I saw some beautiful sunsets recently but could not manage to paint them to my satisfaction so I took a photo instead and drew over it.
I enlarged the moon for emphasis, but had some difficulty drawing the craters and eventually I switched to an old face reflecting a second meaning of sunset.
August 28, 2023
Sunset
August 27, 2023
Atlas Shrugged
I finished watching all 3 episodes of the movie version of Atlas Shrugged just to see what the fuss is about without having to spend days reading the book.
A bunch of industrialists and intellectuals were fed up with the socialist government, and decided to go on strike to form their own community in the mountains, while the economy and society crumbled.
It is basically a libertarian (and a bit technology) fantasy from an author who grew up in the Soviet Union, offering some reflections for the current government policies leaning towards state intervention.
Flying low
I felt a bit sleep on a late Sunday morning while reading that paper about AI consciousness and authored this motion graphics over this photo I saw a few days ago to reenergize my mind.
August 23, 2023
Natural American Spirit
This is a 3D drawing inspired by a pack of cigarettes I found while hiking.
Compared to 2D drawing, 3D drawing requires more efforts to place all these volumetric strokes, but also does not bother with the camera perspective and proportion.
August 20, 2023
San Luis Rey mission
Drew after this photo by Henry P. Schmidt which I found mesmerizing and very different from other photos of the same mission I found online.
Ladybugs
Saw https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/printing-protest and immediately visualized the ladybugs moving in my mind.
I extracted the foreground (ladies and bamboo sticks) and several individual ladybugs via https://segment-anything.com/ to, and animated them via Adobe Fresco Motion.
August 16, 2023
Water lavender
I am starting to experiment with https://feather.art/ which is an app (based on https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530092) for painting in 3D via a 2D interface by specifying the support surfaces first followed by projecting the (screen) strokes onto them.
It took some time to get used to the workflow, but I like it so far.
August 13, 2023
The gap in the curtain
I heard from a podcast/blog about this book offering important lessons for finance, so I borrowed the annotated digital version from the local library and read it via hoopla.
In a nutshell, the book is a fable (or a collection of individual but connected fables) where having partial information about the future can be more perilous than having no information at all, as one may misinterpret the information, take actions with unintended consequences, or just be psychologically paralyzed by the uncertainty and eventuality.
From the perspective of CS/ML, the book is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of over-fitting, as the characters in the book are trying to fit the information they have to their own actions and narratives (or vice versa).
And the danger of partial information applies not just to the future but also to the present and the past, as we often have to make decisions based on incomplete information.
