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tonybridge wrote:isn't this a wonderful community? :-)
I’m glad you like it here, Tony, but I don’t think it’s my place to comment on how wonderful it is!
Even knowing what I’m supposed to be looking for, I’m afraid I still don’t see it. I don’t see any whisky bottles, either!
Alfred wrote:I was first introduced to ragtime through Scott Joplin’s piece The Entertainer, which was famously used in the movie The Sting. For me, the definitive versions of that and other Joplin compositions were played by Joshua Rifkin, but I’ve now discovered the equally listenable Scott Kirby. Both played Fig Leaf Rag at a considerably slower pace than young Leander plays it.
Perhaps top of the list for me, Joplin’s very last composition: Magnetic Rag
Another fine performance of an old favourite:
https://youtu.be/hHHCb5tAhd4
GB wrote:Yes, I agree. Leander does tend to play rags too fast. But that does not detract from his talent. And he really does seem to enjoy himself playing. His expressions are priceless!
One of the best interpreters of rags on piano is, in my opinion, Ann Charters. For instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsY737Y4A9U
He certainly does seem to enjoy playing, almost always with that infectious grin not far away!
Whilst his ragtime is too fast for us, his boogie woogie timing sounds just right to me:
https://youtu.be/s7uIjEz8n1E
Thanks for the link to the Ann Charters performance.
From this post:
Leander is clearly a very talented young man, but I think some of his performances would sound better if he slowed down. This applies particularly to ragtime pieces such as Fig Leaf Rag, whose composer Scott Joplin regularly included in his manuscripts the instructions “Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.” Leander himself raised this question in the pinned comment on the YouTube page:
Leander-piano wrote:Also tell me if you think I am playing this song too fast. I am working on playing some songs more slowly. I get so excited about songs that I play them too fast sometimes.
I heard some people play this quite slowly.
I was first introduced to ragtime through Scott Joplin’s piece The Entertainer, which was famously used in the movie The Sting. For me, the definitive versions of that and other Joplin compositions were played by Joshua Rifkin, but I’ve now discovered the equally listenable Scott Kirby. Both played Fig Leaf Rag at a considerably slower pace than young Leander plays it.
GB wrote:Two possible solutions:
1. Buy a cd/dvd drive that connects via a USB. Do a search for cd/dvd usb drive. I have a Dell, which works very well.
2. Copy the Serif DVD to a flash drive, and install from that.
3. Download from t’Internet. Check your email!
William wrote:I know that forming an impression is not exact science, but we need to start somewhere.
Well said, William! If I may, I’ll leave it to you to do the six runs and report back on the results.
William wrote:That is quite a claim
Not really, unless you reject the premise that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is no objective standard for beauty, since what is considered to be beautiful is influenced by cultural norms (which differ between cultures) and personal experience and feelings, so it’s all subjective.
Because an AI system is a kind of simulator, it can only have whatever kind of ’mind’ ihas been programmed into it (even if heuristics are thrown in) so it can’t have the real personal experience and feelings that are needed for subjectivity.
William wrote:Perhaps I should correct them and then start again in a new thread so that we can try to find out using several runs whether asking for a story or for a beautiful story makes any difference, doing a New Topic each time.
No, please don’t do that. The current topic is
The prompt for the story about the mint plant
and this is a continuation of that topic.
William wrote:I have noticed previously that even after a New Topic that the same name seems to be used. So will it always be Emma for these stories?
You can specify a different name, can’t you?
William wrote:If using the adjective 'beautiful' is found to make a difference, maybe try with a different adjective. What should it be?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder! An AI system can’t understand subjective things, so you’re merely feeding it a word that it can use in its reply. As I hinted earlier, I favour omitting it altogether.
Do you get a different result if your prompt simply says “Please write a story” instead of “Please write a beautiful story”?
William wrote:Please write a beautiful story of a lady picking the items of a customers order …
The order in question isn’t an order for customers! You need to change “a customers order” to “a customer’s order”.
William wrote:… and seeing that a mint plant has been ordered and reads the note.
Plants can’t read! The mint plant doesn’t do anything, but the picker lady does three things:
(a) picking the items of a customer’s order;
(b) seeing that a mint plant has been ordered;
(c) reading the note.
So you need to change “reads” to “reading”.
pberk wrote:Here's a little video to pass the time. I made this some years back. Sorry if you've already seen it.
Writer's Block
https://youtu.be/X-2BKI93H9A
Brilliant, as usual. Thanks, Paul. And get well soon, Gordon!
Robert The Texan wrote:All anyone with a functioning mind needed to do to understand this monster was listen to what he said beginning around 2015 and view objectively everything he did and said after then. Those who viewed him in a positive light after all this are intellectually and perhaps even morally beyond redemption.
I have little use for them. I refuse to be "magnanimous".
There has been quite a lot of comment from seemingly knowledgeable people suggesting that the Republican Party somehow managed to pull off a hugely successful disinformation campaign, so it’s probably a little unfair to classify all of his supporters as intellectually and/or morally bankrupt.
GB wrote:On the first link, did you note the comments below? It's only about a month old since it was posted, and the lad comments
I am sorry I made some mistakes because my friends were running back and forth outside.
I never noticed the mistakes!
Yes, I saw that, and I never noticed either!
As you say, Geoff, amazing talent! Thanks for the links.
William wrote:Alfred wrote:You can change the shape of the decay curve by altering the parameters of the gradient.
Is that by changing the opacity from the 20% that I used?
Or something else?
William
You can alter the other parameters, too. When you choose the Fill Tool, the control line has stops for the different colours and opacities along the gradient. You can add or remove stops, and you can reposition the stops or the ‘midpoints’ between pairs of stops (positioned exactly halfway by default).
William wrote:So it seems that the colours move from the background colour towards the yellow colour of the bands as a sort of chunky exponential decay.
You can change the shape of the decay curve by altering the parameters of the gradient.
William wrote:Do you know how each of the red, green, and blue channels is calculated when opacity of a layer is used please?
I am wondering if it is, if opacity is expressed as a value p in the range 0.0 to 1.0, if there are n layers, as
x = p * x(i) + (1 - p) * x(i - 1)
Alas, I cannot use square brackets, as the forum software treats them as markup.
…
Using Paint to look at what is the colour gives (153, 153, 204), so it looks like my guess at the formula might be correct, at least for just one semi-opaque layer upon an opaque layer.
I think your formula is indeed correct, unless we’re both missing something!
As for using square brackets, you need to ‘escape’ them by using {code} markup via the ‘angle brackets’ button on the toolbar above the message text area.
x = p * x[i] + (1 - p) * x[i - 1]
You’re welcome.
William wrote:The original is landscape A3 size at 300 dots per inch, plus bleed areas.
I did not include the bleed areas when exporting the png image file.
I think it would have been illogical to include the bleed areas, since by definition they are not part of the image.
William wrote:I use one seventh size because the original is 3508 pixels in height, after rounding up the original millimetre-specified A3 size after changing to using pixels as the measurement units when producing an artwork, so using 501 pixels as the height of the png image is a convenient size for use on the web in discussions such as in this thread.
If you keep the original measurement units instead of switching to pixels, you avoid tying yourself down to a particular output resolution. Simply choose 300 DPI, or 600 DPI, or 192 DPI (or whatever) during export.
The video didn’t write anything, a young woman in the video asked a question!
Their YouTube channel is here:
https://www.youtube.com/@violin_phonix
Searching for Libiamo takes me here:
https://www.youtube.com/@violin_phonix/ … ry=Libiamo
The other video on the search results page is from a different flashmob video, in a supermarket instead of a restaurant.
William wrote:This is a one-seventh both horizontally and vertically png image of what I have got so far.
I presume the “one-seventh” refers to the dimensions, which isn’t particularly meaningful when using arbitrary units. With a 9.7″ diagonal, my iPad screen is smaller than your (11.6″?) laptop screen, but the pixel dimensions of the image are the same.
William wrote:The sunlight effect is produced using a full width borderless yellow filled rectangle 600 pixels high at 20% opacity and then four copies of it are placed, each with a y position 100 pixels lower down the canvas than the previous one.
If you don’t want the banding effect that this method produces, you can use the Fill Tool to create a Linear Gradient fill instead.
Beautiful. As noted in the comments (by the person who uploaded that video) there’s a shorter version on the singer Pien van Gerven’s own YouTube channel:
https://youtu.be/IhIfjYV0hDs
William wrote:An interesting video
What struck you as the most interesting thing about it?
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