Me, myself and I.

I’m going to start publishing my photos here, including the astrophotography ones. When I post them on Facebook, they hardly look anything like the originals anyway. I used to post them on Twitter, but then it became even worse than it was when it was Twitter.

I’m also going to try and develop the language to describe my photos well, and I understand that an image’s “alt” text is very valuable to more than just people with sight-impairement.

All words are my own. As an exercise I took my alt-text and created an image from it using the Flux.2 Dev model on my own PC, and it actually came pretty close, so I figure the alt-text must be half-decent at least! There are the usual deviations. I don’t intend to post these routinely, but it’s a fun experiment. In addition to that, I had used an LLM to help me find the term I was grasping for where the layers of hills and trees are lit more diffusely with distance. This was what I was looking for!

The writing goes well with me trying to be more observant in general recently. Yesterday I was stood for half an hour watching birds of prey with my binoculars. There were four or five of them hanging around. I was attempting to concretely describe their features to myself in detail, and that helped when I went back in and was trying to figure out what they were. I have spent a lot of time looking at birds of prey, but never actually taken the time to truly identify them. They were red kites btw. I thought they were probably buzzards at first! I saw a jay fly past as well, which is very rare!

Anyway, this is my image of a sunset over The Skirrid, near Abergavenny. Captured from my back garden.

Here is my local-AI-generated facsimile with only the alt-text as a reference, not my photo.

I’ve wasted too much of my life scrolling through Facebook. I like the fact that it can keep me in touch with friends, family and colleagues, as well as various groups I’m part of for my hobbies and interests. That’s not what you mainly see now, though. I see more about Donald Trump than I do about anyone I actually know.

I scrolled through my timeline, and it was the 41st entry that finally showed me something from someone on my friends list. Just four of the previous 40 entries were from pages I follow or groups I’m in. The rest were advertisements, antagonising political stuff and “promoted content” - just absolute brainrot.

I have a thing for digital sovereignty. I like films too. Letterboxd is the site where I log and review films. I like it because the interface is very usable, and it’s not a horribly obnoxious place where you have adverts and other things literally screaming for your attention all the time (Facebook: fuck you!).

I found out Netflix and others are in talks to buy Letterboxd, so I decided that my film log and reviews were no longer in a safe space. From now on, my own website is the source of truth. However, I’ll continue publishing reviews to Letterboxd for as long as the site continues to be good, not least because I enjoy reading other people’s reviews.