Wordy Nerdy Girl

Since 2017, I have only done stuff that I thought was interesting or useful regardless of whether it pays, because we have more than enough money, and despite what billionaires might tell you, there is literally no difference between "more than enough" and "much more than enough."

So I no longer work for money. But in retirement one must keep busy, which is why I have taken on an unpaid gig as the social media intern for a coffee and tea business that donates 100% of its profit to charity.

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

“Huh,” said Dad very casually. “Did you get charged for it?” 

I spent the next five minutes checking my bank account and came back into the living room to announce, “No, I didn’t. Do you think it’s a mistake? But it has my name on it! what does this mean”

It was around the time that I started to sound panicked that Dad confessed to buying it for me (“I didn’t realize the mystery of it would be so terrifying”). Which was very, very sweet and slightly unfortunate because yesterday I purchased a replacement kindle for myself. 

“But who would do this?” she said to my father who said he was sure he had no idea. “A student? A stranger? Someone who broke into my car to steal it but felt bad about how dirty it was? WHO??”

Eventually Dad was like, “Honey. It was clearly me.”

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.

part of autism is just being incredibly stressed. overstimulation? stress. holding a conversation? stress. something happening to our schedule? stress. people talk about how often autism is recognized and diagnosed via our stress responses (like meltdowns) because it is just so common to see autistic people stressed because of lack of accommodations to how our brains work.

like. loud noises physically hurt. it’s like a static shock from my ears to my spine that doesn’t stop until the volume goes back down. i thought we all agreed that ‘that’s too loud!’ and covering our ears meant ‘ouch!’. turns out i’ve been dealing with a stressor almost no one else has, my whole life, alone.

nature is healing

When I was 14, my friends and I went to see Madagascar 3 - told our parents and then walked to and from the theater by ourselves. When I got home, my mom asked me all kinds of questions about the movie, and I told her about it, and I kept singing the stupid Afro Circus song