Category Archives: posse

These are sent to microblog which posts them to mastodon.

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Likes What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit.

Someone told me that her friend was having a chatbot write her husband a poem for their anniversary, which made me wonder if the husband desired a polished product or an expression from the heart. In Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the big-nosed title character ghostwrites love letters for his friend to the Roxanne both of them love. She comes to realise it’s the author of the letters she really loves. What happens when you realise the true love who touched your heart is’nt even human? Accepting it as your Al lover seems to be one answer.

I enjoyed the comparison of ai with Cyrano, and the rest of the article was striking.

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iframe{margin:0px;mix-blend-mode: screen; /* Blend mode to make black transparent */}

The other day I was exploring Are.na and saw a lovely gif. I’ve been thinking about the animations created by Ade that are quite analogue and wonder-filled, example. I had thought about some sort of JavaScript & css version the would show a transparent gif over a slideshow of images. I’d tried a few but none looked very nice. This new gif looked amazing and I downloaded it and incorporated it a file I was testing. It looked a lot better than my other efforts.

Thinking to publish this experiment, I started trying to find the original to see how it was licensed. Are.na has a nice feature where you can pass an image to a Google search. This didn’t turn up anything useful except a Pinterest link to a YouTube video. This must have been the source of the gif.

In my testing I’d used the css mix-blend-mode to make the black areas of the gif transparent, so I wondered about the video. Turns out if you target the iframe that is YouTube video embed code that works too. The image behind swaps out every 3 seconds.

Compare with the original video & with the background on a separate page: Transparent Youtube.

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3x3 grid of images, photos with a map in the centre. From topleft: The moon setting behind some trees, a sun lit orad, a sunling path trough bracken, a winter tree with the rising sun behind, the map, a raven wings outspread agaist a blue sky, an oak tree, a ranve perched on a rock, a buzzard in a hawthorn tree.

I arrived at the Kilpatrick hills car park at dawn this morning. It was already pretty full. Frosty with a clear sky. The full moon going down. More folk than usual on the tracks and paths. Saw a few redwing feeding on hawthorn along with blackies & thrushes.
Beautiful warm light to start, long shadows.
The frozen ground was much nicer than the usual bog between Loch Humphrey and Duncolm.
On Duncolm a raven circled diving & twisting with quiet croaks. Seemed unfazed by me and came quite close, shining in the sun. Saw a few more on the way back. A little egret in the horse field. I wonder if they come to the field when the tide is high. I saw this one at 12:30 and high tide at Old Kilpatrick was at 12:40 today. I’ll try and keep a note.
Nice view of a buzzard in a hawthorn near the road and a flock of fieldfares on the field and hawthorn.

Photos on flickr & on the

walkmap