NerdlyNews

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Mechas are cool. Mecha toys are even cooler. But mecha toys based on my own stories has been the coolest.

When I was eight (making it the late 80s), I spent two years in South Korea. I remember how much I used to love going to toy stores and staring longingly at all the various mecha kits. Miniaturized robots fighting titanic battles over the fate of the world was a fun escape, especially with the Cold War still breathing its last gasps and the threat of North Korea ominously real, making every day life intense.

My love of big robots continued throughout the years after I returned back to the States, growing with games like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid and Zone of the Enders, while anime such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Patlabor, and Escaflowne fired me up even more. That passion influenced me professionally too as I spent my first big gig writing game manuals for LucasArts and building mechas in what was then a new 3D package called Maya on my own time to improve my art abilities. I obsessed over details, how the parts would actually move, and what type of complex rigging systems the robots would need to be animated.

When it came time to writing my new book, Mecha Samurai Empire, I drew on those experiences and tried to craft a more realistic mecha book, integrating my knowledge of animation and visual effects. I made parallels between the huge teams that are required to bring a character to life and the crews driving the massive mechas. Read the rest

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Pete Warden (previously) writes persuasively that machine learning companies could make a ton of money by turning to data-compression: for example, ML systems could convert your speech to text, then back into speech using a high-fidelity facsimile of your voice at the other end, saving enormous amounts of bandwidth in between.

Less exotically, ML is also used for “adaptive compression” algorithms that use ML-based judgments to decide how to compress different parts of a data-stream without compromising fidelity in ways that are perceptible by human observers.

Warden points out that companies already spend a lot of money on compression: vendors that want to sell ML-based compression systems would be asking for customers to switch who they spend an existing budget with, a much easier sell than convincing companies to spend money in an altogether new category.

One of the other reasons I think ML is such a good fit for compression is how many interesting results we’ve had recently with natural language. If you squint, you can see captioning as a way of radically compressing an image. One of the projects I’ve long wanted to create is a camera that runs captioning at one frame per second, and then writes each one out as a series of lines in a log file. That would create a very simplistic story of what the camera sees over time, I think of it as a narrative sensor.

The reason I think of this as compression is that you can then apply a generative neural network to each caption to recreate images.

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A half a century after Judy Blume’s classic young adult novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was first published, it’s going to be made into a film. Blume has consistently refused to allow her books to become movies. Fremon Craig who wrote and directed The Edge of Seventeen will adapt “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” for the screen and direct the movie with James L. Brooks producing. Apparently Blume hit it off with them during a trip to Hollywood in August. From Deadline:

“It is this right of passage for women and girls,” Fremon Craig told Deadline. “It’s rare for me to run into a woman or girl who hasn’t read it and every time I’ve mentioned it to a woman, they clutch their heart and let out this joyful gasp. There’s something so timely and full of truth and I remember for me that at that age, it felt like a life raft at a time when you’re lost and searching and unsure. This book comes along and tells you you’re not alone. Women remember where they were when they read it. I can’t think of another book you can say that about….”

“I got the greatest email from Judy where she said if someone were to make a film of one of her books, she hoped it would have the same tone and feeling that The Edge of Seventeen had,” Fremon Craig said. “It’s maybe the greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten, because she has always been a North star for me as a writer.

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I can imagine the first brainstorm: “What if the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey was actually a massive pack of cigarettes? And they found it at the bottom of the ocean?” Here’s the actual back story according to Big Dog Media Productions:

When health warnings first appeared on packets in 1971 and the rules for cigarette advertising rules were changed, tobacco companies were faced with the challenge of maintaining brand awareness and driving sales in a market made more aware of the risks than ever before.

The change in rules, coupled with a fresh approach to advertising in general, gave birth to a unique genre of advertising that neatly ticked the boxes of the rule book yet created an art form. As with Surrealist art, these ads aimed to surprise and intrigue the viewer by replacing the objects people expected to see in a particular scene with something incongruous – in this case, a packet of cigarettes.

Collett Dickenson Pearce was tasked with the advertising for Benson & Hedges in 1973….

The story goes that Frank Lowe, Managing Director at CDP in 1977, had two finished campaigns to present. After much debate, he took both campaigns to CDP’s Creative Director, Colin Millward, and asked him his view.

Colin said “…one will let you sleep at night, the other will make you famous.”

(via r/ObscureMedia, thanks UPSO!) Read the rest

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Video from Sacre-Coeur in Quebec (attributed to Jean Arthur) shows the forest floor lift and fall eerily as high winds blast the trees.

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I wanted to be able to control a light above our bed without having to get out of bed. The Philips Hue Wireless Dimming Kit (currently on sale for $30 on Amazon) was an easy way to do it. The kit comes with an LED bulb that connects wirelessly to the dimmer. The dimmer is mounted to the wall with adhesive tape, but you can remove it from its magnetic housing if you want to control your light from another part of the room.

The remote is much easier to use than a smartphone app (and more secure, too, I imagine). I’ve learned that the remote can be used to control up to 10 light bulbs.

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Boing Boing pal, Peter Bebergal, has a new book coming out later this month called Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural. In 2015’s Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock n’ Roll, Peter explored what he identified as the “occult imagination” and how it had provided critical inspiration to many ground-breaking rock artists of the 60s and 70s (and beyond). In Strange Frequencies, Peter takes a hands-on look at how technology has always gone hand-in-hand with explorations of the otherworldy. He experiments with building a spirit radio, EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recordings, a brain machine, and an automaton, and examines the legend of the Golem (arguably the “programmable robot” of Jewish mysticism), spirit photography, and the relationship between stage magic and magic of the supernatural.

To give you a taste of some of what’s in Strange Frequencies, Peter recently appeared on Ryan Peverly’s Occulture podcast. Peverly says that Strange Frequencies is the coolest book you will read all year.

And Haute Macabre has just published an interview with Peter conducted by the poet, Janaka Stucky.

JS: I’m glad you brought up divination because that relates to something else that was revelatory to me throughout the book, namely: that the ‘technology’ in the “technological quest for the supernatural” of the title isn’t just cameras, or televisions, or other mechanical devices, but also that crystals or sigils and other more fundamental tools external to our bodies are a kind of technology we use.

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