I’ve lied and deceived you all! Or some of you. Maybe? Anyway, I spill the beans in my new blog post, The Truth About My September Photoblogging Challenge. 👀
The Truth About My September Photoblogging Challenge
This September, Micro.blog ran a photoblogging challenge: snap a photo every day based on a prompt. I participated for the first 14 days before… life happened. 🤷♂️ But I had a lot of fun with the challenge for those two weeks. And really enjoyed seeing what everyone else was coming up with throughout the month.
Congratulations and well done to everyone who participated!
I promised to reveal all the machine-generated images after the challenge. Yes, some of my entries were not snapped by me, but instead dreamed up by a text-to-image model. First, here’s a complete list of my 14 entries:
- Day 1: abstract
- Day 2: buildup
- Day 3: precious
- Day 4: orange
- Day 5: forest
- Day 6: well
- Day 7: panorama
- Day 8: yonder
- Day 9: language
- Day 10: cycle
- Day 11: retrospect
- Day 12: panic
- Day 13: glowing
- Day 14: statue
Five of these were generated by software: buildup, orange, well, retrospect, and panic. I also broke the cycle for day 10 and published a photo taken by my dad. The rest of the entries were snapped by yours truly.
Going into the challenge, I was prepared to lie, not only with the generated images but also with my writing. To trick and deceive you all. 😇 But it never came to that. So, the stroll I took and the beer I drank… all of that actually happened.
Phew. It feels good getting that out there; no more lying on my blog. For now.
Thanks to everyone who followed along and guessed how the images were made. I fooled you a few times, but over all, I’m very impressed with your ability to identify synthographs.
I mentioned the 90s clear-craze back in June, and maybe it’s just me, but I sense a small renaissance is going on. Just in the last week or so, both Analogue and Flipper Devices released translucent editions of their gadgets. I don’t mind! 🤤
I’m enjoying a cozy little puzzle game called Automatoys. Simple controls, lo-fi jazzy tunes, lagom difficulty. The developer, Steffan Glynn, was inspired by the vintage arcade Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. 🕹️
You should watch Bottoms. Best friends PJ and Josie start a fight club in the name of female self-empowerment as a scheme to get other high schoolers to have sex with them. Hilarious and unhinged! 🍿
Look at this work of art. What a beauty. 😍 Nice work, @aparrish.
i made this custom game boy flash cart by "dead bug" soldering a DIP parallel flash chip to a cartridge edge breakout board that i designed. there's no memory bank controller in here, so you can only flash roms up to 32kb (i have tetris on there now haha) but i like how it turned out!
GitHub now has a setting to underline links. 👏 Thanks @eric et al.
A lot of accessibility work is a progress over perfection mindset, with a mind to the long game. Which is to say onwards and upwards!
If Listen to Page in Safari on iOS is grayed out, check Siri’s language setting—it must match the webpage’s language. I struggled with this when Siri was set to Swedish while I tried to listen to English posts. Weirdly, the old Spoken Content feature doesn’t have this language restriction.
When you take a screenshot of a webpage in iOS 17, you get to choose between Screen and Full Page. Neat!
Oh, wow, what a badass move! Bill Willingham gets fed up with DC Comics and sends Fables into the public domain. 👏👏👏
I misremembered and thought today’s prompt was sculpture, not statue. What a fail. So no guessing this time. This is John Bauermonumentet. Sculpted by Karl Hultström in 1931 and photographed by this fellow human today, during a stroll through the city park. 👸
I’m taking Apple’s Self Service Repair for a spin. (I’ve sourced parts and service manuals in… less official ways in the past.) The experience is okay so far, except that they reserved 16,543.32 kr (roughly $1,482) on my debit card should I take the rented tools and run. 🫠 So, it’s not for everyone.
Keep in mind that for some, it’s still hump day! 😊 Here’s my entry for day 13 and the prompt glow. Is it produced by wetware 🧔♀️ or software 🤖?
Karin af Klintberg’s latest film, Kungen, features an extraordinary synthy and organic soundtrack by Katharina Nuttall. Kinda reminds me of the score from The White Lotus. Well worth a listen on YouTube. 🎵
For day 12, the prompt is panic. Would you bolt if you saw this shadow? And was it captured by me 🧔♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?
We made apple pie for today’s commercial special event! 😋
Tonight, I enjoyed a cold beer in the evening sun on our balcony. So in retrospect, getting those cans of Okinawa-style lager from teenage engineering was a good call. But, is this a photo I took 🧔♀️ or the creation of a text-to-image model 🤖?
Let’s break the cycle for day ten. Here’s a throwback of me riding a bike in the summer of ‘93. Captured by good ol’ dad. Definitely human.
I know my way around a few languages – programming ones, that is. Like assembly language for the classic Sharp LR35902 (the CPU of the original Game Boy). But here’s a question for you: did I 🧔♀️ take this pic of the handheld, or was it cooked up by a text-to-image model 🤖?
The prompt for day eight is yonder. Are those tourists actually real, captured by a human photographer 🧔♀️, or are they just the creation of a neural network 🤖?
