Confessions of a researchaholic

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?

October 22, 2023

There is a piece of mouth inside my desk drawer

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 10:10 pm
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Once, when I was at first grade, there was a homework assignment about filling-in-the-blank for a Chinese language class.
I was short of time and/or patience so I finished it as quickly as possible.
The day after submitting the assignment, the teacher came to me and asked why “there is a piece of [mouth] inside my desk drawer”, which I apparently wrote by looking at only “a piece of [ ]” without the rest of the sentence.

Pumpkins – generative fill experiment

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 11:43 am
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I used the same text prompt “pumpkins” to generatively fill regions within the graphical sign on the left and the yard on the right via Photoshop, and the corresponding results faithfully observe the surrounding contexts (graphical and physical pumpkins).
The motion graphics over the white arrow is added via Fresco.

October 13, 2023

Flip hair style

Filed under: Imaginary — liyiwei @ 10:37 pm
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During a dream on Oct 10 2023 morning I saw a guy with a hair that can flip open from the back like a carpet to reveal his scalp.

October 8, 2023

Squashes

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 10:16 pm
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Inspired by some squash arrangements I saw in a company cafeteria, I realized that I could draw a few individual squashes and rearrange them later for different compositions.

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