BOX067: The Last Email

22.03.2222.03.22

DS067B: Steel cube frames littered around a warehouse with colour distortion.

This weekend I had an email from a colleague from Australia. We worked together on a project a number of years ago and had some really fun times. I went over to his university a few times and he came over here. Within the formal bounds of that project we got on well enough and enjoyed each other’s company. He emailed to say that not only was he was retiring from his job but also from the design and academic world in general, moving ‘off-grid’ down by the Southern Ocean to fish in the estuaries. I don’t really know how to reply to his email because the subtext is; we’ll never speak again. Not in a bad, ill-meaning way, it’s just highly unlikely if not impossible that we’ll cross paths or exchange ideas or thoughts. So I don’t really know what to write when I know full-well this will be the last email I send him. So it’s just sat open behind this window glaring at me.

DS067B

Well this is why it’s a bit late getting out. I started making this cube frame structure, worked on a procedural weathered texture and then didn’t know what to do with it so I scattered a bunch around a warehouse ‘set’ I had using rigid bodies and then still didn’t know what to do. I decided to mess around with rendering layers since I haven’t done it for a while and did one where the cubes were super blurry and was about ready to post when I decided I could do more and instead went back and cranked up the chromatic aberration on the layers with the cubes. So it all had to be re-rendered this morning.

Tale Spins

I feel like Real Life is just the best writing on technology at the moment. The most quotable, grippable bites and ideas. Yes it’s paid for by Snapchat but it’s also consistently good, so. If anyone from there reads this, I would actually put aside my usual grumbles about writing to have a go at doing a piece. Anyway, here’s a great piece form Megan Marz – Tale Spin – about the general idea that ‘story’ is dying. She cites the focus on vibes by Netflix et al as they know you’re generally watching in the background instead of focussing, Marvel using its vehicles to host IP rather than progress plot and blogs and TED talks erasing meaning.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about any of this stuff: My postgraduate thesis weakly hung on the idea that narrative and/or story was an inherent part of resisting power, using examples of the suppression of literature and stories in extremist regimes in both fact and fiction. At the time I worked in a bookshop and so I romanticised novels and stories in a way that someone who used to work in a bookshop and romanticised novels and stories would now look on as disgustingly naive and posturing.

Marz makes a case for the multiplicity of story-telling forms that have emerged from blogs, art projects and Excel sheets. Well worth a read as it’ at least four times as good as my thesis.

Short Stuff

Great profile of Ingrid LaFleur who ran for mayor in Detroit and is the founder of the Afrofutures Strategies Institute.
Distributed Autonomous Occultism, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek, perhaps a serious occultist examination of technological hype with some great quotes: ‘In an echo of the sixties counterculture, there is a sense, today, of pulling community out of our asses – unsurprising after atomized individualism has, for decades, corroded the IRL social fabric.’
Interesting piece from Brookings on crypto. The crux of it is that policy makers don’t understand crypto and their fears of money laundering are overblown so there’s no need to regulate. The authors then point out that there may be upcoming methods through which laundering is made easier.
Andrew Dana Hudson has released the next extract from Our Shared Storm. It looks really good, you should buy it.
The New Public newsletter has some interesting musings on what ‘digital ghostsigns‘ are.
Missed this video of a bunch of crypto VCs laughing at how they were planning to exploit investors by dumping junk tokens on them. At this stage is crypto is largely inevitable and probably worse for most people but the hype investment is too big to fail: “We’ll probably never see another significant debate between the hardcore nocoiners and coiners. The arguments from both sides are well established. Now it’s just a wait-and-see whether crypto fades away and becomes as relevant as Beanie Babies, or it destabilizes several nation-state economies, 1990s-Albania style.” Concoda on The Normalization of Ponzinomics.
And as others have pointed out the actual future envisioned by crypto/web3 is kind of sad and boring:

Most of the hype around crypto, NFTs, web3, and metaverse is being generated, after all, by already wealthy participants eager to bring fresh blood to the casino. I just expected that the inordinate wealth present in this space would mean something more impressive than Second Life mods being projected onto screens—but maybe that means the hype is working if I naively anticipated anything other than spectacles given how little of this space is anything other than speculation: speculative finance, speculative tech, and speculative visions.

Alright, love you, sorry I was late again. Maybe I should go back to Wednesdays oh I dunno.

Box057: The rig to end all rigs

20.12.21

DS056: Inverse kinematics and cloth simulation all tied together. About three days’ work.

This week’s render was probably the toughest ever to produce. I built the set before knowing what was going in it and then decided to return to my attempt at making a fully rigged robot arm.

The model is actually a beefed-up version of a desktop arm with added hydraulics and cabling with my own materials added. The tricky bit was doing all the rigging. I decided to learn inverse kinematics after avoiding it my whole life. This means that the rig follows a leader, with all the rest of the armature automatically adjusting based on a series of weights and limits rather than forward kinematics where you animate from the base outwards. The difference is easily explained in how you pick things up; if you reach out your hand to pick up a cup, your arm automatically follows without you having to direct it. If we were a forward kinematic system you would first have to position your upper arm, then your lower arm, then your hand, then your fingers.

The rig use for the robot arm. Lot of work to have something that can follow my mouse around.

I even rigged the cables to work this way so that they move and flex realistically. It was definitely one of the most grinding renders I’ve done because it takes a lot more forward-thinking about workflow, if you set things up in the wrong order or if one piece is just slightly misaligned you can end up with a broken and glitchy system. Having spent two or three days carefully and intricately setting up an enormously complicated system I then decided to chuck in an element of danger by using cloth simulation to anchor a balloon to the claw. You can set different parts of a cloth mesh to behave differently so I kept the string floppy and the balloon pressured, inverted gravity and weakened it for the whole scene (which is a lot easier than telling something how to float) and then ran the simulation about three dozen times. My only advice here: ramp the simulation quality steps way up – sky’s the limit. I think the final version is something like 300 against the default of 5.

Fallacies

This week’s Exponential View focussed on quantum computing with an interview with a founder of one of the companies developing it. The science is fascinating and it’s something I know blissfully little about. What was interesting was the way the interviewee, Chad Rigetti, trod the line between the mundanity of technological innovation and the existential premise of computing at the quantum level. For example, when asked about application he talked about the quantum theory of gravity, something that we cannot really experiment with on Earth with our current computers. However, when pushed on the everyday application he defaulted to national security, intelligence and finance, citing Moore’s law and saying that ‘computing technology has always been a fundamental driver of economic development… an inevitable march of better computing power.’ I fully believe him when he says the science is what’s most interesting, it’s just predictably tragic that something as incredible a unifying theory of gravity isn’t going to drum up as much funding as crypto.

There are two fundamental interconnected fallacies in technological innovation. Both of which have been explored extensively by scholars of STS: First, that technological ‘evolution’ is inevitable – that the next thing will be better – and secondly that everything will be modellable or simulatable. The narrative of tech innovation is that through these duelling paradoxes, some supremacy over the ‘messiness’ of ‘nature’ (both human and non-human) can be achieved. But these are fallacies. Every new innovation is never quite good enough to model things with enough accuracy and so the next innovation is the promissory one with the current one being an exception for its failures: ‘…past failures are often isolated as special or peculiar cases with little technically or organizationally in common with the newly proposed promissory solution.’ (Borup et al.)

This is not to say that innovation is pointless, it’s more complex than that. Is there a way to present new technological innovation as neither inevitable nor final? Rather than an all-or-nothing approach something that is more about presenting technology in a constant state of imperfect flux? Open-source stuff has some of this. Blender’s development pipeline is fascinating because it’s totally open and done by volunteers. There’s some fanfare around releases but there’s never any promissory rhetorics of finality; it’s treated as incomplete (and all the more charming for it) and in constant development, which is a useful way to inspire the community to contribute. I’m sure there are loads of other examples.

Short Stuff

Venkatash Rao is literally giving away his OODA loop work for anyone to use. OODA loops were all the rage about five or six years ago but Rao has stuck with them and made something really rich. Also, I’m super in to giving stuff away and it’s great to see such an influential character leading there.
Meredith Whittaker’s Steep Cost of Capture – a pretty concise overview of the big-tech-so-called-AI research industry nexus.
Piece on Vox here talking about that idea of inevitability more and it’s ties to the American manifest destiny worldview.
Everyday Robots seems like a complex project – to build robots that can perform everyday chores. I’m always torn on these types of projects. On the one hand, it’s a super interesting and remarkably complicated set of technical goals to be able to teach robots to do things that we take for granted like folding sheets and wiping surfaces. On the other hand it feels like something we don’t really need robots for – we’re good at household chores already and the house was built around the able human body in most cases, so why adapt robots for it? They cite economic productivity as a rationale but again, there are better reasons for robots; see the ever-citable Paro.
An expolanet found where there should be none: 11 times the size of Jupiter found orbiting a binary star system 10 times larger and hotter than the Sun.
Brief into from IGN on speedrunning and tools. It’s a bit hyperbolic in places and skips over some of the interesting things in specific controversial runs. For more on the exact maths of that 1 in 7 trillion Minecraft speedrun check out this Standup Maths.

I’m migrating blogging to Monday because of my new training schedule. It’s best to get a solid block in Tuesday-Friday. Ok, love you, love you, love you. Have an amazing week.

Box055: The Gifts

01.12.2102.12.21

DS055: I really wanted to focus on doing some complex lighting here in Eevee – determined that it must be possible to make good quality global lighting. I ended up using three probes for the different parts and then two light sources – a sun lamp and a blue area lamp to light the shadows a bit. I also added volumetrics to try and add some depth because I’ve been working on trying to make that final 1/10th of a leap into deeper environments. At Tony P’s advice I’ve also started posting wireframes to show a bit of ‘making of’ – there was a time when I used IG reels for ‘making of’ but it was a lot of work.

Ok, this is a brief one. I have a bunch of tabs open and have been trying to read where I can (including ‘books’) so this is mostly short stuff. I did a good render and sort of just want to share it now. I feel like there’s something I’ve forgotten to mention.

It was my birthday the other week. I didn’t do anything for it really but had a great day around and on bikes. What really has stuck with me was how many thoughtful and meaningful gifts I got. Just little things where someone had really referenced something we talked about or joked about over the year, or folks who really made an effort to make something. I am so grateful for these types of people in my life. I just don’t have the mentality or perhaps the patience to do this for others. I don’t know why, even with Mrs Revell I am completely thoughtless about gifts, seeing them purely as a transactional thing (as I do most things I guess.) There’s a measure of guilt there at first, these folks have made a real effort for me and I have never done it for them. But maybe that’s it, maybe we are meant to all be different people and I suppose all I can do is hope that I can provide some value or meaning to the folks around me who are so kind. I doubt it, but maybe.

I have a confession to make: A few months ago I set up a mailbox to send all your newsletter in thinking it would be an easier way to consume them. That box just passed 300 unread emails this morning so clearly something has gone wrong. I’m going to have to undo it and get them back in my inbox so I at least pass through them.

Short Stuff

Speculative space. More and more of these projects to sort of demarcate speculative design seem to be cropping up. They usually have the same few references but this one’s got some weirder stuff in there too so it might be a useful resource.
This was a really beautiful obituary slash book preview I guess about David Graeber. I am enormous fan and there’s a great little story of his life and interactions amongst his ideas and approaches here: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds.
Writing of, I need to revisit A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse which was (after Debt) one of the pieces that I loved first of his. I promised ot talk about it on a podcast on Wednesday which was presumptuous.
Why Video Game Doors Are So Hard To Get Right from Vox on YouTube dot com. I’ll go back to something Ian Bogost once said (which I will now have to paraphrase because this blog is unsearchable) upon seeing a character take off a t-shirt in Last of Us II: ‘Things that are easy in real life are hard in video games, things that are easy in video games and hard in real life.’
Erik Carter’s newsletter Design Harder is out and I finally read the first edition – The Rise And Fall of Adobe Inc. about the history and future of that behemoth and some alternatives.
Little bit old hat now but NFT Bay is a 15TB download of ‘all’ NFT images currently (a week or two ago) on the Ethereum blockchain. As a piece of critical technical practice, it’s pretty on the nose and joins a list of happenings exposing the lack of understanding NFT boosters have of the thing they’re boosting. The artist, Geoff Huntley, has an FAQ here.
Similarly, Wout Van Aert, one of the world’s greatest (and tragically underrated by his team) cyclists has NFT’d images of his victories. Images which he couldn’t possibly have taken and from the article none of the proceeds of which are going to the photographer. What does victory in mean if you’re literally willing to sell the concept for cash?

I still haven’t made this blog searchable have I? It’s on the to-do list. Ok, that’s it and I love you as always and see you soon.