This is a series of generative art images I am paticularly fond of. Originally these were going to be part of my RobGAN Hitchcock project, but they kind of stand on their own. Created with Stable Diffusion.
For some reason, I've always been particularly moved by a sense of loss. It's the sole valuable observation I ever got from a kindly but not particularly effective therapist I saw for a while in my 30s, one of the few deep and profoundly true things about myself I hadn't already excavated on my own in my decades of frequent navel-gazing before that.
I've always written a lot—although I never considered myself a writer, so much as just someone who writes things down a lot—and in my 20s I had started occasionally writing longer essays, when I felt moved to. At a certain point, a few years after writing this one, I believe, I realized the longer pieces that I always felt were the most successful, the ones I had labored in love over and really eventually did manage to express what I had set out to…
For a while, I had a Twitter account, @robGANhitchock, where I was posting AI illustrations of Robyn Hitchcock lyrics I created using a Generative Adversarial Network ("GAN"). This was an interesting project, because when it started I knew next to nothing about generative art; as I worked on it I learned more about crafting prompts, and more and better tools emerged, so over the course of the full set, you can see the progression of experience and improved generative algorithms: from the first few in VQGAN, then FreewayML,…
Here's a fairly old repost from my consulting site, where it got no traction whatsoever.
The Bad Statements Detector is a specialized search tool designed to aid in online research and to help prevent people from passing along nonsense on the internet, by making it easier to look stuff up on fact-checking websites like Snopes.com, Politifact, FactCheck.org, and other myth-busting websites all at once.
It works very simply: drag a “Detect BS” button to your bookmarks bar to create a "bookmarklet", a javascript bookmark that opens a tool when clicked. Then, while you surf the web, you can drag your mouse to select text on any web page and click your “Detect BS” bookmark link. This will return no-nonsense links from a multitude of reputable fact-checking and science websites that tell you if the statement you selected is well-known BS (plus offer you some sharing options right from the popup.)
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If you don't want to read the introduction you can skip straight down to the reviews.
IntroductionA number of years ago I started jotting down summaries of movies I've watched, just to keep track of what I'd seen. As the years went by, the list grew, and occasionally (but not often) I was moved to write more, until finally I wound up with hundreds of them, mostly very short summaries but occasionally a little more in-depth for movies I particularly liked or loathed. There's a brief section of favorites and honorable mentions, then below that they're indexed by movie title, click a letter to see the titles starting with that letter.
By the way: this list is extremely heavy, although not exclusive, with horror and science fiction films, because that's what I watch most.
A word about my terminologyAs I wrote these reviews just for myself, I…
Ok, not a great movie by any stretch, but deserves an honorable mention for being fairly original, clever, and darkly entertaining.
Wil Wheaton fiiiinally earns my complete forgiveness for Wesley Crusher, by playing his very creepiest self in what, for at least 2/3 of it, plays like one of the better (although definitely not one of the best) Black Mirror episodes. Set in the 80s (and well done at that, not overplaying it) a lonely bachelor stuck at home caring for his mother brings home a "Rent-A-Pal" VHS virtual friend. Seriously, I didn't have high hopes for this one, and the ending engages in some much-too-predictable strokes, but overall it's mostly well done enough, and creative enough, to be worth a watch. Bonus points for keeping you guessing about whether the video tape is or is not actually responding to what's happening in front of the tv in some amusingly…
Back in 2009 my old ex-friend Rick Abruzzo, whom I'd met some years earlier during a mutual effort to resuscitate the soggy corpse of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, invited me to come down with my guitar and fill some airtime on Baghdad By The Bay, his show on San Francisco's Pirate Cat Radio. A few unruly friends tagged along to egg me on, and in addition to going out live over the wires, the ensuing off-the-cuff, improvised hour of chaos was recorded for posterity on Pirate Cat's state-of-the-art low-quality direct-to-mp3 recorder. This is that chaos. It may or may not have passed for showmanship—you be the judge.
This is basically a nearly-finished live album, warts and all, and creeping up on 15 years after the fact it just awaits on a little bit of final production gloss and mastering for me to…
I quit Twitter a while back, and sometimes even just glancing at FB consumes a full day, so I have no outlet for my amusing social-media-worthy passing thoughts, except to just think them privately to myself. And that's so 20th century.
So this page is my new one-person social network, "Kwitter", a place to post thoughts, which I call "Kwits". Anyone who is me is invited to register and post.
This one is finished except for the final production and mastering... it needs some studio gloss on it.
This a a drone album I did in early 2023. I created the basic audio for this with the wonderful Bento analog synthesis emulator, then arranged and produced it in my hated enemy Logic Pro.
Unlike a lot of my music, I would actually present this as worth a listen, for anyone open to things this far from conventional musical ideas. Dim the lights, put your headphones on, and drift downstream through my inner space for 80 minutes. You may like it or you may not, I never would have expected to. I certainly wouldn't ever have thought that a 80 minute piece of music with only one note could be engaging all the way through, and especially not hold up to repeated listening. But I'm pleased to…
Idea for a movie: A time traveling refugee from the 1990s is stuck in another era and must try to blend in, but is found out when it is discovered he knows how to correctly pronounce the names Shania, Tyra, and Demi.
Geezer Butler, bassist for the band Black Sabbath, came up with the idea for heavy metal music when the band drove past a movie theater showing a horror film, and there was a ticket line up the block. He thought to himself that if people like so much to be scared, what if he wrote music that was like a horror movie?
So, I wonder... what would the world be like today if the band had taken a different route, and driven past an X-rated theater instead?
What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but must use Wordpress to do it?
Ice…
Let's talk about sex! No, wait, let's talk about something even more taboo!
These are some samples of political, ideological, or economic thoughts I've jotted down. I don't consider myself an authority on these things, for sure, I just like to think things through, and as I like to say, for me these kinds of writings are intended to open a conversation, not to be the final word.
Posted with great reluctance, my perpetually unfinished magnum opus, likely to someday stand as my failed masterpiece, a ponderous 65-minute arabesque of serialist post-rock instrumentals which, after 7 ongoing years of work and no end in sight, is at this point holding up the completion of 8 subsequent albums.
I wouldn't make a recommendation as to whether anybody should listen to this or not. This isn't actually intended for anyone to listen to, this one in particular I'm really just making to suit myself, writing it for its own sake. You're welcome to check it out, but that's as far in as I'll welcome you.
Some degree of patience may be of help to those who do care to venture into it, because it does something longer, quieter, and more deliberate than it may at first…
An early experiment in the serialist style I've been developing, which I was once told by a figure in a dream should be called "Zetetic Music". 2017. This is not a listenable or enjoyable album nor a particularly interesting piece of music, and is posted here primarily for the historical record. There are many other things on this site much more worth listening to.
I've been putting together an album of goofy electronic arrangements of classic tunes. Here's one I'm still working on at the moment, a medley of classic favorites, called "The Strutbutter / The Great Game Show In The Sky".
Angel trumpets and devil trombones, and you are invited! Here's some phantasmagorical music-themed generative AI illustrations I, well, generated.
These were, by the way, generated with Dall-E 2.5, which is sadly no longer available. All public instances have been replaced with Dall-E 3 which is much more literal, produces crisp, more concrete and digital-looking or often cartoonish images, and is not good for abstraction or "sloppier" images. I remain hopeful Dall-E 2.5 will become available again, or a future version will allow the use of prompts again that can facilitate generating more obscure, impressionistic, and stylistically varied output.
On my IT consulting business site, I'm using a php script I've written to generate on-the-fly random email addresses specific to the browsing session looking at the site. So, I can include email addresses in plain text on the site, but if a spammer harvests one, I can block it, and other people legitimately browsing the site will still get individualized working addresses they can contact me with.
It generates a log as email are generated, so you know who got what email. You'll want to watch the log size yourself so you don't fill your disk space.
Obviously it's more complicated than just this, there's whitelisting involved as well as some other behind-the-scenes trickery, such as double-checking emails against the log as they arrive, that I can't reveal publicly for opsec reasons.
But, I can reveal the basic php script that coughs up a random email address specific…
For confused first-time visitors and other people still acclimating, here is a description of these little tabs to the left, as well as some other features of the site.
Open "Expert Mode" CLI Navigation - this give you the option to switch your browser's display to an old-fashioned terminal mode where you may browse this site, view pages and images by typing text commands. Just like how we used to browse the web back in 1978!
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New - Draggable elements! Several elements on this website, including these tabs, this popup message, and the "Hire Mike" badge in the lower right, can be dragged around with your mouse, to avoid them blocking content. Positions are remembered per tab, so as you navigate around the site, they will stay in the same place for your whole visit.
Enjoy!
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This will switch to a terminal emulator, load this page, and allow you to browse this website and view its contents by typing text commands.
Plus there might be, y'know, some fun stuff hidden in there. Just for geeks.