50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
I have to run out to work (I’m finishing an audiobook job today), but before I go, I wanted to share this gallery of super weird and interesting things I made yesterday using Google’s Deep Dream.
It’s surprisingly satisfying to make these things, and it’s a whole lot of fun to tweak the various settings to figure out what they do.
My performance of Ready Player One has been named one of the ten best narrator and audiobook pairings of all time on Goodreads!
I’ve loved magic since I was a little kid — In fact, I still have some of the magic-show-in-a-box sets that my aunt Val gave me when I was growing up — and I always wanted to be a member at the Magic Castle, but I couldn’t, because I wasn’t a real magician. Recently, though, the Castle changed its rules, and started allowing a select number of non-magicians to join as associate members … and I was allowed to join! So now I can go and watch magic whenever I want, which is awesome.
Last Friday, Anne and I went on a double date with Chris Hardwick and his girlfriend, Lydia, to the Magic Castle. We had a nice dinner, and then we spent the evening watching magic shows, including a mind-blowing closeup show that we saw from the front row.
While we were sitting in one of the shows, laughing and gasping and marveling at the magician on the stage, I realized that the real power of magic, and the reason that I still love it now, at 42, as much as I loved it at 8 and 10 and even into my surly teens, is that when we get to watch a magician perform, we can feel the same sort of wonder and delight and joy that we felt the first time we saw magic when we were kids.
I think I’m going to dig out my books on sleight of hand (for you fellow magic enthusiasts out there, it may please you to know that I still have my original copies of Now You See It, Now You Don’t) and see if I can rediscover some of the skills I once had. Maybe I’ll take some classes at the Castle, too, when I have time.
Ah, time. If I were a real magician, I’d wave my magic wand and create more time for myself. That’s a trick worth learning.
The entire purpose of this post is to get the error warning off the top of my blog. Apparently, this theme doesn’t like whatever was going on with the photo I posted yesterday. For the handful of you who care about things like this: It turns out that there was a URL shortening plugin installed that was causing the warning and the strange insertion into the header. I deactivated it, and reactivated the native one, so hopefully that will fix things.
I made this from a picture I took while we were on vacation in 2008. If you want to see it in all its 3072×2304 glory, you can click on the image.
It is, like everything I publish, CC-BY-NC-SA.