Choice Overload [461]
Greetings from the streets of London...
I’m Christian Payne, Autotelic, photographer and writer. In this weekly dispatch I seek out novelty, explore how we share, what we share and consume, plus where we might be going. Thanks for joining in.
#TheAction
These sporadic bouts of sunshine has had me in the garden assembling a greenhouse…among other such torturous activities. It’s nice being outside though. It will soon be time to open the garden bar.
And when not outside I’ve been scanning negatives and editing photos I took the other weekend. Real things made in physical space.
It is said (possibly by a human) that soon enough, over half the content on the internet will be generated by AI. I’m trying to focus on all the cool and interesting things that this might mean and not to be concerned about the reduced diversity and authenticity of what we see and hear. Or the disruption to traditional industries that may not be able to keep up.
But personally I will, where possible, put an emphasis on human creativity and analogue artistic practises. Not as an antidote. I don’t believe we can stop a tidal wave of this magnitude and speed. More as a raft. In the hope we can ride this out and reconnect on the other side. To find a new place and relevance in an AI driven world. Somewhere we can fortify our human connections, and explore new avenues of creativity.
Right now though, I’m in that London with the family. The photo at the top was taken a short while ago after we watched Stranger Things The First Shadow on stage. Get to the theatre and see it. An easy 5/5 if not more.
#ThePictures
I picked up this book by Irish Photographer and music producer Eamonn Doyle with words by Kevin Barry. If you fancy a flick through the images there’s a video here.
A beautiful book unlike any other photo book I own. Stark, striking and mostly shot from above. It puts cliche aside and tells today's stories of Ireland.
#TheWords
“An autotelic[1] is someone or something that has a purpose in, and not apart from, itself.”
Last week I learned the word Autotelic from Dan Kieran and I’m hanging on to it. It’s way better than generalist. I can very much relate to it.
Big gods and the origin of human cooperation.
Long read: A meteor brighter than the sun smashes into Russia. Afterwards, a local named Andrei Breivichko founded a group he called the Church of the Chelyabinsk Meteorite. The meteor, he said, was holy.
#TheSound
I’ve subscribed to the Cluster F Theory Podcast. It’s a brand new project and at time of writing six issues has just dropped into the feed. It’s from producer and writer Gia Milinovich and cultural theorist Professor Timotheus Vermeulen. The tagline is ‘Concepts for catastrophic times’. A much needed listen. Search ‘Cluster F Theory’ in your pod-catcher of choice. I just listened to the first episode on the train and I’m already well invested.
The Streets of London by Ralf McTell is the first song I remember asking to hear over and over again. Not yet old enough to use the tape player I’d take the cassette to my mum and ask her to put it on. I’m pretty sure it was my dad’s kind of music which was far more strait laced. It was all about the words for me. And how they painted a picture for me.
The people featured in the lyrics were mostly Parisians that Ralph remembers from his travels.
What makes an album the greatest of all time?
#TheConsumed
Britain’s bitter bread battle.
My finest culinary catastrophe this week was attempting to make up a recipe involving black bean paste.
The fried veg and rice dish would have been amazing if I could read Korean. Inside the box was a bag of black beaney goop. So I cut open the bag and poured it all in. The kids loved it. Although they had much less than me as I hate waste.
It tasted really strong and incredibly salty. But we ate what we could. Which for me was all of it. As I said… I hate waste. When I’d finished I googled some proper recipes using the goop and they recommended between 2 and 4 table spoons of the paste should be used. I had used 21.
The next thing I searched up was “how much salt do you have to eat to get acute salt poisoning.” But I couldn’t find the answer. I was too thirsty. In fact I think I drank more water over the rest of the day than I had for the preceding week. Weirdly my blood pressure was fine the following morning.
Would I eat it again? Probably. It was tasty. But I shall use it VERY sparingly.
#TheThings
As mentioned above I have managed to get my hands on the new Fujifilm X100VI
Here are my initial thoughts in audio. It’s 10m 45s and I mostly chat about my X100 journey from 2011 to now, the current hype, the things I like and what I’m getting used to. At one point there’s the sound of hale as big as conkers hitting the shed roof.
All in all I’m really pleased with it. I just need to re-find my flow. I’m not looking forward to processing buckets of huge raw files. But more on my data storage issues below.
I have an 8TB Drobo (raid-based hard drive backup) which is filling up, and as the company went into liquidation last year I really need to sort out an alternative back up. While at the Photo and Video Show last week, I was keen to do some research into NAS drives but failed to dig that deep into the options. If you have an opinion on this, please let me know.
Charlie aka Beardy aka The Tall Photographer was also at the photo show with a similar mission and is considering tape back up. That’s a surprise to me as although I am aware that tape was still being used, I had no idea it still sat along side Synology and QNAP as a financially viable option.
Having put my feelers out for an easy to use 4 bay drive option (similar to my Drobo) I’m being recommended Synology far more than QNAP. No one has yet to recommend a seed drive. (This article by Bryn Robinson will explain more on that). Who knows what the data storage systems of the near future will look like. In my lifetime alone we have gone from 1.2MB 8” Floppy Discs to 2TB Micro SD cards. That little memory card, smaller than a fingernail, can hold the same as 1,747,627 8” floppy disks. Mind blown.
It’s 15 years ago today (according to Twitter) that I got my first Drobo and while rummaging round to find an SD card for my new camera I found this Sandisk 4TB Extreme Ducati Edition SD Card from around the same time.
It was pretty fast back in 2007-8, and I originally bought the card so I could travel light and transfer photos from my camera to my laptop without needing to cary a card reader. Not long after re-finding this in the back of a drawer I was served this YouTube short telling me this little card could now be treasure.
In some places it can go for £500. I doubt YouTube knew what was in my drawer. It had probably spotted me buying this 256GB MicroSD card. It seems MicroSD cards are cheaper than SD cards of the same spec. Perhaps because more Micro SD cards are made.
#TheThanks
I must thank the paying subscribers that pay $5/month to get all the content I share into this feed. Please consider upgrading to become a paid supporter. Thank you for reading, sharing and liking.
#TheWeb
60 years ago yesterday... Original Pirate Material
The Documentally community map is for everyone to get a sense of where we are in the world. Please add your approximate location or if you wish I can do it for you.
Global warming is affecting global timekeeping.
Project Ellman - Googles plan for a digital twin chat bot. “We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment. When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear.”
Some of my other places include Letterboxd, Discogs, GoodReads, FarceBook, Flickr, Strava, Untappd, LinkedIn, YouTube, Mastodon, a ham radio newsletter or search ‘Documentally’ on Wire, Birdsite, Bluesky or Daft Social.
#TheEnd
It’s the holidays. I’ll no doubt be back but don’t wait for me. Do something amazing. Or many things. Big or small. And if you feel like it, let me know what it is/was. Keep in touch.
And thanks for reading.
If you believe that fighting for your freedom means denying someone else theirs, then you are not fighting for freedom. You are fighting for supremacy.
~ Karim Wafa Al-Hussaini
Fight.
See you out there.
Over…
What is on the fitting / lens guard end of your lens? I have the X100VI, too. Mine looks substantially larger. Does that vignette at all? I'm guessing the answer is no but it's so much more streamlined than the hood I use.
I've had a synology so long now I've forgotten how long I've had it (technically 2 - first one around 2003/4. It eventually became unsupported so I moved on, I think in around 2012). This one has had a disk upgrade in 2018 or 19. Granted I don't do anything fancy with it, just use as a fileserver - if I tried running more of the server packages it might show it's age.