Considering "leaving behind" again... Can't really remember how many "photo" or "art" communities I have been through the last couple of years, fotolog.com, flickr.com and eventually dA then and now.... And I remember, after all, not to really stay in one place like that for all too long so far. Fotolog, sooner or later, turned into a narcissistic place for people to share headshots of themselves it seems, and asides that in terms of features never really managed to be on par with other platforms. Flickr, a very nice and friendly platform when it started, grew stranger and stranger after being acquired by Yahoo!, until they eventually decided to introduce censorship to audiences in parts of the world (including Germany where I am from...), making further activities there pretty much unacceptable. Moving on simply to "another" platform ... ?

Well... the worst thing about leaving Flickr behind actually was that leaving behind a platform rather soon shows the limits of most of these so-called "social networking" sites these days: Networks mainly are limited to the scope of the very platforms, and a lot of "networking" found an end as people left this "one" platform heading for other places just to see that the "network" won't be able to extend to there, as interaction with other "friends" in this "network" suddenly wasn't possible anymore because of the technical limitations of that very "network". From that point of view, there's a "decentralized" approach suddenly growing to be of interest: Simply use a photoblog software (like the one offered by pixelpost.org) and install it somewhere, and sign up with some photolog aggregator like photoblogs.org or [link]. Attract people to your site, same as you are visiting others as you suddenly again have an aggregation of your friends work, even though now they're not living on "the same system" anymore but just in their very different (technical) worlds. So far so good...

... but what to do with communities still of interest, for whichever reasons... like dA? Oh well. No "either-or" decision so far. Try to make the best out of it for as long as it's possible... but try not to get dependent of it that much... Let's wait and see.

Moving to a new flat sometimes is not that easy given you used to spend quite some years of your life in the "old one", and now are suddenly about to completely get started anew somewhere else, moving over all your things, living out of boxes for a while until things finally are all set-up again. Even more, moving to a flat just across the street is a feeling which is just strange in a very special way if you got to know the person that moved into your "old" flat after you left. That's when you look out of your window, watching the light behind those windows on the opposite where you used to live just a few days ago, and you catch yourself pondering what might happen behind these curtains, what this person might do in the rooms so familiar to you. It feels like a strange invasion into one's privacy, even if there's no real reason for that. I wonder how long it will take to get used to this situation...

another thing's different comparing gimp 2.3.x to 2.2.x: the "cutter" tool now acts... different, to say the least. in the end, again I guess it's all about learning, they merely changed it to behave more or less "intuitively", more or less similar like in other imaging applications. only bad thing is: the "from selection" option is gone, it's impossible now to do a rectangular selection and then cut it out simply using the "from selection" button... or at least, if the option's there, I haven't yet found it...

running through my first moments of testing gimp 2.3.6, I found out how incredibly fast one can get used to a certain software interface. in the new version, quite a good thing has happened (they finally made the "colors" menu top-level instead of leaving it as a submenu of "layers" which felt sort of bizarre), but it's just about getting used to it. probably it takes a bunch of accidentally deleted layers to finally know where the "desaturate" menu item is hidden now...

today I discovered gimp 2.3.6, the recent development version of my preferred imaging tool, being part of the debian "experimental" branch. first impression: the interface is a little more sorted, there's a handful of new options as well as some _really_ new features like the object isolation algorithm. let's see what will come ouf of that...