpetuated the biographical fallacy — that the key to unlocking the one, true meaning of a literary work is listing how each detail in a literary work “could represent” some detail in the author’s life, and that once you’ve constructed that list,…
For a medieval project, I wanted a wood pile, but I didn’t want to have to stack the individual wedges manually. I’m experienced enough with Blender 3D that it only took me a few minutes to get this simulation running — but as this video clip attests, I need to adjust a few parameters. …
I recall being very moved by the 1980s Gregory Peck / Christopher Plummer made-for-TV movie “The Scarlet and the Black,” which dramatized this story. From the late summer of 1943, O’Flaherty worked with “The Organisation”, a massive partisan network, to save more than 6,000 Allied prisoners of war, anti-Fascists, and Jews from Nazi concentration and…
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art Similar:‘There’s a certain madness to it’ … fans await new chord in John Cage gig with 616 years l…The organ composition is called “As Slow…AestheticsGettysburg Address event marks 150th anniversary of President Lincoln’s historic speechOn the Civil War battlefield where Presi…CultureWe Tried to Do Vanlife Right. It Broke Us Down.Shortly before I got married,…
I miss the convention in movies and TV shows in which the main characters visit a music hall or club, and we watch them watching an entire number. Maybe they exchange a few lines during a musical bridge, but mostly they’re just in character, sitting through a performance. I have only fragmentary memories of H.R.…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Dax, Worf and Kira arrive at an otherwise empty bar. Before Quark can take their order, a mechanical noise drives them away. In a service tunnel (the source of the noise), Nog is expertly assisting O’Brien, but something goes boom, critically flabbergasting all the station’s jimberjams. The only way to unflabbergast them is…
Artificial intelligence is making steady advances into subtitling but, say its practitioners, it’s a vital service that needs a human to make it work […] AI is unable to decide which sounds are important. “Right now, it’s not even close,” Deryagin says. He also stresses the importance of the broader context of a film, rather…
If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped. —Harvard Business Review
Rewatching ST:DS9 At dinner with the Siskos, Cadet Nog reluctantly reveals that the B-plot will involve his difficulty getting respect from Klingons. Because this is TV, General Martok shows up at that very moment with this week’s plot-starter: an intercepted message for “Michael” about a terrorist missile launch which threatens to trigger a devastating war.…
Essays like this remind me why I picked my English major. There are other ways to get facts. Newspapers are full of them, as are podcasts and documentaries. Travel shows proliferate, take your pick. But even then, there is nothing like the view of the world via a novel. Novels can go beyond merely being…
The illustrations clients bring to her are commonly littered with unclean lines and nonsensical text, and they look like a mess of pixels when blown up beyond a certain size. “There’s people that are aware AI isn’t perfect, and then there’s people that come to you angry because they didn’t manage to get it done…
Traffic on my website has plunged over the past few years. In 2019, my site attracted almost 1.5 million visitors. The content on my site has not gotten this bad, this quickly! Back in 2016, a single popular page on my website attracted almost 1 million visits — about as many visits as my entire…
Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the…
Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage. I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as…
A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…
I’m getting ready to record about 18hrs footage from four different cameras, and I noticed my new 4K webcam was heating up pretty fast. I’m settled in a dorm room at the University of Toronto, far from the junk drawers and tool boxes that would have aluminum foil and copper wire. I suppose I could…
This is what I’m in Toronto to observe. Similar:How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pinkJust watched videos of the musicals “Tho…AcademiaStar Trek: "Wink Of An Eye"/"The Empath"Amusing, if cynical, reaction to some of…AmusingBlender 3D UpdateHoly ray-tracing, Batman, it’s a Blender…AestheticsI Find Myself in Another Showhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=517BhV1j0…DramaFilmmakers fighting “Happy Birthday” copyright find their “smoking…