DHH: Why is paid social media a bad idea?

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Tech

I don’t think everything ANYONE does is great. Not my good friends, not my coworkers, NOT MYSELF. This preemptive distancing from controversial figures when they do something you actually agree with is just so performative and pathetic.

DHH: (world.hey.com)

Finally, I’m with DHH on something. Don’t feel like you need to distance yourself every time you reference a person or work that someone on Twitter told you is bad.

As for the rest of his post, I dunno, but watching what Musk does with (to?) Twitter is fascinating at the very least.

Short

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Meta

Short posts are fine.

Journal posts are back on daily.baty.net

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Meta

I’m sorry, but as much as I like the idea of maintaining only one blog, I just don’t enjoy composing my daily journal entries in WordPress. I’m once again writing them in Emacs and posting them on daily.baty.net using Eleventy.

I took the opportunity to use a simpler layout using less CSS and I think it reads better but let me know if you disagree. I’ll surely continue to tweak things.

The RSS feed is daily.baty.net/feed/feed.xml or daily.baty.net/feed/feed.json depending on which flavor you prefer. Consider the daily-notes-at-baty.net experiment closed.

Nick Brandt on using a digital camera – I hated it

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Photography

I brought a Hasselblad 60 megapixel medium format digital camera to Africa with me. I took photos side by side with my film camera. The digital camera’s images were sharper. They had more detail in both the shadows and the highlights. The digital camera made photographing very, very easy.

And I hated it. … In fact, had I photographed using a digital camera from the beginning, I’m not sure that I would have liked a single photograph that I had ever taken.

Nick Brandt, I am the Walrus

His animal photographs are astonishing. And he uses short (50-100mm equiv. on 35mm film) lenses on film cameras. Amazing.

NICK BRANDT. LION BEFORE STORM SITTING PROFILE, MASAI MARA 2006

Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Photography

This Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0 is by far the worst lens I own.

Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0 lens mounted on Leica SL2

And yet, I’m drawn to it for that very reason. I’m feeling a pull toward low-fi digital. Or at least imperfect digital. I’m not tempted to go buy a 2003 digicam like the kids are doing, but I’m also not drawn toward the APO-Summicron-SL that I used to shoot with.

This Elmar is quite soft and has such low contrast that it seems like there’s something wrong with it. As an example, here’s a mirror self-portrait straight out of camera:

Self-portrait using the Elmar 9cm

Awful, right? Gloriously, satisfyingly awful!

This lens has been sitting on a shelf for years because I didn’t see the point, when so many better lenses are readily available. But now I’m thinking that maybe I’ll find a few “shitty” lenses to shoot with and see how it goes.

Everything is here now

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Meta

I’m perfectly aware that the following may only be true for like 18 hours, but…

I’m only posting here on Baty.net using WordPress. No daily site, no wiki. Everything I write is going here. I dislike using WordPress, but it has everything I need. And I don’t honestly spend that much time actually writing. It’s fine.

My daily journal posts are excluded from the home page, but are included in the RSS feed or directly via baty.net/journal (that will redirect to /topics/journal/ for now). I would like to include today’s journal post on the home page, but I don’t know enough about WordPress to make that happen yet.

I was so sick of thinking about Tinderbox vs Hugo vs Eleventy vs TiddlyWiki for my daily notes this morning that I routed around all of them and landed here. Let’s see if it sticks.

Narrator: “It didn’t”

More like everyone else

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Misc

I’m wondering if I should become more like everyone else. Should I post “5 Tips to improve your workflow right now!” articles on Medium? Should I be “super excited” to humblebrag about myself on LinkedIn? Should I fire up my Instagram account and splash gaudy “stories” all over it throughout the day? Should I buy some neon background lights and work on an unnecessary 90-second musical intro to my upstart YouTube channel?

No, I shouldn’t.

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