Happy Mother’s Day especially all those cat moms out there!
Happy Mother’s Day 2023
Saturday Cat picture
Yeah this is what I want to do too all day.
AI Revolution
This is a great take. I read these comments of Hinton earlier and I got the feeling he is trying to pose himself as modern day Oppenheimer a little too much after he made millions of dollars of it.
My own adventures in AI revolution consist of couple hours in image creator app creating an all cat power metal band and couple of minutes in Chat GPT which made me a fantasy story of a Finnish politician rescuing a princess – it wasn’t really good and I wouldn’t buy it as a novel and not even borrowing it from the library.
Yeah so my opinion about AI or these language models is that everything surrounded it is mainly hype but it will come commonplace eventually as part of every day life and work. I can see it being useful in excel as it would make all the formatting and tables by just asking it nicely.
City pop
This article by Cat Zheung from Pitchfork.com is the most definitive article about City pop:
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-endless-life-cycle-of-japanese-city-pop/
It is a great read. Highly recommended! It opens up my own fascination of this silly music. I have been fascinated with Japanese city pop music for about 10 years ever since the almighty YouTube algorithm recommended this weird time capsule of a music to me. I’ve found that it is the most suitable background music for working. The words are jibberish for non-Japanese speaking person like me. There are weird choices of English words during the chorus. But it is great. You don’t have to listen the words – you can just let it flow in the background. Has it increased my creative or productive output? Not. But I still put on some YouTube city pop playlist when I’m working. And I am transported to drive some convertible Toyota along Japanese coastline during the height of Japanese bubble economy.
My first touch point of city pop was of course Plastic Love but my favorite city pop song is this one:
Tutorial: How papercraft gundam models are made
So how to make great papercraft gundam models.
First you build preferentially PG grade plastic gundam model. Model or grade doesn’t make a difference but everybody loves RX-78-2 so let’s go with that. PG grede is great for added mobility.
Then when you have built it and cleaned up all the plastic spruces and put on every decal you can just let it do the whole work and just sit back and take occasionally photos of the process.
The Gundam model just goes to work and figures out itself what needs to be done. It will collect all the parts and starts putting it all together.
Other than that there is not much for the process. The plastic little gundam model does all the work. It will cut the pieces. It will fold the pieces. It will glue the pieces together. It doesn’t rest until it is done. It doesn’t even have any need for Pepakura app. All you have to do is to print the papers in right color.
No kidding. All true.
Saturday Cat picture
Our Jaska in a rocking chair.
So what I’m doing right now
It took me a long time to find the motivation to start the next papercraft project when I finished the SD Musha Gundam papercraft. I browsed the web for a long time without really getting excited about any model. I wanted to do something I hadn’t done before and I knew it had to be some kind of gundam model. But nothing really inspired me.
I browsed through Korean gundam models, because they are the most complex and accurate models I’ve come across. I came across a super cool gundam model from the Iron Blooded Orphans series. I’ve only seen the first two series and a few OVAs of Gundams. And Origins manga I’ve read all the parts. But other than that I’m not into gundams other than the robot models are awesome. So I hadn’t watched the Iron Blooded Orphans series at all.
The model I was drawn to was Barbatos Lupus Rex.
The model was designed by Hikaru 11, real name Hirasawa Hikaru. He is an Indonesian paper model designer.
This model is not freely available online, you have to buy it directly from the designer via Facebook. The model costs $35 but is worth every penny. If you want to buy this model I recommend you contact the designer on Facebook.
The model is like a PG plastic gundam model. The model has an inner skeleton and the armor is built on top of this.
This model is coming along… slowly.
You can contact Hikaru 11 at Facebook if you wish to purchase the model for yourself. I will not send templates or PDO-files.
Stay tune for more updates!
Damn you Mark Zuckerberg!
Yeah so Instagram decided to ban my account. For unknown reasons. Probably because of questionable material on the account. Material which consisted mainly of pictures of cats and paper models. I have my suspicions about what my have happened but I don’t know for sure. I think that somebody might have reported my account to Meta and Meta doesn’t do anything but just bans accounts. I started to follow this vegan-account and it was banned by Meta same time as my account.
I could get the account back, though, if I agreed to give my phone number and provide my own face photo to Meta. Those are pretty big privacy issues to hand over to someone as reputable as Meta. So I just decided to let that account go. Which is a shame in itself, as that account had about 160 photos and a lot of followers – far more than on YouTube, for example. And I was more active on Instagram than on YouTube. All of that is now gone.
After the initial shock, I realised that Meta had done me a favour in its own way and a lot of idle scrolling was out of the way. I thought I’d leave making a new account and enjoy my own freedom from having to scroll mindlessly through Instagram. But I made an account again and with a new name @thetuupiainen_ig, but I’ll see if I’ll start updating anything there.
One of the absolute best things about Instagram is the online photo archive, which you can access from anywhere and I miss that. I plan to start collecting and publishing photos on this site, so they are at least in my hands and no mega-company can decide what happens to them.
With Twitter in the eye of the storm, this own Instagram-gate reminded me of the problems that come with these social media platforms. If I can get my photos collected back here, then at least I know they’ll stay here until I decide what to do with them. The good thing about social media platforms is that visitors come along and have the opportunity to find them. The problem with this site is that visitors have to find their way here to see them. But this site is more of a blog for me than reaching out to a large audience.