Category: Art

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Wally’s Wild Ride

The state of AI music in 2025 is getting pretty good. Here is a song written by a prompt in ChapGPT then converted the lyrics and music with udio.

The story that inspired the song was from a time that my grandpa took my young uncle Wally to the stockyards on a thoroughbred horse that was broken but still wild. My grandpa sent him home on the horse and at 10 years old, he was too little to control her. After she spooked and started to run for home, Wally worried that if the barn doors were opened the horse would run into the barn and he would get scraped off. Here’s the song:

Update (April 9, 2025): Even though it should not have come as a surprise, given how he had been deteriorating lately, I was still caught off-guard when my cousin Lydia contacted me last night to let me know that Wally died yesterday while she was there at the old folks home visiting.

When I played this song for Wally last week he confirmed, “If the door would have been open, Molly would have killed me.”

He was 92 years old. He will be greatly missed.

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Image Playground

I’ve tested out the new Image Playground app for MacOS and the results are pleasing. I created a whole collection of my family (my wife and my siblings and their respective spouses). This is what we would all look like if we were in a Pixar feature:

There is still a little wonkiness in some of the eyes but overall I think the state of the technology is progressing nicely. The other change from other image generators I’ve used is just how fast Image Playground is able to generate the images. These took just a few seconds each.

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Three Seconds Everyday 2024

2024 is the 11th year I’ve created a once a day video project. Lots of travel this year, lots of kids, and lots of fun. It’s a pretty good glimpse at the everyday routine of our lives.

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The Vanity Fair Interview with Billie Eilish, Year Eight

Every year since 2017, Vanity Fair has interviewed Billie Eilish about her life and career. They didnt release last year’s conversation but they are back this year with the eighth iteration.

It’s amazing that Vanity Fair picked Eilish for this project when they could have picked any number of up-and-coming stars from 2017. They got lucky picking not only the one who went supernova winning multiple grammies and maintaining popularity but who is also self-reflective, eloquent, and willing to talk about her emotions.

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Becoming Led Zeppelin

The long awaited authorized documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin has finally released the first trailer:

From Angie Maroccio at Rolling Stone Magazine:

The film was first announced five years ago, then premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. That same year, an early clip of “Good Times Bad Times” was released. In May 2024, the “hybrid docu-concert film” was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics.

Making the film was challenging for MacMahon and writer-producer Allison McGourty, as hardly any footage from the band’s early years existed. Through their research, they were able to include unseen concert footage, including their early performances at the Fillmore West in January 1969 and the Texas Pop Festival in August 1969.

“We spent five years flying back and forth across the Atlantic scouring attics and basements in pursuit of rare and unseen film footage, photographs, and music recordings,” McGourty said in a statement. “Then we transferred each piece of media with custom techniques, so that in IMAX, these 55-year-old clips and music would look and sound like they came out of the lab yesterday.”

Becoming Led Zeppelin will be released on February 7th, 2025 in 200 IMAX theatres.

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Cabel Sasser at the 2024 XOXO Festival

Just in time for Thanksgiving1, Cabel Sasser gave a talk at the 2024 XOXO Festival about the importance of appreciation for art and craftsmanship in this 20 minute talk. I’d say more, but trust me when I say the unfolding of this journey is worth it.

Hi, I’m Cabel. I was driving to Seattle and got hungry, so I stopped at a McDonalds in Centralia, WA. And when I went inside, I saw something incredible.

Here, let me tell you my story:

Here’s a newly launched archive of nearly lost Wes Cook work.

  1. Canadian Thanksgiving[↩]
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Firehouse Five and the Cinderella Surprise – cabel.com

Cabel Sasser won an auction of Dixieland jazz 78rpm records and found a long lost song cut from Cinderella:

My goal was to preserve some never-before-heard recordings of an incredible Dixieland jazz band made up of mostly Disney employees, the Firehouse Five Plus Two. But along the way, I accidentally discovered an incredible lost song that was cut from Walt Disney’s Cinderella. And you’re about to hear it too. Let’s go…

Read on cabel.com/2024/02/13/firehouse-five-and-the-cinderella-surprise/

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Jon Stewart Returns to TDS

Last night Jon Stewart returned as temporary Monday host of The Daily Show. After creative differences with the executives at Apple Tv+ concerning Stewart’s material ending the show before its third season, the polically minded comedian has returned to Comedy Central to host once a week leading up to the election.

Here’s his first episode back:

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Casey’s Sisyphean Task

For the past couple years I’ve been trying to get my best time swimming a kilometre under 16:00. I’m still not there and obviously it’s not quite the same level as Casey’s three-hour marathon dream but the video definitely resonates in so many ways:

(via Waxy)

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