By Eric Rood
Look, I’m not going to pretend to understand what this whole Deep Dream interface thing is, but I know there are plenty of coding geeks who read Hooniverse who can explain it (and please feel free to do so in the comments; if you can’t geek out on Hooniverse, then you can’t geek out). From my understanding, it somehow simulates all of your most enduring nightmares and then adds them to photos so that you can’t sleep. Ever. Naturally, from the moment I saw the first few brain-dissolving images, I knew that photos from the 24 Hours of LeMons would be perfect to feed into Deep Dream with the results likely both mind-breaking and somehow also fitting. So I took a half dozen more shots from last weekend’s full 24-hour race (during which I may have hallucinated some similar-looking images in the depths of the very early morning hours) at Autobahn Country Club near Chicago and saw what I could see.
Follow the jump for more with the original images linked below them (lead image here). I’ll offer no explanation because it’s probably better that way and you can slightly embiggen the images by clicking on them, even though I’m breaking Hooniverse rules in doing so (Sorry, Tim and Jeff). But you can’t break a few minds without braining some omelettes. Or something. I still haven’t slept.
Be forewarned: You can’t unsee the images after the jump and they will hurt your all of you.
(Yes, you’ll get a proper recap if I can ever sleep again. Or possibly if I never sleep again.)
[All images copyright 2015 Hooniverse/Eric Rood]
Jeff Glucker
Sleep? who got to sleep
The sunrise photos is pretty close to how I remember it IRL.
http://i1.wp.com/hooniverse.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Engine.png
Fairly typical for a self-service wrecking yard.
If I can’t figure out what kind of car this is, I’m going to start hallucinating… Looks very Prizm-y to me.
Nicely done. It’s a Corolla All-Trac.
Did they come with the strut brace or did someone jack that from a GSi? In any case, there are some distinctive shapes in that engine bay that I can pick out. Probably couldn’t do that with any other cars. Pretty much got lucky on this one.
It’s the subframe hedgehog, isn’t it? Pretty unique to what Toyota was doing at the time.
Dammit now I’m definitely hallucinating.
Hah, it’s even better with an animated gif
https://camo.githubusercontent.com/0e5d5226a76ab855cd6aae86f30535b9a07a6963/687474703a2f2f6d656469612e67697068792e636f6d2f6d656469612f6c34316c52783932517173495879354d492f67697068792e676966
Next thing you know…
http://i2.wp.com/hooniverse.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Paddock_Sunrise.png?resize=720%2C482
Yep, that’s how I remembered the night portion, with two legged beaver monsters roaming the paddock and the devil overlooking the scene.
Not a coding geek, (just a regular one) but as I understand it, they fed the computer a whole ton of photos ( mostly of dogs and birds) and programmed it to learn certain features to recognize them to aid in image searches. Then it gets weird. they set up sort of a feedback loop and then fed it random images and asked it to identify the dog or bird or whatever and then kept feeding it back until it turned the image into the Lovecraftian Nightmare you see before you.
Looks a little Hieronymus Bosch’y to me….
This may explain, at least partially, the behavior of cats……