podcast friday

 Every Christmas, Behind the Bastards profiles a non-bastard, someone whose existence has made the world a better place, and the second the title for this one dropped I knew it'd be the episode I'd feature this week. "How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music Into a Weapon" (Part 1 | Part 2) is about Woody Guthrie and features Margaret Killjoy as the guest and is basically my entire identity because certain mothers of mine showed me Alice's Restaurant when I was a tiny child and the entire cultural tradition of leftist folk music from Joe Hill to Billy Bragg imprinted on me as a wee one. Woody Guthrie, obviously, is the guy who is responsible for the lion's share of that and thus obviously I want to listen to two of my favourite podcasters talk about him for a few hours, warts and all.

If you have an awkward parasocial crush on either of these two, finding out that Robert is a cousin of Pretty Boy Floyd or hearing more stories from Margaret's trainhopping days will not solve that problem, incidentally. Also hearing what is probably Robert's actual accent is a trip and a half. 

Anyway it's really good and they include a lot of Woody's music in it, as one should.

A terrible AI mural

 I met up with a former colleague for coffee today (delightful) and she is obsessed with this terrible AI mural that I had to see, and now I am obsessed with this terrible AI mural, and now you have to see it. Here's an article. The photo in the article does not do it justice, nor does the description. I was just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, laugh-wheezing. It's so bad. It's fractal bad. Like you look at the entire thing and your brain tries to spare you, papering over the obvious gaps in reality that this thing has generated, except that it can't, and you succumb to its non-Euclidian geometry and travesties of anatomy and perspective. You look closer and there are details that compound the Uncanny Valley effect, squirming into your brainmeats until you succumb to its madness.

Like the question said former colleague had for me was had she told me nothing about it, or even pretended to like it, would I have noticed. The answer is yes, because there's an immediate unsettling aspect to it. It hadn't occurred to me that AI murals were a thing you could do, but I would have immediately clocked that something was wrong. But then you get closer. There are Dia de los Muertos skeletons, each rendered in a different style, some realist, others highly stylized, one a Coraline knockoff. The perspective of the street scene is wonky. The flowers are all rendered in different styles, with different light sources. Usually skulls have teeth, which is a problem because a lot of these just have gums. Bone gums. Hands are a challenge for most artists, including me, but skeletal hands are even harder, and these are not done successfully. The clothing is nonsensical, in one place appearing to melt away, exposing a gaping wound. There's a guitar, unfortunately, because AI does a very bad job with stringed instruments. 

My favourite is a donkey. The donkey occupies the same space as the one-point perspective street, but exists in a different dimension, because it has a huge head and tiny little forelegs, and I couldn't stop straight-up giggling over how bonkers this donkey looked. It's glorious. Holy shit.

The good news is that this is possibly a sufficient outrage to wake Diego Rivera's corpse from its eternal slumber so maybe we'll get some decent art out of that. And also terrible publicity for the restaurant that will serve as a warning to others. Someone has already painted "hire human artists" on it so the community's opinion has been made clear.