Art & Craft

Art & Craft

Fluffy Frog, Famous Frog

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Check out this frog I knitted! He’s a cutie, right?!

He is quite tiny.

I have wonderfully talented friends who created an art collab which resulted in huge technicolour banners of dioramas of all of our underwater-themed crafts. Little frog took part, and he got very big and colourful!

These banners go to festivals and get seen by thousands of people, so lil froggy is now kinda famous!

These are the sorts of craft things I love most… humble, fiddly beginnings that morph into something mixed-media and multifaceted. I double extra love it when people re-craft my crafts into things I wouldn’t normally do, like this.

Art & Craft

Robot waiters, chatbots, and AI image generation

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I love technology. I work in tech and I am a big consumer of tech in its various forms. But I’m not blind about the shortcomings of a lot of technology, and part of what I find fun about using new technology is comparing how it actually performs with the marketing bluster about it.

Yesterday I went to a hotpot restaurant which had a robot waiter. Not so much the sleek, cool and futuristic robot that you might have imagined if you were asked a decade ago what the robots of today would look like. This robot had a cat face, played muzak-style elevator tunes, and needed rescuing when it got stuck on the edge of a wall. It was cute and novel, but only capable of bringing out dishes and returning to the kitchen. I’m sure if the human cooks and wait staff there were asked if it made any significant impact on their workload, the answer would be a no.

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