The office ordered everyone lunch for a big meeting. They mess up my order for a "Ham and Cheese" and give me some vegan bullshit. I don't complain or make an issue, i don't care about lunch anyway. CEO comes over after, he is impressed. Says I didn't know you were vegan. Us two are the only ones. We got to stick together. In the moment I just nod and say yep. I wasn't really processing it. Now I have to own up to my mistake, or be a vegan at the office until I can get a new job. I feel like I watched a Seinfeld episode that was exactly this..... ☹️

Some great tips below on cinematography. But I want to use it instead for a little rant about AI and art. (Cinema art.) When I first when to film school, I bought into the whole auteur theory of film, because that's what they taught. (The auteur theory is a really pompous snobby idea with a really ugly history, but I'll save that rant for another time.) Anyhow, the idea was that the director was the "true artist" behind any film, and the best ones used film to express their personal vision. And, of course, that meant bossing everyone else around, telling the writer what to write, the actors how to act, the editor what to cut, and, of course, picking the specific shots to include in the most artistic way possible. So basically, a jack of all trades expected to be an expert in all of them. Once I started shooting my own films, and crewing on others, I came back to reality. A director has two key jobs: 1. Get the film done. 2. Make it as good as possible given the circumstances. That doesn't always mean picking every shot. Film, at least IRL film, is inherently collaborative. So being the best director doesn't always mean telling the writer to change stuff, or the editor how to edit. It means getting it done. And that generally means on time and on budget. Beautiful shots are a bonus, but not always required, and sometimes get in the way of the story or making the schedule. You need to focus on getting the film done and it should be judged purely on whether it is "good" (generally entertaining) and not by who contributed what. A decent cinematographer is going to know more about cinematography than most directors, same with writers, actors editors, etc. Most of the time a director is better off hiring the best people and getting out their way and focusing on making the schedule and keeping on budget. One of my earliest Hollywood jobs was re-editing B-Movie films that were so bad, they couldn't even be released on video. (Back when the market was hungry for straight to video films because Hollywood hadn't embraced VHS.) These were super bad films, bad acting, bad editing, bad sets, and really bad directing. How do you fix that? Good editing. (Or at least better.) It gave me a lot more respect for the contributions of editors. They can absolutely save a film when everyone else has screwed up. At least in my case, I got them released finally. This experience made me really jaded about directors that wasted too much time trying to make "cinematic shots" on B-movies that didn't need them. In my case, the directors had long since been fired, so to cut the films together, I'd have to go back and reprint shots that the director hadn't bothered to print. So in some long oner that the director insisted upon, and screwed up, I might find an insert that made the scene watchable. And it was interesting to see that a director might not print a take with the best performance by an actor, because they weren't so happy with the camera framing or movement. So they printed a bad performance. Now, all that griping aside, AI completely changes the game. So despite what others may claim about AI video destroying the "art" of film, it actually has the potential to make truly auteur films possible. The director (especially if they are an editor) can carefully compose each shot to express their vision, without the risk of going over time and budget. They can edit the film, and then go back and easily improve the composition of each shot. A lot of the cinematography theory stuff, that I dismissed as unpractical other than for very big budget films, can now be a regular feature of AI films, if you spend the time to learn and have the taste to execute. Below are some very good auteur filmmaking insights.

Made in Midjourney Style Creator --exp 50 --sref 7865308251 --stylize 500

--exp 90 --raw --sref 182927265 1139522336 434473802 411778464

sometimes you paint over the 3d model and sometimes you model after the drawing

update. last night kiddo was ALL ABOUT guillotines and kept contriving rationales for us to build one

After AlphaGo, the skill of human Go players noticeably improved. I suspect we will see a similar pattern in math.

BRYAN JOHNSON: “I think a lot of people would want to exist [forever] if… society was not so brutal.” SKEPTIC: “What have you done to change those brutal conditions in society? You spend $2 million every year trying to look younger. And honestly, YOU LOOK YOUR AGE.” “So what are you doing to make humanity better, really, other than pursuing your own vanity?” Watch how Bryan answers that question, and how the woman instantly pushes back.

“Make me an app that that translates what my woman wants to eat, make no mistakes”