💾 Archived View for sol.cities.yesterweb.org › stream.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:49:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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join the plankton. reverse chronological order, dd/mm/yy
the ipod nano 7th gen might well be the worst music player on earth. sure, it's nice looking and slim and has bluetooth, but it's weightless with no clip like 6th gen and there is absolutely no way to get music in that bastard without itunes. a great loss to both the sensorium and linux.
god i abandoned my boy (gemini) i abandoned by child !! i dropped so many things last october... i keep meaning to come back but i've been forgetting orz
social media improvement ideas:
while nothing can be done about the first item, i've been trying to prune the people i follow on twitter and tumblr so i have less to catch up on. it's a little tricky though, because there's a lot of great artists online and i don't see any point on restricting my "access" to them. some balance has to be reached.
i could also argue for a third point:
tumblr actually has a post limit of 250/day but that's an insane amount no one really reaches. i'm thinking more like. maybe twenty [1]. of course this also means:
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[1] being a little generous because i like sharing memes instead of just Thoughtful, Meaningful Postès
(also i love gemtext but it's so fucking annoying how i can't use asterisks for footnotes. numbered footnotes are for links and references, not asides, imo. but you gotta live with the limitations, and i know this isn't universally agreed with)
was poking around and came across this post by cinni. it's true! when i get a little time i want to maybe write a little intro to gemini from noob to noobs? i'm so busy tho. maybe i don't have enough to say on the subject too... i mean, all i did was sign up for yestercities, all i really had to figure out after that was how to connect to it to add my stuff (really really easy on linux). eh.
gemini is not easy for tech noobs
september's over, which means my monthly artlog is up on my website
i'm tired of having to think about my generative work / GAN art in general from a point of defense. does that sentence make any sense? i feel it's always all about "is it art, is it not? is it theft?" so on and so forth, that's all people ever talk about, then i get annoyed about it (because i hate seeing people get things i know wrong) and... what about the art itself? what about the *images*, if you don't want to get into the matter of what is or isn't art. it's like the images become interchangeable, uninportant. i'm so tired of that.
of course, that's definitely part of the way social media flattens art (of all kinds) into contextless imagery. so. yeah our relationships to images is kinda fucked innit. so yeah man idk. i want to be able to talk about this stuff on my own terms instead of getting bogged down by the need to defend it, you know what i mean?
yet another day where i just open software and don't work on my thesis at all. i know humans can't really focus on a task for longer than 4 hours or something. maybe "using the computer" all gets lumped into a single task for me? maybe i'm just entirely uninspired. i feel lost. i feel overwhelmed. i want to be sent to the seaside like a rich victorian lady. i want to be able to see my friends on a random mon-fri afternoon. i want a salmon and cream cheese sandwich. with arugula.
i feel there's something fundamentally wrong with the way we (as in mainstream online ppl i guess) approach minimalism. and i don't mean just like. minimalism as an aesthetic that veils consumerism (ie you Have to buy the pretty minimalist products instead of using what you've already got etc), but the way we think about decluttering?
to me, it feels a lot like diet culture. yeah you go and get rid of your stuff but then six months pass and you somehow still have a lot of stuff to get rid of, and it's like it doesn't last? try as i might (and i've been looking into stuff like capsule wardrobes since high school), the level always remains more or less stable.
and i dunno. i love (or at least like) most of the stuff i own, even if i'm aware that a lot of it... won't really get as much wear as i like to think they will. i've some stuff that i know i'll only wear once i get top surgery, and that i hang on to even though i have no idea when that'll happen. on the other hand, it's so hard to find stuff that fits my body, my needs and my style that i end up keeping a ton of stuff i don't wear often, but that i know i won't be able to replace if i want them back in the future. which is all rather silly.
legend of zelda: oracle of ages is a proto-souls-like because 1) it warps you to the entrance of the dungeon when you die 2) you keep all your progress 3) it's extremely hard
i love virtual homes so much... the tiny top down pixel ones in particular are just heavenly! wish pixel art was more my thing, it'd be fun to make virtual doll houses <3
huh do you think those extreme minimalist under 100 possessions digital nomad type people ever create physical art? do you think they feel it's a waste of resources?
what is it with all this anti AI art [1] sentiment online these days?? i mean, no one's obligated to like it, but i can't help but roll my eyes. like it's just generative art guys... there are many things to be criticized in the field of machine learning, sure (dataset ethics and energy consumption for example), and with anything there's good and bad art, but... "AI art is a souless affront to human life"? come on. i'm begging you for a hair of nuance.
i'd love to write a more solid defense of it but i'm rather busy with my thesis (incidentally about AI art lmao) so it's just this little post in my microlog but by god this is exhausting.
EDIT- welp went and posted it. it's way more polite than this little microlog
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[1] by AI art i mean both raw output and edited / otherwise modified images, by the way. there isn't any entirely autonomous art, it's simply impossible. "AI-assisted art" is just... AI art itself
gendered language is an eternal minefield. maybe that's why i prefer to write in english, rather than tiptoe around portuguese's constant gendering of words. or maybe i just spent too much of my formative years on anglophone forums. who's to say? language is an interesting little puzzle.
can't believe it's nearly june already........ girl i need to write my thesis.......
also i wanna write a short story.. dunno what about and i most certainly don't have the time or energy! i haven't even finished my goddamn dataplankton zine. digital art is just not in my brain for some while now tbh
i had one more thing to say here but i can't remember what.. well whatever. i had a really tasty lunch today. made a sculpture in ceramics that a lot of people liked for some reason? i was just vibing with the clay tbh. we had to make something mask- or face-like and i really really didn't want to so i just sorta kept adding clay into little ridges while talking about american horror story season 1 (it's a really hard show to summarize? i'm kinda bad at summaries though)
anyway yea here's a little diary! :)
note to self mostly.
artificial intelligence is a loaded term. anything that makes AI sound alive is troublesome. it's more... a mechanical thing that cyborgizes us. an exoeskeleton of the mind?
the water cooling the servers as a primordial soup.
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btw a while back i saw a tweet complaining about permacomputing talk being put on gemini... idk i just thought it a little funny how much we equal computing and the internet. computing is about hardware, is it not? internet conservation is its own beast.
the natural state of the internet being entropy and link rot and ephemerality isn't good from a preservation and conservation standpoint but! archiving the entire bloated web isn't even sustainable anyway. maybe we could just make little folders on our computers to archive morsels of what we personally find valuable and that's ok
i'm now using linux part-time! i'm using mint, and it's pretty neat! having some trouble setting up lagrange though... i cannot for the life of me find my user data to import the files from windows. the github page says it's on ~/.config/lagrange/ but that folder doesn't exist. i couldn't even find my search history (visited.txt) through the find command? wonder what this is all about really. wish i could import the files directly thru lagrange like i did with my id :/
WAIT: just like a minute later i figured out you can, in fact, import directly from lagrange. feeling quite silly now. still wonder where that folder is though
i also need to figure out how to connect to the server, bc i don't really like titan all that much
WELL: scratch that as well, figured it out. note to self: file manager > connect to server, use secure webdav
welcome.gmi, which i fought for my life to find for some reason
funny how much i talk about tech versus how little i actually talk about art... i think i really ought to be thinking more about AI art on an aesthetic level too. it's hard since there isn't as much to *read* so i don't really have as much repertoire. but obviously there's a lot to be said! like how working from the same datasets and models can flatten and homogenize the style, right?
because unless you're training your own model with your own specific dataset you have to just take what you get here and it all... kinda looks the same. the interest for me is more the indeterminacy itself and the "subjects" — the designs of the machine if you will? plus by not controlling the style you do end up with several different styles. well whatever. it's complicated to talk about the AI aesthetics since there's a lot of it... hm.
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well, how is this not about art though? as a digital artist, isn't the digital my medium? much like an oil painter might want to study and reflect their paints and pigments and surfaces, or a ceramist their clay and glazes, digital media is very much the physical medium through which i make art.
...also i just really like reading about tech (and speculative tech futures)
old man waves stick at jupyter notebooks. i wanted to try running a colab notebook locally just to see what it's like but i don't know nearly enough about python to make it work... well i'll keep trying (maybe later in the week when i have more time)
rushed glide clip-conditioned text2im
the closet is killing me from the inside. never have i felt so acutely aware of the size of my prison. i've tasted enough of the comforts of... simply being that i now know just how limited i am forced to exist. it's unreal to me that i have to go through hell before i get to live. it literally didn't have to be this hard.
i feel there's something to be said about our obsession with personal data. like spotify "on repeat" twitter chain things etc. why do we care? legit question... i think it's more like... they made it fun for us to look at our stats so all this hungry data collection seems more benign? "haha yeah spotify keeps track of everything i do in its shitty little app but isn't it cool that i'm in the top 1% listeners of john musicman?"
i mean, again this is one of those things where i make it sound like a nefarious plot to make us get used to this invasion, when i know it probably isn't. just feels a little icky. if you wanna tell your followers what you've been listening to lately can't you just post "i've been obsessed with john musicman's new album this month!"?
i'm really glad for this little stream. i really enjoy the neocities update feed but it feels so nice to write as much as i want knowing it won't take up anyone's space, like in basically any social media ever. i dislike the thought of spamming people with "useless" stuff in a short period of time, even though i know most people don't care. this is such a low pressure way of doing things...
i wish social media (and neocities' hybrid social media / website host thing) gave you an option between sharing something to your followers' feeds or silently posting it to your page. at least neocities lets you delete updates (but then anything you update during those 24 hours will be deleted too, which is not ideal)
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i think you shouldn't read too deep into some small things unless it's for artistic reasons. then the world is your oyster.
i posted a photo today. i took it with my phone at a reasonably high resolution, then downsized it to about 400x600px and saved it as a low quality jpeg, artifacts proudly introduced. the image is around 15kb in size. there was no real point in doing it, i'm not hosting it myself and it won't make any real difference in load time, and i could have made it much nicer looking with not a lot more file size if i indexed it instead. effectively it was just an outfit pic with a gimmick. but it does feel satisfying to be in control of the crust. it looks like shit because i willed it so, because i wanted to see what it'd look like. call attention to it? i don't know. i did it because i wanted to, because compression has been on my mind (i've written a little about it on my artlog i'll post tomorrow)
and i want to make it an unspoken part of my expression just as my outfits are. if i'm to be an immaterial boygirl online, i want to highlight that images are intrinsically lo-fi, no matter how hyperreal they intend to be. or something.
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i think part of degrowth might be, counterintuitively, accepting impermanence. by this i mean that nothing lasts forever, nothing really should. can't really put it much into words but what i mean is viewing growth as success conversely means failure might be degrowth? this idea needs cooking, but i'm thinking about infrastructures needed to make something everlasting or something of that sort.
because if we see a "degrown" society as filled with things made to last then it gets stagnant doesn't it? i really wish i could explore this more but there's only so much i can read in a period of time... but i think of these things as a creative person and the materials you need to create things like clothes and decor and furniture and stuff. they're creative expression but how do we deal with these things in a slow, need-driven utopia? i don't *need* more clothes, but i enjoy sewing them. there will be fashion and useless little trinkets in the utopia, but how will we deal with them?
i'm sounding like a scratched record, but i really like just how legible everything is in here. focusing on just doing one thing (text), and doing it very well, truly is the best solution to anything really. taking notes for my web design: reading on the computer is my nemesis, so i'm always looking for ways to make it more comfortable. i think it lies in customization, which is why reader mode is also so nice. you can't design for an universal, platonic human being, you have to more or less let them design for themselves. a tricky spot, i'm very glad this isn't my profession!
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the temptation to have all my online parts link to one another is so strong... personal branding brainrot. i must trust that anyone who happens to stumble across this capsule will and wants to see my art or writing will simply click the link on my homepage, and that's enough for its own rabbithole. as much as i love the *hyper* part of hypertext, gemini is its own tiny sphere and that's what i love about it. Keep It Simple Stupid is forever relevant