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n.b.7 | neural radiance french fries

2 to read + 2 to watch + 1 to play

Author

Nick Bondura
23 Jan

Update to my last entry: I started some blogging.

I wrote about how I feel as though I'm unknowingly planning my digital estate. A little dramatic, but...

Anyway, I want to keep writing, and I'm discovering the key may be setting some sort of realistic "ceiling". In this case, around 500 words max. Otherwise, I think I try to write out every thought and argument I can think of, then just never finish anything. So, if the "mini-blogging" method works, expect some more from me soon.

But for now, enjoy a few links below.

— n.b.

W A T C H :

Might be some viewer bias involved, but McDonald's has really put together some interesting adverts lately. First with one directed by Edgar Wright (which got some weird hate along the way?), and now with a collaboration with Karen X Cheng.

In what may be the first to use Luma Labs' Neural Radiance Fields, the commercial zooms through a photoreal, 3D space that was captured and re-rendered using the emerging technology. Even though it required the actors to stay incredibly still (typically NeRF is used for environments or objects), it's a very cool execution regardless and opens the mind up to other possibilities.

If you don't already know what this is, here's Datagen's definition of Neural Radiance Fields:

A neural radiance field (NeRF) is a fully-connected neural network that can generate novel views of complex 3D scenes, based on a partial set of 2D images. It is trained to use a rendering loss to reproduce input views of a scene. It works by taking input images representing a scene and interpolating between them to render one complete scene. NeRF is a highly effective way to generate images for synthetic data.

//

I'm a very big fan of video essays--probably mostly because I wish I could make them--and this may be one of the best I have ever seen.

Defunctland creator Kevin Perjurer digs a rabbit hole when attempting to find the original creator of the iconic Disney Channel mnemonic theme. The result explores the mystery, yes, but also discusses the fragility of digital media, the jungle of ownership and credit, and what it means to be an artist.

While I've always loved Defunctland, I've grown pretty accustomed to its production style, never expecting too much. That's why I gasped, multiple times, during this latest effort. Should be considered award-winning stuff. If you have the time and the nostalgia, I highly suggest a watch.

R E A D :

I think I touched on a very similar topic last issue ("dimming the sun"), but thought this was an interesting piece from Futurism about New York City's net CO2 footprint.

NYC's CO2 levels would be even higher, the researchers posit, were it not for the city's massive amounts of greenery, with 170 square kilometers of tree canopy cover and 94 square kilometers of grasses. On summer days, when NYC is at its greenest, that vegetation ate up 85 percent of those carbon emissions, their cross-reference analysis found.

//

I'm a sucker for a good Twitter thread (for as long as the platform lasts), especially when they contain historical oddities that I previously knew nothing about.

History Channel Creative Director Dan Snow lists his favorite "geographical quirks" in this one. Scroll through at the link, which includes my new favorite in this genre, below:

P L A Y :

As a somewhat lapsed RPG dungeon master, I'm always looking for a good monster generator. The team at Ockult Örtmästare Games (creators of the tabletop RPG Morkborg, which I have admittedly not played) created this one, which I've been having a lot of fun with.

Seriously, try it out and close your eyes imagining the results. How could you not with a brief, disturbing output like this?

THE MONSTER APPROACHES...

Skeletal with too many mouths. It's a parody of man. More than anything, it wants to die, but not alone.

Why is it hidden away in an attic? Why is it guarding a leathery, hairy egg? I don't know, but it's evocative!

Thank you again for reading.

— n.b.