Author: shrugbread

shrugbread-Environment

This project was supposed to be about a one-sided conversation from conscious me to what I consider my uncooperative creative brain. I beg and plead it to show up and carry me when I need to. When assignments are due and the clock is ticking where is it? I can only assume it’s in an echo-ey, stairwell, distracted by every possible worry and dream it can muster. While ignoring my calls.

This project presented a number of issues. Lighting glitches, audio glitches, and confusing myself with pro builder geometry. My biggest failure in this project was the lack of spark. I tried making my scene more interesting by populating it with objects I thought were appealing and in some cases are symbolic. This does not come across though, I feel as if some of the objects are poorly assembled, and the lack of animation giving it a dead, still feeling. I still very much enjoyed this project though. I found working with the audio, building the rooms, and in all honesty, play-testing to be the most fun part of the project.

shrugbread- PhazeroVideo

I am appreciative of the mention of how a project can get away from its original intent and still be an interesting piece of art. Starting a game and not knowing if it will become a horror or a walking simulator, but the genre having little impact on the expectations or quality of the said game is very comforting. Not having to stick to the confines of genre is very comforting.

shrugbread-UnityEssentials

I started screenshotting from lesson 4 because before then there wasn’t really much to show

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Then…tragedy struck…and a lot of my assets got deleted

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…Even MORE tragedy struck all of my materials got deleted

but hey…at least the pool is intact

I now stand defeated by Unity.

I kept watching the tutorials though!

shrugbread- Situated Eye

I created a detector for if I’m washing my hands. I couldn’t get the p5 code to work so I took stills from a video to detect if my hands were in the sink washing my hands or no hands in the shot. I was thinking particularly about this application as an enforcer rather than something on an individual basis to check one’s self. A world where everything even how long and properly we wash our hands…while with good and productive goals and intentions, the thought is still discomforting. Below are the results of how well my detector worked. Class 1 below is not washing and class 2 is washing.

shrugbread- ImageProcessor

I decided to focus on the selfie 2 anime GAN photo manipulating program on Runway ML. I found the results quite hilarious because in most cases it failed entirely to deliver on the promise of realistic anime stylized images. I found some of my results closer to a Picasso rendition than an anime style. The resulting images more so just blocked out certain colors and bumped up the saturation, while fun looking I can’t quite say that they recognized the facial features as easily as in the reference images. A version of this filter also exists on Snapchat and works much more consistently and live, but using it for a  bit I can tell that it’s pulling from a database of hairstyles, face shapes, and tracking them onto the face whereas this uses a GAN to tweak the image and until it is considered “anime style”

shrugbread-Text to transformer

Tomorrow I have to clean up the breakfast mess in the kitchen, straighten out the guest room, do some laundry, and start getting everything organized for Christmas! I’m hoping to finish my Christmas shopping tomorrow, too. (I know, my husband doesn’t know that yet.) It is really hard to shop for my husband since I have nothing in common with him anymore. (My own fault for not planning a VDay party or something – ugh.) All we do now is sit around and argue about politics. I can’t handle that every night.

There’s no way I’m gonna spend all that time on a Wii Fit, so I decided to make my own. In college, I used to surf eBay all the time looking for vintage books that I thought people were always searching for. (They’re typically hard to find because of one or two copies out there.) I figured it would be a good project for the former book blogger. My first idea was to cut out a foam core board from a spool of paper that a teacher would supply in the classroom. I thought that would be easy and cheap.

I have been drinking a lot of water so far. I even set up a water station at my desk today so I could have cold drinks when I needed them. If you have never had to work out with a sore throat, you are probably missing out on some of the best cold medicines ever. I was glad I had gotten a bottle of salt pills from the doctor. They were a lifesaver on Wednesday when I had the worst sore throat of my life. Instead of the gross gooey taste I had, I had delicious saltiness to make me feel better quickly.

shrugbread-facereadings

I found the clearview.ai coverage very interesting. Scraping the bottom of the barrel of the internet to identify every instance of an individual was scary, but also scary in a way where the worst of it can only be left up to our imagination. If a project like clearview.ai exists and comes under great scrutiny, then who is to say that they haven’t done more nefarious things unchecked, or a competitor to it has not.

I also found interesting the point made in the article “Against black inclusion in facial recognition” that law enforcement doesn’t need more tools to identify, surveil, and subsequently oppress black people. Treating facial recognition more as a time-bomb prompt to explode in the faces of oppressed people.

shrugbread-08-Looking Outwards

Above is an image from the project “Fooling Facial Detection with Fashion” by Bruce MacDonald. The goal of the project was to create an adversarial to the “histogram of oriented gradients” method of facial tracking. Because our faces are constantly being scanned many people have invested effort into “protecting” themselves from the constant surveillance. This project exists as a small novel experiment in the very real context of adversarial attacks and reminds me particularly of deep fake detectors and deep fake detector breakers. The slightly scary idea that if you provide enough images of your face, something we present to our phone cameras near-daily, that your identity, privacy, individuality, can be compromised. We are still in the infancy of what surveillance technology can do, and while paranoid, this project gives me a feeling of dystopia where there is no corner of the earth where you can escape being viewed, and to protect ourselves we have to fool an AI  that we created.