web-goddess

Author: Kris

  • Aussie architecture 🏠

    Do you know your Art Deco from mid-century modern? Your guide to five popular design eras – Fun little visual guide to some of the common architectural styles you see in Australia. There’s a quiz at the bottom too! I immediately fell in love with the Star Theatre in Launceston. *sigh*

    Relatedly, I was interested to read that someone in Ohio has built a “new” Frank Lloyd Wright house from blueprints he drew but never built. Hilariously, the FLW Foundation refuses to classify it as authentically his work… because they built it to modern building codes. 😂 I’m not surprised. When we visited Taliesin in 2010, I was shocked by how poor some of the workmanship was. The walls were thin, and there were literally gaps around some of the windows. “How in the world did the family live here in Wisconsin in the winter?” I asked the tour guide. “They didn’t. They had another home in Arizona.” Of course! While some of his ideas were brilliant, his designs don’t always seem especially suited to the realities of how people live.

  • Links that have been occupying me lately

    • AO3 is entering a new era – some fascinating number-crunching here on the stats around what’s happening in the world of fan fiction. I’ll confess I’ve read a ton on AO3, and I was motivated enough to look up the full report. I also didn’t realise the impact that AI-scraping is having on the fanfic community, but it makes sense.
    • Coming Soon: From ‘The Sims’ to ‘World of Warcraft’, You’ll Be Able to Play Your Way Through ACMI’s ‘Game Worlds’ Exhibition – Oh, fun. We’ll have to plan a trip to Melbourne.
    • Why are we still using 88×31 buttons – Nostalgia! The bit about IAB ad sizes reminded me of my “Responsive Ads: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things… Yet” talk. It also reminded me of Amazon’s “Phone Tool Icons,” these little badges employees can earn that get displayed on your page on the internal company directory. Some people were obsessed with those. I remember back in 2020 I tried to get a new one approved to award to people who managed to record their Summit talks with a perfectly white backdrop. (Everyone had to scramble and record at home during Covid lockdown, and for some reason Amazon PR were super fastidious about your backdrop not having any visible shadows or texture on it. Like, we’re all paranoid about the global pandemic and finding toilet paper and homeschooling kids, but you’re totally right, a perfectly smooth white background is the #1 priority. 🙄) But it got rejected, because whoever approves the Phone Tool Icons hates fun. Anyway, I pinged a friend there yesterday to see what size they are, and turns out they’re 120×30, so they’re not actually Micro Buttons anyway.
    • Do One Thing – Everything is awful, and when I’ve run out of stupid Internet things to distract myself with (like fan fiction and video games and micro buttons), I find myself seeking out these posts with suggestions of how to cope.
  • Caffeination

    Caffeination

    I’ve caught a cold so I had to pull out of a planned trip to visit the in-laws. While I will be without my in-house barista for 3 days, Mr. Snook has ensured that I will not lack for caffeine. (Toby’s gives you a voucher every time you buy a bag of beans.)

  • Happy anniversary, part 2

    Happy anniversary, part 2

    Since we had to get dressed up for an event in the city tonight, we took the opportunity to finally check out Fabbrica for dinner afterwards. We shared the wagyu tonnato, deep-fried zucchini flowers, trottole puttanesca, and hazelnut tiramisu. Everything was very, very good.

    Wagyu Tonnato

    Deep-fred zucchini flowers

    Trottole puttanesca

    Hazelnut tiramisu

  • Happy anniversary!

    We went out for breakfast to celebrate the fact that 24 years ago today, two silly, shy, impossibly young web developers got drunk enough on vodka-Redbulls at the Leopard Lounge in Fulham to confess their mutual crushes and have a pash on the dancefloor. ❤️

    A collage of two middle-aged people having breakfast

  • A tale of two dresses 👗👗

    Earlier in the week, I popped into Made590 to pick up a couple shirts… and whoops, a new Liberty dress was right there. It was Tana Lawn and it felt like silk, and I looked great in it. 😍

    Saski dress in Liberty Tana Lawn

    I sent the photo to a couple friends, and one of them went by a few days later to pick one up for herself. That night she said, “You know it’s AI-generated, right?”

    Wait, what? Liberty of London? The famed 150-year-old “purveyor of craftsmanship,” that prides itself on its “dedicated in-house design studio” who are responsible for “hand painting and creating our beautiful prints”? THAT Liberty of London?

    Yep, them. Check the “Editor’s Notes”:

    For Avalon Scenes, the design studio approached Tom Furse, an artist and musician who specialises in creating artwork with AI in controlled environments. Harnessing the cutting-edge potential of AI technology, this design conjures a display of surreal landscapes morphing into psychedelic flower forms…

    Well, that sucks. I had a good long think about it. It really is a lovely dress. I am not against algorithmic art entirely, and I can see cases where I’d be fine with this – like if the model was trained only on Liberty’s pattern archive. But I could find zero mention of the technology used, not on Liberty’s site or the artist’s website or Instagram. (The artist is actually a musician that seems to dabble in AI, so I doubt he’s training his own models for this.) I contacted Liberty through both their website and Facebook page to ask for details, explaining that I was concerned about whether the model used for their AI-generated fabric was trained on any stolen artwork, and how the environmental impacts of the project lived up to Liberty’s stated corporate social responsibility goals. I got a reply back asking “Which AI-generated fabric specifically are you asking about?”

    Not good.

    I decided to return the dress today for one featuring Australian plants photographed straight from the shop owner’s garden. Made590 were lovely about it, and I can’t fault them – most people wouldn’t feel as strongly about this as I do. But right now I’m in the “no ethical use of AI” camp, and I’d rather pay artists for their art. I’m so disappointed in Liberty – ACTUAL LIBERTY OF LONDON – jumping on the AI trend bandwagon. Ugh. I’ll update if they ever send me the details, but for now I feel a lot better about my pretty new dress.

    Saski dress in Botanist print

  • Bouquet 💐

    Bouquet 💐

    Our neighbours have been growing some beautiful dahlias, zinnias, and sunflowers in the garden up at their weekend cottage, and they just gifted me a lovely bouquet “to match your red kitchen”! 😍

  • Pub lunch

    Pub lunch

    The Purls of Wisdom all got together at Philter today to put a big dent in our $600+ of pub trivia vouchers!

  • Links I’ve been reading lately

  • Highlights from the w-g archives

    On this day…

    • in 2015 I went to a tech meetup that Dropbox were holding in a Sydney laneway, and I learned about an Aussie startup called Canva. I introduced myself to founder Cliff, did some research over the next week, and decided to talk him into hiring me. Two months later I was working there. It may well have been the most significant meetup of the hundreds I’ve been to over the years!
    • in 2009 the Sydney CBD experienced a major power outage. It was a turning point in my relationship with Twitter, as the locals were having a lot of fun positing that zombies were running amok in the city. I jumped in and never looked back. (Well, until the end of 2022.)
    • in 2007 Kim and Kelley Deal came into the knitting shop where I worked, and I didn’t even recognise them at first! Thank goodness my crappy mobile phone had a camera on it.
    • in 2003 I knitted a bikini. No, I never wore it. Knitted bikinis look flattering on approximately 0.2% of the population.