Excursions

A year ago I wrote “Woke up to find that Amazon brought a bag full of ‘things’, untied it on stage and started throwing it against the wall. No one has any idea if what try hurled is genuine or shit and if it will ever stick.”

Amazon did that again today — a yearly ritual now.

I am not a gamer. I cannot play a single-person shooter. I was ok with this particular style of gaming when it was on desktop, with a keyboard and a mouse. On mobile, I am terrible. I just can’t make sense of the direction or speed. And completely pathetic in multiplayer situations.

Same applies to the racing games. It was ok till it was simple lane following games, like Road Fighter. But then they become a lot more real.

Actually, the quest to be more real with the gameplay and the graphics killed this form of media for me. It made the controls a lot more convoluted to be fun any more. Arcade-type games had some breezy liveliness to them. But gradually, gaming became a lot more serious, a lot more pro for my casual taste. These pros ruined the arcade in a way.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there do not exist casual games. There do. However, most of them are ruined by the freemium model. And I am not the first one complaining about this.

But what that meant was even the casual gamer in me had recently died — pushed way back for the fear of the effort it would take to find that one good, clean casual game. Like Monument Valley or Alto’s Adventure.

So I was pretty excited with the announcement of Apple Arcade. I am especially pleased with Apple’s aggressive pricing and push in the non-US markets and the initial reviews of the games. These sound like the games that match my taste.

I hope these stay the way they are currently. I hope the pros do not ruin the Arcade again.

I recently started watching Undone. Actual storyline aside, I am not yet sure if I like this method of animation - rotoscoping. Especially the way it is used in this particular show. It is too close to reality to not be presented as such. Why go through all this trouble?

I recently changed the pair of glasses I was using. I do not like to go through the pains of this whole process.

First, one needs to select a frame that would suit his or her face — something that “looks good” on the face. It is bloody difficult to see if something looks good if it is the see aspect that you have problem with.

“I don’t know how it looks on me because you have taken away from me the very object that I can look through.”

Testing eyesight that follows is a similar hassle. I am surprised that there is still no better and foolproof way to do this than actually putting glasses of increasing powers on your face.

Or if there does exist a better way to do this, may be I need to visit those clinics.

Anyway, thankfully this time I was lucky with my glasses - I think the frame does look good on my face.

I find it fascinating that Twitter recommends me to follow someone that hasn’t been active for more than two years. Why, why should “follow” that person? I am yet to come across any recommendation engine that works.

While cleaning up my old notes back from 2009, came across this wonderful quote by Hunter S. Thompson.

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

I have been planning to refresh the look of my blog for quite some time now. I, finally, managed to get the things changed a bit today.

The biggest change was the addition of the theme switcher — if you don’t want to read with a light background, you can change the whole theme with a toggle at the top-right corner. I haven’t made it any fancier than it needs to be, it is a plain simple round button.

I was a bit hesitant for a long time to put a manual theme switcher on the home page. I thought anyone can already change the way they read the content with the reader mode of the browser. However, what’s the fun in that. Plus I never found that one perfect mode I liked across the devices and browsers. So I decided to include one that at least I would enjoy reading right here.

I have also added the support for prefers-color-scheme media query to future proof it against the upcoming system-wide (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows) dark mode preference - no manual toggle for you if you are on a dark mode on your system. I haven’t tested this thoroughly yet though. I will continue to experiment with this further.

I am very picky with the fonts and the colors I choose across the site. So I did not want to touch the existing setup till I was sure I had enough time to get this done properly.

Recently, I have been seriously considering moving my Wordpress account to a paid plan. It hosts my old blog with posts from ages ago — it currently acts as an archive of the un-migrated posts for me.

There is a reason why I am a bit itchy with my writing workflow. I am struggling to get stuff written across systems, mainly mobile and desktops, at home and work, with drafts kept in sync. Sure, I can use Dropbox as my file store and access the draft posts using iA Writer or other Markdown text editors. However, I am very particular with not signing into and linking anything personal on my work machine, so this workflow does not work at work.

I would have really liked something that is web based. I have been, since long, trying to find a micropub client with a satisfying writing experience for long form posts, along with drafts support. I still haven’t found one. Neither have my attempts to just create one ground up gone anywhere, mainly for the need for multiple working drafts.

I do have a Netlify CMS setup for my main Hugo driven website. However, though it works fine from a desktop, it has a terrible experience on mobile.

Wordpress solves this particular problem for me. I have come to realize finally that it has a nice, clean writing interface on desktop. And with its stable mobile app, the workflow is manageable on mobile too.

But, boy I am ruined by markdown - I can’t write in “Rich Text” any more. Plus, I can’t host my posts on a website which does not have the Indieweb principles baked in. I am aware that Wordpress has a IndieWeb plugin. However, one needs a business account to install plugins. And that’s too much of a cost to sign up for this casual experiment.

So my search for the online writing interface with support for sync and drafts and satisfactory interface on desktop and mobile continues. With Wordpress, it’s so close, but far.

I am tired of people making fun of a feature just because they cannot think of a use for that. This attitude recently came to the fore with Apple’s introduction of “slofies” - the slow-motion selfies. The call for “stop trying to make slofies happen” was loud and clear from the tech community. Apparently, “no one else wants to use it” because we do not want to use it.

That’s a terrible take. Sure, may be the feature can be graded low on the “usefulness” parameter, but it stands high on the fun scale. And our smartphones today are the most personal devices we carry around with us today, and that is not just because they are useful. They are equally fun too.

So stop mocking anything that you will not use. Selfies. Crazy filters. Slow-motion videos. Loop and Bounce effects - the boomerangs. They all make these dull devices a lot more fun. And their fun factor is what makes them sell in masses.

I wonder what the purists think of the recent computational photography trend.

Google started it with its all-in-cloud touch up of the photos. And then they moved it on-device in the camera app. Every photo one took was stitched together from multiple shots with different settings. And eventually each OEM made their cameras smarter, “AI-driven”.

Latest iPhone 11 stitches a single photo from 4 under exposed frames taken before the shutter button is clicked, one normal picture and 1 over exposed frame. They call this process semantic rendering. What follows is some heavy processing. Here’s snippet from the The Verge’s review of iPhone 11 Pro review.

Smart HDR looks for things in the photos it understands: the sky, faces, hair, facial hair, things like that. Then it uses the additional detail from the underexposed and overexposed frames to selectively process those areas of the image: hair gets sharpened, the sky gets de-noised but not sharpened, faces get relighted to make them look more even, and facial hair gets sharpened up. Smart HDR is also now less aggressive with highlights and shadows. Highlights on faces aren’t corrected as aggressively as before because those highlights make photos look more natural, but other highlights and shadows are corrected to regain detail.

What you get as a result is an extremely clear picture with each object in the photo appropriately visible.

But with so much processing of each image, should this even be called photography any more? Here’s Wikipedia introducing the term.

Photography is the art, application and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.

What we do with our smartphones is neither an art nor is it creating a single image.

All parts of the photos are independently captured (and even pre-captured) with the best suited settings, processed post-capture, with even some live sections including audio recorded. This is not “creating an image” any more.

Someone might say it all started when the digital photography became mainstream - when the physical limitations of the analog methods did not constrain the person with a camera in his hand. However, what we capture is no longer a single image anymore. A more apt term for these might be “visual memories”. Common people are interested in doing just that, they don’t care if they are called photographers.

Let Photography stay an art.