image by htown, via bogchat (sans border)
This was made with pix2pix, a web-based image processor that supposedly turns line drawings into fully-fleshed photographic renderings.
Most of the results are on par with the famous #botched_fresco_restoration in Spain.
Artists who use the pix2pix service without high expectations can get some charming results, however.
htown's image above is delicate and somewhat mysterious!
Good breakdown from fanfare on the obnoxious trend of peekaboo scrolling on web pages (notably the search results page from Eric Schmidt's company).
A terrible trend on the Internet is the peek-a-boo effect. It can come at you through a variety of ways.
One common way is when a website tries to preserve the visibility of the header when you scroll down, through the use of a transition or an animated effect. I assume the logic is that once you've scrolled all the way down a page, the header is out of sight, and getting back to it would require the brutal task of scrolling up (or in the case of a touch screen, swiping up) and that's way too much work. So to make things easier, websites try and keep the header fixed at the top, all the time. Okay - that seems like a decent solution to a problem. So why not just use position:fixed any be done with it? Why use a 'seamless' transition --using animation--, which by definition won't look seamless, because an animated effect on an otherwise static page is an attention-seeker, and therefore a distraction! It's calling attention to the most unnecessary part of a web browsing experience.
An even more infuriating example in this variety of header peek-a-boo effects are websites that wait until you've scroll down a bit on the page, then trigger the re-emergence of the header, once you've scrolled up, even by a hair. It's absolutely jarring, especially if you use the scroll wheel a lot, and move an article up an down a bit just out of habit.
Another example is the jack in the box peek-a-boo effect, in which a div is hidden off-screen then POPS out once you've hit a certain point on the page. I assume this is meant to be less of a surprise than a sudden popup modal that pops up on the page without warning like a screamer (e.g. SIGN UP FOR OUR MAILING LIST), but the effect is just as bad, if not worse.
Blogger Carl Beijer wonders who's actually on twitter, or at least, how influential it is. Not sure what prompted this but it might have something to do with all the mainstream journalists who obsessively discuss "what twitter is thinking" or believe it's significant when "twitter erupts." How much thought leading is really going on over there? Says Beijer:
[N]ot everyone, it turns out, uses Twitter to talk about the news:
--One recent survey shows that only about 11% of the population ever gets their news from Twitter.
--Among respondents who ever use social media to get the news there is also significant variation in consumption: for instance, 30% of that group say that they "hardly ever" get their news from social media. If these trends holds for Twitter, then it is probably a significant source of news for something closer to 3-8% of US adults.
Beijer concludes with this paragraph:
This, I think, is a much more realistic assessment of Twitter's news reach: bring together all of the blue check journalists and unverified posters, the sinister operatives and the doe-eyed normies, the Pepe teens and the Gritty teens, the #TCOT grandpas and rose emojis - put them all together, and you are reaching a single-digit percentage of US adults, somewhere between 3-8%.
This hairball of newspeak might send a Twitter-unobsessed reader to the Urban Dictionary. A few people I asked didn't know what "Gritty teens" meant. Email if you have an idea.
edits after posting
Update: Thanks to Rubbercat for emailing a Gritty teens explanation: "'Gritty teens' refer[s] to an emerging contingent of meme-loving leftist kids. Its namesake is the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team's new mascot Gritty who, after a few initial weeks of universal revulsion, became jokingly recharacterized as this hip ultra-leftist antifa hero in photoshops and memes. There was a counterprotest recently and Gritty was on a lot of the signs."
"Liberal guilt" is a term that's gone out of fashion but it's weirdly intertwined with the Silicon Valley brand of paternalism. Witness the endless parade of Others on the search page of a company that, according to Fortune, "still hasn't fixed its diversity problem" in actual hiring.
The image above, from a few days ago, depicts baseball great Roberto Clemente as seen by uncredited artist Roxie Vizcarra. (Subject and artist are never written on the page -- you have to click somewhere to find this info.)
Vizcarra renders Clemente in a generic "clip art" style, transforming him from determined sports competitor to slightly vacant pretty boy. Like many of this company's illustrations it seems oblivious to human anatomy and perspective illusionism. The batting arm, for example, appears unnaturally twisted and lifeless. Clemente stares off in the distance, presumably looking at a high pop fly he just hit -- but appears stupefied rather than focused. In fact, the baseball seems to have sailed past him and landed in a pair of... severed hands. Is that a heart-shape on the ball stitching?
The map of Puerto Rico, Clemente's home island, appears to have been conquered by the sponsoring company, which has appropriated the territory's flag.
The blue molecule next to Clemente's elbow does not mean he is also a nuclear scientist. That's the "share" icon.
A previous post pondered the provenance of eBaum's WORLD and Cheezburger. Who owns them exactly, and what is the chain of possession from previous owners?
So is Viumbe a Literally subsidiary? Is eBaum in transition between owners with dated website info? Or is Literally the "old" owner? Inquiring meme ghouls want to know.
Thanks to polyaenus for emailing with some additional research. The text below is quoted in full from the email:
First, looking at the Viumbe site, it seems quite dead.
It lists three sites in its media kit pdf and two of them redirect to Ebaumsworld.
@celebremix stopped tweeting in 2012 and @viumbe in 2013.
The sales contact listed in the media kit seems to work somewhere else now.
However, the Ebaumsworld and Cheezburger twitters are still active, run by "EiC" @colbydroscher.
Ebaumsworld was acquired by Handheld Entertainment Inc (ZVUE) in 2007. [link]
Interestingly, Handheld was run by Google cofounder Larry Page's brother.
At first his company made a video/mp3 player called ZVUE, trying to compete with Apple's iPod.
I guess this didn't work and they tried to pivot into online media. [link]
Before they made the big purchase of Ebaumsworld, they ran some other sites:
"It offers content through YourDailyMedia.com, FunMansion.com, Putfile.com, Dorks.com, ZVUE.com, and UnOriginal.co.uk Web sites" [link]
ZVUE was eventually suspended from trading in 2014. [link]
I'm not sure how Viumbe got ZVUE's assets but this says it was formed in 2009. [link]
Viumbe "relaunched" Ebaumsworld in 2012. [link]
Viumbe was sold to JoBookit Holdings Limited in 2014 for $2.5 million according to this lawsuit. [link]
"Jobookit develops game changing concepts and dynamic technologies to optimize and ultimately simplify the world of online recruitment."
not sure what that has to do with a meme site.
This guy [twitter] is listed as both the CEO of Jobookit and the Co-owner of Viumbe until it was acquired by Literally Media in 2017. [link]
Literally (founded 2015) acquired Cheezburger in 2016
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cheezburger-acquired-by-literally-media-joining-ebaums-world-as-the-destination-for-reaching-millennial-and-generation-z-audiences-and-the-5-entertainment---humor-destination-according-to-comscore-data-576567001.html
(look at that fucking url lol)
One weird thing is that according to the above link, Cheezburger "joins" Ebaumsworld as being part of Literally Media, in 2016. Yet Filstein's own site and LinkedIn says Literally bought Viumbe in 2017. Confusing.
one last link i found from a bitter content farmer...
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/blogs/why-i-was-fired-from-viumbe/84865523/
