Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I’ve been an amateur shutterbug for years.
I’d let this project fall to the side for a while, but I started coming back to it last week, and this morning before work, I finally finished processing and uploading my photos from our summer 2024 vacation up to Victoria, B.C.
If you’d like to scroll through someone else’s vacation photos, I have them split into two albums on Flickr: 2024 Summer Vacation 1: Sequim and Port Angeles and 2024 Summer Vacation 2: Victoria, B.C.. Otherwise, here’s a one-shot-per-day sampler.
Sunday afternoon, we went down to Federal Way to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Snow White. It was cute! It was definitely solidly in the realm of “how close to Disney can we get without getting sued” territory, and it had more endings than Lord of the Rings (the audience was actually getting confused), but it was still an enjoyable performance and made for a good afternoon outing.
Finished two books this week: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, and a Star Trek manga.
I indulged myself with a silly idea I had a few weeks ago, and created a 40-minute mix of mashups based on Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. Definitely a mix that will either really work for someone or drive them absolutely up the wall.
I also picked up two new albums on Saturday that I’ll start listening to into this coming week:
Synthetic. Facts. Eight, the latest in a compilation series from Infacted Recordings.
Astral Elevator, the first album from The Tear Garden (Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy)) since 2017. I was first introduced to The Tear Garden (and Legendary Pink Dots, for that matter) in the mid-90s, and I’m glad they’re still working on this project.
Pat Saperstein in Variety: Heaven 17 Plans New Version of ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ Calling Out Trump Instead of Reagan: ‘It’s Not Going to Get Any Less Relevant, Is It?’: “…the band plans to release an updated version of the song, which has become an unofficial anthem of the resistance to Donald Trump. At a recent protest sign-making party in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, it was part of the anti-fascist playlist that got neighborhood activists dancing. A few days later, the fast-paced, incredibly catchy ’80s standard could be heard blasting from speakers at the Downtown Los Angeles No Kings protest.”
Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post: Meet the people who dare to say no to artificial intelligence: “Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google’s chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones.”
Peter Wolinski at Tom’s Guide: How to disable Copilot in Windows 11: “Disabling Copilot in Windows 11 is a straightforward process, and this guide will walk you through the steps to do so.”
Mauro Huculak at Pureinfotech: 4 Quick ways to permanently disable Windows Recall on Windows 11: “Recall is designed to function as a photographic memory, powered by a local AI model, making it easier to locate past activities, including documents, websites, messages, images, and apps. […] Recall automatically takes snapshots of your screen at regular intervals (around every five seconds), which can capture sensitive information, such as private conversations, financial details, or personal images.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Knowledge is Worth Your Time: “What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn’t the topic. You’ll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don’t end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made.”
Anil Dash: ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web: “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.”
Margherita Bassi at Smithsonian Magazine: See This Year’s Hilarious Finalists From the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, From Gossiping Leopards to Breakdancing Foxes: “Founded in 2015 by two professional photographers, the awards merge skillful wildlife photography with the “positive power” of humor to promote wildlife and habitat conservation, per a statement. The competition is free and open to novices, amateurs and professionals.”
Ella Glover at The Guardian: ‘I get to do whatever I want in the moment’: why more people are going to gigs, festivals and clubs alone: “Some research suggests that the average age of festivalgoers is increasing, and older people are still going out frequently, which may account for the increased number of people attending solo….”
📷 I did post an album of photos of the day’s adventures, before, during, and after the protest. I had fun playing a bit with these; the only lens I brought was a Pocket Dispo, a disposable camera lens mounted in a 3-D printed fitting. It gives the images a fun bit of distortion. Definitely not an everyday lens, but fun to have in my kit for when it feels right.
The rest of the week was a pretty standard week, with no particular stories of note.
Read one Star Trek novel, Gene DeWeese’s Into the Nebula.
We finished our rewatch of Scrubs; our first time watching all the way to the end, including the Scrubs: Med School ninth season/spinoff. The first few seasons of Scrubs are definitely the best; much of the latter seasons are very hit-and-miss, but generally still at least amusing.
We also watched Murderbot, which was a really good adaptation of the first book in the series, and even got my wife, not as much of a sci-fi fan as I am, invested and enjoying (most of) the show. The one disappointment was a section in the final episode that fills in a period of time that’s skipped in the book, and which was tonally very different from the rest of the show, enough so that we skipped forward through a chunk of it. Still, overall, really good, and I’m looking forward to the second season when it shows up.
Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater: “Joshua makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”
Jason Aten at Inc.: After 18 Years, This Is Still the Most Useful macOS Feature You Probably Forgot Existed: “…one of the most underrated features in macOS is also one of the oldest: the Guest User account. It’s been around for more than 18 years, first appearing in Mac OS X Leopard in 2007. Yet most Mac users barely remember it exists.” It’s a very clickbait-y headline, but honestly, I’d not thought about the Guest User account in years, and it’s worth keeping in mind.
(Collecting and editing together a Mastodon thread. Nothing new to see if you follow me there.)
This past weekend I went down to Portland to visit my mom, and all the photos I took were shot using lenses from her dad’s (film) Konica Minolta, attached to my Nikon D750 using a lens adapter. The lenses date from sometime after 1976, according to what I’ve been able to determine from a little web research), and require shooting all manual (which is a good skill to brush up on from time to time anyway), and it was a lot of fun to do.
The weekend’s photos are now in a Flickr album. I really like the quality of these; they’re definitely not as “clean” as I get with more modern lenses, but the flaws of the older glass produce some neat effects, particularly in lower-light situations where I’m shooting wide open. Not an everyday lens choice, to be sure, but definitely worth bringing out from time to time.
And finally, a funny-but-serious (to me, in retrospect) story about this photo:
After spending the morning at the Pittock Mansion, mom and I needed lunch, and wanted to find someplace air conditioned, since it was a 90°+ day in Portland. So we went to a close-ish mall, the Lloyd Center, not knowing that it is virtually abandoned — I’d be surprised if it was at 30% capacity. Empty space after empty space, with just a few stragglers trying to hold on, mostly grouped around the ice rink at the mall’s center.
After eating some mediocre Orange Julius chili dogs and watching a bit of a Willy Wonka on Ice production on the ice rink (because, sure, why not toss some random Roald Dahl in), we were wandering on when we passed a jewelry store. One of the display case windows of the store had been shattered by something, leaving a very prominent starburst pattern in the glass. This caught my eye, and I figured I’d see what kind of shot I could get, with the cracked window and the sparkle of the jewelry behind it.
Being in “absent minded art brain” mode, I didn’t even think about what this might look like until, through the viewfinder, I noticed the store employees looking at me and gesturing in my direction. Suddenly very conscious of the situation, I put the camera down as a pleasant looking lady came out to talk with me. As it turns out, as soon as I apologized for not thinking about the optics of the situation and explained what I was doing, it turned out that she was also a bit of an amateur photographer, and we had a nice little chat about the window, how the shatter effect looked, and what sort of shots I might get. And then, after another little laugh about the whole thing, we all moved on.
But as we walked away, I couldn’t help but think about the rather stark privilege in the experience. Wandering through a down-at-heels mall, passing a jewelry store that someone had likely tried to rob, blithely taking photos of the damage, and walking away with a pleasant conversation and funny story. I have to think that would have turned out differently if I hadn’t been a 51 year old white man wandering around with his disabled mother in a powered chair. But in the moment? I just thought it would be a neat photo.
Day 158: All is fine now, but the day started with a late-night/early morning trip to the ER due to localized pain on my left side. The doctor thought perhaps kidney stones, but after bloodwork, peeing in a cup, and a CAT scan (my first…now there’s a milestone for you), I came back medically “unremarkable”. Apparently it was just severe gas. The photo was taken about 4:30 am, after four hours there, and an hour before we finally got to leave with a prescription for some medication. Today is completely blown for anything other than lying around in a sleepy, cranky daze.
Day 93: We have a silly Lego nautical theme above our fireplace. On this side is a Lego pirate ship sailing through shark-infested waters by a small desert island with a castaway in his shack. We’ve decided that he was more interested in protecting his treasure chest than being rescued.
Day 18: Forgot to swap sunglasses for normal glasses before heading into the store, and thus inadvertently fulfilled my personal “creepy old white guy in the grocery store” quota for the indefinite future.
A lazyweb question: Is there decently modern web image gallery software anywhere?
I’d like to move away from Flickr in favor of self-hosting my photo galleries. But so far all the packages I’ve found are…well, they tend to look and feel (both on the backend admin side and the frontend public gallery side) like they haven’t been updated in the past decade or more.
Admittedly, sometimes this is because that’s exactly the case…which also doesn’t make me want to download them. But sometimes they’re still apparently under active development, but still look and feel like early-2000s projects.
Software I’ve installed, poked at, thought “mmm…well…maybe…”, and looked on to see what else I could find:
Things I’ve looked at but not downloaded:
I’d like to stop giving Flickr money (I have nothing particularly against them, but at this point, I have nothing particularly for them either; their website doesn’t “give me joy”, and when embedding photos, the alt text is just the image title, not even the image comments, let alone any option to add true alt text), and I simply don’t trust Google enough to drop all my images into their systems. I’ve played with SmugMug as well, but again, I’d like to be able to self-host, not pay.
I’m a little surprised that this is such a sparse field, but I suppose that Flickr and Google Photos are “good enough” for most people these days, so there’s not a big market for people like me: a tech-savvy hobbyist photographer who’s not particularly interested in relentlessly pursuing monetization.
Recommendations would be appreciated if I’ve missed something worth investigating. As it is right now, though, I’m guessing my best bet will be to see what I can manage with either Piwigo or ZenPhoto.
Another day of wandering around a museum, enjoying the pretty sights, and getting back into practice with my camera. Once again, five of my favorites from the day below, and more in an album on Flickr.
Picked up my “real” camera (Nikon D750, as opposed to my iPhone) for the first time in something over three years today…funny how a pandemic-induced lockdown can affect your hobbies, isn’t it?
We went out to the Museum of Flight, which we hadn’t been to for at least 15 years, had a nice day wandering around, looking at all the neat airplanes and space stuff, and I started getting used to the camera again. Felt good!
A few shots here, and more in an album on Flickr.
