doomsey

I’d make fun of him for staring at a cellphone, but is looking through the viewfinder any different?
Willowbrook Wildlife Center, yesterday. As shot.
// #photography

Bruges, 2005.
// #photography

Willow #caturday

the author whispers in your ear: “Go read the rest. You missed it.”

Night. A line of cars waits. Traffic lights showing red and another light showing up green. Amber reflections, line of white headlights. Not edited, actually. A photo. Christmas? No, actually Thanksgiving I think. But the scene says Christmas. The voice in my head. The picture gets printed. Shown. Rolled up in a tube somewhere? Probably. This is Deerfield Road, at the Deerfield Metra stop. We lived there, at the time, with my wife and my cats and a bad attitude and a PhD project that needed to be completed but wasn’t going super well. I am not in that home, a home that was an apartment. I am at the station. Leaving? Arriving? Don’t know. Don’t remember. But my wife is there. And my cat.

2004. November.
This is Deerfield Road. At the Deerfield Metra stop.
// #photography

it’s blue.
and green.
like the sky
and the tree

Backlog deep cut.
2014, Colorado Rail Museum I think?
… yes. https://coloradorailroadmuseum.org/snowplows/

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A blue lake.
Where was it? What was it called?
Was it my wife, or my friend, with me there?
Where am I standing? Does the path go around? All the way?
Is that where I tripped and got covered in mud?
No matter. A lake is a lake. It’s blue.
Like the sky.
// #photography

feeling exposed // #photography

Rookery building, Chicago. Sep 2011.
A Chicago Architecture Foundation (now Chicago Architecture Center) tour. Generally recommended, if you're in the area. Lots of great architecture. // #photography

lights along the path?
or a mirage…


// #photography
Morton Arboretum
Nov, 2025

emmett and willow looked happy this morning but i entirely failed to take a decent picture of it.
oh well, you get to see them anyway. // #caturday

hannibal, mo (but taken from the il side of the river)
september 2010 // #photography

the pithy framing is the trees

Some more composite work I've been doing.
The black and white ones are for the book project. The last was just a whim. I thought I would like the results, and did.

one can say a fair bit in an image sans words
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Another photo converted to "sketch" that I did for my book.

doomsey @doomsey So I want to throw this out there for (nobody to) comment. I have a manuscript. It's basically done. It's kind of nuts, and probably unsaleable, even after I rewrote it to get rid of IP that would never be clearable. But I'd like to, if anyone has something to say, hear comments on this: Generative model disclosure: This manuscript is written and illustrated by a human author, except where specifically cited. The question of "Is this text written using Al" is more complicated. I did not use an LLM or any other generative model to create the text or images in this book. But saying "no" to "used an LLM" is trying to assign the most representative binary to a complex situation. My brain is polluted, because I used the LLM to examine me. As an interviewer. Those interviews were stripped to my prompts- answers— and the prompts rewritten into form parts of the text. A few LLM-written words are left in the final manuscript, marked as such, to document the process. Side note: LLMs, especially ChatGPT, try to replace the voice with investor-approved blandness. Fuck that. The only way I can even try to use LLM text without feeling icky is satirizing itself. It There's a whole thread there - if I put the model on my personal computer over there, something that can (and *does*) run open-weight models for me, having never paid the bigco doing the training and having not used its output as product, is anyone harmed? If doing that helps to pull me out of dark places, does the good outweigh the potential of "stolen thoughts?" If the work gets published to help others, should I feel guilty for the process that got me there? A while ago, during the writing, I had a friend tell me a variant on "you're a horrible person for even looking at this." While it *was* pulling me out of dark places. I haven't talked to them since. An ex- friend, I suppose. I miss them. 2/22/26, 11:48 AM

I brought this over from Mastadon because I have zero reach there and I think it’s an important question. It’s fine to comment here too, if there’s something to say.

(sorry to the people who only want to see mediocre photos 😅)

https://hachyderm.io/@doomsey/116115539575308862

I grab the phone while my wife was driving.
A bird appears above us.
My spouse: “Is that a red tailed hawk?”
Me: “It’s a bird.”
My spouse: “Does it have a red tail?”
Me: “It’s backlit and black.”
Here it is. I like the composition.

(Later, my wife declared it a red tailed hawk.)
// #photography

My spouse is carrying a protest sign.
"WHAT THE FOX?"

my spouse is also a fox most of the time, except when she’s human or owl. 🦊

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Luna and Henna
Luna (left) not looking happy is a rare treat.
Mostly she’s screaming. // #caturday

Another from the January trip to Fermilab.
I keep ending up back there. The light was *amazing*.
// #photography

the gull sits in judgement, and we are not worthy.
(and neither are the seals 🤣)

// #photography San Francisco, June 2010

missing!

(yes, really)

Yeah, I saw the study about that. It’s interesting, and on reflection I do see that in what I am working on. However, is that worse than having no idea what to write down at all?

It’s remarkably hard to convince pre-trained instruct models to *stay away* from giving orders. gpt-oss particularly.

a view of the boat-hotel from the glass-garden.
(another composite)
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I don’t really see why I shouldn’t *use* the tools. For things that don’t replace humans. Like brainstorming.

If I download “open” models, run them on my desktop, don’t pay the companies hawking related services, and don’t publish the output is, there harm?

home.
or at least
the place that I live.
// #photography

This was a dead-end; I ended up compositing this into something completely different, a place that doesn't exist.

But I liked this on its own merits, as well. // #photography

I’m not sure how to write about this one.
It’s just… human, and quietly contemplative.
Fermilab, Aug 2025

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... So burnout has been a pretty big topic of discussion right now. Many of my friends are in some stage of "out for a bit" (and I'm just a month ago back-- to part time, another can of worms). But these are my peers. I'm out of touch with people who aren't senior. Some thoughts across the board?