I read an article somewhere about point-and-shoot digital cameras making a come back in popularity. I don’t know which article it was, but my take away was that having the whole device dedicated to a single function made “cheap” digital cameras almost always better than a smartphone camera. Despite having personally yeeted my own personal digital camera archive merely 3 or so years ago (now I’m sorely missing that pink Sony Cybershot with the skull emblem) the article’s assertment makes sense to me. With owning an aging smartphone, the prospect of a camera upgrade is always exciting. But all the newer digital cameras I see online seem to be a reasonable $200 for the budget versions. That’s how much my phone cost at this point. I don’t have to invest much more to get a better camera AND phone. So I went to the local thrift store to see if I could get lucky.

I feel very lucky. After some digging in a bin and detangling several piles of knotted cables, I found 3 old digital cameras. A very old Canon PowerShot at 3.2 MP, a Pentax Optio at 5 MP, and Samsung ES25 at a familiar 12.2 MP. I was not expecting the hit of nostalgia I would get from finding these cameras. The silver aluminium casing of the two oldest cameras rang deep, and all the single function buttons on the back was very exciting. It was a journey wondering if these would even power on when I bought them, being impressed that they all took AA batteries and excited when I finally found some with a high enough MaH to get the device to read its memory card, and the sense of victory when I used copper tape to fix the broken contacts of the ES25, and pushed passed the “memory error” message to find that I needed an old card that was under 4gb to get the Canon and Pentax to function.

As for the photos… yeah, no contest. My smartphone, an old LG G8X Thinq, is better. I tried to take some consistent shots with each device to find strengths and weaknesses beyond pixel resolution, but I have many cameras and little patience. Luckly it was irrelevant once I took a picture of the backyard and only my phone camera could detect the distant part of the sky that was blue and not cloudy. It’s a detail too big for my rose-colored glasses to gloss over. This was likely never the comparison the article wanted to make, but I had fun while my hopes were up. And it is interesting that, IMO, the oldest Canon was taking the best shots of the 3 cameras. Here’s a small gallery of comparisons.

I don’t think I’ll go the route of purchasing a proper dedicated camera. I’m not sure I’d recognize the advantages over new phone camera technologies as I haven’t had proper exposure to either. I like the idea of maybe downgrading back to my old pixel 2 for its size convenience and pulling out a dedicated camera for pictures, but I’m certain that if I were in that position I’d be excited by the idea of a device that somehow combined both my old phone and my new camera and any quality sacrifices would totally be worth it.

See a deal on an external SSD that’s too good to be true? Go ahead and get it! You get your money back when you prove it fake and you can keep the card reader as a reward!

Good morning.

I’m uh I got a little bit of free time and I’m desperate to post something with that time. So I’m gonna read a post I made on the Kopimism subreddit a month ago in a week attempt to inspire more activity there.

Titled the Immortality of Kopimism

{Greetings my Kopipanions,

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels discouraged by the stagnant state of Kopimism today, and while I do believe it is good to continue to dev and remix Kopimistic ideas and language to further integrate them into our societies, I’m also refreshed knowing that the facts of Kopimism have always existed and will continue to exist even if the current version becomes unmaintained and obsolete.

The positive and negative energies, the 1s and 0s of our our organic code, have always been transferring and remixing. CtrlC and CtrlV always exists. So long as someone is willing to CtrlF, the essence of Kopimism is always there to be observed.

That being said, we still have a very strong template to derive new and even better iterations from, and I hope you all are still ^searching$ new ways to share our values with the wider world.

Personally, I’m making an effort to do more regular meditations on the Kopimistic tenants so I can more naturally identify the different GUIs of CtrlC and CtrlV in the various programs of my life and debug whether I’ve been as open and shareable as I should be. It’s the start of a long journey, but I’m excited where it will take me.

How have y’all been observing or executing Kopimism in your own lives? I’d love some ideas to remux into my own.}

Uh yeah uh Kopimism is not a big part of anyone’s lives. I kind of hope… but I still like the premise and if you don’t have religion this is a- I don’t know I’m actually… I’m going to stop speaking there because I’m probably just gonna say something really dumb and shallow. Uh, Something to think about I hope- not just- yeah it is pretty basic all right. That’s the intention though. Hopefully it’s motivation to do better, yay.

Original Born Art logo contest submission.

I made a website for a local DJ, Dirty Traffik dirtytraffik.live. I wanted a catchy, electro- profile pic. So after searching through half a dozen filter based websites, I just drew the pic on the right. Then I didn’t like it with the website, so ended up just vector stamping a photo of the DJ and manually adding artifacts. Now that it’s all done, I like the pic I drew again. So here’s both. They each have their merits, I think, though I imagine its difficult to dislike just one of them