Also a reminder that if your PhD in Classical Reception thesis had included an analysis of my sculptural series "A Catalogue of Shapes" you'd be guaranteed to win the Durham Prize right now. But (wholly inexplicably) none of you did, so none of you are 😜

Right up your street @adrivahni.bsky.social

"people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI ... because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes" Luddites know how machine works

Made a new print. Because this way I'm not tweaking my once-minimalist, but fast becoming acanthus-filled jungle website. It's on my Saatchi Art page. In case anyone was wondering.

Hektor EXΩ

Before transforming piles of stuff into assemblages, I draw a scale version of the envisioned sculpture first. This helps me to try out various compositions, colours, and patterns. While aspects of the final sculpture closely reflect the original design, these mostly develop in their own direction.

Word of the day @tyranosaurossmudge.bsky.social

@douglascheape.bsky.social?

@postmonkey.bsky.social be warned 🚨

I've given the website a refresh and heroically managed to fight off my worst instincts to keep it clean. Odds are, by next week it will be as cluttered with random nonsense as my workshop is 🫤 charlaynvonsolms.com

Ancient assemblage:

It is enormously frustrating as a scifi author that we have been writing stories for DECADES about why it's bad to hand your thinking over to a machine, and then Gen AI comes along and everyone starts using it without question.

"and they gave me a scepter [skēptron], a branch of flourishing laurel, having plucked it. And it was a wonder to behold. Then they breathed into me a voice [audē], a godlike one, so that I may make glory [kleos] for things that will be and things that have been" Hesiod, Theogony 30-32

Luxury is not just having a bookshelf so tall you need a roofer's ladder to reach the top 2/3rd of shelves, luxury is having Vincent Magni transform your books on said shelves into an artwork. #booksky actualitte.com/article/1097...

This is for @tyranosaurossmudge.bsky.social and @mustacheelliott.bsky.social

@theotheralice.bsky.social thinking of @wildobliquities.bsky.social

Best film adaptation of The Odyssey, wrong answers only

Big news everyone! The one and only @curatorrob.bsky.social is now on Bluesky. If you love a Roman palace, hypocausts (not standing in them obviously) and Huxley the dog - do give him a follow. 😃

"By reappraising the 14th-century masterpiece through the lens of modern meteoritics, Burbery proposes that Dante envisioned Satan as a high-velocity impactor hitting the Southern Hemisphere and tunneling to Earth's center ... treating the Prince of Darkness as an oblong, asteroid-sized body"

Remember how in line 27 of the Theogony the Muses tell Hesiod "we know how to say many falsehoods resembling true things"? Well, they tell packs of lies, I tell packs of lies. As it turns out, the so-called 'last video' was not the last one, after all.

@edrybicki.bsky.social 🚨

Ophelia: Hey gorgeous, come over. Hamlet: I can’t, I’m busy hiding a body. Ophelia: Yeah but listen, my dad’s not home. Hamlet: I know.

Instead of using slop to illustrate articles (which invariably suggests that the text is probably mindless effluent as well), here is an entire repository of quality artworks that's free to use, and well worth just browsing.

Good news for people who love great views, but may have trouble scaling mountains: in addition to being able to take the cable car, once you get to the summit, Cape Town's Table Mountain now features an accessible walkway designed to accommodate wheelchair users and prams (baby strollers).

@fuzzybunny.org the place where we first met and tried very hard to terrorize with bad puns and Latin is leaving us 😧

Mary Geddry:  “It turns out war is only war if the White House clicks ‘confirm.‘ Until then, it’s just a lightly militarized misunderstanding involving explosives. “ #insight #perspective

For sky watchers in Cape Town, hopefully (once the clouds clear) we'll be able to spot Comet Panstarrs. Here's two links to help find it. www.iziko.org.za/wp-content/u... theskylive.com/planetarium?...

"Csikszentmihalyi understood that creativity does not begin with a solution, or even with a clearly defined problem. It begins earlier, in a more uncertain and searching state of mind." thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-1960s-ar...

@edrybicki.bsky.social? @80incognito.bsky.social?

For today's #mosaicmonday and #MayThe4th mashup, here are a few of Space Invader's mosaics (including some Star Wars themed ones) scattered all over Tatooine (Djerba in Tunisia). itinerrance.fr/actualites/i...

The Lawyers have recommended that I post the following disclaimer: Please be aware that my seemingly harmless little sculptures are in fact a dangerous class of gateway drug. 😬 Exhibit A: "The exquisite and powerful art of Charlayn von Solms was my first foray into this field" (Dr. S. Masters)

Tantruming toddlers of drunk parents playing with atom bombs 😬

"and it occurred to me, I said nobody is ever going to even know a thing about this in years to come. It is going to be like any other 300 shipwrecks, commercial shipwrecks that have taken place in the Great Lakes and nobody, it is going to be completely forgotten, and that is why I wrote that song"

No idea how accurate this is, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but thanks Eskom. The years of ineptitude and consequent load-shedding that forced everyone who could afford to do so to invest in renewable energy may finally be paying off.

@adrivahni.bsky.social how's this for a little dash of joy to make everyday life worthwhile?

#BlueSkyArtShow #ShadowPlay

#BlueSkyArtShow #ShadowPlay

#BlueSkyArtShow #ShadowPlay

Ant 1: "Hey look everybody, I've designed an anteater harness." Ants 2-5000 000: "Is that to keep anteaters away from the nest?" Ant 1: "Nope, this will enable us to train anteaters to build nests and protect the colony." Ants 2-5000 000: "Cool!" "By the way, what will all these anteaters run on?"

@80incognito.bsky.social should we start crowdfunding for you and Bowie?

how could I resist?

Penultimate video, almost done. Thank you for enduring these.

My sincerest apologies for posting these here, but I'm doing a comparative experiment involving another site. So far, the results are quite interesting.

@postmonkey.bsky.social a fresh heord of ka’apiuara!

Few things compare to the joy of exploring a wonderfully intricate infographic. (paging @stoopalu.bsky.social) Find it here: cartography-of-generative-ai.net

How to bypass SynthID (Google's watermark) "the core hypothesis behind both v1 and v2: if the watermark is just a layer of image noise, it should be possible to remove it by re-processing the image through a diffusion model while keeping the source composition as tightly constrained as possible."