Curiosities for October 2021

I'm back again! Learn more about AI-generated art, my recent obsession with ray tracing, and a few notes on the best Fate/stay night route

Hey friends,

As you may know, I took a break for the past few months. It was great! I was able to rest, relax, and recharge. I went back to my province, spent time doing things I love, and disconnected a bit from social media. A lot of happy surprises happened as well!

📝 From the blog

I still published a few blog posts during my sabbatical. Most of these were written in advance before I took my leave. You can check this tutorial on how I did it in Jekyll and Github Actions. With that out of the way, here’s a recap of my recent writing:

• Last July, my Twitter feed was flooded with AI art that were generated from text. Given a prompt, say “a cat with a hat,” a model can produce images as if drawn by a real human. This was made possible thanks to the VQGAN+CLIP models.

  

  These artworks were drawn by a machine learning system (VQGAN+CLIP) based on a given text prompt.

  Hence, I decided to study the VQGAN paper and wrote an illustrated explainer about it (“The Illustrated VQGAN”). I had fun writing it because it’s been a while since I plunged deep into a paper. In addition, I also compiled a list of VQGAN+CLIP implementations. You can check it out if you like to generate AI art of your own!

  Of course, I also generated my own AI art! In my exploration, I let VQGAN+CLIP imagine creatures from Philippine folk culture! It conjured images of a kapre, sigbin, and santelmo based from their descriptions alone. The results were amazing! Below is a preview. Check the link to see videos of these images being drawn:

  

  Nuno sa punso, sigbin, manananggal, and other Philippine folk creatures as imagined by a machine learning model.

• The sabbatical has also given me time to reflect on my ideas on career, growth, and life. I boiled it down into a personal framework composed of building, earning, and playing. The goal isn’t about having a definitive statement on what I want to do, but rather to ask better questions about what I do:

  

  If you’re interested to learn more, then just click the link above! Of course, this may not be applicable to everyone and it’s heavily influenced by what I think works for me. However, I still hope that some of these ideas resonate with you!

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Recently

Ok I’ll admit, some of these finds were from August and September. I immersed in a lot of things lately and it has been great to share all of them here. Also, I’ll try to cram everything in this e-mail so let’s see…

📖 Reading

I’ve read a lot during the past few months and I don’t think I can include all of them here, so I’ll just talk about my favorites!

• Blue Period¹: a seinen manga that focuses on an artist’s life and struggles. The protagonist, Yaguchi, stumbled upon the joy of drawing and has committed his way to learn the craft. It touches upon the topics of talent vs. passion, burnout, earning money vs. pursuing your interests and more! It’s a good read for anyone who is into any creative pursuits—programming, writing, etc—as the plot becomes relatable and inspirational. Also, it’s getting an anime soon!

  Also, if you have a MyAnimeList (MAL) account, add me up as KobeniNoAisha!²

• Ray Tracing in One Weekend: speaking of colors and graphics, I’ve been dipping my toes in graphics programming for a while now. This book is great, it teaches me what I need to know while making a decent output in a short span of time (a weekend!). I like it because it fits my learning style, I am better when learning by example and when producing an output in the end. Here’s my output from the weekend book:

  

  If you want to take things to the next level, the author has provided “Ray Tracing for the Next Week” (currently going through that) and “Ray Tracing the Rest of Your Life” (lol we’ll see!).

• Patterns in Confusing Explanations: this blogpost is an interesting resource on technical writing, especially for someone like me who blogs a lot on things I learn. It talks about why some explanations become confusing instead of enlightening. I’ve been guilty for some of these, especially on making strained analogies and starting out abstract. This post has made me more mindful of my writing!

As I’ve mentioned, there’s quite a lot, so here are some runner-ups:

• Parasocial Nintendo Complex: 10 Years of Game Dev

• Working in One Bit by Lucas Pope

• An Introduction to AI Story Generation by Mark Riedl

• Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing by Emily Bender

• Currently reading Children of Dune!

🎮 Playing

There were a few neat surprises and underrated gems in my gaming list this month. Some of which I didn’t expect to be that good. In no particular order, I enjoyed:

• Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight: this game fills the metroidvania hole that Hollow Knight left.³ I actually find it a bit difficult, even on normal mode. I have to learn enemy patterns and master dodging while platforming. There are insta-kill environmental traps, and unforgiving enemies (I hate those flying ladies with spinning scythes). Even so, Momodora is still fair, I felt that each death is solely due to my impatience and sloppiness, not RNG.

  If you’re looking for a well-made metroidvania with some old-school nostalgia, then I encourage you to play this game:

  

  Yeah, it’s also a waifu-vania.

• Frog Detective 1 & 2: The Haunted Island and the Case of the Invisible Wizard: these are two short games (around 1.5 hours each) filled with laughs and joy. It’s an amazing narrative game with humorous writing and inane absurdity. I love every second of Frog Detective! I think that the creator, Grace Bruxner, has made a gem. I encourage you to also watch her GDC talk, “Building Games Around Humour”:

  Play this in a lazy afternoon or a cozy night. I also encourage you to voice out the characters while playing with younger siblings or cousins! I had a great time in this game!

  

📺 Watching

I didn’t watch a lot for the past few months, surprisingly! I just binged a few anime and that was it:

• Fate/stay night: Heaven’s Feel movie trilogy: this is the movie trilogy for, in my opinion, the best route in Fate/stay night. If Unlimited Blade Works (UBW) is shounen, then Heaven’s Feel (HF) is seinen. HF is a good character study of Shirou and Sakura, and a good development of the world and other characters. In this route, it is interesting to see Shirou go against his ideals of saving everyone into just saving one person he loves.

  I think this movie exemplifies a more realistic version of Shirou’s ideal of a “hero of justice.” This time, it’s not about saving everyone, sometimes you just need to save one. And choosing who that “one” is entails necessary sacrifices.

• The Beauty of Bézier Curves by Freya Holmér (~25 min): this educational video talks about how smooth Bézier curves are formed. You see them in the line tool in Illustrator, procedural art, and level-generation in games! Also, because of this video, I discovered Freya’s channel, it contains hours of good content!

So that’s it for this month’s curiosities! I hope that you had a fun and safe October. In the Philippines, we’re in the middle of the “-ber” months, that means the Christmas spirit is now felt everywhere! Wishing you a safe and happy Christmas season :)

See you again on November!

1. The title, Blue Period, was inspired by Picasso’s “Blue Period,” when he painted monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green. Art historians argue that this period of somber works coincided when Picasso sank into severe depression, as blue tones dominated his paintings for several years. It was then followed by the “Rose Period,” an era of warmer colors of orange and pink.

2. KobeniNoAisha literally means “Kobeni’s Car,” a fan favorite meme-“character” in Chainsaw Man. It’s not even a character, it’s just an object! The funny thing is that Kobeni’s Car had a higher popularity ranking than Kobeni, the actual owner!

3. I dropped Blasphemous for this! Yeah, I still find Momodora’s gameplay more exciting than the former. The platforming in Blasphemous feels weird and a bit off—I might pick it up again though.