Aw Diddums

I used to be able to make a simple picture if I wanted, but those days seem to have gone. For instance, I took a flower brush and used it to make a very simple wallpaper, with small flowers lying against a gradient. “Just something quick I can upload to one of the wallpaper pages.”

I should have known better. First I had to change the colour of the gradient to a grass-coloured gradient, then I put real grass in and got rid of the gradient, then made some butterfly brushes and put some butterflies in, and painted them all up a little with light, shade and texture so they looked more three-dimensional. Then Photoshop Elements crashed and lost the butterflies, so I went to bed.

Next day I made some bigger, better butterflies, and painted in some sunlight. Swithered over whether or not to put dewdrops in, but decided it wasn’t that kind of scene. Finally I made a simple little ladybird and plunked her in the middle.

Having finished, I looked at it again and said “those flowers aren’t right; the perspective is dead-on whereas the other things are slanting slightly and need the flowers to do the same. Never mind, it was only meant to be a simple picture.”

Over supper I changed my mind again and decided to delete the flowers and make some new ones. Those flowers were the REASON for the picture, and now I’m about to edit them out completely! Sigh.

I wonder if there’s a creator up there who has similar problems…. maybe he/she started out by making flowers, then added grass, butterflies, a ladybird or two, sunlight (only after making the other things) and kept on and on tinkering till he/she had an entire universe.

I can’t keep it simple any more, and that’s both interesting and unsettling.

A week ago in Rumbling Discontentedly I mentioned dewdrops on webs. This was it:

The funny thing about ideas is that people tend to get the same ideas over and over… partly because they are drawing from the same wells of inspiration. Like when I took a photo of a cobweb with dewdrops on it, and was going to blog about it, and a little while later found a couple of blogs by other Scots around the same time, talking about these cobwebs with dew on that they’d taken photos of. There is no way that they copied me, as I never blogged about it… and I didn’t see theirs till after I thought of it. Actually, I doubt if they ever came near my blog.

Yesterday I was working through the images in my watch list, and this one popped up: Water Drops on a Spider Web. Actually there are three – you might prefer the green or the blue, but I went for the glowing, variegated one I mentioned first. It’s as though there’s a bed of nasturtiums in the background.

A thought: are there nasturtium beds? Nasturtium tangles, maybe.

Funny, I deliberately posted a picture (on a wallpaper site) that I didn’t like that much, and it almost immediately got favourited by someone. Just shows, you never know what others might like.

Why did I post it? I’m entering into a period of confusion where I want to post nice things but don’t want to post things that are too nice, just in case someone pinches them… then I ask myself why I really care.

I never posted any short stories on the internet; that was a ground rule from around 2001 or whenever I first got online. Now I don’t know… I mean, I’ve got this blog; that has short stories of my life. Sometimes I think I should just enjoy myself and not worry too much. Where pictures are concerned I’m practising, and looking at other people’s pictures (and tutorials) for inspiration. There’s a bit of give and take involved.

I find myself looking at a picture and thinking “mm, I love that one,” and putting it carefully away. “For another day,” I tell myself. Maybe never… or maybe one day I’ll be so good that I’ll post today’s rainy day pictures without a second thought.

I suppose that’s the aim.

Noontime naps were due
To kittens’ early rising
Now I sleep alone

Caedes comments came
Following silence: “great pic!”
Site must have asked them

Won’t always oblige;
Sure they were happy to find
My picture pretty

Broke a toe again
By stumbling over a shoe
No one’s fault but mine

Aw diddums, earache!
Whole jaw of tooth pain would be
Much preferable…

Brought it to its knees
With efficacious drops of
T.C.P. magic

Dog ran after cat
Ancient leather collar broke
Thank goodness for walls

Took kitten for walk
Came an icy springtime wind
She trembled and cried

My stories seem dull;
Wondered if these condensed lines
Would make sense at all

No cause for concern –
Overnight this will not be
A blog of haikus

I’m quiet because I’m

• packing
• still addicted to the Caedes desktop picture site.

I made some wallpapers for it and keep ’seeing’ more wherever I look. I’m frustrated by all the possible permutations one could have of a particular picture… I wish we could capture them all, but it’s not possible.

I realize it’s a silly thing to wish for. Supposing it was possible to set a computer to provide and store every single possible picture or piece of artwork, good or bad, there would be nothing left for anybody to do. All the photographers and artists would be stuck. If you painted something and said “look what I created,” somebody would say “oh yes, that’s Flower Painting Number 313330077278297 - I was looking at it on the Computerized Artwork Database (CAD) only last week.”

Blogs are the same, maybe - all those perfect blog posts that never made it into existence for one reason or another. Depending on when a blog post was written, it arrives in just one permutation of how you could have written it. I often plan blog posts in my head… then sit down and type something completely different, using different words.

This post was going to be about packing up for a house move.

I went looking for some nice new desktop pictures. I found this elegant phoenix and fell in love with it; not just as a design but as a living presence! You sense there’s a real bird there, even though it’s the white hot heart of the flames. If you reach in to touch it, it won’t burn you – it’s soft and warm. Gorgeous. Who said there are only three ways of beating the winter blues?

Here are links to other pictures I liked – there should be something for most people here:

Blue Rain – if we had scenery like this around here, I’d never get any work done. Oh, wait…

Compass of the Soul – a luxurious, expensive looking desktop.

Galaxy Wars – an amazing abstract in blue.

Guardian of the Darkness – this one will worry your office colleagues.

Impatient Jungle – Now I want a little zoo too…

Innocence (quack!)

Liverpool Echo – did Rapunzel’s prince fall into a rose bush like this?

Misty Sunset – lovely snow scene for your winter desktop.

Sydney Bridge at Night amazed me, though I usually avoid city scenes.

What! An individual who would outmatch our cats, glare for glare and talon for talon.

Wild Blue – it would be an extra special dream, flying over a land like this.

Going Home – I have a special affection for this fantasy scene. I also love the song of the same name by Runrig.

Land of Nod – where I keep fetching up. I don’t see anywhere to spread my duvet, though.

I reckon I was a locust in a former life. Humming through the verdant stretches of cyberspace, when I hit a desktop picture site or similar, I gobble it up till nothing is left but bare stalks, then off I flit to the next place. The trouble with Caedes.net is that I’ve met my match. It’s like trying to drain a goblet filled with the sea. I’ve browsed the images till my Mac is burping, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. The gallery for new images boasts over 300 items and they’re still coming in. The three pictures featured on the main page refresh randomly. There’s a voting booth, which is horribly addictive – you don’t get to choose which to vote for; it’s chosen for you, and you always wonder what’s coming next. The main bad point with this is that sometimes you see a picture that has plenty of votes but is underrated (or deliberately voted down, maybe) but because it’s high enough on the vote map, you won’t get the chance to redress the balance. And then there are pictures which (in my opinion) have been rated too high – will they always be at the top of the charts?

I saw something on the site saying that you can only upload a picture after you’ve voted for ten images in the voting booth – interesting idea. I wondered if it would work on a blog site, but I don’t think it would. By the time I’d commented on ten Blogigo blogs, I would have forgotten what I was going to blog about.

Dishing out TLC to unloved images is not easy. You sit staring at a distant stick insect on an over-exposed stump surrounded by dry yellow grass, trying to think of something encouraging to say about it. I’m sure my forebears (whether human beings or locusts) never had this problem.

It’s the last day I see Mum on this side of Halloween, so I set her Mac to randomly show a folder of Halloween desktop pictures which I accumulated secretly. I had just finished, and was sneaking away, when she appeared in the doorway and stared at the Mac.

She burst out laughing.
“Where did you get THAT?”

‘THAT’ was Midnight Trooper, the free Halloween picture from Digital Blasphemy. The Mac just so happened to choose it first.

“It’s from a computer art site. It says down here in the corner – Digital Blasphemy,” I said

I had finished walking the dog, and the day was already getting dim around the edges. “I better go home before it gets dark,” I said. “I don’t want to be caught when the ghosties and ghouls come out. Especially as there’s no Jolly the Trolley to protect me.”

“In that case,” said Mum, “he would probably get home before you.”

This should be subtitled ‘Computer Artists Beware’. I’m going to have to set up a separate blog category for graphics.

I discovered some fantasy desktop pictures by Ryan Bliss at Digital Blasphemy. Most are not free (what a fantastic way to earn a living!) but he has a gallery of free wallpapers which had me happily downloading. My favourite is Endless Blue.

Ryan says there will be a Halloween picture or two dropping into the free gallery in time, and the pictures will regularly change, so if you like them, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Gazebo 2003, Archipelago and Coalescence are all better than they appear in the thumbnails, despite the fact that Gazebo 2003 is at the bottom of the ‘download’ list and something called Orthohedron (which I didn’t like) is in the top five (now the top two).

I also (thanks to Timothy at Timmargh.net) stumbled across a site called Moodflow. My absolute favourite (of all my collected wallpapers so far) is Walking with Orion. Another one I love is Paradise Cove, but it’s not alone in the beauty parade.

There appear to be a lot of dreamers in the human race. Any time I’m going through an ‘everybody’s a rat’ spell, I will have these fantasy wallpapers to remind me otherwise.

One good thing about all this, displaying the same wallpapers on both computers, was that I finally focused on a big difference between the PC and iMac monitors. The PC’s monitor was dimmer and bluer – seemed to show less of a range of colours. Makes me wonder how any of my Paintshop Pro graphics ever worked out! Certainly explains why some look good on the PC and terrible on the Mac. I remember one in particular that shaded nicely into black (I thought) and then I got it on the Mac and you could see the stark edges. That was very disappointing. Next time you see graphics and photos that are absolutely horrible, consider that the owner’s monitor might be on the blip, or set wrong.

Meanwhile, my PC’s display had ‘drifted’ so that there was an annoying black strip down one side. Dug out the monitor manual, which was satisfyingly fat because it was published in a thousand different languages. ‘See Section 4′ it says, and ’section 4′ turns out to PART 4 in Italiano. The English section 4 is on page 17, still within Part 1. Having worked that out, I centred the display. Wasn’t allowed to change colours or colour temperature – something to do with the sRGB mode. I’m lost – will have to consult Internet later. Currently the PC is in a state of Endless Blue.

At any rate, I was able to raise the brightness. Is there a normal level of brightness? Mine was set at 40%, and it was a little like swimming through the depths of a lagoon. I raised it to 50%, and now the violet star in Space Dust by Anders Fernström looks fractionally more violet and less blue. In future most of my wobbly graphics will be done on my Mac.

I’m trying to think of something non-wallpapery to discuss, but my mind has gone blank. Remove the wallpaper and the colour vanishes. ‘Solid Aqua Graphite.png’, perhaps. That’s Apple for endless grey.

Edit Feb 2008: A comment to this entry when it was hosted on Blogigo:

Pacian wrote at Oct 28, 2006 at 10:27:
Sorry this took so long, but I have these links on my other computer, and this is the first time they’ve both been on since I read this. When my old monitor drifted, I used these sites to try and get it back to normal:

http://displaycalibration.com/
http://w4zt.com/screen/

My current monitors show everything just nicely, so I can’t be bothered to calibrate them properly according to these things, but you can waste a lot of time fine-tuning on these two sites.

(It took me about a week to realise that my old monitor wasn’t remembering the settings when it was turned off for any length of time, so they turned out to be useless for me.)

Yesterday I was complaining about the darkness of the morning, and it turned out to be a dark day anyway. At 11.30 AM it began pouring with rain, and kept it up for the rest of the day.

My favourite site at the moment is MacDesktops. There are some good pictures there – so many that I haven’t seen them all yet. There seem to be two brand new ones every day and you see them right away, as they appear at the top of the first page. you can even set the preferences so that only the resolutions you are interested in show up – it remembers that when you come back.

Looking at the landscape pictures that people took all over the world made me feel strange. The clouds in one picture are just so, and will never be quite that shape again. You find yourself studying a fuzzy rainbow on the side of a green hill in a continent you’ve never set foot on, in 1999, and you know that when that rainbow was there you were somewhere else doing something different, completely unaware of all of this. Or there’s a sparse dry plain covered with red dust and spiky brush and cacti, and you wonder what it must be like to live anywhere near there, growing used to the heat and cold and strong colours of the area. Then, right next to it, there’s the cold mountain lake with conifers round it, and for a moment you feel you could step through the frame and find yourself there, the sharp cool air glancing across your skin. You can almost smell the trees and hear the lake slapping gently.

All of a sudden you’re on the verge of hyperventilating. All those moments captured – of flowers now withered, insects now dust, summer days long since sunk into night. And the brooding sense of the people who were there but are invisible – very little idea of what they had been thinking or planning, except that they liked the rainbow in the water spray and hoped the butterfly wouldn’t fly away just yet, or maybe just wanted to finish the camera film.

I’m not sure why I’m even talking about this, except that all those isolated moments from other people’s lives had come together in this one place, and the total effect is like a stream of time. It offered proof that trees fall in forests even when you’re not there to see. Mountains blow up when you’re quietly sleeping on the other side of the world. Other people are there, even if you’re not – observing the smoking mountains, the shattered trees, the ice on the twigs, the butterflies and rainbows, and though you never met these people, suddenly you are seeing all these things not just through their eyes, but through the eyes of anybody else who was ever there.

I downloaded very few of those photos, purely because they made me feel so… and I still can’t find the right word. Maybe it will come to me in my sleep, or when I’m brushing my teeth or walking the dog. Inspiration, striking like a tiny meteor. Maybe.

Grogport – Argyll & Bute, Scotland
© August 2001, Diddums

Hum well – last night I downloaded some desktop pictures for my Mac and PC. The Mac’s desktop pictures are set to ‘random’, so when I got up this morning and turned it on, this is what I was greeted with:

http://www.pc-wallpapers.co.uk/viewer.php?cmax=5&cat=TR&id=000011

If you haven’t got your specs on or don’t wish to follow the link, it’s Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. When I came back into the room half an hour later, it had changed to this:

http://www.pc-wallpapers.co.uk/viewer.php?cmax=8&cat=HE&id=000003

(Large green helicopter surfing the waves).

I don’t always stick to fluffy pink bunny wabbits and Hello Kitty, though (cough) I have a few of those too.

© 2006, Diddums

It shows what is out there if you’re bored with flying windows and false jaguar fur.

I set my Mac’s desktop picture to change every half hour at random. Life is exciting now – you never know what it’s going to be! I’ve had two violent purple ones already.

My desktop picture folder was tidied up and includes a large selection of old desktops from both Mac and PC, along with a few I made or downloaded from the web. My favourites are the dinosaurs from ITV’s Prehistoric Park. There’s one with a prehistoric croc eyeing a young dinosaur coming down to drink, and I pointed at the croc and said “you’re in MY world, croc, and in MY world you don’t get the dinosaur.”

I’m afraid my world isn’t a very nice one for crocs.

As for the PC’s old desktop pictures, the Mac has been trying them on and laughing wildly. “Look at these old bloomers!” It better watch out, as the PC has stormed off in a huff once already. Well, the Mac probably wouldn’t admit it in a million years, but it rather likes the PC’s old iceberg picture. It promptly chose that one when I said it could pick whatever it liked.

In fact, I’m now feeling guilty for all the years I’ve forced both computers to stick with whichever desktop I told them to use – they must have got very bored.

Anthropomorphism isn’t daft – it’s a curse. You spend so much time feeling sorry for every dead leaf and speck of dust that it’s just horrible. When I was six or seven, I was watching something on TV in which they were testing the wing or tail of a plane. It fell apart and I started weeping. My grandmother asked, “what’s wrong?” and I said I really had no idea. The piece of metal fell apart and it just made me sad. She laughed, and said “they were only testing it.” I’m not sure it made much difference. The world oozes tragedy from every pore.