Aestektics

Student - Artist - Engineer Github

[everydaylouie]

happy friday the 13th

[itscolossal]

Aerial Explorations of International Cityscapes Washed in a Neon Glow by Xavier Portela

[showerthoughtsofficial]

There is a alternative universe where every coin toss in history was Heads and the scients can’t explain why.

[automatagraphics]

[suggestivecacti-deactivated2018]

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on. But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it. And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.”

— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit (via raggedybearcat)

[everydaylouie]

hello, world (a test of some virtual singer software!)

(soundcloud)

[lukasz-buda]

≈ Sheep fighting against the storm to get home. ≈

[aiweirdness]

April Fool’s pranks written by neural network

On April 1, people play pranks on one another, and a well-designed hilarious-but-harmless prank is a true work of art. There are lists of pranks online for inspiration, but there are only so many of these, and what do you do if your target has already read the same lists?

I train algorithms called neural networks to write humor - usually inadvertent, as they try to name paint colors or invent pies or design candy heart messages. Once I tried to train a neural network to tell knock-knock jokes, to mixed success.

I wanted to find out if I could get a neural network to invent new April Fool’s pranks. I collected pranks from internet lists until I got tired of it - but because each list only had a few, I gave up after I had collected only 132 entries. This is a pitifully small dataset, especially for sentences. I set up a special-purpose neural net for this, with lots of smarts but a very short memory. As I hoped, it learned individual words and phrasing from the dataset, but rearranged them into new combinations.

The result: pranks that they will never expect, and will never understand.

Place a pair of pants and shoes in your ice dispenser.

Put marbles in the refrigerator.

A meat and mashed potato sundae makes for quite the hand soap dispenser.

Put a glow stick in a toilet paper into the toe of your kid’s shoes.

Conference call two people then, when, when your kid asks what it is, say “Dinner.”

Try using old clothes to pee.

Glue all the eggs in the hubcaps of someone’s computer.

Put marbles in the hand soap dispenser.

Put food coloring in the mailbox.

Take the door knob off your kid’s shoes.

Hide an alarm clock in someone’s keyboard who isn’t a very good typist.

Hide all of the entrance to your office building if it only has one entrance.

Putting googly eyes on someone’s computer mouse so that it won’t work.

If you rip up a toilet paper roll, then leave them a ransom note.

Serve up a glass of juice in the fridge!

Place a pair of pants and shoes in Easter egg foils.

Rearrange somebody while pretending to pee.

Fill in this form, and I’ll email you more rejected April Fool’s pranks that make even less sense.

[prostheticknowledge]

Stable Neo-Hookean Flesh Simulation

Graphics Research from Pixar discusses technical method of realistic elasticity of surfaces that removes artifacts and glitches:

Non-linear hyperelastic energies play a key role in capturing the fleshy appearance of virtual characters. Real-world, volume-preserving biological tissues have Poisson’s ratios near ½, but numerical simulation within this regime is notoriously challenging. In order to robustly capture these visual characteristics, we present a novel version of Neo-Hookean elasticity. Our model maintains the fleshy appearance of the Neo-Hookean model, exhibits superior volume preservation, and is robust to extreme kinematic rotations and inversions. We obtain closed-form expressions for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of all of the system’s components, which allows us to directly project the Hessian to semi-positive-definiteness, and also leads to insights into the numerical behavior of the material. These findings also inform the design of more sophisticated hyperelastic models, which we explore by applying our analysis to Fung and Arruda-Boyce elasticity. We provide extensive comparisons against existing material models.

More Here

[snowysaur]

commission for @sparkleerose!

[quixoticrobotic]

help what were those little graspy hands that held stuff people used to wear on their skirts called

[quixoticrobotic]

Chatelaines!!!!!

[quixoticrobotic]

concept: instead of like. a bunch of belt pockets or wtf ever give your character a tricked out steampunk version of THESE PUPPIES

[decodering]

Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility

Karwai Pun, GOV.UK:

The dos and don’ts of designing for accessibility are general guidelines, best design practices for making services accessible in government. Currently, there are six different posters in the series that cater to users from these areas: low vision, D/deaf and hard of hearing, dyslexia, motor disabilities, users on the autistic spectrum and users of screen readers.

[…] Another aim of the posters is that they’re meant to be general guidance as opposed to being overly prescriptive. Using bright contrast was advised for some (such as those with low vision) although some users on the autistic spectrum would prefer differently. Where advice seems contradictory, it’s always worth testing your designs with users to find the right balance, making compromises that best suit the users’ needs.

[github]

[kleinsaur]

I’ve been wanting something like this to reference! Boosting for the others that like to dabble in code/design.

[nonelvis]

This is some of the most lucidly written accessibility advice I’ve seen. Making accessible web pages should be the default, not an add-on. It’s really not that hard to do, especially when you think about it from the start – and it benefits everyone.

(Obligatory note that there are exceptions to some of these guidelines, e.g., “bunching” some interactions together is an important way to cue which interactions are related to each other, but that’s why these are guidelines, not absolute rules.)

[assemble-the-fangirls]

young web designer: thank you oh my god no one has been able to explain this quite as well and this is just good shit

[studyinthemoon]

[Images descriptions from https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/ 

Designing for users on the autistic spectrum

Do

use simple colours

write in plain English

use simple sentences and bullets

make buttons descriptive - for example, Attach files

build simple and consistent layouts

Don’t

use bright contrasting colours

use figures of speech and idioms

create a wall of text

make buttons vague and unpredictable - for example, Click here

build complex and cluttered layouts

Designing for users of screen readers

Do

describe images and provide transcripts for video

follow a linear, logical layout

structure content using HTML5

build for keyboard use only

write descriptive links and heading - for example, Contact us

Don’t

only show information in an image or video

spread content all over a page

rely on text size and placement for structure

force mouse or screen use

write uninformative links and heading - for example, Click here

Designing for users with low vision

Do

use good contrasts and a readable font size

publish all information on web pages (HTML)

use a combination of colour, shapes and text

follow a linear, logical layout -and ensure text flows and is visible when text is magnified to 200%

put buttons and notifications in context

Don’t

use low colour contrasts and small font size

bury information in downloads

only use colour to convey meaning

spread content all over a page -and force user to scroll horizontally when text is magnified to 200%

separate actions from their context

Designing for users with physical or motor disabilities

Do

make large clickable actions

give form fields space

design for keyboard or speech only use

design with mobile and touch screen in mind

provide shortcuts

Don’t

demand precision

bunch interactions together

make dynamic content that requires a lot of mouse movement

have short time out windows

tire users with lots of typing and scrolling

Designing for users who are D/deaf or hard of hearing

Do

write in plain English

use subtitles or provide transcripts for video

use a linear, logical layout

break up content with sub-headings, images and videos

let users ask for their preferred communication support when booking appointments

Don’t

use complicated words or figures of speech

put content in audio or video only

make complex layouts and menus

make users read long blocks of content

don’t make telephone the only means of contact for users

Designing for users with dyslexiaDo

use images and diagrams to support text

align text to the left and keep a consistent layout

consider producing materials in other formats (for example, audio and video)

keep content short, clear and simple

let users change the contrast between background and text

Don’t

use large blocks of heavy text

underline words, use italics or write capitals

force users to remember things from previous pages - give reminders and prompts

rely on accurate spelling - use autocorrect or provide suggestions

put too much information in one place

End of images descriptions]

[workinginavideogamestudio]

(Thanks Rachel!)

[prostheticknowledge]

Augmented_Laser_Projection_Interaction

Project from colorsound is a proof-of-concept implementation of lasers incorporated with projection, with graphical effects synchronized together:

I have been wanting to try this for quite a while, and finally i could do a humble proof of concept of it, more to improve and do but really a great fun and concept.

Basically is a Mixing of Projection and calibrated laser with interaction.

More info can be found here, another more recent example can be found here

[h/t: Philip Reul]

[yuki-kawatsu]

‪久しぶりに手グセテキトー落書き_φ(･ら･‬ ‪お昼休みにしましょ☆‬ doodle

[prostheticknowledge]

Fly

Music video for track by imai featuring Kaho Nakamura put together by Baku Hashimoto uses stop motion method with Japanese confectionery:

A stop-motion video of various types of mochi🍡, popular sweets for old people in Japan. I had been shot this the whole summer at my grandparents’ house.

More Here

There is a making-of post with much detail (in Japanese) here

Update [20/03/2017] - An English version detailing the making of the video can be found here

[paperbeatsscissors]

C:\WINDOWS\