I keep forgetting to write a post. Instead what happens is I leave myself little bread-crumb trails of notes (“chitaru shiota exhibit; can’t relate”, “birdhouse craft”), like a woman fleeing a crime scene that she will later have to investigate. They just sit there. A little graveyard of intentions. This is the inconvenient curse of my flavour of ADHD: I cash in the entire dopamine hit on the idea…
An article from 2015 is making the rounds again because the internet has no new ideas and neither do we, that says Shakespeare (yes that Shakespeare) was quite possibly absolutely baked out of his mind the entire time. Pipes found in his garden. Cannabis residue. And honestly this explains so much. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep ; that is not a…
A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is nice to be reminded of the kinds of small lives we still agree to make room for. --- Have you noticed that we don’t get any art isms anymore? The 20th century minted them like currency: Expressionism.…
There’s something good going on with music these days. Romance by Fontaines D.C. is a perfect album. I have listened to it almost every single day for weeks and have not gotten sick of it once, which is – and I mean this clinically – a medical miracle. Jack White is on SNL. The Strokes are touring. There is a band called Angine de poitrine who are the most aggressively anti-AI band I can imagine…
Thinking about resuscitating regular written updates. Reasons, in order of honesty: vanity it might pressure me into actually doing something worth reporting on writing is a part of my brain that has been gathering dust and I am becoming increasingly concerned this is turning me into a bore. --- Found an interesting framework for evaluating art via Instagram Reels, which I realize is not the most…
I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not actually that smart, which leads to very convincing lies (see: the “how many Rs in strawberry?” saga). If I had the inclination to double check…
Wow, long time, no posts! Anyway, about them text-to-art generative models going about, eh? Surprising nobody: I am extremely into them. I’ve been using DALL-E and MidJourney since they came out, and even though tons has been written about them, I wanted to give a slightly different overview: the perspective of someone who isn’t interested that much in their realism skills. I think that the most…
(This is a post mostly about art but I swear there’s a moral in here for all you tech readers, or at least a discounted therapy lesson.) As you may have noticed from these latest posts, at the beginning of this year I decided to “do more art”. This went really well for a couple of months: I was making new shit; I was pumped; I felt competent. Around September I stopped feeling competent and got…
A couple of months ago my friend Jana helped organize HashiConf Europe , and asked me to work on generating custom artwork for each of their speakers. This was my first experience with creating art for someone else, and especially art that had to match someone else’s artistic guidelines. I’ve said this before, but I live and nap by the idea that rules (and editing) are at the core of the artistic…
It’s been one week since you looked at me 8 months since I’ve been writing these weekly notes, and I think I’m going to take a small break from it. It’s been a good experiment, but I’ve been getting sloppy with remembering they’re due, and it’s starting to feel a bit self-indulgent. Because I don’t actually advertise that they exist, I don’t think anyone reads them, so I’m not entirely sure why…
On Monday Frances took me to the teamLab exhibition at the Asian Art museum. It was really wonderful! I hadn’t seen the one in Japan so I was new to it, but the interactive art nerd in me was all over the concept and trying to figure out what was static and what was interactive, and where the sensors were. Tons of fun! On the weekend we went to the Gold Cup ⚽️ final in Vegas. This is important…
First off: I think I’ve done a bad numbering in some of these recent weeks, because I wanted to write about what I actually did on July 13/14, but apparently I’ve already counted that week? Counting, man, a hell of a thing. My good friend Maeghan who aside from being a top drawer human being and tswift fan is an amazing professional contact (and I don’t deserve her one bit), connected me with the…
So here’s what happened: I went on vacation and because I’m leaning so hard into this funemployment life I didn’t open my laptop once. Every year Zach and I go to his parents’ (now my in-laws! hah!) lake in Minnesota for the 4th of July. Normally we fly there, but last year we drove (because of the panderoni) and this year we also drove because you can’t fly with a big dog anymore. It’s kind of a…
The last time I changed something big on my site was 3+ years ago. I was really into gradient rainbow text and IBM Plex Mono. It was a mild increment over whatever I had before, which was just a cleaned up and colourful version of Left from like 6 years prior. Anyway, what I’m saying is: this website had hella split ends. Here’s the before and after: ↓ But also, why? I used to write a lot of blog…
It’s true, I did. I also wrote a blog post about it because tbh I did a good job on it, and it’s a good read. As two ladies of leisure, Frances and I went to the MOMA on a weekday to see the new Nam June Paik exhibition. I didn’t love all of it, but the bits I really enjoyed were all about putting TVs in unexpected situations. Which makes sense, since I really enjoy when surrealism is executed…
Weird flex: been making cheese fondue for lunch because I make the rules here. One of the (many) amazing things about being a Canadian living in California is that this state (unlike, say, no-rules-nevada) doesn’t recognize non-US driving licenses. This means that after almost 20 years of getting my first driver’s license I had to do the whole circus show (written test, road test, being treated…
Trying out titles because I have enough weeks that even I can’t tell them apart and I lived through them. Sports!!! We went to the Nations League ⚽️ semis and finals in Denver. If you don’t know this about me, I am a bit of a football (soccer) hooligan. Zach and I go to games, we sit in suporter sections, we chant. We went to France for the Women’s World Cup, because sports is a great excuse to…
Chopped off 10 inches of my hair and I feel unstoppable. I always think I can deal with mermaid hair when the reality is I cba to brush it and it keeps getting longer and drier until I’m ready to take the kitchen scissors to it. I resisted that impulse and got a professional to cut it. Am I finally an adult? I am writing this update FROM A PLANE. Yes, a real plane. My brother-in-law’s family is…
normalcy resumes chez nous. I know this isn’t true everywhere, so if you’re in a place of lockdown: I am sorry for how annoying these updates will be. I was a good girl and bunkered down for over a year, and now I’ve got antibodies in spades and taking advantage of it. first trip of the after times: Monterey! I’d never been, because prior to last year we didn’t have a car, and renting a car for a…
Ya look at that? It’s May already. My dog’s is turning 2 on the 14th, does anyone have any good dog cake recipes or should I just give her an almost-empty jar of peanut butter with the same success rate? I got my second fouchie outchie! (#teampfizer). I wouldn’t say it bodied me the next day, but I felt uncomfortable enough to sit in bed and read not one but TWO Bridgerton novels. I’ve now read…
One of my favourite kinds of art to make involves taking nature and seeing it as simple shapes. Buildings are cubes, flowers are circles, hills are curves. Shells are spirals. Tree rings are weird circle bois, and they are some of the best. I’ve wanted to make a generative art of a tree ring for a long time, but everything I made kept sucking (scroll to the bottom if you don’t believe me. Shit was…
I’ve been skipping weeks because a) literally nothing happens and b) I don’t have a good system to update these notes. They’re a markdown file on a GitHub repo, and I kind of need a computer to edit it, but I also kind of don’t open my computer that much these days? I also keep forgetting which day is Monday. Room for improvement. I wrote a blog post about how I generated some tree rings in…
First week of being funemployed! It was very weird. By Wednesday I had lost track of what day it was, and I kept thinking it was a Saturday. By Friday I was overwhelmed with capitalism guilt and thinking that I HAD to do something to “stay productive”. What a fake idea y’all; it hadn’t even been a full week of vacation! I got vaccinated!!! I had no side effects other than a very sore arm, which is…
Let’s not bury the lede: I quit my job. After 8 years of working there, Google feels like a very different company than the one I joined, one that aligns less and less with my values, and it was time to move on. It sucks, because my immediate team was a group of wonderful people who do great work; I will miss them, and the work I did, greatly. I haven’t had a vacation longer than 2 weeks since I…
Calico came out and I finished it in 2 days! It’s an adorably cute game about running a pet cafe in a fantastical little world. It’s honestly the kind of game I would make. It has an incredible cooking activity interaction, which I can only describe as “shit, this game engine has physics and collision detection, let’s use it for something!”. It’s great. (spoilers if you don’t want to play it: the…
Trying something really revolutionary this week which is “doing nothing”. Bear with me here. I mean: listening to an audio book and NOT also cleaning the house. Just sitting, listening to that book and doing nothing. WASTING THAT TIME. In this economy??? Yes. Do I dislike the idea? Also yes. Related: I switched to the Samantha Irby (Wow, no thank you) audiobook because a) she narrates it and her…
It’s been another week of people being shit, innit? I know I should be used to this by now, but it never ceases to amaze me the capability people have for violence and evil, and the capability the patriarchy has to excuse it. “Dude had a bad day”? For real real? If that excuse has legs then you’d expect every uterus-holding person to do at LEAST a murder per year. And yet it’s always white dudes…
I took the whole week off because I was very tired of life. It’s the year anniversary of the last time the world was normal and it’s bringing me down. Between covid and immigration delays it’s looking very 50/50 on whether I can attend my closest cousin’s wedding this fall in Romania, and I’m beyond gutted at the thought of missing it. All I can do about it is wait, and that’s making the pandemic…
This week was entirely consumed by the fact that I opened an online store to sell generative “art” prints. Art is in quotations here because I have a deeply unhealthy relationship with calling anything I do art, or myself an artist, but we don’t have time to for a therapy session right now. It went really great. I sold out of 2 kinds of prints! People who weren’t just my friends put it orders! My…
I got deep into geocaching, friends. I found 3 caches in Arizona! I didn’t sign any of them because I kept forgetting to bring a pen, so now nobody will know I was there. Geocaching is mad in the US. We drove back from Arizona (flying? in this economy??), and there were HUNDREDS along the highway. First, who are these people that stop on the side of the highway to hide a cache? Second, who are…
I skipped week 5 because all I did in the panna cotta was watch 3 seasons of “how to get away with murder”. It’s a terrible show and I’m not ashamed of it. What is up with that star codex thing? I can’t believe there was a cult of assholes in tech I didn’t know about. I’m obviously not surprised they existed, there’s an asshole under every rock in tech; I’m just surprised I didn’t know about it.…
Tahoe (where we currently live during this pannie-d) got a ton of snow this week, so I’ve been in winter mode. Went skiing on Friday, went snowshoeing on Sunday. My calves are on fire. Skiing is pretty safe; everyone is wearing masks, they’ve closed all the lodges, and tbh nobody should be within 6 feet of me skiing on a good day. I can tell when I accidentally overdo it with the hobbies (which is…
Monday was off which ruined any routine I had formed. I barely got used to waking up on Mondays to go to work and then bam, 2 weeks in, a Monday off. I had dreams all week about working part time, probably because my brain is clinging desperately to this hope of not having to ever wake up on Mondays. I got 3 aquatic snails in a small little aquarium. They live next to my laptop so I can look at…
Still into soups: I made a bomb cream of broccoli. I also bought a new vegan broth base to fuck with because buying the cartons of broth is like buying bottled water aka: bad and wasteful. My dog’s skin is turning grey. I know this sounds funny but it’s like, a thing. There could be a number of reasons for this, but the most likely one is that she’s an inbred dumbass and allergic to something in…
I’ve been thinking for a while about setting this up, and this week seems as good as any. Both Alice and Frances have weekly updates that are a joy to read. Jenn has a live laugh blog. Maybe this is the year of long form tweets? I haven’t touched my site in like 6+ months so when I tried to run jekyll locally it obviously didn’t work, so what you’re reading took like 40 commits on GitHub. In work…
My one policy about blogging is “write the blog post you wanted to find in the search results”. I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday trying to get typedoc to only show the docs for the files I’m actually exporting in my library, and didn’t find anything on the internet to help me, so here is the blog post I wanted to read. The problem You are working on a JS library. You author your…
Back in the day when I worked on Polymer I got used to relying on a bunch of useful CSS classes that at the time we called iron-flex-layout . They were there partly because flexbox was a sadness on IE and you needed to say everything 3 times to maybe get it right twice, and add some very special flex-basis: 0.000000001px “bug fixes” that tbh nobody should ever have to write by hand. But they were…
My job nowadays involves a lot of music and JavaScript. You know what musicians really care about? Paychecks (support your local musicians, go to concerts, don’t steal music from indie musicians). But also: keeping time. Keeping time in JavaScript is kind of a joke, not just because time is a social construct (this is the Jenn Schiffer social engineering at work), but because it’s really easy to…
One of the first things you stumble on when you start using TensorFlow.js is that sometimes you need your data as a Tensor, and sometimes you need it as a JavaScript number. Maybe it’s for logging it, maybe it’s for displaying it somewhere during training, maybe it’s because you don’t trust the robots to be better than you at math. This is a quick post that tries to clarify why doing this…
Inktober is a project where artists make an ink drawing every day for the whole month of October. This year I did an inktober but ignored all the rules, and made Internet Stuff™️ instead. That experiment lives here , but I want to tell you why I did it before you go ahead and judge it. I think that it’s also important to tell you it was a huge pain in the ass just in case you watched it unfold and…
Magenta.js is a JavaScript library that helps you generate art and music on the web. It’s also the team that I work on now! One of the things that I do whenever I join a new team is learn a bunch of things, and then make a bunch of tutorials that past Monica would’ve loved to stumble over. This is one of them! In this tutorial, we’ll talk about the music generation bits in @magenta/music (one of…
Machine Learning (ML) is the dope new thing that everyone’s talking about, because it’s really good at learning from data so that it can predict similar things in the future. Doing ML by hand is pretty annoying since it usually involves matrix math which is zero fun in JavaScript (or if you ask me: anywhere 😅). Thankfully, TensorFlow.js is here to help! It’s an open source library that has a lot…
When you have a float CSS property on a box (with a value different than none ), this box must be laid out according to the float positioning algorithm . Loosely, it says: if the box has float:left , the box is positioned at the beginning of the line box if the box has float:right , the box is positioned at the end of the line box text (and more generally anything within the normal, non-floaty…
Before I wrote the JavaScripts, I got a master’s in AI (almost a decade ago 🙀), and wrote a thesis on a weird and new area in Reinforcement Learning. Or at least it was new then. It’s definitely still weird now. Anyway, I loved it. With all the hype around Machine Learning and Deep Learning, I thought it would be neat if I wrote a little primer on what Reinforcement Learning really means, and why…
So testing, right? We should do it. The thing is, testing is hard, and good testing is reaaaaaaally hard, and tbh I’m pretty bad at testing. So I end up not testing my apps, and then I feel guilty about it, but I’ll stop you now: you can’t run guilt on Travis. If this sounds familiar, then this blog post is for you. I did a little song-and-dance that sets up Puppeteer * , takes screenshots of your…
You can tell I hate writing year in reviews because this one is really, really late. I tend to hate bragging, and I definitely hate introspective and, in particular, I always think I am underperforming (and that’s fine). However, that’s usually not true, and writing a year in review forces me to see the awesome things I did, so even if I did end up underperforming, at least I can learn from that.…
Updated May 18, 2020 (get it? :: ? I made a funny) Shadow DOM is a spec that gives you DOM and style encapsulation. This is great for reusable web components , as it reduces the ability of these components’ styles getting accidentally stomped over (the old “I have a class called “button” and you have a class called “button”, now we both look busted” problem), but it adds a barrier for styling and…
There’s this thing I hate about the modern web which is that sites are rarely one giant html file filled with goodies. You can’t just “run a site” locally. You need an npm or a gulp step or a docker if you’re lucky. And probably a local server, but not the one you have installed. Which, I mean, makes sense, because modern web sites are big and powerful and have complicated front-ends and do more…
Shadow DOM is a fairly recent-ish spec that gives you DOM tree encapsulation – it’s one of the superhero lions in the Voltron of specs called “Web Components”. Web Components let you create reusable, self-contained components in JavaScript; the Shadow DOM bit makes sure that the CSS and markup you bundle with your implementation is encapsulated, hiding the implementation details of your element.…
The Meownica Web App Workflow™ goes like this: Write bad code until the file is too long Refactor that code into some web components Repeat steps 1-2 until done Realize you forgot to do the PWA dance, so your app is scoring 45 on Lighthouse Make it into a PWA by doing basically the same steps every time. I’m not joking about step 5. It’s all a bunch of fairly simple boilerplate and party tricks,…