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I'm a bit of an eclectic mess 🙂 I've been a programmer, journalist, editor, TV producer, and a few other things.

I'm currently working on my second novel which is complete, but is in the edit stage. I wrote my first novel over 20 years ago but then didn't write much till now.

I post about #Coding, #Flutter, #Writing, #Movies and #TV. I'll also talk about #Technology, #Gadgets, #MachineLearning, #DeepLearning and a few other things as the fancy strikes ...

Lived in: 🇱🇰🇸🇦🇺🇸🇳🇿🇸🇬🇲🇾🇦🇪🇫🇷🇪🇸🇵🇹🇶🇦🇨🇦

Laurie Ashton Farook

Rose-Ringed Parakeet

2023 03 10-11, 18 day 266-268 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).  Seven day gap in there – I was sick. Again. Because this is apparently how I roll now.

Today, I’m painting a rose-ringed parakeet. This species of parakeet is common in Sri Lanka. In fact, in one house we lived in, we had a neighborhood pack of these parakeets numbering at least 50. They loved the orchid tree we had in front of our house. They loved hanging around on the banana plants and the dead tree in the next door lot, too. I loved watching them and hearing them chatter.

For more info, including seeing the time lapse, follow this link:
https://lmashton.com/rose-ringed-parakeet/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A bright green parrot with a pi…
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I will be hiring a postdoc (up to 2 years) for a project on transfer learning and dataset similarity, to work with us in Copenhagen 🇩🇰.

The official call will be online soon, but please reach out via email if you might be interested!

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Otter

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Laurie Ashton Farook

King Fisher

2023-03-09 day 265 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

I decided that today, I would do my own thing while applying the lessons from yesterday’s tutorial. Today’s subject is a king fisher. This bird was a frequent visitor to our house in Sri Lanka, so I feel a bit of affinity for the bird.

I didn’t do things exactly the same as yesterday’s digital painting, of course. Nevertheless, it is done and I’m quite happy with the results.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/king-fisher/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital watercolour painting …
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Laurie Ashton Farook

Parrot

2023-03-07/08 day 263/264 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

This is a watercolor tutorial by Joel Create. I like learning different techniques and styles, and I want to learn better watercolor techniques, so this was perfect.

I had fun! I want to become better at digital watercolour anyway, and Joel’s tutorials are always good. I loved painting this bird and I’m happy with the result.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/parrot/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital watercolour painting …
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Laurie Ashton Farook

Desert Sunset

2023 03 05/06 day 261/262 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

Today is a migraine day along with tonnes of joint pain, especially in my fingers and left arm. Did I sleep wrong? Is it just that kind of day? Yeah, I dunno. It is what it is. At least the migraine isn’t that bad compared to my teenage years migraines.

This piece just did not work for me, though. I can’t get it right. So I’m taking a break and will finish another day. I’ll do another post when it’s finished. Whenever.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/desert-sunset/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A screenshot of an unfinished d…
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Laurie Ashton Farook

Palm Tree Sunset

2023-03-03/04 day 259/260 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

Admittedly, I like sunsets and sunrises, and oceans, and palm trees. I even love the idea of life on a tropical island. I can’t handle the heat at all, though, and that is an entirely different story.

I can pretend that this is from a photo I took of the Indian Ocean from where we lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It isn’t, but it’s not far off at all. And it’s fairly likely I’ll do more along this theme in the future.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/palm-tree-sunset/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting in pinks and…
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My Tulips are starting to open as well.

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My Phlox is blooming!

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Fahim Farook

Edited 2 years ago
@dipti Yep, Bengali cinema is also Tollywood — talk about confusing 😛 The one I confuse all the time is Mollywood since it’s for Malayalam but I often think it should be for Tamil (Madras = Mollywood, Bombay = Bollywood). So yeah, all around confusing …

Incidentally, there’s a long list of the Indian cinema “woods” here (see the sidebar on the right below the main info box): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_West_Bengal

I learnt of a few that I hadn’t even heard of 🙂

I used to love Bollywood in the ‘90s — even though they mostly copied old Hollywood movies, I loved the sappy love stories. But today’s Bollywood seems to have just lost its way — they want to be Hollywood, but they can’t seem to get there because they never seem to pay enough attention to the plot — it’s almost always, “accept what we tell you even though it contradicts what happened just 10 minutes ago”. At least, that’s my opinion.

Hadn’t seen “Pushpaka Vimana” but thanks for the recommendation. Will give it a watch — I do love Kamal Hassan movies but back then, I was mostly watching Tamil stuff 😛
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@dipti First, not Bollywood — that’s Hindi. This is Telugu, so Tollywood 😛 Second, just because that’s the norm for quite a few Indian movies, doesn’t mean you have to accept it. Quite a few of the non-Bollywood movie industries are doing much better on this aspect these days …
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A digital art creation of two blue and gold macaws in-flight through the dense jungle flora. A fun avian creation where a tropical theme is desired.

Colorful Macaws In Flight available here: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/143499662

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Fahim Farook

Edited 2 years ago
Quite a few Indian movies are either political/crime thrillers or a slice-of-life/family story. Then, there are the love stories which usually occur in the intersection between the above two categories …

"Vinaro Bhagyamu Vishnu Katha” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21338696/) seemed to have all of these elements in some measure and at first, it looked like a movie that I’d really like. But as the plot progressed, it kind of bogged down in way too many plot elements that mixed in confusing ways …

I haven’t finished the movie yet, but I’ve hit the portion of the movie where just too many absurd things happen and so my guess at the moment is that this might not be one of my favourites … but I guess we’ll see once we get to the end 😛

#Movies #MiniReview #Telugu
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Fahim Farook

I haven’t been posting much recently, or doing my daily #MachileLearning paper readings, since the wife and I got sick. I’m mostly recovered (the wife a bit less so) but then the month of Ramadan began, and with it, fasting.

So I’ve been taking things a bit easy and not adding more to the workload. I love reading the new stuff that’s happening in #DeepLearning and machine learning, but going through all the papers each day is time consuming and I get a little obsessive about completing stuff. So I figured it might be time to take a break while fasting 🙂

There’s a bunch of exciting things happening with LLMs and I’d like to try some experiments but that’ll probably have to wait till next month.

For the time being, I’m trying to catch up on my missed out Indian movies and there’s quite a few mini reviews that I’d like to write … and perhaps I will do a few of them as time permits?
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Laurie Ashton Farook

Pine on a Ridge

2023-03-02 day 258 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

This is complete experimentation on my part. I see things I would change if I were to do it again, and yet, I still like it.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/pine-on-a-ridge/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting of a lone pi…
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Laurie Ashton Farook

Edited 2 years ago
Northern Lights

2023-02-28 to 2023-03-01 day 256/257 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

I’m not entirely happy with this, but I wasn’t making it any better, so I said enough and I’m calling it done. No doubt I’ll try this again. Later. Sometime.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/northern-lights/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
Digital painting. In the foregr…
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Laurie Ashton Farook

Mountain Mist

2023-02-26/27 day 254/255 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

This is another tutorial by Joel Create.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/mountain-mist/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting of a mountai…
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@greysemanticist Interesting, and thank you again 🙂 Will try this out and let you know if I manage to make it work for me.

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was like 12 or 13 but recently it’s become more of an issue since I can’t now read without glasses either (originally I was near sighted). So am looking for solutions that don’t involve lasik since I am not quite comfortable with the idea of eye surgery …
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@greysemanticist Ah, thank you 🙂 I got an e-mail sometime back which said that it can help you figure out how to restore your vision to 20/20 (the e-mail was in the spam folder, incidentally …) and that led me down several YouTube searches which led me to some videos but none of them were particularly useful.

So when I saw your post, I was intrigued. Will watch the video and give it a try and see how it goes …
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