Masks | AI Uses

 

Interesting John Foxx (his stage name and performing persona ) interview on Identity, and that he thinks some performers he knew died because they didn’t separate their real self from the their stage performer. They tried to live out their larger than life stage persona all the time. 

Masks allow a performer to be more than themselves too.  

Andreas Katsula loved his G’Kar make up  

J. Michael Straczynski: “Andreas Katsulas loved the G'Kar makeup. He was a big fan of Greek theater (no surprise there) and he said many times he found the mask element to be liberating, rather than imprisoning. Behind the mask, he was truly free. “

There is a saying about Japanese people from a Jesuit Priest from way back when that says they have "three faces" .

1.The First Face (Public Persona): The mask you show to the world

2.The Second Face (Inner Circle): The face you show to close friends, family, and loved ones.

3.The Third Face (The True Self): The face you never show to anyone.

But why would you believe anything a Jesuit Priest said?

Also I think that pretty much applies to me as well, and I am not Japanese. 

Many Social Media users use a mask too, curating their feed. Not being their “warts and all” selves. Like that white American being the X expert on all Japanese Culture, or the like, and being the only thing they ever post on, while wearing a kimono.  

This music+comic uses as a background the tracks music visualization from  MilkDrop3.  Grabbed that using OBS. Formatted using Handbrake.  The comic animation done as usual with MOHO, but with a green background.

That was then chroma keyed over the visualization using my video editor MOVIE STUDIO. 

Image of composite layers:

Music Ion Storm can be found on Bandcamp

Other Things

A week since had stitches out and getting better faster now.  But Doc did indicate over 4~6 weeks to get back to "normal". Was out to local supermarket yesterday and walking with a shorter stride is more comfortable at the moment.

Rick Beato did a video on using AI locally using LM STUDIO and QWEN3.5.  His video is about  private, secure local use is better than using an on-line subscription service. Such services probably don’t have much of a future, in the same way Recording Studios didn't.  

The latest version he used wouldn’t install on my 32GB i7 Win11 machine ( some funny business by Microsoft I wonder?),  but I did find an older version and MODEL Qwen2.5 that did install and run.  Not the latest and greatest, but that doesn't matter without an idea of what I would use it for.  It is chat/text based and isn't the kind of thing I had bothered to look at at all previously even though it has been in the news for what seems like ages now. I have never bothered to touch ChatGPT either. Being "retired" being the main reason though I expect.

So I asked Qwen2.5 what it can help me with: 

So could it come up with better rhymes than I currently have in my track STORY SHAPED BEATS? 

It can.  

THAT is interesting.

I don't want to use what it suggested here, but will see what it comes up to improved what I do with spoken words and lyrics next time.

An interesting new application to me. I can't live without a spell checker, and a tool that comes up with alternate rhymes sounds useful to me, as an assistant or something to bounce ideas off.  It isn't the kind of function in any word processor I know of, like WORD or Scrivener.  

Of course you can just type this into Google AI and get results, but that is feeding the art stealing machine that the AI industry is with your new work. (Yes the model being used stole lots of work before it was bottled too, but that isn't about to be undone from what I can see)

Most uses of AI are really bad for society, programmers and artists.  But I was interested to see that artist Takashi Murakami used AI to come up with variations to his own lion line art.  I have nothing against that use at all. 

This week I updated a large vector cartoon vehicle illustration that had 2 pets in it, as a minor but important part of the illustration.

The customer had sent me pet photos and one of them a cartoon done in AI they liked.  So trying AI is what I did too. GEMINI AI in this case.  But first I reduced the number of colors in the reference photo and made the background white. Uploaded it to GEMINI AI asking for a cartoon, and it gave me a PNG file. I then loaded that into COREL TRACE and it made a VECTOR image out of it, after optimizing the conversion settings. That produces a RGB vector file, so convert that all to CMYK with global color model search and replace in CorelDraw.

The AI made a few mistakes though, so I edited the resulting CMYK CorelDraw images, added more high lights, teeth, fixes to color and changed some of the colors to make the pets more visible in the final illustration.

I think this was worthwhile for a small part of the illustration, where the customer can complain about likeness etc. in this case.  

 

I read that many companies have laid off 1,000s of programmers and replaced them with AI.  Having been involved with a few large software projects, and that AI lies a lot, I expect that will not go well for the companies!

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