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It was 247 years ago when humans first came to the island Che’el. Their ancestors came from various islands of the Archipelago, and their descendants spread to many more, but as Che’el drifted, apart from the Archipelago, the humans upon it survived in ecological balance with their island and with the ocean. As the first light rose over the water, Jun rubbed the sleep from his eyes and started gathering his tools. He peeked back into the shelter at his parents as they slept on, curled around his baby sister. She had been restless as of late, so their sleep came during what precious few moments of quiet they could find. Jun tried to sneak out, but he still heard stirring behind him as he left. ...

This is a very short story I wrote inspired by generative AI for language. I wrote it before ChatGPT made this into a household topic, but I still am happy with how I constructed the story. Sample Output As I wake, I like to think of my mind as a computer booting up. My consciousness comes online as system checks complete… My research is on machine learning for generative text models. This entails creating and training neural networks which can produce text similar to what a human would write. My dream is for my work to become part of the first artificial general intelligence or AGI. For an artificial intelligence, or AI, to qualify as an AGI, it needs to have the ability to understand or learn any task that a human being can. ...

My third origami design was the simple sauropod (pics at more angles on the insta). If you want to fold this, the crease pattern is below. Here, like with the lizard, I started with a tree diagram and did circle packing through box pleating. In this case, I found I wasn’t quite able to pack box pleating squares sufficiently, so I used a technique called the Pythagorean stretch which is what creates the strange polygonal areas in the pattern. These do add some folding difficulty, but not as much as fully eschewing box pleating. ...

The baby sea turtle was my second origami design. If you want to fold this, the crease pattern is below. In this case, instead of starting with circle packing, I started by making the pleats I eventually wanted to end up on the back of the shell, then just played around until I felt the head and legs looked about right. For help folding, I made an album with pictures at various stages. ...

The simple lizard was my first origami design! If you want to fold this, the crease pattern is below. Most origami design starts with creating a tree structure representing the rough shape of your final figure. Then, you covert terminal nodes in the tree into circles to pack into the square, with each circle corresponding to a spike as long as the circle’s radius in the final design. In this case, the final model looks basically the same as the tree diagram, so we can jump right to the circle packing: ...

This next sculpture was one I made while visiting Neha. She was less excited about geometric figures, so we decided to make a rose! It was much warmer here than it had been in MN, so we didn’t need to start by piling up the snow and waiting for it to compress. We were able to just create our pile and immediately start carving out the base to make the basic shape of the rose. We weren’t able to finish on the first day, and unfortunately when we resumed a couple days later, the snow had melted and refrozen enough to become icy and brittle. As a result, we had to be far more cautious when we carved out the petals, and in certain places, the pedal edges collapsed anyways. However, I think the effect still ended up working pretty well! ...

This sculpture actually took a few intermediate forms before reaching its final state. My first goal was actually to create an igloo. I brought out a sturdy cardboard box and tried to pack snow into the form of bricks, but the wno was far too powdery. Unlike last April when I was making my snow dinosaur, it was quite cold out, and the same construction techniques would not work this time around. ...

As mentioned in my dino paintings blog post, I find dinosaurs to be a reasonable default subject for new artistic pursuits. With new snow on the ground, I wasted no time on deliberation and got started on my dinosaur! The weather was fairly warm, so the snow was easy to stick to itself. I was pretty concerned about the structural integrity of the neck and head, but the snow held fine! I was also able to dig out the space underneath the bellow so that the legs were each separate from each other. ...

Introduction During my trip to Norway, I bought a chunky wool Dale of Norway sweater. This spawned a love and long running search for more chunky wool sweaters. While reading through reddit threads, I found a review of a sweater ordered from the website souwestchunkies.com (now defunct), and it looked amazing. Ordering involved emailing the site owner with measurements, and he’d have a very chunky sweater made to fit you perfectly. I had to give it a try. ...

At the start of my college junior summer, I painted what is still probably my single favorite thing I’ve painted. I was staying with my aunt for a couple days before starting my internship, and I took the opportunity to paint with my artist cousin Sonika didi. She’s absolutely fantastic and paints pieces for galleries while also working in art education. See her pieces here! We looked at a variety of modern artists to get style inspiration, and ended up settling on Chuck Close. We didn’t feel we could quite capture the surprising level of realism he managed to achieve, but it would be fun to try painting with a diagonal grid texture anyways. I was very happy with how mine ended up turning out! I had lots of fun altering the shades of the individual cells on both the background and dinosaur to indicate the light source being present on the top right of the painting. Sonika didi’s cat was also really cool! ...