Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Isn't She Pretty: #WrappedInPink — Pale Pink
Submission for the Mood Board and Fashion categories of the Wrapped In Pink AI generative art competition, Dec 2024.
Latest "feature" Articles
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genres
season's geekings: Pure CSS interactive web holiday lights (updated for 2025)
/* xmas lights */ #lightrope { text-align: center; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; position: fixed; z-index: 1000; margin: -15px 0 0 0; padding: 0; pointer-events: none; width: 100%;left: 0;top: var(--wp-admin--admin-bar--height); } #lightrope > li { position: relative; display: inline-block; list-style: none; margin: 20px 20px 20px 22px; } #lightrope > li > div { position: relative; border-left: 2px solid rgba(0,0,0,.05); border-right: 2px solid rgba(255,255,255,.5); margin: 2px 0 0 -3px; padding: 0; display: block; width: 8px; height: 18px; border-radius: 50%; transform-origin: top center; -webkit-animation-fill-mode: forwards; animation-fill-mode: forwards; pointer-events: auto; } /* Colors for different bulbs */ #lightrope > li:nth-child(5n+0) > div { -webkit-animation-duration: 0.8s, 4.1s, 3s; animation-duration: 0.8s, 4.1s, 3s; } #lightrope > li:nth-child(5n+1) > div { -webkit-animation-duration: .9s, 4.3s, 3s; animation-duration: .9s, 4.3s, 3s; } #lightrope > li:nth-child(5n+2) > div { -webkit-animation-duration: 1s, 4.5s, 3s; animation-duration: 1s, 4.5s, 3s; } #lightrope > li:nth-child(5n+3) > div { -webkit-animation-duration: 1.1s, 4.7s, 3s; animation-duration: 1.1s,…
Posted inWriting Posted in genres
Opinion: How the Section 174 Tax Code Changes Caused a White-Collar Job Crash
Note, Sep. 2024: I want to point something out: I’ve given few references here besides a couple of Google search results I happen to like. This page gives my current understanding. I’m still researching it, and you should research it yourself, don’t take my word as gospel truth. But this is how I understand it right now.
Googling section 174 layoffs will point you to a lot of information.
I’m also going to add some links at the bottom to interesting references to the issue, as I come across them. —Mike
IMPORTANT UPDATE, July 3, 2025: Pending signing of the new tax bill tomorrow, it appears the below information may finally be obsolete. The tax bill passed by Congress today quietly included a provision permanently repealing the below-discussed Section 174 changes. See https://abgi-usa.com/section174/latest-and-greatestUPDATE 2, July 16, 2025: If…
Posted inI Can't Believe It's Not Poetry! Posted in genres
Hair Of The Dog: Interlude Tonsorial
Exqueeze me whilst I sing the tale
of facial hair gone tough as nails.
When short, it chafes, when long it scares!
Crepusculating facial hairs
portend the chafed skin one expects
of consequence in harm direct
of concourse with the roughshod necks
of neck-beards come to wreak their heck!
'Ere I detect, this sullen morn,
a loathsome beastly beard is born,
to aggravate, and for a week,
imperturbate the shaven-cheek'd
and terrorize the newly shorn
with skin smooth as a baby born
and terror in their widening eyes,
as chafes, it does, their inner thighs?
O!
Gentle on a summer's eve,
till facial hairs arrive en-scéne
and, stubbly on a summ'ry day,
abrade a poor girl's thighs away!
Enbarbatating facial growth,
when unwisely left alone,
may force a call to…
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Shine, Shine, Shine: You Light Up My Life
These people are lit, yo.
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genres
god is in the details: Web Design—Adding Text Previews To HTML Details Disclosure Elements
Looking around the site, you might get the hint that I'm a big fan of <details class="detailsClassName"><summary>blah blah blah</summary> even more blah blah blah</details> disclosure elements.
For those unfamiliar, that's this:
Here's a title of a section
Here's where a bunch of information goes. Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah
It's true. I am.
But, I have one issue with them: sometimes I feel like they're a little nonintuitive. It's easy to miss them in certain circumstances, or maybe even not to realize they're clickable.
So, I came up with a way to make them show a preview of the contents.
First, you need the following…
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Generative Mystique: Feminine Stochastique
About This Gallery
This gallery deals with the unavoidable stereotypes of femininity that one encounters using some current generative art tools ca. 2024.
Being trained on a society's art, there are two possibilities for generative visual art software: it can hold an unflinching mirror up to that society, including reiterating its existing biases; or its creators can seek to consciously tilt the output to favor what they deem to be better choices, which opens the whole project up to accusations, and let's face it, perhaps the reality, of introducing other biases. The unfortunate truth is that at the time, people never thought to question making art that almost exclusively reinforced certain notions (of femininity, or anything else). They did not consider themselves to be biased. So too, despite the most admirable intentions, it's honestly a valid question whether or not current attempts to right historical wrongs are undoing bias,…
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Their Generation, Baby: Gray Ponytails
The revolution isn't over.
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
More Wild Styles: By Request, Wild SF & Wild NYC (Work In Progress)
A cousin of mine was helping work on a volume of poetry and asked if I had more images specifically of San Francisco or New York City in the style of “Wild California” Studies — AI Generative Art gallery that they could consider for inclusion. I didn't, but I whipped some up.
I'm pretty fond of how a lot of them turned out, but, as with so many of these projects, I wound up making many that are visually striking but don't really have much artistic value beyond that, and the work remains to be done to winnow down all the striking images to the ones that really are special.
Until then, I'm so fond of them, though, that I thought I'd give a preview. Here's the complete output of those experiments, awaiting the best of it being culled down into the final presentation.
Right now…
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genres
For Web Devs and Other Tool-Using Animals: Scripts to Analyze CSS from Firefox’s Javascript console.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to understand why your wordpress site's freaking menus display fine when you're logged in as administrator but are completely broken when you're logged out, it may be useful to be able to easily compile all the CSS for the affected page elements for both the working and nonworking versions, and compare them to see what might be different.
Let me back up. I had a problem the other day where my Wordpress site's caching plugin, which performs various optimizations on my site's code for non-logged-in users, was adding some sort of broken CSS. When I was logged in, everything worked fine, but when not logged in, something changed somewhere in the CSS that caused some of my menus not to display. I had a rough idea of where the changed code must be, but no more than that, and…
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Baby, It's Cold Outside: #SaturdayMonsterChallenge — “Winter Monster”
Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024’s #SaturdayMonsterChallenge theme on LinkedIn is "Winter Monster". Here's what I did.
Bonus Gallery: Leftover Winter Monster Images
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Art Waits For No Man: On Time
I posted The Contents Of The Rest Of The World’s Dream Do Not Concern Me (or, Why I Didn’t Turn 40) and Day Nights at around the same time, and in making the featured images, used Stable Diffusion XL to create a bunch of images that I'm kind of fond of, all around the themes of time and calendars. Here's the leftovers.
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genres
In With The Old: Resurrecting the HTML <BLINK> tag
Back in the bad old days, there was an HTML tag called [code][/code]. It did this, which everybody hated because it was annoying, and everybody's web pages looked like this:
.blink { display: inline-block; animation: blink 1s step-end infinite;} .oldschool, .oldschool * {font-family:times,'times new roman',serif !important;} .oldschool:not(a), .oldschool *:not(a) {color:#000;} .oldschool a, .oldschool a blink {color:blue !important;text-decoration:underline !important;} .oldschool a:visited blink {color:purple !important;}
Hello! Welcome to Kupietz Arts+Code This is the homepage of Mike Kupietz where you can see all his art, music, writing, and code! 
BEST VIEWED WITH
An interesting bit of history, courtesy of Lou Montulli, early Mozilla engineer and author of…
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genres
Tonal Eclipse Of The Heart: “The Quest For Tone (On A Budget)” — Electric Guitar Noodling With A Purpose
Over the past few years I accumulated a range of inexpensive but beautiful-sounding equipment: a '94 Standard Stratocaster, both Xtomp and Ampero modeling effects pedals from Hotone, and a Fender Champion 20 modeling amp, the latter three of which, as digital modeling hardware containing hundreds of software models emulating vintage analog signal processors, amps, and speaker cabinets, enable the budget guitarist to achieve a range of guitar sounds and timbres previously requiring equipment costing thousands of dollars.
Over time, and in an effort to revive my once-popular GuitaristInProgress Youtube channel, I began occasionally posting videos of my various efforts to wring maximum guitar tone from a setup that cost me, including everything, in total about $800. While I'm pretty far behind in posting, I still update it occasionally.
Here, for you tone aficionados, are what I've posted to date.
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Who Trails On A Leash: Portraits In Flesh — AI generative illustration gallery
Painted faces, paintings of faces — an exploration of fantastic portraits and fantastic art. (Titled with apologies to the shade of David Bowie.)
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Nothing To See Here, Folks: Just Some Vacation Snapshots
Just some photos from my cross-country vacation.
Funny how different vacation photos sometimes are from how you remember things being. Guess I should have used a camera instead of an AI.
Still, some of them really are surprisingly accurate to how things really were.
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genres
Nearly Famous: Sing This All Together — Kupietz Musical Collaborations & Guest Appearances
Here's a page collecting some of my musical guest appearances documented on the web. Currently there ain't much that's been documented, and less of that that's posted, but as I go through my archives I'll dig up more.
Daniel Sonenberg with Mike Kupietz:Dan's a very old and dear friend and major force early in my music education, currently a successful opera composer, music professor at University of Southern Maine, and still playing rock & roll. I've contributed small bits to his rock and classical compositions twice.
- It Doesn't Matter To Me (feat. Michael Kupietz & John Kapsis)
Dan Sonenberg - Words & Music, Jon Kapsis - organ & clavinet, Mike Kupietz - guitar solo, Matt Schickele - backing vocals
- Radiohead Song
Dan Sonenberg - music, Mike Kupietz - text
This was a…
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genres
Video Killed The Pagespeed Score: Non-render-blocking YouTube embeds in WordPress
On this site's Music Reviews page (itself built on-the-fly by a shortcode that sorts and displays posts from a "Music Review" custom post type), most of the reviews are accompanied by YouTube video embeds from the album in question.
What I didn't realize in setting that up is that YouTube embeds use [code][/code] tags to embed videos, and [code][/code] tags block page rendering—the page's onload property, which signals that the page is fully ready to display to the viewer and to remove the spinning "page loader" image I use on this site as pages load—does not fire until every iframe on the page has fully loaded its contents. This caused that page, which currently only has a handful of videos on it, to load very slowly. What's worse, this site's custom menus parse all page contents every time the site is updated to display for word counts,…
Posted inNews & Info Posted in genres
The Man Behind The Curtain: Bio — About Mike Kupietz
It is I! About Mike Kupietz
A year of this site, my baby, my pride and joy, ranking on page 11 of Google search results for my own name has convinced me it's time to do a little search engine optimization, so here's some brief biographical information about artist and technologist Michael Kupietz to tip off the brilliant algorithms out there as to who and what this site just might be about (including awkward third-person references to please Google's SEO.)
Mike Kupietz is an avid musician, artist, and by day a software engineer, much of which is linked to on my Other Sites section at bottom.
Mike Kupietz: Origins, range, and distinguishing characteristicsI'm an east coast expatriate who somehow, incomprehensibly, has been based for half my life now in San Francisco.
I grew up on Long Island, and attended Very Big State U upstate for two…
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genres
Got To Pay Your Dues: Bedroom Full O’ Blooze – (mostly) acoustic blues videos
This is a playlist from my GuitaristInProgress Youtube channel, just a bunch of old blues tunes I ran through at various points. These are some select ones I like, but if you click that link to go to the channel, there are plenty more.
The below is displayed with some new scripts I'm working on, please forgive me if it's a little buggy. Click on a video from the list at right to load it up.
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genres
If I Do Play So Myself: The Best of GuitaristInProgress — video playlist
These are probably my favorites of the various video performances I posted on the GuitaristInProgress Youtube channel over the years I was active there. There's both kinds of music here — classic rock AND blues! Plus, a few hints of electric guitar and one odd psychedelic spin on my old Wurlitzer organ. If you're only going to watch one of my videos, make it one of these.
If you click that link to go to the channel, there are plenty more, but these are probably the best ones.
The below is displayed with some new scripts I'm working on, please forgive me if it's a little buggy. Click on a video thumbnail from the list to load it up.
And, as always: apologies in advance for my vocals.
Posted inWriting Posted in genres
You Are Hear: Music Reviews
As of this writing (March 2024) this is pretty sparse, I only just had the idea. Generally I've never written much about music—I don't need to, because music is just one of those things I retain like a steel trap; it's all carved in stone upstairs, so I don't have to spend time putting it down on paper.
But, I was thinking, I do like a lot of obscure and unjustly overlooked albums, as well as having some unpopular (and therefore inescapably superior) opinions on popular music, so I thought it would be fun to make a list. This will certainly grow over time.
Posted inPhotojournal Posted in genres
When They Pry It from My Hip, Ironic Fingers: Exploration & Explosions, a Nevada Desert Hipster Road Trip
NOTE: Some of the activities documented in this photo album, like a lot of what goes on in the Black Rock Desert during the off season (when seven different government agencies aren't there standing by to protect you from yourself), fall firmly in the "Don't try this at home" area. Or even in the "Don't do this at all" area. Seriously. Don't do any of what you see here. You will get yourself killed. We had preparations and precautions which are not described here. And one of us almost got killed anyway.
Back in Spring 2003 I got wind that a bunch of folks I'd met through some fin de siècle attempts to revive the soggy corpse of the SF Cacophony Society were heading out for a road trip through northern Nevada, to do some exploration in the abandoned American Flats silver refinery in the hills outside…
Posted inPhotojournal Posted in genres
Vacation Photos: Pseudonymous adventures in Europe pretending to be the Billboard Liberation Front
For a little while I used to run the Billboard Liberation Front's website (INB4: no, don't even bother asking. I have no idea how to reach them anymore. The Old Man is long since retired, and I stopped talking to everyone else I knew through the BLF maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Maybe try contacting them through their site.)
Anyhow, funny story, for maybe 5 or 6 years after I stopped associating with them, I still was getting cc'ed on their website's comment form submissions, which nobody paid any attention to anymore. In late 2007, a request came through from an arts organization in Belgium, asking if the BLF would come give a lecture at a "Culture Jamming" arts festival called "The Game Is Up", thrown annually at the historic Vooruit Art Center in Ghent, that year's theme being "Art For Sale", a…
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genres
Pings On The Wig: Raving And Drooling: (An Accidental Review and) Lyrical Illumination of Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”
Introduction:
Pink Floyd's album "Animals", for me, might stand alone as the most singular achievement of the rock 'n' roll era. I've always argued that Pink Floyd were not a rock band, but the first act of what several decades later eventually came to be called "post-rock"—musicians grounded in the language and conventions of rock but doing their own thing with it—and never did they push the boundaries of rock music further from its beginnings, while still staying true to its basic visceral nature (this is, after all, a genre of music named after a slang term for fucking) than on "Animals". Culminating their epic series of classic 1970s albums, each of which further developed the musical experiments of the last, "Animals" was about as far as they, or anyone, would ever take it without completely untethering from…
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genres
Optimization-A-Go-Go: WordPress Shortcode & Function Performance Optimization with Transients
I suffer from that paradoxical form of laziness peculiar to computer geeks where I will save myself save myself 15 minutes of work on something by spending 4 hours creating a shortcut. As such, the menus on this site are dynamically generated by traversing the category tree in PHP and laying out menus and submenus from categories and subcategories, sparing me the trouble of updating them manually as I add new content. This took some effort.
I created a shortcode that does this (well, modified a shortcode, originally from the Hierarchical HTML Sitemap plugin, by Alexandra Vovk & WP Puzzle) and soon my site was happily generating dynamic menus on the fly and keeping up with my work as I added pages, edited titles, and rearranged categories.
And, along the way, getting slower.
And slower. And slower.
Finally the other night, due to a confluence of circumstance,…
Posted inPhotojournal Posted in genres
Beneath Berkeley: UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels Photojournal—Urban Exploration
Back around 2005-2006, as social media took off, I was a member of an urban exploration chat group, memory fails but it was probably something on Tribe or Friendster. Mentioning my interest in the UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels—a fabled network of sometimes-dangerous underground utility tunnels cross-crossing the UC Berkeley campus, which had once been well-traveled by intrepid explorers but had since been sealed off, with all access supposedly welded shut, although as of this writing I can find no evidence online of this other than an absence of any reported explorations after about 2001, and one or two scattered online claims of later access (which happen to jibe with the experience I'm about to relate)—I was contacted by privately by an old-school liberty-spiked homeless punk kid named Spider, who said he knew a way in.
After a preliminary meeting to…
Posted inWriting Posted in genres
Infrequently Asked Questions: What’s the best day of the week to take off if you work a four day, 10-hours-a-day work week?
What’s the best day of the week to take off if you work a four day, 10-hours-a-day work week? -Jeannie F, Marin County, CA
Thursday. Trust me, being self-employed I’ve done a lot of experimenting.
The ideal 3-day workweek is easy: that’s MWTh — Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. It makes Monday easier, because you know you have the next day off. You arrive Wednesday feeling like it’s Monday, except tomorrow is Thursday, which is Friday for you! Then, every week, you get a three day weekend to cap it off! It’s ideal, and I recommend the MWTh work schedule for everybody.
Working a 4-day workweek, especially 4 10-hour days, is more complicated. The entire dynamic changes. The ideal 4-day workweek is MTWF. The best day to take off is Thursday.
You have to think in terms of psychology: three 10 hour workdays in a row is easy to handle, it just…
Posted inWriting Posted in genres
Infrequently Asked Questions: Why are musical notes an octave apart considered to be the same note?
Q. Why are musical notes an octave apart considered to be the same note? -Charlotte V., Seattle, WA
Notes an octave apart are the same note because of the mechanics of vibration. Consider a piano string that is hit by a hammer and vibrates 1000 vibrations per second. So in 1/1000th of a second, it does this: Starts at center, then is hit by hammer. Snaps upwards. Hits the upper limit of its vibration, when the tension pulls it back towards the center. Crosses the center but keeps moving because of the momentum. Hits the downward limit of its vibration. Snaps back towards the center. Crosses the center on its way upward again, completing one cycle.
The precise timing of this motion is:
0 Seconds - position center - hit by hammer
1/4000 of a second: hits upper limit of motion
2/4000 of a second: crosses center…
Posted inWriting Posted in genres
Infrequently Asked Questions: Do the odds of winning the lottery change if more people play? Is flipping tails more likely after four heads in a row?
A.) Do the odds of winning the lottery change if more people play?
B.) What if 5 people each flipped a coin. If the first four all land on heads, the odds of the fifth coming up heads also is much lower, isn't it?
Answers:
A.) Do the odds of winning the lottery change if more people play?
OK. For starters, let's call the lottery what it is: it's a gamble.
For purposes of illustration, we'll consider another gamble: a coin toss.
Before we look at the question of more people betting changing the odds of winning, think about this: if you flip a coin a certain number of times, there's only a certain number of possible outcomes. For instance, if you have three flips, they can come out 8 different ways:
1.) Heads, Heads, Heads
2.) Heads, Heads, Tails
3.) Heads,…
