🎶 #MattFishel

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL8G...

#20s #r2025

Valentinovo sta v postelji preživela.

Vroča in potna.
Tudi mišice so ju bolele.

Romantično sta gripo prebolevala.

#r2025

Stopil je do nje: “Živjo!”
“Pssst, berem,” je siknila. Bila sta v knjižnici.
“Eno poglavje preživi z mano,” ji je z nasmehom knjigo zaprl.

#r2025

Usedel se je v avto in vozil in vozil in ... Vozil.
Ko je iz avta stopil, se je kot nov človek počutil.
Natočil je gorivo in ponovni reset pričel.
#r2025

Tekla je.
Ni za maraton trenirala, tudi "beach body" ni gradila.

Tekla je, ker se je potem bolje počutila, mirneje spala
in predvsem sodelavci so drugi dan manj nadležno delovali.
#r2025

“Modre ustnice imaš, ven iz vode!” se je jezila mama.
“Še pet minut!” je zakričal.
Še danes... V svojih mislih, s pogledom v nebo.

#r2025

Spet tisti občutek že doživetega, sploh po peti pijači.

“Ji bom bil poslal pijan SMS ali sem ji ga že?
Bo bila jezna?
Sovražim te časovne fluktuacije!”

#r2025

Stala je pred ogledalom.
Z najlepšim nakitom na sebi.
In nič drugega.
Sama.
Gola.
Fantastična.
S sabo zadovoljna.

#r2025

V tišini je sedela na balkonu in v prazno gledala.

Stopil je na balkon in začel debato ... jezno ga je pogledala: “Mir, nehaj govoriti!”

Zbegano jo je pogledal. “Če nisi tiho, ne morem v miru sosedom prisluškovati!”

Odstranil se je z balkona. Pivo si je odprl.

#r2025

Bila je samostojna, samosvoja in z močno samopodobo,
a šele njuna dvojina jo je preoblikovala v žensko,
kakršne si v ednini ni upala sanjati.

#r2025

Zbudil se je sredi noči, motorko prižgal in družino razkosal.

Nikogar ni zbudil, saj jih je z večerjo že globoko omamil.

“Bil je tak prijeten fant, vedno je pozdravil in cerkev redno obiskoval,” so zmedeno vaščani razlagali.

#r2025

“Gospa knjižničarka, zakaj je v kletnih prostorih opozorilo, da odsvetujete listanje knjig na lokaciji?”

“Zaradi papirnatih ureznin.”

“Ker bolijo?”

“Ker včasih prikličejo mučene duše bivših knjižničark in knjižničarjev … In nekateri so zelo zaščitniški do knjig …”

#r2025

🎶 #MattFishel

youtu.be/lr6-Rkzlgo0

#20s #r2025

Dež solza je prekrival njen nasmeh.

#r2025

Nemočno gledam svojega otroka, ko iz ure v uro močneje kašlja.
Virus se mu po pljučih širi.

“Ne, nočem avtista za sina,” je bilo moje prepričanje, ko so nam cepivo ponujali.

Upam, da mu bo kurkumin čaj z D vitaminom sedaj vsaj malo pomagal ...

#r2025

#r2025

🎶 #KimWilde

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rV6...

#20s #r2025

Jimbo
El tiempo pasa y un nuevo enfrentamiento llega.

#illustration #r2025 #31dediciembre #day31 #dia31
#cat #gato #devil #originalcharacter #fantasyart
#art #illustration #drawing #digitalart #clipstudiopaint
#characterdesign #conceptart #popculture

Ricitos

La sorpresa en los ojos de Ricitos, que ha de ser. un
nuevo año talvez.

#illustration #r2025 #31dediciembre #day31 #dia31
#girl #chica #devil #originalcharacter #fantasyart
#art #illustration #drawing #digitalart #clipstudiopaint
#characterdesign #conceptart #popculture

Monday - May 19, 2025 #40 | An antidote for human loneliness Help your people find you. Help the machines help you. Below is a selected excerpt of my daily Chrome browsing history. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out what to work on next. I wanted to leverage #atproto and also attack human loneliness. In 2023, the Surgeon General of the United States declared America to be amidst a "loneliness epidemic". Suffering loneliness is equivalent to "smoking a pack of cigarettes a day" and everywhere I looked, it felt like people were struggling to find their people. (Which is bad for many reasons. ☹️) This site's source is open and freely available for mix/reuse. 👍 I have a working a theory that "stated preferences" are nearly useless and that "revealed preferences" are much more representative, especially over a sufficient longtitude of time. Moving forward, I hope more and more people will share their browsing history. (And once the Meta Raybans go mainstream, their life history!!) Nowadays, we all lead such rich and fulfilling interior lives. YouTube, Kindle, Spotify, and an endless stream of worthwhile pursuits and diversions are available via our magic rectangles. Since we all spend so much time online, sharing that digital trail is, I believe, the highest-signal way of how others can discover you. Increasingly, we'll make friends less and less IRL first. Rather, I think we'll increasingly meet online first and then translate our most promising relationships that start virtually into IRL relationships as a second step. Be algorithmically legible. We're at the precipice of a new era where Very Online People are about to inherit the earth. And the people who opted out (due to very valid privacy concerns) are honestly, IMHO, all about to be unceremoniously left behind. If the agents and algorithms can't see you, then they can't hire you. They can't connect you. They can't help you. And everything is seriously about to goto agents 24/7...

Mon-May 19, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #40: "An antidote for human loneliness"

"Be algorithmically legible... If the agents and algorithms can't see you, then they can't hire you. They can't connect you. They can't help you. And everything is about to goto agents…"

🔗 robertl.in/history 🏷️ #r2025 #rl40

Tue-May 13, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #39: "The Eye of Sauron"

"If ever there were a time to wonder ab what it means to be human; ab what it means to live a good life; ab why we're here at all; I humbly posit that time is now."

1. @now.robertl.in
2. @dame.is
3. bsky.app/profile/alic...

#r2025 #rl39

Thursday – May 1, 2025 #38 | Art history majors get the last laugh Thoughts on Midjourney Last weekend I started playing around with Midjourney ($10/mo; there is no longer a free tier). It's been fun because with the tool, I've been able to generate some breathtaking art. I feel like I've also been able to glimpse a vision of the creative future. For the longest time (and I was guilty of this), lots of people dismissed prompt engineering. It just sounded so squishy, overly-flowery, and self-important. Just so totally non-serious, honestly. But after actually using Midjourney, I'm starting to come around. The best prompts I've seen are multi-paragraph with technical vocabulary and referential knowledge. Many folks think prompting is "simply typing words". But that's akin to describing programming as "simply typing words". Words have precise meanings. Words like aperture and focal distance; the difference between soft colors and warm colors; knowing about futurism and brutalism and their aesthetics. You'll be able to maximally leverage MJ if you're fluent with art styles/artists/movements/epochs. Pop-culture knowledge also helps too! (eg. Makoto Shinkai is hugely popular, as is Greg Rutkowski.) Put another way: the closest analogue I can give —again, after having actually played around with MJ now— is that I now think of LLMs as an abstraction layer between human intent and the final product akin to something like Java and Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Back in the initial days of computer programming, people used physical punch cards to express their intent and instructions. Then eventually came Assembly. And now we have high-level languages enormously accessible to just about everyone. The same abstraction tools are now coming for art and creative pursuits. It's poetic all that 15th century esoteric cocktail knowledge that art majors spent tens of thousands of dollars acquiring so many years ago has, now at long last, paid off...

Thu-May 1, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #38: "Art history majors get the last laugh: Thoughts on Midjourney"

"I now think of LLMs as an abstraction layer between human intent and the final product, akin to something like Java & the Java Virtual Machine (JVM)."

#r2025.05 #r2025 #rl38 #art #ai #midjourney

Thursday – April 17, 2025 #37 | What is "community" in a company? And what is "community" in a country? Every year, our company has an annual Awesome Week where we all get together. Previous years, we did it in-person but this year, we're doing it remotely. I had a few thoughts, so I thought I'd jot them down! First, We moved to only having half-day sessions– the entire morning into early afternoon. I love this. It gives me time to reflect on all the presented material. Previously, they were whole-day sessions which, for me at least, was honestly exhausting and overwhelming. Now I have a few hours in the afternoon to catch up on client work (email support, answer Slack questions, meetings) plus reflect on what I actually absorbed in the morning sessions. What I enjoy about Awesome Week every year is that it provides a platform that introduces questions; it plants the seed in our heads to think about interesting things that we otherwise may've never pondered. One question we got asked was, "What does community mean to you?". For me, I crystalize around the fact that in a community (at least in a company setting), means everyone is exerting comparable effort towards a common goal. One of our speakers said something great, "A company can compensate you for your labor. But it can't force you to bring your 'best selves' to work." So how does a company get people to bring their best selves? For me, personally, what my colleagues and peers around me do really sets the tone and culture. I believe that "no one likes being the sucker". Like, we've all been on that group project back in our school days where one person did significantly less work but everyone got the same grade. Those types of group dynamics foster resentment. After a while, if sustained, everyone starts putting forth less effort. Standards and quality deteriorate. So on, so forth. Culture is hard and culture is the glue that keeps a community together...

Thu-Apr 17, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #37: "What is 'community' in a company? In a country?"

"It means when I show up every day, everyone else is exerting as much effort towards a common goal as I am."

1. www.archives.gov/milestone-do...
2. w.wiki/DqXN
3. youtu.be/coS2CdNd7Io

#r2025.04 #r2025 #rl37

Saturday – April 5, 2025 #36 | What is "talent"? It takes more than effort and an attitude of learning + replying to Ted Chiang Got some strong reactions to my last essay so here are some more thoughts: First, I totally understand that talented people need to put in work. That's table stakes. Anyone who is good at anything has put in the work. Thousands of hours at the gym shooting the ball at the hoop. Hundreds of hours at the piano practicing. Obviously, effort and an attitude of learning is necessary. But to be crystal clear: effort and grit are not sufficient. Anyone who thinks effort and attitude is enough to get good at art is someone with talent. Someone who has not spent hundreds/thousands of hours trying to improve at something but failing over and over until just giving up. If effort and a learning attitude is all that's necessary, why aren't there more Steph Currys? Literally, you could simply put someone out at the 3-point line and just have them practice making baskets all day. This is because Curry has talent. Yes, he's obviously practiced a ton. But additionally, for whatever reason, he's able to launch the ball pretty consistently with exactly the right spin, arc, velocity at the hoop to make the basket. Think of all the hand-eye coordination happening in milliseconds; all of the fast-twitch muscles firing. (And he's able to do it in the heat of the game with the clock winding down and everything on the line.) In short, more often than not, whatever he's able to visualize in his mind's eye, he's able to physically manifest into reality. I think about drawing in a similar vein. To draw something aesthetically pleasing requires making thousands of individual decisions. How thick to make this line? What color to shade here? How much shadow to apply there? Etc...

Sat-Apr 5, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #36: "What is 'talent'? It takes more than effort and an attitude of learning + replying to @ted-chiang.bsky.social"

"AI has helped *quantize* the choices that go into creating art."

1. archive.ph/igtnw
2. youtu.be/b8yscBsO42c

#r2025.04 #r2025 #rl36 #ai #llm #art

Thursday – April 3, 2025 #35 | Playing God: Who gets to be an artist? Thoughts on OpenAI's "Ghibli-style" image generation release with GPT-4o First, I totally empathize with Miyazaki's distress and sentiment that "[AI animation] is an insult to life itself." I think we all do. The man is 84-years old. Studio Ghibli is his life's work. Millions (myself included) grew up on My Neighbor Totoro and other beloved Studio Ghibli movies. The Ghibli-style is renown for being entirely handcrafted with Miyazaki closely overseeing every single frame with immaculate attention to detail. Famously, this single four-second crowd scene took Studio Ghibli 15 months to complete. To watch a cold, soulless machine achieve the same result with near no effort pains the human heart. To add further injury, OpenAI did not give single bit of remuneration to Miyazaki to train on Studio Ghibli's work. There is a natural deep-seated injustice that one instinctively feels. How can this possibly be legal or ethical? In what Universe is this possibly okay? After pondering this a lot though, my thinking changed. Another way to look at things: a lot of people have dreams of being a creative person. A musician. An artist. A writer. For example, when I was a child, I absolutely worshipped Calvin and Hobbes. I loved everything Bill Watterson drew and as a kid, I spent hundreds of hours trying to mimic Watterson's style and also draw anime and manga. But eventually I gave up. Nothing I drew, despite my hundreds upon hundreds of hours of trying, was any good. I had friends who could effortlessly draw beautiful comics and cartoons. But God had not given me those talents. So eventually I went on to study engineering in college because I had no artistic gifts. But my dreams of being a cartoonist never disappeared...

Thu-Apr 3, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #35: "Playing God: Who gets to be an artist?"

"For the first time in history, thanks to our collective ingenuity & relentless industry, man now has a shot at leveling the playing field; of giving so many of us a chance at artistic creation."

#r2025.04 #r2025 #rl35

Tue-Mar 25, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #34: "How do billionaires support art they love?"

"But I also wonder: how many artists reject money from really rich people because they fear their art would be irredeemably tarnished sheerly by association?"

#r2025.03 #r2025 #rl34 #billionaires

Saturday – March 22, 2025 #33 | Breaking laws in the name of innovation How Spotify and Uber won: break the law, win the market, settle and "seek forgiveness" later This is a weird piece for me to write because at heart, I'm personally an ardent rules-follower. I like getting the gold star (one reason why I love social media so much: adulation from random strangers! 🥳) and I do what I'm told. (And to be fair, I do believe this quality has helped me immensely in being both a good employee and a good husband.) When it comes to startups and business though, I've definitely noticed a pattern: many of the success stories have often outright flagrantly broken laws to get to where they are today. Two companies that come to mind are Spotify and Uber. In the beginning, Spotify knew it had a flywheel problem: users would not subscribe if they didn't have a huge music library to stream. Labels wouldn't license music if there wasn't a huge subscriber base though. People may wonder why other streaming services never won the market first? Why did the Amazons, Googles, and Apples of the world, given their massive resources, lose the music streaming game? Because they followed the laws. Spotify got its start by initially streaming a lot of music it didn't explicitly have rights for. Eventually, in 2017, Spotify did finally agree to a $43 million settlement; but it was a small price to pay. Today, Spotify has over 30% of the global music streaming market and is the biggest music streamer on the planet; its net income was $1.2 billion USD in 2024. Uber has a similar story. As far as I can tell, Travis Kalanick's greatest insight with Uber was that he could simply just break all the laws and "seek forgiveness" later. Taxi services is a very regulated industry in many places of the world and in our biggest cities, medallions can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Uber basically just ignored all those laws and did its thing anyway...

Sat-Mar 22, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #33: "Breaking laws in the name of innovation"

"I guess the closest thing to a lesson could be: for people who have the risk appetite and conscience for it, breaking the law doesn't matter as long as you win."

#r2025.03 #r2025 #rl33 #spotify #uber

Tue-Mar 18, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #32: "Rejecting Dark Forests"

"In summary, unless you're super-famous like Yancey & have other specific considerations, I really encourage people to share publicly."

1. www.ystrickler.com/2021-the-ble...
2. @timour.bsky.social

#r2025.03 #r2025 #rl32 #darkforest

Sun-Mar 16, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #31: "Celebrating commutes"

"Commuting is a chance to temporarily exist in a liminal, interstitial space... if I were a religious person, I'd say something like, 'God is speaking to me through Spotify.'"

1. youtu.be/ySFeL-ipAz4

#r2025.03 #r2025 #rl31 #woowoo

Sat-Mar 15, 2025

#ScreenshotEssay #30: "What core values constitute a good life?"

"A good life, IMHO (for me at least), is one where by the end, I've touched the lives of billions. Anything short of that, I shall consider failure."

1. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

#r2025.03 #r2025 #rl30 #life