king pedagogico

So I’ve been training this neural network to generate cookbook recipes by letting it look at tens of thousands of existing recipes.

The generated titles can get a bit odd.

There’s a creativity variable I can set when the network is generating new recipes, and when I set it low, it comes up with its best guess at the most quintessential recipe titles:

Cream Cheese Soup Cream Of Sour Cream Cheese Soup Chocolate Cake (Chocolate Cake) Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake Chocolate Chips Chocolate Chips With Chocolate Chips

When I tell it to get creative, things get even weirder.

like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.

but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror. 

it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”

or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”

like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:

“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.

and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.

anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.

The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.

I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.

Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit. Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.

Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.

As for me, I get this way with stark geometry existing in the real world. Some production house and network logos are famous for inducing this kind of fear (Screen Gems “S from Hell” [X] and Viacom “V of Doom”[X], anyone?), and I get freaked out sometimes when I see the triangle shapes on these kinds of doors:

And the sculptures of Philip Jackson really do a good job of combining this geometric thing with good-ol’-fashioned uncanny valley:

“Jellyfish Dreaming of Infinite Video Game Deaths”

“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi 🙏

So these are the early-of-the-earliest experiments while I wait on my foundry sand. I used the silicone putty that came with it to avoid wasting the good stuff but it came with drawbacks. Like it takes a LOT of pressure to pull fine detail and you can see evidence of that especially around the eyes. I like liquid silicone much more as it flows into crevices.

However it was a great proof of concept. I learned a lot very quickly about technique, both pouring and how I want to approach future molds. Hoping to make a mold that pulls exact detail, but if not I’ll just have to carve features deeper/harder. Going to try this exact master in sand before working on it again.

The cast you see there got a light go over with steel wool which scrubbed off the impurity layer that gives it a gold sheen in spots. Unfortunately whoever refined this alloy didn’t do a good job minimizing slag. SO. MUCH. SLAG. But the steel wool vastly improved the appearance; this bodes well for mirror polishing. Absolutely final pieces will also be oxidized and polished back out; I’m curious to see the total effect.

You’re All in on the Pathfinder Humble RPG Bundle

My tumblr and Facebook are filled with articles about why teachers quit and memes about how badly teachers need a vacation. There are rants about parents and administrators and disrespectful students. Burnout and exhaustion. Judging by what I read on the Internet, teaching must really suck.

I worry. Clearly, I worry about the conditions teachers face every day that make them feel this way. But I also worry about the impact of this negative narrative.

If teaching is so miserable, why should a capable person even want to enter the profession?

If all teachers burn out, why not replace credentialed teachers with TFA-style teachers meant to leave the profession within two years anyway?

If teaching is so impossible, it must take savior-type people to do it. Think “Freedom Writers" or “Stand and Deliver.”

Do the public and policy makers just tune out legitimate complaints from the trope of the overworked and underpaid teacher?

—

But here’s the thing I never read: teaching can be an awesome profession. And not just in a community service “makes me feel all warm inside” way.

Teaching gives me a space to be creative and analytical all at once. I get to create a plan and put it to fruition. I am serious and professional and theatrical and silly all within a day. I get to build relationships with people big and little and design my own community. I spend my days with people I legitimately love. My “office” is a giant space I have designed myself and I am never bored at work.

I know teachers give a lot, but I get so much from teaching, too.

People often ask me what my long term goals are. I can’t predict the future, but for now, my answer is simple. I want to keep doing what I’m doing.

—-

Where are all the teachers who feel like me? I know I am not unique or special.

Rants are funny and the Internet can be a cathartic place to share about a rough day. But I also wish there was more space here for sharing joys and successes.

We need some positivity to combat the negative “press” about teaching.

We can even use our joy to encourage change. We need teachers who can stand up and say, “I love teaching and plan to teach for the next 30 years, and that’s why ____ must change,” and “I am a professional and am getting awesome results, and that’s why I should be paid like doctors and lawyers.”