I plan to take a sample of pictures and add them to my capsules photo gallery. I figured it would be okay to write up a little post on my thoughts seeing as there are fellow capsuleers adamantly opposed to such things.

Cats, nature, pictures of my smoking pieces, books, some art stuff, fractals.

We are largely visual creatures. Shapes are an important part of observing and understanding. As someone who talks about abstract shapes like fractals on a semi-regular basis its near impossible to meaningfully describe these shapes without visual context.

In the earliest versions of the fractal compendium I hadn't learned how to host photos yet and resulted to ASCII art for simple diagrams. While this works well for simple fractals and basic sets, I had to pray the art existed somewhere online or painstakingly make my own. I am not a great ascii artist, FYI.

If I want to show a fractal or reference image now, i can just link to an image less than 50kb in size which describes what im talking about better than ASCII art ever could. Pictures along side text let me have my cake and eat it too as an author.

To Image Gallery

I think there should be limits to the size of photos you want to share if you present yourself as a small net space. The spirit of the small net is minimalism and data/energy efficency. Getting the most bang for your buck with as minimal resource use as possible. If A 4k 300MB image can be downscaled to a 600x400 50kb dithered image and retain 95% of its visual value, its a good trade to make.

I played with the concept of adding dataurls directly into my compendium pages but decided against it. I think it should be the user/client choice whether to indulge in more data-heavy stuff. Not every client supports them, and the cost is bloating an otherwise lean text document with pages worth of base64. Its not a trade I find particularly worthwile both as an author and reader. 'The Unix Philosophy' is overplayed but it has a good point here. Text files are for text, image files are for images.

Trying to convey images through text files is not particularly efficent.

The one redeeming factor of dataurls is that they encode both the text and image data into one source file, making it so that any archives contain the complete set with no missing assets. It also negates the ever-present link breakage which plauges urls in general. Its easy enough to archive assets along side text files so im not entirely conviced this is such a great thing considering your losing some data-compression with the whole base64 thing bloating the total file sizes even more.

Fractal Compendium Update

The FC hasn't had a lot of love these past few months. I just got done fixing some broken links to get what little is there in working order again. I feel kind of bad for my neglegence. So this week I am focusing my writing challenge to making FC entries or updating the old ones to a more acceptable degree.

To Fractal Compendium

I will re-format the current and upcoming entries to be gemlog compliant so that it can be indexed by Antenna, Cosmos, your particular comitium feed, whatever.

I didn't do this before because FC entries are anthological by their nature. Subject to more growth and change than a log. There is no real chronological reading order to them, and over time it is worth coming back to a FC entry for new appendicies after its creation date. For that reason I wont add a formal date to the main index.

Im also not sure if the FC is everyones cup of tea which is another reason I didn't publish it on aggregators. But similar to my glog ive come to the recent revelations that I shouldn't care about hypothetical people and what they want or dont want to see. If you don't want to see my writings don't click on the link. Ill share my work how I please. If you don't like it, take an industrial sized huff of my cock and fhack off! 🤷

The FAQ I salvaged a while back is kind of long and covers too wide a variety of topics.. Lagrange has the great feature of showing the headers on the left splitting things into chapters like a book but not all clients have that feature. I think it might be more user friendly to split the big text file up into several smaller text files listed in its own catagory of the FC main index. Similar to the sierpinski family. Thats not part of the writing challenge though Just some thoughts

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