Nice!

I finally gave my all-but unused Instagram account the heave-ho last week. Left with a “Am tired of Meta’s enshittification of their sites…” message.

Besides I have a pro account on Flickr, (for a loooong time - from when it was a yahoo property) and that is SO much quieter and friendly since it’s just about photographs.

Yeah, twatter needs to meet a slow, costly, end for Musk.

Kit looks more she/her than the OG icon.

Hmm… …the silliness continues.

I adore those critters. Lived for a while in the Bay Area and had friends in the hills above Santa Cruz, so knew full well about them.

Fast forward some 25 years and my dad decides after the end of the third divorce to leave New England move to the California mid-coast… and he tells me about these humongous yellow and black slugs… I told him they feel really cool and to pick one up.

He calls me a week later to grumble that he did… but oh, by the way, did I forget to mention that their slime was like a natural form of contact cement that took days for him to get off his hands?

Why no dad… I did not forget.

I love you too.

Oh hey… I used to get those all the time as a kid!

Eventually I worked out that it could be made to instantly go away if I stopped breathing and just stretched my shoulders back and twisted in the same direction that the cramp was on

It always felt like a stabby, stabby muscle twinge right under my rib bones.

I think so? (Am still running Mojave because I have 32-bit programs I use almost daily.)

NGL, I’ve been to that point, getting others to just let go of QuickTime and use VLC instead… LOL!

Appears as if three are looking over the right shoulder of the photographer. Only one is looking straight into the lens.

That, and the color of the suits really isn’t helping.

I dunno… the Tiny Dish of the Chef’s Sincerity looks like it may be a banger of an item…

I think a lot of people also forget that there was a gamut of immune response to Covid… It ranged from no issues at all to dropping dead within a few weeks. At what point did the low oxygenation in those made just ill enough from Covid to end up with breating problems, also get a touch of mental decline from that as well?

I know a lot of people that seemed much quicker on the uptake and had more mental acuity before Covid… and historically I’d be the first one to take the position that I don’t know shit and usually have my head up my ass. Now, I’m the one that seems to have my shit together when so many no longer do.

WTF?

Dementia.

Everyone thinks it means all of the sudden you stand in the corner mumbling at the walls and wearing your underpants above your clothes… but it starts oftentimes years ahead of diagnosis with irrational, defiant, rash decisions that are put down to stubbornness and age.

Also, Trump IS terrified of ending up like his father, so in keeping with what he learned from Roy Cohn, it’s about keeping everyone around him off-balance so they can’t tell if it’s really mental impairment, or some “5D chess” move he’s making.

Ultimately, he probably at this point, doesn’t know himself. Part malignant narcissist, part desperate terror, part dementia and part self-delusiuon.

Getting to all of one’s content is the rub. You can’t delete more than a years’ worth of comments. Reddit locked all the older posts and threads down once the IPO dropped, so they could privatize it and sell it for AI training. Last October, I got permabanned after 14 years there, and could only delete my comments that went back as October 2024.

Weirdly enough, someone (or a bot doing some training?) randomly responded to an ancient (over 7 years ago) comment I made and it popped up in my Reddit mailbox… Shouldn’t be able to get replies as content that old is usually archived and static. But not this. Hmmm. I of course deleted it and worked my way though as many of the threads under that post to find any other comments I may have made, but I could not get to any other content that was as old.

I still maintain a few logins to swing through and check for any more of my content coming up… Going to get as much of it gone as I can. I’m patient.

Hmmm…

I wonder if it would be possible for a lawsuit to open up Reddit to banned users who still have their accounts who also want to delete their content. All I could get at was the prior years worth of comments I made, but the earlier 14 years worth is still there, but unreachable.

If I can’t play the game anymore, I would like to take my ball and bat back before I leave, thankyouverymuch.

It’s Reddit. It’s a cesspool run by trash humans.

Yeah, corporate advertisers.

Can’t speak of violence guns or anything else, lest it upset the VERY kinds of people looking for that “Disney” sensibility the Mayor of Minneapolis refered to last night, after he got asked about dropping the F-bomb in response to the shooting yesterday.

It’s squeeky-clean and “sanitized” for your protection, now that it had it’s IPO and went mainstream.

Come on, what do we all expect? Everyone here is old enough to know how this all rolls.

It’s all got to be puppies and daffodils and fairy tales that keep the shoppers feeling safe and spending.

Capitalism 101: Keep the consumers warm and fuzzy.

If you ever get a chance to see any of his works in a gallery or museum… do it! The colors glow like nothing you’ve seen.

When I was little, I had an aunt that had one of the prints called Ecstasy - from 1929 - in her home.

Faded and of course stained (even though it was under glass) from the chain smoking she did.

It was one of her most cherished things, so I learned everything she knew about Parrish - she had an encyclopedic book on his technique which I read from cover to cover and as I got older, I tried my hand at glazing - a fierce technique of layering transparent and translucent color onto panel or canvas.

Each color separated by a clear coat so you look into the image, like stained glass, layers deep.

Years later, there was a comprehensive show of his pieces that came to the Currier Museum in New Hampshire (early 90’s IIRC) and I got tickets for myself and auntie…

I got to his most famous image - Daybreak - and the colors in it are beyond anything that any online photos show.

Not even the NY Lithographic Society that initially had rights to the image come close.

Pinks and magentas in the trees that frame the image that take your breath away. I stood in front of that painting for a good 15 minutes and have the colors burned into my mind.

At some point, if I can find a good enough high-res copy, I’m going to try my hand at doing a CMYK color separation of the image (with Photoshop or GIMP) and readjust to what it actually looks like. No one’s gotten it right. I’ve always been a bit of a colorist and zoom in on tint, tone and shade, so this challenge is one that hits my artistic monkeybone, big time.

I won’t even get into the landscapes of the New Hampshire winters and the evening light he recreated in those images. You can fall into them.

Definitely, again, if you ever get a chance to see a real Parrish… do it. It’s absolute magic.

Maxfield Parrish’s use of color theory and it’s application in his glazed paintings made using most often (esp. for commercial works made for print) cyan, magenta, hansa yellow and lamp black pigments in a translucent medium.