For the longest time, on cohost, I kept saying "man, I should try to organize something to meet up with the Bay Area folks".
It almost became a running gag because I would post about it, and never act on it for many reasons. So when the shutdown of cohost was announced, and after seeing the Seattle and Philly "cohost wakes" being planned, I went "fuck it, we ball".
I posted about it, people said they'd be interested, Nicky and Diane helped me actually find a spot and time, and I announced it. I was diligently keeping track of who had replied and how, to have an at least vague idea of how many people would show up.

18 days later, earlier today as I write this: we had 40 people show up!! I don't actually have a group picture to show because I wasn't the one who took them and not everyone wants to be visible publicly in such a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.

In fact, I barely had any time to take many pictures myself! The only ones I have are of Cohost 2, a huge scroll of paper that Nicky brought so we could make posts by hand.
It was a lot of fun, wish I took more pictures. But I feel chatting with people, recognizing folks from the website and having a good time was more important than taking pictures, you know?

People hung out, some of them played a fighting game with specialized controllers^[1], people talked about the website, nerd shit, linguistics, and a bunch of other things. Emails were gathered so people could organize and try…Read more

Well, it turns out I was pretty lucky because Justice's show last night (September 29th) was a very very good one in terms of pictures! I got literally as close as one could realistically be, even if I was slightly off center!

As I got out of the show, I was pretty worried because Justice's light setup made it much, much harder to get consistently good shots. Don't get me wrong, those very quick color changes in the lights look amazing in person, but they are challenging to shoot with a smartphone.

But I think I managed to get some pretty damn good pictures given the situation. Like those taken during Gesaffelstein's performance, all of them were shot with Halide and in RAW with "Process Zero" enabled. The only adjustments I made (if any) are cropping and slight tweaks to the exposure/contrast.

Everything else is straight out of the iPhone 13 Pro's camera system. Which, for some of them, is outstanding to see, honestly. As always, click the thumbnails to get the JPEG at 100% quality.

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I just saw Gesaffelstein last night at Portola and boy that shit ripped. I had already watched his set from Coachella earlier this year, so I "knew" what to expect. But as always, watching a live performance is one thing, being there in person is another.

A true banger of a show, the combination of the minimalist set design and the hard hitting music really really worked.

As I often do in concerts, I took plenty of pictures/videos. It took me a few hours to triage everything (because Darkroom on macOS kind of sucks) but I managed to trim it down to a reasonable amount.

All of these were taken on my iPhone 13 Pro using the 3x telephoto lens. The first three ones were taken with the stock iOS camera, all the others were shot using Halide in RAW with "Process Zero" mode enabled.
And honestly? It produced incredible results given that: this is a phone camera, at a music festival, taken by hand^[1] in a low-light environment.

Halide (in RAW mode) was already a killer tool for concert photography in my experience but Process Zero really takes it to the next level. The capture speed was more than enough, turns out when your camera doesn't try to capture hundreds of frame for one shot, you can go pretty wild with it. The focus was a bit hit or miss but that's expected given the environment (the fog machines really didn't help haha).

I only had to adjust the exposure/brightness on a handful of shots! It's incredible, really. I hope to be able to take good shots of Justice tonight 🤞

At any rate, here are the pictures (click to load the full, uncompressed JPEGs):

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This post is mirrored on cohost as well and was written with it in mind. But also not? It's fine, don't worry about it.

Like many people in my age group, I think it's fair to say that I grew up online.

the pre-social media years

My "life online" really started in the mid-2000s when I joined the forums of Crystal XP. This name probably won't mean anything to you, but if you used Windows XP at the time, you might have seen their "BricoPacks". These were 1-click installers that reskinned your entire Windows installation. Their most successful one was the Vista Inspirat one. Pretty wild stuff. Oh, and also CrystalXP was "responsible" for that one Tux and its myriad of variations you might see on every other Linux fanboy's profile.

But like I said, they had forums. I joined those forums after reading CrystalXP's Photoshop tutorials and wanting to share my progress and get advice. I met a bunch of people, some of whom I am still friends with to this day, learned a ton about graphic and UI design.

I drew icons, wallpapers, all of varying quality that I would post to my DeviantArt profile.
I went hard into the Windows customization bit. At first, it was simple stuff, but around 2006-2007, I got enamored by Mac OS X's UI from watching a friend's Mac screenshots.
From this point on, my goal was to make Windows XP look like Mac OS X (Tiger and then Leopard). I wish I still had those "desks" screenshots because man, I was good at that shit. I made skins for iTunes, a skin for ObjectBar that mimicked the Leopard menubar, skins for Miranda IM that copied Adium skins.

A year later, I would get my first Mac. A…Read more

A little post to tell the folks who are only reading the RSS feed about what I've been up to on damien.zone:

I got a links page with:

• my own links!
• nice buttons I keep seeing on people's websites! I'll try to collect more as time goes on
• I have a button too!! Gwyn absolutely killed it, you can grab it on there as well
• friends' links and just cool links in general

I started a projects page. It has almost everything I would care about publicizing on here. The big thing missing are links for my Mac Themes bot that people enjoyed on cohost. I'll remedy that. In the meantime, you can find the bot on Mastodon, Bluesky as well as Twitter.

I have a "final cohost post" ready to send on next Monday (September 30th). I might mirror it here, we will see.

I have another, longer, "my online life" type post that I don't think will be ready before cohost's goes read-only. As luck would have it, I already had plans for this weekend, so I won't have much time to spend on a computer before Monday. But I hope it'll be at least slightly interesting when I'm done with it! The hardest part will be to edit myself to not write too much, haha.

I also ported my old blog posts over to this blog. I don't think they showed up on the RSS feed (at least I hope they didn't) so, in case you weren't aware:

• Better TweetDeck post-mortem part one and part two. Part two is probably the one you'll want to read in 2024.
• "The intersection of liberal arts and technology". Kind of a rant/thinking out loud post I wrote at like, 10pm on a weekday back then..…Read more