If you don’t understand the nostalgia that Ontario Place generates in geriatrics like me I invite you to take a wistful gander at the video below. But before you start kvetching about how, by today’s standards, the place sucks, I’d remind that this was the olden days and us kids were just happy as fuck not to have to walk 15 barefoot kilometers in the snow to school.
This video might leave you with the impression that Ontario Place could be the upswing but the reality is that its fate was sealed and loaded onto the S.S. Therme which sailed some time ago.
One the one hand, a spa-and-water-based attraction on the grounds is not that out of place. On the other, the promo material makes it look a little exclusive and pricey. The current admission price of FREE makes it hard to compete.
I suppose there’s always Trillium Park but with half of the unique and scenic path through Ontario Place now off limits, it just gives the small trail a melancholy feel.
Turns out that had I visited just last week I would’ve had some souvenir photos of Ontario Place but as usual the government quietly gave everyone the middle finger and fenced off most of the area “for the collective good” (paraphrasing mine).
So, in a very apropos way, this year’s winter photos from the western tip of West Island will be some of the last ones I have.
Sometimes when I tell people about these things, even if they’re being polite, I can see that they don’t really believe my “stories”.
The thing I was talking about earlier, for example … if I described the guy I spotted pacing back and forth in front of the “base of operations”, especially in the context of my writing, my audience would probably nod politely and wander off to find someone less “imaginative” to chat with. They might even be insulted, maybe not be so polite.
So I feel that trying to impress on people how much of the material in stuff like /sectionb is drawn from real life would be futile. I’d just get the same checked-out stare for my troubles.
But I get it. The world around me so often resembles a movie or a comic book that even I sometimes have trouble believing it.
The guy I surreptitiously surveilled in these pictures, for example … assassin? Cleaner? Who can tell? And who’s alive to be able to tell? Did I just do a bad by posting these photos? Am I now a marked man? Will more men like him come?
So many questions.
Naturally, after these were taken and after the guy finished rummaging around the trunk of his sleek and muscular jet-black Audi (naturally), he left two discarded gloves on the road and drove off.
I know, my AFK time has been excessive as of late but as usual it doesn’t mean that I’ve been idle. I had some new adventures, got busy with some undercover work (more on that later), and stuck my fingers into far too many pies.
Take the thing above, for example. Figured I’d try something different but new directions always come with a price. Don’t even get me started about inflation!
Anyway, this tune is supposed to be Chopin’s Nocturne No.20 in C Sharp Minor … or at least what’s left of it.
I’m happy with the result but much of the process is manual so I may have to spend some time slapping together some automation for the next installment.
I’ve been thinking about producing a more immersive rendition of /sectionb. I’ve also been thinking that producing a “Parapsychological Spy Thriller” via conventional means is not be the correct approach. It needs to be a little more artsy, interpretive, associative. Unfortunately, illustration and animation aren’t really my thing.
Although I can draw some basic proportions and I try to pay attention to composition and colour, I can’t produce the type of visual output that modern artificial intelligence can. But as it happens I also dabbleincode so it wasn’t long before I was fucking around with Stable Diffusion and similar software. Unfortunately, if I wanted to use the AI to produce short films the still images it spat out would need to be animated using something like morphing — doable but laborious.
By one propitious circumstance a fairly recent upgrade to Stable Diffusion by Deforum popped up in my search results one day and as soon as I saw a few samples I got giddy. Not only is the animated output of DSD dream-like and trippy, which is very apropos for /sectionb, it also improvises around the periphery of supplied prompts/themes in surprising ways, which is also quite apropos.
Initially I tried adding voice narration but it just didn’t fit so instead I converted the text to subtitles/closed captions, chucked in some original music, and after that the video basically just produced itself.
... with pictures
... with sounds
... with videos
... with opinions
... that's shorter
... that's longer
