So it is the 1st of December as I write this. The weather has been appalling. Damp, cold and wet. Welcome to the first day of Winter. Of course this is a British winter so when I say cold that is somewhere between 5 to 8 degrees C. Not that cold I know. My blog my rules!
It wasn’t always that way. Over the past 20 years we’ve had snow and frost. However, that was sometime ago. More recently it has just been cold and damp.
Only 90 days to go to spring.
What was so special about the 23rd November? I am sure there were many births, marriages and deaths on that particular day. Perhaps people were distracted by other things happening? Whatever the reason I didn’t get any visits to this tiny crevice of the internet. Anyone who has come here before will know that I don’t do this for the holy trinity of the online world: Hits, Likes and Subscribe. But nowadays I rarely see no visits. We all live in an interesting world.
Yesterday was a good day. We took the long road to Uppingham through SE Leicestershire. The purpose of the trip was to visit the Goldmark Gallery. Each time I visit the gallery I am transported to the commercial art world of the West End of London. The notional reason for this visit was to view the new Picasso exhibition. It was all very good (its Picasso so no surprise there). But this isn’t the charm place. No that is walking around the rabbit warren of nooks and crannies to see what is being exhibited where. One of my favourites was the toilet. Whilst you are using the facilities you can take in a series of prints by Toulouse Lautrec. On top of this the staff are always friendly and helpful. Just wish I had the spare cash to but some of the exceptional work. Are well it is a big payout on the Euro Lottery tonight. We can all dream.
Anyway, if you are in the area it is always a good place to visit and enjoy.
I’m too tired to make any sense of these. They just drawings I made over the past few days.
Every now and then I start to realise that I am not as young as I was. This is usually associated with my chronic medical condition making an appearance.
Over the years I have been prodded and probed by any number of medical professionals. The result of this is that I have developed coping strategies when things do flair up. This mostly involves taking things easy for a few days until I start to recover. One positive affect is that I have time to remaster images I captured years ago. I have the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom along with x number of year’s experience of using said software. What can I produce?
New images of Whitby, Southall Minster and the Moira Blast Furnace is the answer. It is always an interesting experiment to remaster earlier images. It also passes the time of day.
A double bonus I guess?
Am I an AI personality? A Bot? If I am then does that mean that this is AI slop? Well I hope that you few visitors to this small and obscure blog will have realised by now. I am a living breathing human being. Any similarity to AI slop is because any number of LLM have digested my almost 20 years ramblings and somehow have turned into one of the billions of ingredients that help create the latest plague flowing through the sclerotic arteries of what now passes as the World Wide web.
I am not an AI denier. I just feel that the almost immeasurable amounts of money being spent on creating pale imitations of human ingenuity is mostly going to be lost. It doesn’t really matter that we’ve been through these bubbles before: canals; railways; dot.com etc. This one is very different.
This bubble is being blown up when there is no real chance of a government bailout. Not because governments might want to. No it is because this would be the third great call on nation’s money in the past 20 years. The nations neither have the leadership nor the money to help out as in 2008 or 2021. I fear this will be the tech bros bequest to the rest of humanity. One great bust. I do hope I am wrong.
If you feel depressed after reading the last paragraph here is a hound dog drawing to comfort you. I fear we all fucked.
Well Claudia has blown through. Plenty of wind and driving rain (I guess you can’t have one without the other). We’ve had the first flood of the season. Suddenly the drought conditions of the summer seems a very long time ago. So will it snow in the next few days. Probably not but given our crazy weather nowadays you just can’t be certain.
‘Fast flowing or deep floodwater is likely, causing danger to life‘
Thank you Storm Claudia. Seems that autumn has decided to impress the awesome majesty on we mortals up here in very damp England. Just for good measure there is just the chance of snow by the middle of next week. It is unlikely to reach down to we valley dwellers but maybe on top of the hills and mountains.
Good job we visited Nottingham yesterday.
Many years ago I remember going on a course where I was told with certainty that the Soviets would drop the bomb within the next two to three years. So much for certainty.
I hope no one who might come across this post will ever experience such a horror. But nearly 50 years on I imagine that this might be what it would look like.
Not at all sure what made me think about this.
How big is too big? The above photo asks this question. In its raw state it is almost 1 GB which is huge. That is what you get when make a panorama out of 7 x 61 MPixel images. Crazy. That is until you look at the detail such an image has.
For those of you who might not know this is the view from Mount St. Bernard’s Abbey of the Trent valley from Ratcliffe Power Station to East MIdlands Airport. It is a view I have captured before but yesterday I decided to really go for it. Perhaps the most memorable thing about the view is that very shortly it will no longer exist. Ratcliffe no longer produces any electricity and by 2030 it will be pulled down. Well at least that is the plan at the moment.
So you can see I was out about capturing images for my latest photo project. If I keep this pace up I might have things wrapped up by Christmas. Not sure I want to rush things that much.
If you ever despair about the value of human creativity, take a trip to the latest exhibition at the Djanogly gallery, Nottingham. AI nonsense might produce a tidal wave of slop, but this exhibition restores faith in creativity.
(Full disclosure: That opening paragraph was rewritten by AI. For some reason it doesn’t like its redraft of my slop!)
Kate Mccgwire really has a thing about feathers. The deeper you examine the works the more intense things get.
I left the exhibition feeling just a little better about the world. I am not sure that is what the artist wished but that doesn’t matter. Human creativity is a wonderful thing.
Simon's Blog 