Author: Seth Werkheiser

GOODBYE, APPLE PHOTOS

The photo you see on the right is from 2002, which is 22 years ago. Apple’s iPhoto launched the same year, but I didn’t get my first Mac until 2003, which is when I must’ve started pouring photos into my computer.

Here we are 20+ years later, and my Photos library is over 350GB in space, but too large to sit on my my new 512GB MacBook Pro.

So the file sits on a 2TB external HD. Everytime I click on a photo, or an album, or anything, I get a beachball.

And since I’m getting more into taking photos with an actual digital camera, that means I need to put more photos into iPhoto (or whatever the fuck it’s called now), which just means more of the same – beachballs, slow, partially downloaded images.

So I finally exported all my photos by year into their own folder.

Yep, everything is out of sort, nothing is tagged, I lose the whole AI functionality of finding the word “burger” in a sign from a decade ago, but that’s ok with me. I also can’t bring up any photo on my phone at any time, but oh well.

I have over 3,000 screen shots.

What the fuck do I need all those for?

And did you know if you have LIVE PHOTOS turned on, like every image has a corresponding video file of a 2-5 seconds?

So 1000 photos is really 2000 files. Of shit I’ll never need again in my life.

Somehow I have duplicate files – sometimes 3x, 4x, 5x copies. Zero idea why.

Not sure the designers of Apple Photos planned on people like me with 22 years of photos, but here we are.

CDS ARE REAL

CJ Chilvers knows his music, so when he streamed Extreme’s Cupid’s Dead he got a surprise:

“I noticed something new in the song “Cupid’s Dead.” Trumpets! I had 30 years of experience with that song. There had never been horns in it. But here they were, being annoying as hell and obscuring Nuno’s incredible riffs.”

I had the same experience with Soundgarden’s ‘Outshined.’

When you’ve listened to a song for THIRTY YEARS you notice the difference, and it’s jarring.

CJ’s “Why I went back to buying CDs (and you should too)” is well worth the time, and makes me want to get back to building my CD collection.

SOME WONDERFUL CATS

My cat Blue, wagging is tail and giving me that look because he hasn’t been fed in 12 minutes. What a scamp.

This little guy came to say hello while I was out for a walk, and thankfully had my camera ready for such a treat.

FIND THE FOG

I planned on visiting one park, but the highway was closed off, so I just kept driving. Eventually, I saw a hill and some fog, so I drove towards the fog and found this park.

It was wet, cold, and gross, perfect for keeping other people away.

I’m also a sucker for views without much of a view. Overcast sheets of nothing are good for my soul.

COMFORT SHOES

I don’t know how I got on this email list, but I can’t look away. It’s atrocious in every way. All images. It’s a train wreck.

I can’t unsubscribe from this nightmare.

CHASING SHADOWS

The sun was going down, so I grabbed my cameras (my god, I can’t believe I’m writing that) and headed outside. It was in the low 40s but for whatever reason, I really enjoy going out and seeing what I can see. The above was taken with the NOMO CAM INS W.

Shot with NOMO CAM 135 GR.

Not shown here is the few shots I took with my Canon P Rangefinder. I finished up my first roll of film with that. Can’t wait to get that developed and see how bad I did!

I also took a few shots with my point and shoot film camera. That roll is almost done, too.

Just last month I sent off one roll of film to be developed, and now this month I’ll be sending off THREE ROLLS. Who the heck am I?

NO GOING BACK

Here’s the terrifying thing about the state of music in 2024 (from The Verge):

“The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.”

Like, that happened 20+ years ago and we’re still recovering. All the music knowledge, the time we spent going to those stores, the jobs that were cut and lost… the digitization of music is an atomic bomb that I don’t think we’ve recovered from.

Back when we paid $16 for a CD, yes, music review sites were crucial. And of course, yes, music critics are of course needed, but they’re not valued (as we can see).

There was a time you could write for an online outlet and make a few bucks. There was also a time when you could write for a newspaper and pay the rent.

Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist. 

That’s from Defector (above).

When I ran Noisecreep in 2008 we were paying writers $50 a post.

A few years later, I was writing posts for $5 a post.

Now Yahoo for Creators isn’t even paying per post, but they “offer a competitive 50/50 ad revenue share from ad placements in your articles as well as e-commerce benefits like affiliate revenue share.”

CPM display ad placements. On blog posts. It’s 2005 all over again.