Pea Bee #6: Drive a train, forever, through a dreamlike land

Hi all, shipping a new issue after a long time. It has been a very difficult past few weeks in this country. I hope you’re all safe and doing well.

Since I published the last issue, there are now nearly double the no. of subscribers to this newsletter. I put an 11px font-size link to my Twitter handle on the bottom of the website of a past project and that has brought in a lot of people to this newsletter. Welcome all, and thank you for subscribing.

I even have paid subscribers now! It’s mad to think (in a good way) that someone would pay to read this, so I am really grateful to those who did. I don’t intend to publish any paid subscriber-only posts or even promise that I will publish new issues regularly. But thank you for your support, this keeps me motivated and incentivized to keep curating this newsletter. 🙏

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PICO-8 fantasy console

Recently, I played a little game called Cab Ride in which you can drive a train, forever, through a dreamlike land against a chill chiptune background score. Maybe it is because of the lockdown or the general feeling of dread, but I really enjoyed playing this game.

This game was written for PICO-8, a fantasy console. In other words, it is like the gaming consoles from the 80s and 90s but running as software. It has a virtual emulator for building and playing tiny retro games.

I went into the fantasy console gaming rabbit hole a couple of years back which took me to the whole subculture of online game jams and demoscenes. So many people are creating beautiful, personal, and extremely creative games on tiny game engines like Pico-8, Bitsy, etc.

I was so inspired by this that I bought the PICO-8 fantasy console in hope that I too will create something cool with it. I spent many hours watching tutorials and learning its game engine. But when it came to getting my own hands dirty and building something, I was completely out of any ideas. At the time I think I attached too much of my self-worth into what was only just a side-project and it made me feel very shitty that I could not produce any results. Another one to file under the always growing unfinished things category. That’s how it goes sometimes I guess, but it was a wonderful journey - I experienced so many cool and mind-blowing things that people from this corner of the web are creating.

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Text to Image generators

I played around with a text-to-image generator model. The tweet below is the prompt I gave and the model generated the image below the tweet. A very disturbing visual interpretation of my innocuous tweet. I have some more of these on my Instagram stories highlights section.

Prompt:

Generated Image:

It’s still astonishing to me that this is possible. And not just possible, I am sitting on my desk and I am able to do this with a click of a button. The much younger me who was so proud of himself to be able to programmatically move a circle from one end of the screen to another would not believe that this is a thing a computer could ever do.

Last year, I got access to use GPT-3, an AI transformer that can generate human-like text for any prompt and some of the demos blew my mind. At the time I had bought a domain name hack called mys.tools (“my stools” ..get it??) and I used GPT-3 to generate hundreds of detailed log entries describing how my poop of the day went. The website is still up and every day publishes a new GPT-3 generated log entry of my stools. Well, not my own stools. (Link: https://mys.tools/)

Converting old cocky tweets to images or asking AI to write poop reviews may not be the most useful way of using this tech but as I see it, all new tech worth its salt must be capable of producing internet art and memes. Jokes apart, there’s some great work happening in this field and I feel like I should say this, or maybe I’ll just whisper it very fast, you’re allowed to be excited about all the cool things happening in tech that’s not “crypto”.

I used this Google Colaboratory notebook for text-to-image generation. You can generate your own art with this too.

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Orange Shower

I log on to my computer every day and scroll and read various internet content feeds and it feels like every day we are straying a lit bit further from God’s light. I recently discovered that there’s a group of people who have a kink for eating oranges in showers. There is even a subreddit (of course) dedicated to shower orange eaters. This sub was created after this extraordinary comment was made by u/PHOTON_BANDIT 6 years ago

As weird as this whole thing is, honestly, I’m into it. I’ve been reading the subreddit, and I am convinced I want to try this. It sounds like this will be a pretty satisfying experience. And this goes without saying, try this at your discretion. I can’t be held responsible if this wasn’t “the most carnal, ferocious, liberating” thing you’ve ever done.

In other news, many weeks ago, I gave in to the fad and tried bath bombs for the first time. It smells really good, dissolves beautifully in the bath, and changes the color of the water, but honestly, that’s about it. Maybe the ones I bought were not of good quality, but it was a very underwhelming experience for me.

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Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is dead. While I will not miss it, I’ve not visited it for years, except for the occasional viral screenshots from its notorious past. But I will remember it from the days when the internet wasn’t this big. Yahoo Answers seemed to be one of the few popular and accessible forums that had other people asking questions that you were too hesitant to ask others irl. The advice wasn’t the best, at times borderline ridiculous, but at least they were honest responses from people who were just as clueless as you were. Still prefer Yahoo Answers answers to Quora answers.

Its death saddens me because that’s years of internet culture history that’s now gone. Yahoo has a history of doing this. They did the same with Geocities too. They buy good, well-liked services with thriving communities and then suck out all the life out of them before killing them in cold blood.

Yahoo Answers’ legacy will live on though. In the form of memes and screenshots and via the good people at Internet Archive.

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