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These “smart” glasses come with zero AI and zero cameras. Designed to block the sun, not send data to the cloud.
…
Excellent work, DDG. The real magic isn’t on the linked page, though, but on their socials, where they posted this amazing video:
Like many others1, MEEK’s Fabulous has been stuck on-loop in my head for most of this year. What a fucking banger of a track, amirite?
And yet… somehow, today was the first time I figured I’d watch the music video. If you’ve not seen it (or perhaps not even heard the song), go do that now; I’ll wait.
The outdoor shots start about 20 seconds in, and… they’re instantly-recognisable by what they aren’t.
They aren’t London, where singer-songwriter Georgia Meek hails from, that’s for sure.
You probably know from the title of this blog post, but the filming location MEEK and her team chose is… Blackpool!
That first outdoor shot is opposite Pier Street Car Park.2
The music video goes indoors, continuing – nay, increasing – how fabulously queer-and-glam it is, through a theatre and arcade/bingo hall3. Eventually, it hits and a series of fast food establishments cumulating in Feast About.
Then there’s some faster and blurrier videography, but it’s clearly the Golden Mile, where she’s heading South and… hey, wait… is this music video actually shot in a geographically-sound order? So far, she seems to have moderately-consistently been moving South through the roads about one or two streets back from the Promenade, from a little North of the North Pier down towards the Central Pier…
Anyway; after her party night out, she finds her way to a late-night chippy, as you do.
She’s still heading South… which makes me think that the ruined steps she’s seen sitting on for literally three seconds might be somewhere between Coral Island and the Crispy Cod. Anybody know?
Anyway, the bottom line is that this music video was – surprisingly but delightfully – set in the area of… what might be the gayest pub crawl in the UK. Which, on top of this already awesome song, leaves me… feeling fucking fabulous.
1 Especially those in queer or adjacent spaces, obvs.
2 Pier Street and York Street Car Park’s are a comfortable walk from Ma Kelly’s Cabaret Bar, which – and I’m less-certain about this one – might be the host of some of the interior shots from the music video. Anyway, if you go around the corner in Google Street View you’ll find Higgitts Arcade and Burger Bar, which – just trust me and go look at it – is the most-Blackpool thing imaginable.
3 I’m almost-certain the arcade is the Higgitts, which I mentioned previously because of its proximity to an earlier shot!
My “commute” since moving to the Chicory House isn’t much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see?
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This is the video version of a joke that’s also available as a blog post and as a podcast episode. Watch it here, or find it:
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When somebody started repeatedly leaving bottles of urine on top of a utility cabinet in his neighbourhood, filmmaker Derek Milton decided to investigate. During his descent into insanity as he tries to understand why this person keeps leaving their piss here (and who keeps collecting them, later), somehow sponsored by the Reolink Go PT Ultra range of security cameras, we see through this entertaining (?) documentary (??) the story of an artist trying to interpret the work of another, more-shy, artist (???).
I don’t know, that’s the best description I can come up with for this weird project. I still don’t know why I watched it from beginning to end. But now you can, too.
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or, how to fuck your shit up by ignoring obvious birthday inflammation symptoms. don’t be like me. seek help.
sorry for this barely scripted and low quality video, the next one will be worse.
special thanks to doctor jacobi for the excellent care, and to the manna charitable foundation for the flight logistics.
The ever-excellent Blackle Mori1 posted this about 18 months ago but I don’t think it got the level of attention it deserves. If if you’ve never experienced birthday inflammation or known anybody who has, it’s an eye-opening experience to hear a first-hand account of this unusual and definitely-real condition.
1 If the name’s familiar but you can’t quite place it, here’s the previous two times I’ve talked about Blackle’s work: my analysis of the construction of the Basilisk Collection, and the (now-famous) Cursed Computer Iceberg.
I relaunched FreeDeedPoll.org.uk at the weekend, after a frustrating server failure took it down. But as I was relaunching it anyway, I took the opportunity to make some changes to the site that I’d been meaning to anyway1.
And while I was re-making it anyway, I figured I’d throw together one of those one-minute tutorial videos that the young people use, these days:
It’s also on YouTube, of course, where I also made one of those “shorts” videos…2
1 Things that weren’t technically-feasible back when I created the site in 2011 like making the PDF generation happen in the browser, so no personal information ever has to leave your computer, for example
2 Y’know, those things for people who can’t even be bothered to turn their phone into the same orientation as virtually every television, cinema screen, and computer monitor that’s ever been made (not that the owners of those larger screens can always turn them to portrait orientation!). Turns out I have strong feelings about portrait video! But if that’s the way to reach out and help the widest diversity of people, I guess that’s what I’ve got to do…
Today, for the first time ever, I simultaneously published a piece of content across five different media: a Weblog post, a video essay, a podcast episode, a Gemlog post, and a Spartanlog post.
Must be about something important, right?
Nope, it’s a meandering journey to coming up with a design for a £5 coin that will never exist. Delightfully pointless. Being the Internet I want to see in the world.
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Turns out I’m not quite done obsessing over Musical Transients (previously, previouslier), and I found this video of a YouTuber playing the album on Clone Hero, because the album’s got an official Clone Hero chart to download and play.
Anyway: Acai turns out to be not only a kickass Clone Hero player, but he’s also a fun and charismatic commentator to take along for the ride.
Incidentally, it was fun to see that the same level of attention to detail has been paid to the on-screen lyrics for Clone Hero as were to the subtitles on the video version of the album. For example, they’ll sometimes imply that the next line is what you’re expecting it to be, based on a familiarity with the song, only to bait-and-switch it out for the actual lyrics at the last second. Genius.
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This is the age we’re shifting into: an era in which post-truth politics and deepfake proliferation means that when something looks “a bit off”, we assume (a) it’s AI-generated, and (b) that this represents a deliberate attempt to mislead. (That’s probably a good defence strategy nowadays in general, but this time around it’s… more-complicated…)
…
So if these fans aren’t AI-generated fakes, what’s going on here?
The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:
- Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
- YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse
…
I put them side-by-side below. Try going full-screen and pause at any point to see the difference. The Instagram footage is noticeably better throughout, though some of the audience clips still have issues.
…
The Internet’s gone a bit wild over the YouTube video of Will Smith with a crowd. And if you look at it, you can see why: it looks very much like it’s AI-generated. And there’d be motive: I mean, we’ve already seen examples where politicians have been accused (falsely, by Trump, obviously) of using AI to exaggerate the size of their crowds, so it feels believable that a musician’s media team might do the same, right?
But yeah: it turns out that isn’t what happened here. Smith’s team did use AI, but only to make sign-holding fans from other concerts on the same tour appear to all be in the same place. But the reason the video “looks AI-generated” is because… YouTube fucked about with it!
It turns out that YouTube have been secretly experimenting with upscaling shorts, using AI to add detail to blurry elements. You can very clearly see the effect in the video above, which puts the Instagram and YouTube versions of the video side-by-side (of course, if YouTube decide to retroactively upscale this video then the entire demonstration will be broken anyway, but for now it works!). There are many points where a face in the background is out-of-focus in the Instagram version, but you can see in the YouTube version it’s been brought into focus by adding details. And some of those details look a bit… uncanny valley.
Every single bit of this story – YouTube’s secret experiments on creator videos, AI “enhancement” which actually makes things objectively worse, and the immediate knee-jerk reaction of an understandably jaded and hypersceptical Internet to the result – just helps cement that we truly do live in the stupidest timeline.
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This was an enjoyable video. Nothing cutting-edge, but a description of an imaginative use of an everyday algorithm – DEFLATE, which is what powers most of the things you consider “ZIP files” – to do pattern-matching and comparison between two files. The tl;dr is pretty simple:
I love it when somebody finds a clever and novel use for an everyday tool.
Back in 2021, as part of a course I was doing at work, I made a video talking about The Devil’s Quoits, a henge and stone circle near where I live.
Two years later, our eldest was at school and her class was studying the stone age. Each of three groups were tasked with researching a particular neolithic monument, and our eldest was surprised when she heard my voice coming from a laptop elsewhere in the class. One of her classmates had, in their research into the Quoits, come across my video.
And so when their teacher arranged for a school trip to the Devil’s Quoits, she asked if I could go along as a “local expert”. And so I did.
And so this year, when another class – this time featuring our youngest – went on a similar school trip, the school asked me to go along again.
I’d tweaked my intro a bit – to pivot from talking about the archaeology to talking about the human stories in the history of the place – and it went down well: the children raised excellent observations and intelligent questions1, and clearly took a lot away from their visit. As a bonus, our visit falling shortly after the summer solstice meant that local neopagans had left a variety of curious offerings – mostly pebbles painted with runes – that the kids enjoyed finding (though of course I asked them to put each back where they were found afterwards).
But the most heartwarming moment came when I later received an amazing handmade card, to which several members of the class had contributed:
I don’t know if I’ll be free to help out again in another two years, if they do it again2: perhaps I should record a longer video, with a classroom focus, that shares everything I know about The Devil’s Quoits.
But I’ll certainly keep a fond memory of this (and the previous) time I got to go on such a fun school trip, and to be an (alleged) expert about a place whose history I find so interesting!
1 Not every question the children asked was the smartest, but every one was gold. One asked “is it possible aliens did it?” Another asked, “how old are you?”, which I can only assume was an effort to check if I remembered when this 5,000-year-old hengiform monument was being constructed…
2 By lucky coincidence, this year’s trip fell during a period that I was between jobs, and so I was very available, but that might not be the case in future!
This morning, Google pulled a video from YouTube belonging to my nonprofit Three Rings. This was a bit of a surprise.
Apparently the video – which is a demo of some Three Rings features – apparently fell foul of Google’s anti-doxxing rules. I’m glad that they have anti-doxxing rules, of course.
Let’s see who I doxxed:
Yup… apparently doxxed an imaginary person with two structurally-invalid phone numbers and who’s recently moved house from Some Street to Other Street in the town of Somewhereville. 😂
(Maybe I’m wrong. Do you live on Some Street, Somewhereville?)
Let’s see what YouTube’s appeals process is like, shall we? 🤦
Have I posted this joke before? It’s all a Blur.
Accessible description: Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and a faded blue ponytail, stands in a darkened kitchen. Turning to the camera, he says “I get up when I want, except on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the tadpoles.” Then he holds up a book entitled “Pond Life”.