Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, art, creativity, fail better, failure, Thoughts, Writers, writing on December 21, 2023| Leave a Comment »
“You need to drop glass on the floor, get the burns, all those things. The real practice is in all the pieces that didn’t make it, the cliched blood, sweat and tears. You can’t know the limits of something unless you’ve failed.”
— Will Shakspeare, artisan glassblower
And you can still make something beautiful along the way.
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, creativity, curiosity, Fiction, inspiration, Writers, writing, WritingResearch on December 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »
If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to be someone else, either because you need background for a character or because some days, daydreaming about a different life is all that’s standing between you and a very impolitic email to your boss, this podcast may interest you!
Curious what it would be like to walk in someone else’s (work) shoes? Join New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath as he explores the world of work, one profession at a time, and interviews people who love what they do. What does a couples therapist think when a friend asks for relationship advice? What happens if a welder fails to wear safety glasses? What can get a stadium beer vendor fired? If you’ve ever met someone whose work you were curious about, and you had 100 nosy questions but were too polite to ask … well, this is the show for you.
Today’s episode? What it’s like to be A Professional Santa Claus.
You know you want to know!
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Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, AI, art, creativity, genre fiction, Thoughts, Writers, writing on December 17, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Ken Liu is one of our modern masters of speculative fiction. The first story of his that I read was “The Paper Menagerie,” “the first piece of fiction to win three genre literary awards: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award.”
So he’s pretty good.
He’s also been thinking about art, AI and the evolving relationship between them. Here’s his new story:
Future Science Fiction Digest – Good Stories
Clara’s favorite part of the workday is the very beginning.
She likes flipping the switches on the wall right inside the office entrance, all sixteen of them, different colors and laid out in two neat columns, like the console from an old NASA space capsule that she got to sit inside once on a school trip to DC. As she takes a sip of her latte, her right hand running up the wall, click-click-click, flipping one switch after another, she imagines herself turning on rocket engines, initiating a docking maneuver, venting some dangerous alien spores out the airlock.
The story is one of the many interesting pieces in The Digital Aesthete: Human Musings on the Intersection of Art and AI, edited by Alex Shvartsman with an impressive roster of authors.
Today’s software can only imitate art, but what about tomorrow?
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Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, creativity, inspiration, science, Thoughts, Writers, writing on December 10, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.
— Carl Sagan
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, art, creativity, inspiration, music, productivity, Writers, writing on December 8, 2023| Leave a Comment »
I was feeling pretty not terrible about closing in on three years of daily posts here, but this guy! Writing, recording and releasing an album every day? Seriously impressive.
‘Like brushing my teeth’: how Michiru Aoyama writes, records and releases an album every day
For two years, the Kyoto musician has risen at five, watched football, then made an eight-track album of super-deep ambient music – while fitting in a two-hour walk.
I’m still feeling not terrible about my streak, but this gives me an extra dose of inspiration. Win win!
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, creativity, genre fiction, Thoughts, Writers, writing on December 7, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, creativity, Thoughts, Writers on December 6, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.
— Winston Churchill
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Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, creativity, Thoughts on November 30, 2023| Leave a Comment »
From the annals of the “Thoughts that have been thunk many times before but are still sometimes good to think again” archives, I found this idea useful today:
When it comes to creativity, you can do anything if you don’t care if it’s perfect.
And you should.
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Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, creativity, Thoughts, toddler art on November 29, 2023| 2 Comments »
I found a picture that I drew of a dragon, lo those many years ago.
Being the curious sort, I decided to see if AI was worth its salt by (obviously) uploading the image and asking it to animate said dragon.
I hoped for something cute and silly.
(Well, actually, what I expected was for it to say, “Are you kidding, lady? And also, You call that a dragon? I could do better than that while managing air traffic control for LAX! Who drew this thing, a toddler?” Yes, more or less. No need to be mean about it.)
What I got was a canned reply on how to animate, plus this:
So, not my dragon and not an animation. Just a lot of “Ooh, look at me,” with a heaping dose of computerized side-eye.
Kind of the internet in a nutshell, actually;)
Posted in Food and..., tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2023, creativity, recipes, Thoughts on November 27, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Still working on that mushroom soup recipe.
Here’s the thing: My default recipe is a little complicated.
I don’t mean that in a bad way, but in a creative sort of way. The truth is, the recipe for this soup is straightforward. Here, I’ll lay it out for you:
The devil is, of course, in the details. I wrote out the whole recipe and discovered two things.
One, I have a hard time doing a thing the easy way. Well, that’s not entirely true. I tend to take a recipe, strip it down to the basics, then build it back up again so that it has what I consider the essentials of taste and texture. This leads to a basic recipe with many, many caveats.
And two, my memory for little things like quantities is not great. Both of these factors are further complicated by the fact that I never quite make a recipe the same way, and the point is to hand this off to people who want it to taste the way it did at a certain time (2023) and place (the wilds of northern Ontario).
So… stay tuned!
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