Swerving at the speed of light

he’s started posting daily rug sighting updates now

update: apparently he’s not the only one

(notice the timestamp on that photo was from march)

Saint Roch, by Francesco Ribalta, c. 1625, Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia

I wanted to last year but I 'never got round to it'. I kill a lot of plants (not on purpose. ADHD and constant watering is hard, and sometimes it's just me confused as fuck about why I suddenly have x thing happening to my leaves) and kind of felt it was hopeless anyway.

Then I was reading your posts, and how you were seeing biodiversity in even small little hopeful changes. And I was like. Hey. Even if I do kill the plants. They will feed insects for a little, while they survive, and after, I can put them in my compost pile and they will feed more insects, and the flowers (if I get any) will feed bees (which are my special children) and so, even if it doesn't give me food, and even if they die, it might be worth it to try.

I never ate the cilantro. Turns out my flatmate has the soap gene. But it flowered like CRAZY and there were SO many happy pollinators.

I ate so many green onion shoots. The bulbs I still haven't pulled because they just keep giving me shoots to eat.

The mint is going HAM and also the insects loved the flowers.

The cucumber plants went absolutely APESHIT and produced flowers ALL SUMMER, and they were BEAUTIFUL, and I couldn't walk outside without a bee or, occasionally, a butterfly dropping by. It's STILL FLOWERING in NOVEMBER in PHILLY and now I have ladybugs and fireflies. FIREFLIES! I didn't see a single one last year and now they love my balcony and I love them so much. I only got two cucumbers but I don't even care.

I had a bunch of nonedibles in a little greenhouse thing, and they flowered too, and I'd find random bugs (a grasshopper. Huge. Massive) in there hanging out. They died when the greenhouse got blown over but they lasted longer than I ever expected to keep a plant alive.

The birds came by my balcony despite the cat avidly watching them by the window. More types of birds, too. And my little compost box is constantly happy with fruit flies and regular flies and things I don't recognize. I never did get around to buying worms, but I haven't had to because the insects are having a blast in there and every time I think "oh, it'll be full" it is, once again, not full because it has been broken down further.

There is a tiny ecosystem on my 6th floor apartment balcony because you get excited about plants, and it was inspiring enough to get me off my ass. Because even if I didn't eat my plants, you reminded me SOMETHING ELSE WOULD.

Scrolling the timeline on Mother's Day can be hard for me so last year I decided to turn my grief into something positive.

This year, I decided to make it a tradition.

I noticed people were posting a lot of old, degraded photos of their parents. So I try to pick a few good candidates to restore.

I spent a couple of years learning how to do this. I am very good at it. And I really enjoy it. But I learned it isn't very lucrative and most people are fine with what AI can do now.

It makes me a bit sad, but I actually think restoring people's precious memories is not the worst use of AI. Plus, I use several AI tools in my workflow. When there is extensive damage, generative fill is a lifesaver. The remove tool makes quick work of stubborn accumulated dust. And AI upscaling makes the photos printable, often at many times their original size.

My restorations are still much better than the free AI ones. I edit them with a precision and fidelity that can hold up to 400% magnification. I take special care to preserve likenesses and often work with reference photos to make sure people's loved ones still look like who they are after upscaling. I also do colorizing by hand (though I will sometimes make initial color maps with AI). I color grade using film stock color references so the photos still look like film, and I add texture and grain selectively to keep people from looking like smooth rubber.

But that kind of quality takes so much time. One photo is probably several hundred dollars of labor. And no one is willing to pay that so I have to charge below minimum wage.

I will probably just do pro bono restorations from here on out. Focus on fixing photos that AI isn't very good at restoring. Plus I have a ton of family photos that I want to restore for my niece. At some point, years from now, she'll be old enough to talk to me without my brother's permission. And she'll probably want to know who her grandparents were. I hope to be ready with photos and stories by that time.

In any case, it felt nice to do this on a hard day. And it helped clarify to myself how I should use this skill I've developed going forward.

Before and afters...

I've had to deal with intense color casts before, but never a green one. Thankfully, the original color was still in the data, but figuring out how to filter out the bad green and keep the good green required a lot of problem-solving.

The original was actually in really good shape and had a lot of detail. But there were just so many people in the photo and they all needed individual exposure correction on their faces. And I colored everything manually. I think this ended up being over 400 layers by the end.

For this one, the car was completely blown out and had no data. But I posted it in a bunch of vintage car forums and was able to identify the make and model. I replaced the blown out car with a better photo of the exact same model from the same year. Then I researched what paint color options were available and matched that as well.

This is one where folks might assume I used AI, but aside from my upscaling tool, I actually did this with traditional compositing techniques. It is probably one of the most damaged photos I've been able to save.

Her facial likeness was completely destroyed.

However, I restored this other photo of her.

And I was able to use it as a reference to restore her likeness in the lake photo.

It doesn't hold up as well as I'd like at this magnification, but considering how damaged it was, I am pretty happy with the result. And I think I was able to make it look like her again.

One might think photo restoration is only about saving really old photos, but I have fixed modern wedding photos that were taken in bad light and I regularly use these skills to fix smartphone photos.

My phone is getting old and is in bad shape. The back fell off and I keep it together with a case. And the lenses are unprotected and hard to clean. So all of my photos look a bit hazy now. But sometimes it is all I have to capture a moment. So I take photos and hope my editing magic can fix them.

I took this out my front window on a foggy morning.

I actually got a court summons for having that chair in my front yard.

It's a long story.

And I just had a visit from a foxy friend the other day.

So I just left the chair in my yard.

It rained soon after and I realized this pleather chair was waterproof. It shrugged off the rain and was perfectly fine. I then sat in the chair and it was a comfortable place to sit outside and relax.

So I left the chair where it was.

I can't leave the house much, so I have to find photographic opportunities close by. I eventually started incorporating the chair into my photography.

This thing was nigh invulnerable. No season was able to damage it.

And I did a fun Halloween bit with it.

It was in my yard for over a year, bothering no one.

But then I got a warning letter in the mail. The county inspector claimed I had "rubbish" in my yard and I had to remove it. I'm suspicious that a neighbor tattled on me.

I am making a lot of progress with my health. But I am at a stage where I have to get worse to get better. So I am currently bed bound most days. I have very few good days where I could move a big red chair.

It took me a few weeks, but as soon as I had a good day, I dragged the chair back into my garage and out of sight.

But it was not soon enough.

The inspector referred me to the court and I got a summons for not complying.

So now I have to appear before a judge and explain why I had a chair in my front yard.

I'm hoping they will accommodate my disability and let me do it over a zoom call. This all feels like a silly waste of time. I have neighbors with old cars on their lawn. I keep my lawn maintained and others let it grow two feet high.