The Idea Thanks to my dad’s good taste in music, my childhood had a killer soundtrack: classic rock, 70s folk music, and 80s new wave. At home or in the car, a constant rotation of The Beatles, Cream, Simon and Garfunkel, Talking Heads, and The Human League. Things were off to a good start. Then in 1995, I...

The Idea Every nerd remembers the first time they saw a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a fly’s compound eyes, or the scales of a human hair: As a newly-graduated engineer, I stumbled on an eBay listing for a vintage AMRAY 1000 SEM and impulsively made an offer which was (luckily, in retrospect!)...

The Idea Pink Floyd’s “Back Catalogue” poster has a great composition: 1990s Sailor Moon has a great aesthetic: What if I combined the two? The Tools Stable Diffusion (sdxl_1.0, ComfyUI) IP-Adapter (sdxl_vit-h) ControlNet (sai_xl_depth256, sai_xl_canny_256) Adobe Photoshop The Process I wanted to recreate the Pink...

UPDATE: I now have a scanning electron microscope in my garage. The Idea I have been fascinated by electron microscopy since I was a child flipping through Popular Science and stumbling upon an image like this: I love using things for things they were never intended for. So, what if I used an electron microscope to...

The Idea I was scrolling through my Instagram feed one morning and was presented with a series of Japanese citypop images: Beautiful images, but they are all of urban environments. What would landscape images look like in this style? The Tools Stable Diffusion (sdxl_1.0, ComfyUI) LoRA training (Kohya’s GUI) The...

The Idea I have always loved the chaos of public-access television. Amateur camera work, rough greenscreen abuse, unscreened phone calls, a general sense of overwhelm and confusion. Let’s Paint TV is as close to perfect as the medium gets: Platforms like Twitch and YouTube are clearly the spiritual successors to...

The Idea I have always found the text I see in my dreams to be interesting - it often looks like English, but isn’t. When I first started playing with Stable Diffusion, I noticed that the text it generates is very similar: A local art gallery was accepting pieces for an exhibition of visual art based on dream...

The Idea For many years my tabletop-gaming friends and I have made the pilgrimage to Indianapolis for Gen Con, North America’s biggest tabletop gaming convention. Over 70,000 nerds from all corners of the world gathering for 4 days of wargaming, boardgaming, and roleplaying. For me, Gen Con is all about one thing:...

The Idea As a lifelong fan of Mad Max, I’ve got a soft spot for double rider leather jackets. I had never had an excuse to own one, until I saw Shih Wei Chieh’s Laser Jacket made for Japanese musician Kazuya Yoshii: Nothing could be cooler than that. I had always wanted a leather jacket, and I’ve got some experience...

The Idea Ridley Scott’s Alien was a life-changing experience for me, one of the most influential movies in my life. So when I finally saw James Cameron’s balls-out sequel Aliens you can imagine my reaction - the Alien Queen, the marine smartguns - perfection. But it was a simple effect in the opening sequence that...

The Idea As often happens, I stumbled upon an interesting video: I knew about tesla coils, but had never seen one that could play music. I needed to know how it worked. The answer: by replacing the traditional spark gap (acting as a crude switch) with a transistor, I could switch the coil on and off at a rate...

UPDATE: I have taken this project much further. The Idea Deep in COVID lockdown (December 2020), I stumbled upon a trending clip of a fascinating livestreamer named “CodeMiko”: I could not believe what I was seeing. Real-time motion capture with face-tracking and live audience interactivity? I had no idea this was...