Monthly Archives: July 2026

art: does lived experience put substance X into an artwork?

Posted on 2026-07-22 by skierpage

People hate that AI art is “disembodied and decontextualized, detached from lived experience” (@Terminus52 in a Substack comment thread). It feels like cheating that a clanker can mindlessly crank out an artwork that “ought to” come from a tortured artist’s … Continue reading →

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AI art: there oughtta be a law!

Posted on 2026-07-22 by skierpage

Stability AI trained its image generator on the LAION-5B data set of 5 billion (!!!) image-text pairs. If you download this data set, you don’t get the images, you get metadata about each image including its URL, plus the nearby … Continue reading →

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music: actually I really do know

Posted on 2026-07-09 by skierpage

“Ride Line the Wind” is the hit Christopher Cross song with the incomparable Michael McDonald killing it on “background” vocals, but I think this album track is even better. It took years to track it down because I assumed it … Continue reading →

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DIY disaster part 42: screws, badly

Posted on 2026-07-07 by skierpage

Buy two fancy bronze ceramic-coated star drive truss head lag screws, and screw them in to repair the fence board. How hard can it be? DIY Disaster caption contest

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art: Tracey Emin – woman power, woman pain

Posted on 2026-07-07 by skierpage

I found Tracey Emin’s “A Second Life” exhibition at Tate Modern irritating at first because you have to read paragraphs of her handwriting. But the payoffs are huge. “My Future” ends with “That’s the last Dead Thing to Leave my … Continue reading →

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