jwz: 21-Oct-2016 (Fri)

Hey, we won some Best of the Bay stuff! Yay us! And thank you for saying "Yay, us!"

DNA Lounge

Bootie SF

Hubba Hubba Revue

Incident Report of the Week:

Apparently the bassist strangled another band member while on stage during their set. It being a metal show, no one was sure if it was part of the act or not. [...] At 8:20pm, the police arrived. [...] He was arrested, and is being booked on criminal battery and threats. [...] About 8:35 the police left with the perp in custody. The show carries on.

Some upcoming events of note:

Meat Beat Manifesto:
Tonight!

Halloween, Part 1:
All Hallow's Eve

Halloween, Part 2:
Booootie

Halloween, Part 3:
Death Guild

Tonight, we have Meat Beat Manifesto, a show I am really looking forward to because I haven't seen them in at least a decade. Storm the Studio and 99% kind of blew my mind when I was a kid.

Next weekend, of course, is the thing that DNA Lounge does best: Halloween. We've got three parties for you this time, and they are each in all four rooms.

Now everyone knows that parents always have a favorite child (even if you were an only child, Mom probably loved someone else more, you know it's true) so it's no secret that our Friday party, All Hallow's Eve, is my favorite. That's the one with the excellent costume contest, where the winners are generally deserving! If you have more than one costume (duh, of course you do, you live in San Francisco), this is the night for you to bring your A Game.

But don't get me wrong, the other two are excellent parties in their own right. Mom and Dad love both of you just as much, I totally swear. Booootie: At our very own party juggernaut, this is definitely their best party of the year, and you're probably never going to see a bigger Halloween party unless you're in a stadium or out in a field somewhere, and who needs that? It's not to be missed.

And Death Guild? Well there is literally nothing in the world more goth than a 23½ year old goth party happening on Halloween proper. Plus goth burlesque upstairs from The Hubbs, of course, helping you get your swoopy on.

Remember kids, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Friday and Saturday are likely to sell out, so advance tickets are highly recommended.

By the way, we haven't decided yet if we're going to print up a stack of those lovely Gene Wilder / Dr. Fronkensteen posters (RIP) by R.Black. We usually print up a stack of the Halloween posters, but honestly, they don't sell. Would you buy one for ten bucks? Be honest: if what you really mean is, "I would totally take one of those home if someone gave it to me for free", that is actually a "no".

Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw

Exterminate All Rational Giger. "It was tricky, but..."

Yahoo's recently open sourced neural network, open_nsfw, is a fine tuned Residual Network which scores images on a scale of to on its suitability for use in the workplace. [...]
What makes an image NSFW, according to Yahoo? I explore this question with a clever new visualization technique by Nguyen et al.. Like Google's Deep Dream, this visualization trick works by maximally activating certain neurons of the classifier. Unlike deep dream, we optimize these activations by performing descent on a parameterization of the manifold of natural images. This parametrization takes the form of a Generative Network, G, trained adversarially on an unrelated dataset of natural images. [...]
Not surprisingly, the results of the optimization are clearly pornographic.

Synthesizing Pareidolia [...] This explains the phenomena above, as the SFW neuron gets excited on the sight of rolling hills and running brooks, and the excitations of NSFW correlate with, well, pornography. The classifier takes in both these expert opinions, and combines them democratically [...] Since most pornography does not take place with a Thomas Kinkade painting in the background, this is a fair heuristic for most real world problems. But what happens if we try to excite both neurons simultaneously?

Concert, SFW: