Confessions of a researchaholic

December 14, 2023

Bubble gum flavored mouth wash

Filed under: Imaginary — liyiwei @ 5:47 pm
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This is an attempt to depict the flavor visually.


https://www.behance.net/gallery/187305817/BubbleGumMouthWash

December 6, 2023

ZZZ

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 10:15 am
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I have a collaborator whose name has the letter Z as the initial for all parts, and thus shows up as ZZZ, which seems sleepy, in our shared documents.


https://www.behance.net/gallery/186219073/Zzz

November 28, 2023

Cellular reincarnation

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 10:45 pm
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These “sleek” cellphones tend to slip and break easily so that new ones have to be bought constantly.

If the process of copying apps and data from an old to a new phone is like reincarnation, then the phone number is like soul or consciousness in that it is unique and can be associated with only one sim-card at a time.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/185895907/CellularReincarnation

November 12, 2023

A political balancing act

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 9:31 pm
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A small island, squeezed between two big powers, has only a very narrow path to navigate, and requires high political skills to do so.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/184406335/UnicycleTWCNUS

November 6, 2023

Septology by Jon Fosse

Filed under: Imaginary — liyiwei @ 6:41 pm
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An aging painter recorded his activities within a few days interleaved with flashbacks and reminiscences of his life and monologues about art, religion, and relationships in a single continuous sentence spanning seven volumes of this fiction.

Several characters in the story, including the writer himself, have doppelgangers with the same name and similar appearances but different life trajectories.
There can be multiple interpretations of this, such as mental confusion and imagined alternative lives as a reflection of the writer who possessed talent in art but deficiency (and regression due to aging and substance abuse) in other mental aspects.

I read volumes I-II (the other name) in an e-book version just to see what the Nobel literature prize is all about, and finished III-V (I is another) and VI-VII (a new name) in audio book versions as I found the audio format perfectly suitable for the continuous verbal style of the story without any visual structure.

A painting titled “St. Andrew’s cross” is repeated mentioned in the story, which I tried to visualize.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/183974007/StAndrewCrossSeptology

November 5, 2023

Restless dreams

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 10:20 pm
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When waking up around 5:36 am this morning, my Fitbit tracker gave me a sleep score of 49 (out of 100) which is much lower than the usual 70+ scores I received.
My brain felt fine despite a bit “dry” (not moving as fluidly as it used to which I attributed to the time switch), but the tracker might have a point given that I could recall having a lot of vivid dreams from earlier this morning.

In the dreams I first encountered a bunch of intruders in my home. I told them that I am going to “incapacitate” them one by one, but before any excitement could happen my dream switched to the realization that I have a bunch of unfinished blog posts (which I guess is a metaphor of all these pending tasks awaiting me) about a city monk, altruism and selfishness, personal finance, french fries and mussels, which I plan to expand into real blog posts later.

Later in the night I created a visualization of my dreams by Adobe Fresco and Photoshop, iterating between manual drawings and generative fill so that I can have some control of the content without having to draw everything by hand.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/183897605/DreamsNov52023

November 4, 2023

A frivolous drawing of a serious topic

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 11:48 am
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[The title of this post is suggested by GitHub co-pilot, and I decided to keep it for fun. A more suitable title would be “spot the difference, by generative fill”.]

Seeing the original photo under https://www.famsf.org/stories/whos-that-lady-tudor-portrait gave me ideas about changing some of the objects for fun, and later I realized that this can be an exercise of applying Photoshop generative fill to create a “spotting the difference” game.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/183818983/SpotTheDifferenceByGenerativeFill

The file is under https://photoshop.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:d22a5ee5-42b8-49dd-8af7-110256990e77 in case you want to see the detailed editing prompts and region masks.

October 29, 2023

Spider web 3D drawing

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 9:20 pm
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Spiders are fascinating creatures that can weave intricate webs much bigger than themselves.

October 25, 2023

He either reads fast enough or pees slow enough

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 10:01 pm
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Seeing some people peeking into their phones while doing other stuff, I always wonder if the small screen is really more interesting than the big world around us?

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