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Writing » I Can't Believe It's Not Poetry!
Interlude Tonsorial

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…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations » Experiments & Studies
You Light Up My Life

Shine, Shine, Shine: You Light Up My Life

These people are lit, yo.

Code & Algorithms » Web
Web Design—Adding Text Previews To HTML Details Disclosure Elements

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…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
Feminine Stochastique

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,…

Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
By Request, Wild SF & Wild NYC (Work In Progress)

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…

Code & Algorithms » Web
Scripts to Analyze CSS from Firefox’s Javascript console.

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…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations » Requests & Contest Submissions
#SaturdayMonsterChallenge — “Winter Monster”

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
Visual Art » Generative Illustrations » Interesting Leftovers & Bonus Galleries
On Time

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.

Code & Algorithms » Web
Resurrecting the HTML <BLINK> tag

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…

Music & Sound » Videos
“The Quest For Tone (On A Budget)” — Electric Guitar Noodling With A Purpose

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.

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
Portraits In Flesh — AI generative illustration gallery

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.)

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
Hiking the rockies in Colorado, we got real close to some amazing wildlife.

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.

Music & Sound » Misc. Pieces, Singles, & EPs
Sing This All Together — Kupietz Musical Collaborations & Guest Appearances

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.

  1. 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

  2. Radiohead Song

    Dan Sonenberg - music, Mike Kupietz - text

    This was a…

private » Programming Hacks Used In This Site
Non-render-blocking YouTube embeds in WordPress

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,…

home » About Michael Kupietz
Bio — About Mike Kupietz

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 characteristics

I'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…

Music & Sound » Videos
Bedroom Full O’ Blooze – (mostly) acoustic blues videos

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.

Music & Sound » Videos
The Best of GuitaristInProgress — video playlist

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.

Writing » Topical Writing » Reviews & Criticism
Music Reviews

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.

Visual Art » Adventure Photojournals
Blue hits again, Harry, Jeff, Blair

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…

Visual Art » Adventure Photojournals
Pseudonymous adventures in Europe pretending to be the Billboard Liberation Front

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…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
Raving And Drooling: (An Accidental Review and) Lyrical Illumination of Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”

Pings On The Wig: Raving And Drooling: (An Accidental Review and) Lyrical Illumination of Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”

Skip intro

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…

private » Programming Hacks Used In This Site
WordPress Shortcode & Function Performance Optimization with Transients

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,…

Visual Art » Adventure Photojournals
UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels Photojournal—Urban Exploration

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…

Writing » Topical Writing » Mikesplaining (Answers to 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?

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…

Writing » Topical Writing » Mikesplaining (Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions)
Why are musical notes an octave apart considered to be the same note?

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…

Writing » Topical Writing » Mikesplaining (Answers to 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?

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,…

Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Local Color: True Stories From Near And Far
How to Find Your Hotel If You’re Lost In Ghent

Local Color—Ghent, Belgium: How to Find Your Hotel If You’re Lost In Ghent

Back in my salad days I once tricked the Belgian government into paying to fly me & two friends to give an arts lecture in Ghent under assumed names (long story, now recounted elsewhere on this site).

The Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Vooruit Arts Center), where we delivered our address, was an elegant old 1910 festival hall in Ghent, with galleries and lecture halls above and a bar in the basement, and which had once been used by the Nazis during the occupation.

The folks from Vooruit put us up in a 300-year-old hotel where hotel owners' incredibly classy cafe on the first floor kept us both caffeinated and entertained, with live a cappella opera singers, and the hotel part was reached by going through a door in the back of a closet.

Just a block or two from the hotel was a row of several…

Visual Art » "Petit Art": Odds & Ends
Robyn Hitchcock fan club 50th Birthday Card

Digital Objets D’Art: Robyn Hitchcock fan club 50th Birthday Card

Robyn Hitchcock used to have an email fan club that I was pretty active in (hence his name coming up a bunch of places on this site; if you're familiar with his songs, it makes sense that he gives people ideas for art.)

Back in, geez, 2003 or 4, I think, he turned 50 so we got together and all contributed a bunch of art to give to him on a CD-rom. This was my contribution, about 12 pages of scanner art (including the somewhat difficult task of getting a good digital scan of a lit candle!) Use the skull, suitcase, and bottle of wine on the right to navigate through the panels.

(Note: at narrower window widths, the navigation icons on the right side of each page below might get cut off and you will need to either widen your browser window, or scroll to the right to see…

Visual Art » Adventure Photojournals
27 Photos from Burning Man 1997

Good Day at Black Rock: 27 Photos from Burning Man 1997

Introduction, 2023:

Back when I first got to San Francisco in the mid-90s, full of youthful idealism, the first thing I did was seek out the San Francisco Cacophony Society and their best-known offspring, the Burning Man festival and the nascent subculture that surrounded it. Well, no, the first thing I did was spend 3 years of my late 20s cocooned at the Green Tortoise Adventure Travel office & youth hostel, where I lived and worked, venturing out only to cavort in the surrounding North Beach neighborhood with the poets and the blues musicians. But after three years of that—straight out to explore what San Francisco's modern counterculture had to offer, without delay.

But well prior to that, in September 1997, a bunch of us Tortoise employees borrowed a bus from them—great perk of working for an adventure tour bus operator—and went out for a long…