Nature's Place

… just MIA for a while. Or is that MIInaction. I do intend to get back to this blog when circumstances are more aligned, we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I post some stuff weekly or so on FB social media – not sure why, because I sure am not social, but for now. Here – Garden Safari Pictures

I remember now, it was to promote my framed and unframed pictures for sale at weekend outdoor markets, and online. Only ever sold a few online, and after the first year nobody was buying at the markets and the cost of doing it was eating into a small pension. So I’m looking at how to do that differently, a reboot sort of. Gotta be practical, if it’s that.

Outdoor market selling was supposed to be adjunct to online selling but when I looked into that I was intuitively repulsed by the in-house manipulation of marketing that was obviously not to my advantage, in fact it was designed to fully occupy me and attach me to the platform by costly fees and promotions if I was to sell anything at all. It also required a lot of non-essential but time-consuming considerations and activities. Labyrinthine is a good word for it.

Today I read an article that gives one good explanation why I was repulsed by some online selling platforms – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish – in a word, enshitification, and it’s widespread. Worth reading … if you care to.

Ebay is still as simple as it ever was, for me anyway, though it has gotten more expensive on sale fees and is not really suited to my current product – close-up photo prints of our local nature. I only have 3 listed there but any of what I have can be purchased if someone asks – https://www.ebay.com.au/usr/macromeds

There’s another description of enshitification, malice intent, or just plain greed as a philosophy. The calculated intent to rob us of the value of our lives, to spend them in thrall to multiple minor excitations of the psyche, in service to a self-defeating process of identification with nothing of value. It’s nothing new, but the intensification, and with the turbo-charging of the process with AI that’s now well underway, the net capture of ones value, ones attention or intelligence, will be comprehensive and pervasive.

That’s progress, the way a virus is a progression of events. And in its way it serves the evolution of intelligence, by eventually forcing a separation from what doesn’t serve, identification of intelligence with what passes. And the dis-identification with such is pain, is change. Change is pain.

We’ll see how the reboot goes anyway, I might buff up my eBay presence and pare all else down to weekend outdoor markets, but I really only want it to pay for itself – properly, not just the days expenses – fuel and stall rent, but the hidden incidentals too – even if that doesn’t include something for my time, 8 – 12 hours a market day. I have no hope or design though, just an idea, for now.

Or it might just be an idea that has run its course. We’ll see … nothing can be set in stone if a reboot is to have a chance. Likewise, nothing can be left out. Regardless of orthodoxy.

Something different is a possibility, though the terrain may be fraught and the effort vain. We’ll see …

Kookaburra in the back garden, where I live.

Pelican preening at the local jetty, perched on a tall power pole.

Duck, regular visitors to the back door these days.

And the Stone Curlew, it’s chick season again. Keeping her eye on things.

© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look …
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