Month: May 2023

Weeknote 20/2023

Posted on May 21, 2023May 21, 2023 by Doug Belshaw

Graffiti stencil on the side of grass cutting equipment: GRAFFITI IS ILLEGAL

There are many ways of measuring time. These weeknotes are one way. Calendars are another way, with my favourite way of marking the months being the French Republican Calendar. We’re just entering Prairial, my favourite month! As a reminder of this, I subscribe to daily updates from the Republican Calendar bot on the Fediverse. (I also find the Moon Phases bot handy.)

This week, then, there’s been a lot on. My son started his GCSE exams, my wife went away on a work trip, and I gave my daughter a ‘Golden Boot’ trophy for banging in 42 goals in all competitions this season. Yes, I’ve turned into one of those parents, but it’s a form of recognition and encouragement.

Now that I’ve got access to ChatGPT’s plugins and ability to browse the web, I’ve been using it to conversationally explore options for our 20th wedding anniversary in September. The user experience of doing that by having a chat with a chatbot is approximately a million times better than miserably trawling through sites full of ads. Although I’m sure that the advertising will arrive soon.

Work-wise, I continued working on the WAO projects with which I’m currently involved. I can’t talk about the Greenpeace work, sadly (because it’s pretty great), but we’ve been setting up Hylo ready for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance to test as their new community platform. It’s going well so far. I’m waiting for feedback on the three projects for workers.coop, and there hasn’t been loads to do on the stuff for Participate recently. There will be once we get people in the bigger tent on their new platform.

At the suggestion of Joe, from whom we subcontracted some of the work, WAO ran a retrospective on the project for CAST that was funded by Sport England. Although we delivered some really useful stuff, it was a frustrating project to be involved with in many ways. It turns out that was largely to do with change of project leads, staff turn over in the National Governing Bodies (NGBs), and a miscommunication between whether (and how) we should interact with the NGBs directly. Lesson learned.

Laura hit publish on a post we’d been working on together entitled Practical utopias and rewilding work which came out of our last couple of co-op days. It features a graphic that I created with five topics/areas for us to focus on. As ever, it’s the intersections and overlaps that are interesting. Related: Laura, who’s awesome at ensuring things get written-up, published a wiki page entitled Our principles even-over everything else. Even-over statements are powerful things for any group of people.

On the exercise front, my ankle is still bothering me. It’s over three weeks since I went over on it while running through some mud, and then had to keep on going because I was a long way from home. I’ve aggravated it since then by stumbling on an uneven bit of path while looking at my phone, and so recently I’ve been on the exercise bike instead of running. It’s very boring, and with one of the exercise bikes out of action at the gym, like a game of musical chairs but with old people pedalling slowly and reading books.

The weather always gets much better at this time of year, and so I’ve been up at the field at the top of the hill near our house with the kids a few times. We’re accumulating more equipment as my daughter, in particular, gets older and wants to improve her technique. So we had the cones, speed ladder, and ‘top bins’ for free kick accuracy training. It’s good fun, and my job is mostly encouragement, ball retrieval, and giving out tips to which they sometimes listen.

It’s the sharp end of the football season and, although my team (Sunderland) took a 2-1 lead to Kenilworth Road, they were out-muscled on a tiny pitch by Luton Town. It’s a shame, but I’m not too sad; another season in the Championship to build the squad before being promoted to the Premier League is no bad thing. We’re watching all of the football on TV at the moment. Manchester City might have won the league and Southampton been relegated, but it’s otherwise all to play for!

Inspired by the social documentary photography I discussed in my last weeknote, I got out my mirrorless digital camera (a Sony NEX-5 from before smartphone cameras got much better). It reminded me that you can stuff as much AI as you want into a camera, but the lens makes a huge difference. I’ll probably start taking it out and about with me a bit more, but in the meantime, I also had some fun generating some AI art which looks like black and white photographs from last century.

I’ve been messing about with my Steam Deck, finally buying a fitted case and screen protector for it, in addition to the travel case which it comes with. For some reason, I’d never installed the Heroic Launcher so that I could get the Epic Games store, and therefore Rocket League. It’s amazing on that form factor, and because it’s all cross-play, I’ve got six years of progress on there from playing on the PlayStation.

Over at Thought Shrapnel, I posted:

Next week, we’ve got some planning to do as our MozFest House proposal was accepted. We also need to figure out what else we need to get done while in Amsterdam next month. That, for me, includes which Japanese arcades to experience. We also need to do some business development, and discuss whether or not we’re redesigning our website. I think we should aim for radical simplicity, like this (but more design-y).

Photo taken on field near our house on grass-cutting equipment.

Time’s Solitary Dance

Posted on May 20, 2023May 20, 2023 by Doug Belshaw

Update: I’ve created four more images and added them to a collection here

This is not a photograph:

I created in somewhat by accident while messing about in Midjourney last night. That’s the great thing about any kind of tool: it allows you to go beyond your own powers. In this example, I leaned into the ‘old man sitting in the corner’ vibe and started to channel social documentary photographers.

AI still isn’t particularly good at describing images in any detail without prompts. So I created some text using the structure suggested by Image Describer and fed that into ChatGPT. I then asked it to come up with a title and description as if the image was going to be part of an art exhibition. After some tinkering, it came up with the following:

Time’s Solitary Dance is a poignant, black and white tableau that transpires in the everyday world of a seemingly ordinary location – perhaps a café or the corner of a barber’s shop. It captures a solitary elderly man, sitting cross-legged on a tiled surface, emanating a sense of solitude and retrospection. This image, despite being created by an AI, beautifully mirrors the aesthetic sensibilities of a late 20th-century photograph. The man’s solitude in a public space stands as a commentary on the paradoxical loneliness that can pervade old age, as seen through the lens of a social documentary photographer. A testament to the intersection of technology and art, the photograph offers a poignant glimpse into the human condition, blurring the lines between the real and artificial.

I’ve seen people ask what the point is to all of this. That it’s not ‘creative’. I beg to differ.

Weeknote 19/2023

Posted on May 14, 2023May 14, 2023 by Doug Belshaw

Sunderland's Stadium of Light with huge flags reading THIS IS WEARSIDE and 'TIL THE END

This has been a week of celebrations. Although I love my children very much, let’s talk first about the football team I support: Sunderland. On Monday, a combination of results — including their 3-0 thrasing of Preston North End — meant that Sunderland crept into the Championship promotion playoff places. This is quite the achievement, given they were promoted via the League 1 playoffs only last season.

I’ll not bore you with the details, but the process of actually getting tickets for the first leg of the playoff semi final between Sunderland and Luton Town was almost as nailbiting as watching them play on Monday. When I did manage to secure tickets for my dad and me, we were in nearby seats but not sitting together. Thankfully, on the day, we managed to swap seats and Sunderland came from behind to win 2-1. It was an amazing atmosphere.

Immediately before that, I’d been at our daughter’s football presentation awards ceremony. She received the Players’ Player of the Year award, and a special mention for having scored so many goals (41 in all competitions, because I counted!) In the second half of the season she played for a boys team and, again, received a special mention for having helped rescue their season. I’m very proud of her.

On Thursday, it was my son’s Year 11 awards ceremony. It was such a positive event, with him receiving subject awards for Computer Science, English, Graphics, Science, PE. He also received an award for services to sport, the number of house points received, and a tutor award. It’s his football awards ceremony in a few weeks’ time. I’m also very proud of him!

I haven’t had enough art in my life recently, so I decided we’d go as a family to the BALTIC to see a Chris Killip retrospective. We went earlier today and had lunch courtesy of the Quayside market.

Chris Killip photograph from 'Pride and Fall'. Huge ship at the end of a terrace street.

Killip passed away in 2020 and I’d seen a small exhibition of his pre-pandemic. What’s particularly poignant to me is the hardness of the lives he documented through black-and-white photography.

Chris Killip photograph from 'Pride and Fall'. Partly-demolished housing with graffiti saying DON'T VOTE PREPARE FOR REVOLUTION

Not only did he photograph the decline of shipbuilding on the Tyne, but a community of seacoalers in Lynemouth not far away from where I used to live. This community was also photographed by Mik Critchlow, who passed away recently. Critchlow photographed Hirst, the area of Ashington in which I grew up.

In terms of work this week, there was an extra Bank Holiday that I worked through because I don’t recognise monarchs. We had a WAO co-op half day on Tuesday in which we continued working on the even-over statements and bento boxes from last time. We also made plans for next month when we’ll be in Amsterdam for a meetup and to attend MozFest House.

I also worked with Laura and John on projects for workers.coop, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, Participate, and Greenpeace. We also recorded an episode of The Tao of WAO podcast and said goodbye to Anne for a few weeks as she finishes off her final year university projects.

Over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:

During the writing of this, I finally relented and allowed my daughter to download Snapchat. We’ve been pretty protective of our son in relation to social networks, which has had benefits and drawbacks. Boys and girls are different, though, and while I read about lots of issues relating to Instagram, I don’t see much negative media round Snapchat.

Still, I was ready to tell her to wait until she turns 13, until her tears made me look at the Commonsense Media review of the app. This is usually a bastion of extremely conservative parenting that I use to back myself up when my kids think I’m too harsh. However, even the comments by parents on that review said that as long as your kid is mature, it’s absolutely fine.

So she’s got it. Her brother is currently showing her around it, and she’s got a huge smile on her face. Parenting is great, but quite often I feel like I’m doing it wrong. Hopefully this will pan out for the best.

Next week, it’s a normal working week. My son starts his GCSE exams so it’s walking-on-eggshells time trying to keep him leading a balanced lifestyle.

My ankle, which I went over on a couple of weeks ago and then aggrevated again earlier this week, still isn’t better. So it’s probably a tendon injury rather than soft tissue. That’s meant I’ve been on the exercise bike for cardio instead of running. Looks like I’ll probably doing the same next week.