Posts by Lyndon Hood

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  • Hard News: Deep Dream: Looking at clouds,

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    And just because it's not all animal-faces.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Hard News: Deep Dream: Looking at clouds,

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    And just a crossover with another project - making very novel cheese that is fairly clearly contaminated but might well still be edible. original

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Hard News: Deep Dream: Looking at clouds,

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    Tiger (original pic by Ali Little) in one of the less dog-prone models.

    A sequence from a cellphone shot of Venus and Jupiter gone wrong that you can follow through to the awful punchline on Twitter.

    Running it really does eat your computing power but it has got me playing with neural networks like a rather cumbersome toy. Currently trying to teach char-rnn to do Parliamentary Questions. A dedicated laptop has been working on this since Friday, though I probably set it up wrong.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Hard News: Deep Dream: Looking at clouds,

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    I don't know if you remember Simon Bridges and his hamburger.

    Also a full inception run showing the people with the Pluto/dog memes were right.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Hard News: Deep Dream: Looking at clouds,

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    Oliver Sacks.

    I managed to set it up using this guy's Docker package (some level of knowing how scripting and command line works is very helpful but I am not hugely deep in those).

    Pluto variations on Scoop.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Hard News: Deep Dream: Looking at clouds,

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    One that's apparently still topical to kick off.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Hard News: Laughing from diversity, and…,

    And just because it was entirely unclear: I meant there's a limit as in a limit to how much control you have over how people respond to your work once it's in the wild, no matter how much you fret over it beforehand.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Hard News: Laughing from diversity, and…,

    I caught up with this Media Take and Brown Eye last night. And discovered White Man Behind a Desk when you tweeted it for the show, so that was a good few days.

    Interesting you both ended up mentioning Jeremy Wells. Not that I want to relitigate anything (I was away at the time and tried to avoid Pronouncements), but feel like a clarification: I imagine at least some of the annoyance wasn't so much over the distinction between irony and sincerity as the distinction between making a joke about something and making light of it. You can certainly be flippant without jesting. And while being funny in earest isn't the only way to do satire it certainly is a popular one.

    That's something I think fewer people get even in principle and can be really hard to pitch and to read in practice. (And that's why I find it annoying when people claim to be 'joking' as if that means nothing they say matters.)

    So if it's eg a white dude mocking another white dude by saying a bunch of racist things I can see where the people he's supposed to be standing up for might - on top of just finding hearing some of that painful - might get annoyed.

    And I consider that, in turn, more a matter for artistic judgment than something eg Susan Devoy should stick her oar into.

    And when heard that clip from it last night I did laugh out loud.

    (Also, like the risk of being misunderstood, this is the kind od thing where worrying too much about it can really screw up your process. Making it work for the audience is the craft but in satire more than anything else there's a limit and I guess you have to accept that.)

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • Capture: Peak Pohutukawa,

    Late to the party without a photo, but perhaps a technical observation. I was wandering around the other day having finally found the clip-on sunglass things for my glasses and it seemed to me the polarising really brought out the contrast.

    Bearing in mind I do have idiosyncratic eyes - some really minimal red/green issue that only shows up doing colour vision tests or noticing pohutukawa or rata blossoming on a forest hillside. When I look at the blossom I also tend to feel like my eyes are responding to something brighter than I'm actually seeing but that may be normal.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

  • OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance,

    Just to tease out: on the one hand the effectiveness you might want from the media - as an ideal - might be to produce in it's audience an impression of the nature and significance of a situation. I don't think it's ever worked that way - as opposed to just, you know, putting it out there - and to actually succeed you would need focus group polling at least as good as Key's. People do have their own priorities, which may or may not include the issue at hand. Or paying attention. Certainly if mass media start hectoring or lecturing they hear from their audience real quick.

    On the other hand the utterances of politicians - perhaps especially their justifications - appear to increasingly be pitched for effect rather than meaning. Reporting on the utterances, no matter how, would be at best facilitating that approach to politics, at worst making yourself the servant of whoever is best at it or whoever you report the most.

    I suppose it could be possible to not do that, but I'm not sure you can get there from here. And everyone would have to play.

    Or maybe Key is right...

    See? Now you're doing it too. :)

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1115 posts Report

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