Best Of MetaFilter

Yesterday I spent 5 hours working in the cold garage, encountering much mouse poop, and finally 5 fat mice ... And that's how I came to make my very first MetaFilter post! — dorey_oh in her post thread on the Peptoc Hotline, offering pep-talks by kindergarteners.

photo via loc.gov

adamsc links to a super secret stash of cunningly hidden Library of Congress cultural treasure in the Lizzo LOC thread

Frame by seyed mostafa zamani (cc by)

RichardP posted Inside the Mind-Boggling World of the Antiquities Theft Task Force

Apocalyptic giant flying bioluminescent jellyfish destroying a city, digital art

Rhaomi entertained the Saturday night crowd in Metatalk by fulfilling requests for art by OpenAI's DALL-E 2

Photo by Wendy Laurel at Lomography Magazine

Film soup is an experimental analog photography technique where you soak a roll of film in different liquids to add fun, crazy colors and effects: oulipian's post Recipes for Rainbows from last month.

A robot draws itself, by OpenAI's DALL·E 2

Please do not miss Rhaomi's Opus DALL·E 2 on "the extraordinary new AI that creates anything you can imagine in a matter of seconds," including examples, explainers, demos, other projects and breakthroughs, fun stuff, deep fakes and more from the new age of synthetic media that will "hit you like a digital blitzkrieg."

cake house by masha_k_sh (cc by-nc-nd)

Oh, look, the new Mefi newsletter has a name! And a second edition! Whee! 📰

Also, the latest Metatalktail Hour asks members to tell the least plausible story about yourself, and it's so, so great. 🕴🏼

Also, also, don't forget, it's the second theme week of August fundraising month, and this time around, we want to see some sweet, sweet art (any interesting art find that you like, in any medium). Search tags for "sweetart" to see what people are posting, and/or tag your art-themed post with "sweetart." 🍭

Yale Art Gallery - Heart by m01229 (cc by)

Weird Science theme week has ended (see all the excellent weird science posts here!), and for the second theme of our August fundraising month, Sweet Art week has begun! Please help us make a spectacle of ourselves by posting all your favorite arty sites, works, and stories. 💖

ocschwar's A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors

This stuff is crazy, it's like someone found a alien spaceship in the desert and hooked the warp engine to its own tailpipe to answer questions about the universe. — RobotVoodooPower

Cash4Lead has posted Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene about AI generated art based on text prompts, and mefites have been dipping a toe in.

screenshot from "Top 100 3D Renders from the Internet's Largest CG Challenge, Alternate Realities"

Animated fabulosity from jontyjago: "Based on the same 3 second model, 2400 CGI artists submitted their own interpretation. These are the 100 best."

by mefi's own elgilito, currently at #10 for Dinosaur Parked on Elephant

It's Mefites vs the AI in not on display's posting of paint.wtf, a game in which participants must convince an artificial intelligence that they are the best artist.

Louis Renard fish illustrations

The Go-Go's: "a kinetic effervescence, with a pulse that shimmered and spangled"; Glorious psychedelic fish illustrations, many of actual fish; Remember those brights spots on the Dwarf Planet Ceres?; All of James Sowerby’s mineralogy compendium illustrations arranged by color; DIY hologram chocolate?; Resurrecting the art of China's dragon scale bookbinding

Moasic Monday : feb 25 by ali edwards (cc by-nc-nd)

carlypennylane asks Where are the Visual Inspiration Websites These Days?

Waiting to come home by mripp (cc by)

Dame posted Retours, "a digital magazine on the intersection of railway history, design and photography."