Flying Cantaloupe

The main character of a webcomic I’m currently making. You can find it at:

In my opinion, Carson, the Silicon Soul is one of those underrated gems-- uh comics in the platform (webtoons) and one of my favorites. It’s sci-fi, placed in a postapocaliptic wasteland of a world... or what has become of it. I love the premise, the setting, the protagonist! 

I really hope more people will read it ;v;

A new paper from NVIDIA recently made waves with its photorealistic human portraits. Called StyleGAN, the algorithm had a new training dataset pulled from Flickr, with a wider range of ages and skin tones than in other portrait datasets. (If your pictures are on Flickr with the right license, your picture might have been used to train StyleGAN). Thanks to that big dataset, a new method of generating images, and a staggering amount of computer power, its human faces are indeed impressive. But, to prove that their method doesn’t just work for human faces, they also generated bedrooms, and cars… and cats.

The cats are so much fun.

In many ways, generating cats is more of a challenge than generating human faces, since cats can be in so many different poses. It has an easier time generating texture than figuring out where all the legs and tails go.

I’ve noticed that for some reason, whenever it generates kittens, one is normal and the rest are haunted. There must be something difficult about pictures containing multiple subjects.

Its humans are even worse, proving that the difference between it and the version that was impressively good at generating human faces was all in the training data.

Speaking of training data, StyleGAN’s training data was something called LSUN Cat. Evidently, LSUN Cat’s images were sourced from the internet, because when it generated some cats, it added meme text to them, assuming that white blocky lettering is just part of what “cat” is.

It also attempted to generate cats with the Shutterstock watermark, although actually spelling “Shutterstock” proved tricky for it.

Another delightful thing about its internet-derived dataset: quite a lot of the cats look an awful lot like Grumpy Cat. She’s only one cat, but she had a profound impact on what StyleGAN thinks cats look like.

There are far more amazing cats than would fit in this blog post. In this bonus material, I’ve collected a few more of my favorites, including several with meme text, perfect for your internet communication needs. You can get them by entering your email here.

The short legend of Ralsei 🖤💚💗

It’s been a long while since a story moved me so much I took a day off to drawn fanart for. This idea has been cooking in my head since November.

And if YOU get this message in the future DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE CLINK ON THE LINK I FUCKING SWEAR TO GOD I WILL CUT YOUR HANDS OFF

A warning to all of my followers there no such a thing as @exposingthoselosers I just thought any form of information is good and can protect my followers from getting their phone or any other devices hacked if you’re connect to the wifi they might hack all of the devices connected.

DO NOT FUCKING CLICK ON ANU LINK YOU GET NOT EVEN FROM UR FRIENDS ON TUMBLR BECAUSE THEY COULD GET HACKED 👀

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

My paternal grandfather was born in 1906 (I have older parents). He and my grandmother came through Ellis Island.

My vocal coach’s grandparents survived the 1906 San Fransisco earthquake and fire. 

My great-grandfather lived to the age of 106. He often spoke of how strongly he remembered his nursemaid’s taffeta skirts rustling as she walked when he was a child. He was born in the 1870s. My grandmother recorded him on video in the 1980s talking about those Victorian bustle skirts he grew up with.

On my mother’s side, we tracked down a marriage record for her 17th-century English ancestors, their signatures still crystal-clear and confident on the yellowed parchment. The church where they were married still stands in London.

Samuel J. Seymour was born in 1860 and at age five, he witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Almost 100 years later, at age 96, he went on live television and recounted his firsthand account of the death of the president. You can watch the interview here.

The last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, died in 2009. 

The oldest person ever, Jeanne Calment, lived to age 122. She died in 1997 after recording a pop album, the same year The Spice Girls were topping the charts; but she remembered that as a child, Vincent Van Gogh once visited her father’s paint shop.