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Tag Archives: photography
MCICR: The Color Crunching Algorithm Time Forgot
You know, when I wrote that initial post on PageMill, I wasn’t expecting to find a new rabbit hole to go down every time I explore the CD-ROM. It’s just happened that way! There’s so much included on it, so many weird, forgotten relics of the 90s, software you can’t find elsewhere, graphics from companies long gone, that I keep wanting to write about.
For today’s rabbit hole, I only ask you, my reader: are you a gambling sort? Today’s program involves just that, random chance, high stakes, and lawfare. I’m being more than slightly facetious. Sort of. Monte Carlo algorithms aren’t nearly as fun as Monte Carlo itself, but I do regularly downsample full-color PNGs to 256 colors for GIFs and things, and a program on the PageMill CD-ROM proved to be, if nothing else, an impressive and completely forgotten stab at doing just that. Let’s talk about why and look at some Somnolian art and photos along the way.
Exploring the Legacy of Image Club Graphics
Just over a week ago, I wrote a blogpost about Adobe PageMill. The kinda tool that could only ever have existed in the mid-to-late-90s, PageMill was a boxed CD-ROM Web page builder, and I find it neat. Being an Adobe product, you can imagine it came loaded up with some Adobe extras (install Acrobat, dammit!), but some of those extras have sent me down an additional rabbit hole. Specifically, it was a pack of Web-ready bullets, rules, headers, and backgrounds under the banner of Image Club Graphics–all stuff I love and stuff I could use in my various old Web pursuits.
My searches for more turned up precious little–until I knew what I was digging for. In the right spaces, you can still find their wares online, and I have some sampler discs from their lot to show you nonetheless. I hope you enjoy photos of cake, Smarties, businessmen, clocks, widgets for your Geocities site, and some jarringly quirky 90s handwriting and dingbat fonts.
(Fair warning that this is going to be a very image-heavy post and filled with the little-seen-on-Letters gallery block type. I know Letters is generally decently old browser friendly–this page may not be, or it may be slow. I’ve tried to optimize things where I can, but we’re gawking at shit today, so it comes with the territory.)
Cammy vs. the PhotoCam III: This Has Gotten Stupid
The AOL PhotoCam has gone from “my curiosity” to “my nemesis” to “my fairweather obsession I somehow now own five of”. I know more about the PhotoCam than AOL did. I’ve seen the way these things break. I can tell when I got each of them by their specific damage. The search for a single working unit has been going on six years now, and I think we’ve found the end of it–because I now own two working units, one complete in the box.
If you know the story, I have more to update you on. If you don’t know the story, strap in! I’ve got a tale of temperamental retro tech, operator error, Redditor intrigue, and new perspectives on the futility of 30-year-old cameras and perhaps life itself. Yes, there will be photos. Hopefully, you find this a satisfying end to the saga.
London, Through the Eyes of the PowerShot A20
A slightly belated hello from Wales, Letters readers! I’ve actually been in the country for a week and a half now, but I’ve been too busy working on art and story stuff with Caby to put up this post like I wanted. I’ll be here until late August, and the rest of the family is in France right now, so we’re vibing with the guinea pigs.
Since I fly in through Heathrow every time I visit, Caby and I start our visits with a couple days in London, zipping around on the Tube and buying way too much fast food. We’ve been getting more adventurous the more often we do it, and this time, I had a new toy to capture the experience with: a Canon PowerShot A20 circa 2001. This $500 MSRP rebadged Canon IXUS 300 beauty shoots in a max of 1600×1200 and takes CompactFlash cards for additional storage, of which I have a 128MB one in there. Gorgeous.
What does London look like through the lens of the A20? Let’s find out.
trip photos: toronto!
Hey! I mentioned in my Art Fight post I was in Toronto at the time of posting. Wanna see some photos? Continue reading
Habby Halloween
Spooky pumpkins for a spooky Halloween! Continue reading
Cammy Revisits the PhotoCam
Longtime blog readers will remember a post I did in July 2019 called “Cammy vs. the PhotoCam”. It was a cute little lark into trying to score some retro tech on eBay and failing miserably. I didn’t have a job or a lot of money to spend on impractical hobby stuff back then, and the entire thing left a sour enough taste in my mouth that I didn’t bother looking for a working unit.
We’re in September 2022 now, I have a job now, and I figured it was time to go hunting again. I got a lot more than I bargained for. On offer today: storytelling! Burning hot batteries! A showdown between three similarly-spec’ed cameras! But first, we start with…
recent photos, 08/08 – 11/08
I still have few drafts that are sitting around here and waiting to be finished, but I have some photos I want to show you in meantime.
Exploring somnol.net’s Old Banners
We like to redesign our sites from time to time, and earlier this year, the top-level domain got its turn. The previous design came in the spring of 2020 and featured a rotating crop of big, toony banners at the top of each page that would show up either year-round or seasonally.
While we gave up on that site design, we’re still very fond of the banners. Obviously, they’re no longer featured on the top-level site. That’s a lot of art and a lot of work going to waste! While we’d like to reuse them in another design, for now, this post will have to do.
Being a longtime reader of the Video Game Critic, I decided to take a page out of his book (or off his site, maybe?) and not just write up a bit on my thoughts on each banner, but get the people who made them to tell their stories about each one.
Posted in Retrospectives
Tagged art, Pennyverse, photography, Quake, retrocomputing, Somnolescent, Web design, Wyn's World
3 Comments
The Change
and the frustration. Continue reading