The tide changes

At the end of last year, we were back in Japan to attend the wedding of one of my best friends. Though I was working, we also managed to get away for a couple of days and go skiing in the Japanese alps, which was fantastic. Some 50-70cm of snowfall (we were there right at the beginning of the season, so we were pretty lucky) and the weather was quite good (though pretty foggy, it was great fun).

It was basically a 2-week trip and was sandwiched between other life events, so it kind of came and went.

In other news, I’ve peeled back even further several aspects of the site. Most notably, is the domain name (the address), which I changed from my personal name to something anonymous. Back when I started the blog, in 2010, I was an active user on Flickr and several other photographic communities online- DP-review, Google’s own social network; Google+, 500px, and probably a few others. They’ve all changed massively, or even died off altogether. Google killed their social network, which was actually kind of cool, but was hard to monetise… Flickr was sold to Yahoo and then Pro accounts left right and centre popped up and I just kind of did my own thing. I went with Squarespace, hosted all my photos on their CMS (content management service) and was a satisfied customer for over 10 years. I’ve another post detailing why I left Squarespace, but I had to laugh as this year Squarespace are running a Super Bowl commercial starring Emma Stone. Imagine how much that costs?! Well, that’s what you can do when you double your prices and get massive investor funding, I guess. You fuck over the people that built your brand, but you don’t care. It’s the process of enshittification, which is well documented online. Because I am not trying to sell you anything, I don’t need Squarespace’s e-commerce bloatware. I left them, and now host for free on Github. The next chapter to this saga, is that Google also hiked up their prices, mainly in the name of our new lovely friend AI. Or rather, the fact that everyone overspent on AI and now needs to scramble to make some money back. I bought my domain through GoDaddy with Google Workspace, which was then sold … to Squarespace! So I was back at Square[space] one. I killed the Workspace requirement as I don’t need a whole separate email account, Google Drive, and AI features. I make nothing from the website, and considering it is 100% human-writtean and human-taken content in the forms of my writing and photographs, I feel it’s acceptable for me to find cheap or cost-effective ways to keep it going. I don’t have any adverts on the site, and I don’t keep cookies of visitors for advertising purposes etc. So, I killed it.

While I was at it, I decided to just kill the domain name. Using firstname.lastname.com was taken and has been for a number of years, with no-one using that domain for a site, which is sad. Adding “photography” as a prefix was nice, but made the url very long, and I want to do more here than just put up travel pics. So, I came up with a new domain name. Inspired by Cyberpunk and Ghost in The Shell as well as my life-in-Japan, I came up with “kuroshi”, which means “black tide” in Japanese. I wanted this to be a piece of the net, which changes so much year on year with everything happening on the web. I do prefer the old days of the web, before everything was commercialised, and before “the public” started writing on Facebook walls and joining this thing called Twitter. My Twitter account predates Elon Musk’s; but he is able to buy it and fuck it up, and I must just watch. Things were indeed better before they were ruined, but there are plenty of great blogs and interesting things going on, on the net. In Cyberpunk 2077 there is this notion of the Black Wall, a firewall to keep the rogue AIs out. Each month I think we’re getting closer to that. Right now, and AI will be crawling through my site and picking out text for its model. That’s fine. But I am me, and this is my kuroshi. It is a tide against the enshittification of the internet, and generally all digital services. It is a statement to listen to physical media again, to disconnect from your smartphone for SEVERAL HOURS, to pick up a standalone camera. To use an old computer, offline. To see technology as something helpful, not essential to our very existence.

I discuss this topic with people more and more; how many things seem to be getting worse. And this isn’t just me getting older and thinking that things were better when I was a child (they were), or even just pre-Covid (they also were), but this is something different, linked to surveillance states, populist politics, little-to-no reasonable discourse, the sortening of tempers, the lack of civility and common manners, the increased selfishness, and the overall lack of excitement for the future. Perhaps China and India are the only nations with significant populations that are indeed looking forward to the future? I have no idea. I just observe Japan dwindling each year since 1990, being in stangnant economy and relying on the ever-weakening yen to support influxes of tourists. I see a Europe that has been navel-gazing since 2000, with the UK thinking that the US would return the favour unevquivocally for support in the Gulf War(s), 9/11’s WMD Iraq excursion, and Afghanistan 2.0. Instead, the UK left the EU, due to press showboating African migrants and reugees from the fallout of helping the US fuck the middle east. Germany has its head up its arse since WWII, worried about bad press and appearing to patriotic, they have given the country over to immigrants and now Deutsche Bahn employees are being beaten to death on trains by people without tickets. The less said about France, the better, and I can highlight the Land of the Free(TM) taking control of Venezuela to secure some juicy mineral deposits, distract from Epstein’s network of filth, oh, and turn on NATO co-members to take control of Greenland because it’ll be great to have some golf courses up there, and China and Russia might want it for a Cuban Missile Crisis sequel. There have often been wars and times of unrest, throughout most of humanity, I’m sure. Pax Eterna of Britannica and the British Empire is often hailed as 100 years of peace, and they did that without biometric ID and age-verification online to protect the children, because the parents have all but shirked all responsibility onto the state to raise their kids.

I will continue to post photos, write about things that interest me, talk about basically 1995-2010 as something of a golden-era. I am writing this post on a netbook from 2010. Then iPads took over and phones became massive, and now there’s hardly any small tech. This netbook struggles with the modern web, because loading Reddit or The Guardian requires at least 500MB RAM and then there’s all the GPU or CPU resource needed to feed you ads.

Which can bring me on to something of a project focussed on e-waste, or at least that’s one way in which I am justifying my rampant eBay purchasing. I’m writing this post in terminal (so, like a code editor), on a Sony netbook from 2011. Specifically a Sony Vaio P with an Intel Atom processor and 2GB RAM. The SSD inside is only 64GB and is slower than today’s devices. I have Windows 7 Ultimate installed, which works surprisingly well. One issue is the high resolution of the screen and DPI scaling - fonts are tiny! I have installed Linux onto this device, specifically AntiX 32bit. It’s a very fast OS and the device is extremely usable. The main issue is that even though it has wifi (with a nice hardware toggle switch so I can be truly offline and save battery), the internet of 2026, as I mentioned before, is a RAM hog. So, even loading up google.com today takes a decent amount of time, let alone a typical website. I have my phone for web browsing, and the web is and always has been better for vertical content - and this is a very, very wide screen. Perfect for watching a video, which it can do nicely, if you use Windows. The battery lasts for about 3 hours and is the standard and original battery that came wth the device. It’s also neon-green, so that’s kind of cool. The nice thing is, for writing, I don’t need more than this. The keyboard is great for its size and I can touch type comfortably. I would like to pick up another one, perhaps in white or black, with the Z560 CPU and 128 or 256 GB of SSD space. They all came with 2GB RAM I believe, but the larger drive works faster and I could maybe do a bit more with it. Oh yes, it has an SD card reader and Memory Stick Duo reader at the front, a little track-point nub mouse like Thinkpads, as well as an optical mouse to the right of the screen. This is to be used with one’s thumb when holding the device almost like a tablet - the left and right click buttons are on the other side for the left thumb. This also works surprisingly well.

I appreciate that it makes little-to-no-sense posting at the end of February with photos taken at the beginning of summer

The net is vast and infinite.