AI Weirdness: AI Weirdness advent calendar 2023. “It’s 2023 and the combo of GPT-4/DALL-E3 can generate passable versions of the saccharine Christmas drawings in an advent calendar. They cannot, however, label them correctly. Also sometimes you get sweatermugs. This means the 2023 AI-generated advent calendar is happening!”
Washington Post: Why we can’t stop watching terrible TikTok cooking videos. “With each second I spend watching these videos, the questions pile up in my head — mostly ‘Why?’ Why is he making French onion soup in a bathroom sink? Why did she stick a chicken drumstick in a jar of peanut butter? Why is this person putting dried pasta in a blender only to make ‘fresh’ pasta? Will they actually eat that? Is this a joke? Why are they making these kinds of videos? And why are they so popular?”
BuzzFeed News: Why Are AI-Generated Hands So Messed Up?. “why do these programs mess up hands (not to mention bare feet) so badly? It’s a question that many people have asked. To find out, I emailed Midjourney; Stability AI, which makes Stable Diffusion; and OpenAI, which created DALL-E 2. Only Stability AI responded to my questions.”
New York Times: Want to See the Weirdest of Wikipedia? Look No Further.. “The Instagram account shares bizarre and surprising snippets from the vast, crowdsourced online encyclopedia, including amusing images (a chicken literally crossing a road) and minor moments in history (Mitt Romney driving several hours with his dog atop his car). Some posts are wholesome — such as Hatsuyume, the Japanese word for one’s first dream of the year — while others are not safe for work (say, panda pornography).”
Mental Floss: How Many Danny DeVitos High Is Mount Everest? The Omni Calculator Can Tell You That, and Other Weird Measurements. “Mount Everest is officially 29,032 feet tall, but that figure only goes so far to capture the peak’s magnitude. It’s much easier to picture 26 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of one another, or 5696 Danny DeVitos. That’s why the scientists and researchers at the Omni Calculator Project developed the Weird Units Converter. Plug a measurement in a standard unit into the tool and it will tell you what it is in Empire State Buildings, spaghetti strands, blue whales, and more.”
CNET: NFT goldrush: A roundup of the strangest nonfungible tokens. “Real digital artists are making real money on NFTs. Take Beeple. He’s a digital artist with a huge fanbase, over 1.8 million followers on Instagram. Art he sold as an NFT recently fetched $69 million in a Christie’s auction. That’s insane to you or me, but not to people who frequent Christie’s auctions, who spend $60 million on abstract expressionist paintings. But even if there is a small percentage of NFT sales you can make sense of, there are many more which are absolutely, positively nuts.”
NPR: ‘Dark Archives’ Explores The Use Of Human Skin In Bookbinding . “Megan Rosenbloom, a young librarian-in-training, wanders through the Mütter Museum’s collection of medical oddities. In an inconspicuous corner, she discovers a display case of leather-bound books with their covers closed — unusual for rare books. The caption explains these books are closed because their binding is more notable than their contents, and that’s because they were made from human skin. This marks the beginning of Rosenbloom’s obsession with ‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’ and the opening scene to Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin…”
The Guardian: From cut-out confessions to cheese pages: browse the world’s strangest books. “Edward Brooke-Hitching grew up in a rare book shop, with a rare book dealer for a father. As the author of histories of maps The Phantom Atlas, The Golden Atlas and The Sky Atlas, he has always been ‘really fascinated by books that are down the back alleys of history’. Ten years ago, he embarked on a project to come up with the ‘ultimate library’. No first editions of Jane Austen here, though: Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Library collects the most eccentric and extraordinary books from around the world.”
New York Times: Pandemic Baking Just Got Weirder. “Back in March, when isolation and homebound boredom were novelties, many Americans fashioned themselves into folksy sourdough bakers. Come June, making bread loaves, cookies and cakes took on new urgency, as professionals banded together to raise funds for organizations that support and defend Black lives. All the while, many artists and amateur bakers had been creating confections at home, not out of practicality or as part of a campaign, but for art’s sake. Their cakes, which draw on the absurdist Jell-O mold tradition of 1950s homemakers and revel in gross-out palettes, reflect ideas about gender, power and respectability.”
Dedicated to all you cool cats and kittens who have ever had to do really weird tech troubleshooting, from the BBC: Internet: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months. “The mystery of why an entire village lost its broadband every morning at 7am was solved when engineers discovered an old television was to blame. An unnamed householder in Aberhosan, Powys, was unaware the old set would emit a signal which would interfere with the entire village’s broadband. After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.”
Mashable: Museum curators show off their creepiest stuff, and we’re shuddering. “The world can be a freaky place. The world of museum curators, however, is apparently downright terrifying. That much was made clear Friday when whoever had control of the Yorkshire Museum’s Twitter account kicked off a creepy-curator challenge. The UK museum claims to house ‘some of Britain’s finest archaeological treasures,’ but this #CURATORBATTLE called for something else.”
Rolling Stone: How a Government Agency’s Offbeat Twitter Memes Landed in the Library of Congress. “In September 2016, Joseph Galbo put a baby in a forcefield. It was the second day of Baby Safety Month, and Galbo, the social media specialist for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, had gotten the OK from his director to try out a new way of communicating to the American public the best ways to protect a newborn. The photo he posted had the goofy aesthetic of a slapdash Photoshop job — a smiling baby with a glowing aura nestled in the center of a blue orb — while the CPSC’s logo at the bottom lent the image the added feel of a low-budget PSA.” Gloriously weird.
Okay, I promise I will calm down about these. But this one uses AI to generate CAT PICTURES. Seriously, how can I not? Futurism: A New AI Draws Cats, and They’re Utterly Grotesque. “GANs have been used for much more ambitious projects in the past. Researchers at NVIDIA harnessed the power of the technology to create uncanny faces that are almost completely indistinguishable from the real thing. But that doesn’t mean bored people on the internet shouldn’t be able to take advantage of the open-source technology for a bit of fun — that is, as long as real-world cats stay out of harm’s way.” I tested this. A fraction of the cats look something like real cats. The other ones look like the dreams you have after a meal of spicy meatballs and eggnog.
The Next Web, included here for sheer weirdness: Student discovers copycat stalker imitating her Instagram account . “A Scottish college student apparently discovered a classmate had been imitating her pictures on Instagram, to an eerie degree. According to a now-deleted Facebook post, a woman named Chloe Cowan and her sister spotted the copycat, allegedly a fellow student named Honey Basra. The latter would apparently recreate Cowan’s photos, down to the clothes she was wearing and the caption.” This may be a hoax.
Motherboard: Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies?. “Type the word ‘dog’ into Google Translate 19 times, request that the nonsensical message be flipped from Maori into English, and out pops what appears to be a garbled religious prophecy. ‘Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve,’ it reads. ‘We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’ return.’”
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