The Fast Fourier Transform is used everywhere but it has a fascinating origin story that could have ended the nuclear arms race.
Someone discovered this important technique 150(ish?) years before it was published — but the only place the scientist included it was in their “collected works vol 3,” in Latin, so basically no one knew about it.
You never know when the “quick trick” you’ve figured out could help someone else have a breakthrough 🤷♀️
Okay! Pursuant to this thread here, a couple people asked if I’d walk through the workflow, and yes! I will attempt to do so right here, live! https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1467652391059214337
Ursula Vernon played with creating a comic using AI-generated backgrounds, which appears to require a lot of post-processing.
handprinted (handprinted.users63.interdns.co.uk)“If you haven’t already heard of Gelli Plates, they’re reusable, durable printing plates that allow you to mono-print without a press.”
In an intentional community, you have to put expectations in writing. You have to have transparent standards that everyone can see.
[W]e also had index cards posted in each common room…with a cleaning checklist. Those index cards took the vague word “clean” (which means different things to different people) and spelled out precisely what it meant for any given room.
Figuring this kind of checklist out…settles two questions and makes the answers transparent and visible:
Is the room clean enough?
Is the job done?
Recently, by dabbling in both comic book and short story writing, I’ve stumbled upon a method to outlining that not only cuts down on the number of drafts I need but streamlines my entire writing process.
Panels > beats
Write actual dialogue, establish setting, break scene into beats
This brings us to the underlying benefit of outlining with comic scripts: its emphasis on the action and descriptive cues in your story as opposed to excessive info-dumps.
Each panel maps out every needed story beat with both dialogue and description in a way that other script formats tend to gloss over in favor of a dialogue-centric approach. That’s why this outlining method works best with action-heavy narratives.
Could be worth trying but I could also see it being a distraction if you aren’t super familiar with comic scripts.
This observation journal page is a late-night variation on previous exercises with flipped descriptions. Like most late-night writing activities, it got a bit silly, but it was fun, and it turns ou…
First, I picked items at random from the left-hand page, and tried to work them up into a simile, e.g. clouds like uncurling ribbons. Those comparisons, being drawn from daily life, tended to still be based in it…
Then I reworked each sentence twice: once for a science fiction setting… and once as some sort of Regency fairy tale…
I wasn’t looking for a 1:1 equivalent, obviously, but something that approximated the original phrase.
The basic idea is to pick (at least) three nouns. One noun is “it”. Next, describe that noun using descriptions more commonly used for (or words more commonly associated with) each of the other nouns. I try to get at least 10 descriptions for each of those two reference words.
So, for example, describing light using terms I associate with water, I get:
- light rivered and pooled
- sunlight that eddies around your ankles
- buildings an archipelago of shadows in the swift, bright tide of autumn
- tepid, stagnant light in the parlour
- a chill trickle of moonlight
Since 2003, Australian photographer Murray Fredericks has made at least twenty journeys to the center of Lake Eyre, a desert lake with an extremely high concentration of salt. Fredericks drags all of his equipment out into the barren landscape, capturing the dramatic sky reflected in both the inch-deep water.
I often find myself more interested in technique than output for all manner of creative work, from art to creative entrepreneurship.
The resulting photos from this series by Murray Fredericks feel very 80s in their pastel toned geometric rendered perfection. I like this starscape even though it feels fake.
Videos by Stephen Silver from Adobe Max to watch for character design:
Effective Character Design: from Start to Finish
Effective Character Design: Shapes and Structures
Effective Character Design: Story, Gesture, Design, and Details
Really cool imagery, I wonder how he does it? Timed multiple exposures and a horizontal track shifting from the right side of an image to the left?
Cool that he uses this striking incentive imagery to advocate for conservation.