Discordant Harmony

Category: Writing and Creativity

  • Projects Update: A Mystery Image, Bumper 3D Modeling, New Minecraft Ideas

    Projects Update: A Mystery Image, Bumper 3D Modeling, New Minecraft Ideas

    Quite a bit has been accomplished since my last check-in on this site. I’ve kept going on the Blender 3D modeling project of the Toyota Soluna (see the previous blog post for more details), finished Unit 3000 in the New Andaman Beach Villa project (Minecraft), and planning a new complex of forest-located builds on a smaller scale. Among all of this, Flames of Rebellion has cracked 43,000 words, and I predict it’s about halfway to completion now. On top of this, the AoPS Academic Year classes (Algebra 2 in this case) have now started back up. So as you can imagine, things have been a little bit busier than normal!

    I’ve also begun a completely new and unrelated project, which I’ll introduce with a single photo at the end of this post.

    The 3D Modeling Project

    The front view of the current 3D modeling process, allowing you to see the progress made on the headlight cutout area.

    I’ve taken a brief one-day break from going insane in Blender, but over the course of the past week I’ve made significant progress on the front bumper cutouts for the Soluna. On Tuesday, I finished the headlight cutout (or at least the inner portion), after comparing extensively against the photo and subdividing into hundreds of vertices to get the contour right. The grille cutout is also done, although it seems a little crude and I might have to go back and refine it later. The next step will be the turn signal cutout, which extends to the side and wraps around to the other end of the vehicle in the reference photos. Assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong (which you never know with this project), it’ll probably be another 2-3 weeks before the bumper is done.

    Given the speed of this project, I’d probably re-calculate my estimate of finishing the 3D model to next spring or next summer. That gives me plenty of time to do the rear bumper, shape the hood and windshield, model the badges, model the openable doors, and actually set a working interior color (unlike some other Mercedes-Benz C250 mods where you can’t change the interior color!). Of course, the JBEAMING, SCREAMING, and UV MAPPING will need to be done after that, so time will need to be factored in for those advanced processes.

    Below is the closer side-view look at the image shown at the beginning of this section, and you can really see all the vertices I’ve added around the headlight cutout to fully shape the area.

    Minecraft Projects and Flames of Rebellion

    Front view of the New Andaman Beach Villa #3000 at sunset

    Flames of Rebellion soared to over 43,000 words this week, with more coming every day. This places the book now at 192 pages, which is at about the halfway point considering that this will be another 380-400 page book. I just finished writing a highly intense scene involving Hikotage, who wound up stranded in World Zero after a serious Common Cause attack, and I’m now proceeding to get into some of the most tense parts of the book. I’m still on track for completing the writing portion around November-December 2026, with the publication date to be around January-February 2027 including cover design and proofreading.

    However, I can’t really get a definitive estimate on this, because the proofreading for the previous book consumed quite a bit of time (over 8 months) and caused quite the delay in getting the book out. I’m not sure what’s going to happen this time, but hopefully it won’t be a full eight months.

    On the subject of the Minecraft projects, I recently finished editing the tour video for New Andaman Beach Villa Unit 3000, and started crafting the floor plans for the next series of forest villas. The tour video is now posted on the official Minecraft Builds website, along with the complete photo gallery. I’m considering remastering the tour video for Unit 1000 as well, but this may not actually occur since I’ll be focusing on building the next few forest villas.

    That next project is set to be codenamed the New Andaman Enclave, and will feature much smaller one-story villas when compared to the lush beachfront ones. These will probably come in four to five configurations, both one-bedroom and two-bedroom, and will be nestled in a small complex with plenty of vegetation, right in the middle of the forest. My plan right now is to build four villas per configuration, making a total of around sixteen villas, but this may change depending on the H situation and how much time I have to create these villas. Along with various competing BeamNG scenario projects and calamitous C250 photo-taking sessions, these Minecraft projects may be temporarily pushed to the back burner.

    The Mystery Project

    To close off this week’s report, here’s a photo of Day One of my latest Mystery Project. I won’t say what it is yet, but the answer could be revealed in a future blog post. This is another one of my long-term endeavors that are tied to International Offshore 2027 (or so we believe, for now).

    Well, that’s going to be it for this update. Good luck figuring out what the hell is being represented by the above photo!

  • Site Update: New Creative Works, Comments, and Inspirations

    I made some major changes to this website’s content and aesthetics this week, which you may or may not have noticed. First, I modified some of the fonts that are used, and installed a new minimalistic font that I felt went a bit better with the site’s theme. That font is now used on some of the page headings and titles across the website. Second, I completely revamped the Short Stories & Poetry page to better showcase my various poems and stories in a grid layout. Each piece has its own Inspirations & Comments section, where I attempt to convey what led me to compose the piece, and the meaning behind it.

    I’m still working on adding more of my poetry and short stories, but I have a semi-comprehensive list on the Short Stories & Poetry home page. In fact, I’m working on a rather unusual coming-of-age short story right now; it might be the submission for the 2027 Scholastic Art & Writing awards. Once that’s done, I’ll attempt to upload it to the website, and attach some comments. I’m contemplating adding a background-header sort of picture to the short stories & poetry page, similar to the large one on the homepage. However, I’d like the text to be overlaid upon the background image, and thus far, I haven’t found a way to do that with clunky WordPress.

    I’ve also made some minor tweaks to the Musical Works page, changing the names of some tabs and linking some of the most recent compositions. As a quick note, it is now possible for people to fill out the site’s Contact form to obtain copies of the scores; there is a one-page preview image available for some of the more recent pieces and a button to get to the Contact form. I don’t plan on charging money for the scores; this is just a mechanism to prevent bots (or people) from coming on and scamming the scores to a wide variety of unauthorized individuals.

    Deep Learning Course: Finally, Some Progress

    A code cell and output from the fast.ai painting classifier, displaying some sample photos that will be used to train the model.

    After about a week of screaming and coming close to quitting the entire course, I finally started making some progress on the fast.ai Practical Deep Learning for Coders course. Yesterday, I finished training the first major project, which is a painting classifier designed to identify the artist of a given painting image. Right now, I’m training it on the works of twenty different Impressionistic artists, with some more modern painters also included. I’m amazed at how much easier it is to use PyTorch to create a classifier than Tensorflow; all you need to do is pull down your images, create a DataBlock, and initiate your learner.

    The reason why I was getting so blocked on this model before was the stupid DuckDuckGo search issues, combined with issues with Kaggle. This sort of classifier relies on pulling down batch images from the DuckDuckGo search API, which is flaky at best and catastrophically time-consuming at worst. So why am I using DuckDuckGo, of all search APIs? Because Microsoft has gone bad and locked their Bing Search API behind a paywall. In a similar way, Google’s search system requires several different API keys, extensive verification, and massive amounts of credentials that make no sense for a small project like this one.

    At first, I thought I was going to have to quit out of this project and find a different data setup that didn’t rely on DuckDuckGo. But then, on Monday morning, I “magically” stopped getting 403 Ratelimit errors, and started downloading images as normal. So I jumped on the opportunity and immediately trained the model to completion with all 4,000 images; after doing some brief testing, it looked like the model was actually pretty good. I’m going to obtain some empirical data on the model’s performance–accuracy, loss, and others–shortly, and use that data to experiment with some different model architectures and data configurations.

    I also did some minor refactoring of the model’s code, which is now available in my official fast.ai course repository on GitHub (though I don’t recommend doing anything with it yet, as it’s still very preliminary, and the repo is still a mess). In unit 2 of the fast.ai deep learning course, I aim to release this painting classifier via a web API so you can interact with it directly; when that’s done I won’t have to deal with muddled GitHub repositories, local files, and broken Kaggle runtimes because the model is released into production already.

    Well, that concludes this regular site update. Stay tuned for further news on AI projects and creative pieces!