High-resolution image of The Night Watch

Man they are not kidding. You can really punch into this thing.

“The new high-resolution image of The Night Watch represents a major advance in the state of the art for imaging paintings, setting records for both the resolution and the total size of the image. The sampling resolution is 5 µm (0.005 mm), meaning that each pixel covers an area of the painting that is smaller than a human red blood cell. Given the large size of The Night Watch, this results in a truly enormous image: it’s 925,000 by 775,000 pixels – 717 gigapixels – with a file size of 5.6 TB!”

Some classic punk

Yeah, this is a fun one.

South Africa Goddamn

Max Roach and Archie Shepp. Holy smokes….

Just some upcoming shows.

Some recent quick and cheap band posters for upcoming shows.

Nick Cave interview

Nick Cave get heavy here.

Not a lot of posting lately, been busy with lots of stuff. Hopefully I’ll pick it back up in Sept.

Portfolio Updates!

Just dropped a bunch of new imagery into the portfolio. Lots of renders and retouching to check out.

Nike Pledged to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint. It Just Slashed the Staff Charged With Making That Happen.

Ouch. Gnarly reporting by ProPublica here.

“So it came as a surprise one Sunday night in December when the dozen or so people on the team got summoned to a mandatory meeting the next morning. In a Zoom call before sunrise, they learned why. The team was being eliminated. The vice president who ran the team was gone. The call lasted less than 10 minutes.

It was the first in a series of deep cuts that one former Nike employee called “the sustainability bloodbath.”

With sales flatlining, Nike executives in December announced a plan to cut costs by $2 billion over three years. Those cuts have dealt a big blow to Nike’s sustainability workforce.

Nike has laid off about 20% of employees who worked primarily on its sustainability initiatives, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found. Roughly another 10% left voluntarily or were transferred to other jobs. The cuts to its sustainability staff of about 150 people were far deeper than Nike’s 2% reduction companywide and 7% reduction at its Oregon headquarters.”

Cool animation though.

Revised doodle from yesterday

Hmm… the render from yesterday was bugging me a bit so I went in and revised it a bit.

This is a composite of these three renders now which I think is more interesting. I dialed down the LUT a bit as well.

Houdini Doodle

And todays doodle sticks with motion blur as the primary component with some volumetric scattering added in.

New Work in the Wild: Specialized Stumpjumper 15

Oh man, this is rad. Did these rendered sets and retouching on the bike for the Specialized Stumpjumper 15. Renders were super fun! I really enjoy it when I get to create digital sets.

Podcast time: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Wild stuff here with MK-ULTRA, Mason and all sorts of strange tales. Takes a bit to get moving but then it starts to open up about 20 minutes in.

“Tom O'Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, is the culmination of a 20-year investigation, which unearthed information about the murders, the murderers, the prosecutors who tried them, and the complex web of connections between Charles Manson, the CIA's MKUltra program, the counterculture movement, and other powerful individuals during the 1960s.”

Houdini Doodle: Motion Blur Study

After testing out some extreme caustics the other day, I kinda wanted to get into some crazy motion blurs. I made three different kinds of motions here to get these effects. The biggest hiccup I had was that my render window in Redshift was showing the blur but the final Render wih Mplay was not. Turns out if you have a motion vector AOV turned on, it won’t render out. Dunno if that’s a bug or not. But was odd to trouble shoot.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

LOL! What a great write up, love this kind of humor.

“I. But We Will Realize Untold Efficiencies With Machine L-

What the fuck did I just say?

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders1.”

“II. But We Need AI To Remain Comp-

Sweet merciful Jesus, stop talking. Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything - or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here's a secret, they didn't do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.”

It just keeps going like that. Yeah, I am of the camp that AI is the new NFT, 90’s .com crash coming.

Deerhoof - "Intro + Twin Killers & The Perfect Me" live at Kroen Beach

Deerhoof live from 2019 and slamming.