AI

Just to recap my Websites

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Online there are several websites of mine, each one with a specific purpose and leading theme, thus it’s pretty easy to get lost among them.
As my uncontrolled interests range farther than that, I think it’s a good idea to contrive a simple summary page like this:

Web-ankh [DE-IT]: is the site of my web services agency.

There are quite a lot of web services agencies out there, but I think I can offer also something more: in particular
– a thorough protection suite against web malware, inclusive of firewall, updating and frequent backups for just in case.
– plenty of experience about online shops to sell digital goods – comes in handy more often than you think.
Gameover’s Atelier AI & I: this site ( also reachable as Luisa Fumi Digital Art) reflects my unrestrained curiosity about AI-generated art.

I tested so many dedicated AI systems and I think that for the time being Midjourney is the best: not easy to prompt, sometimes sort of “moody” (laugh if you wish), but really unique as results.
Here I present the outcomes of my fights with Midjourney (only the ones I won 🙂 upsized and post-processed in a traditional way.
I’m enthralled by this experiment and keep having a lot of fun with them.

All the images are “ethical”: they do not reference copyrighted characters, living artists, brands, or recognizable individuals.

To flesh out the site there are also a “Cover Art” section, a “mini-clips” page and a Print On Demand Gallery.
Professional photography: a site to show off my skills and my long extensive experience as photographer.

Mostly editorial and travel images from all around the world – untouched by AI hands 😊.
Hosted by Picfair, the site offers also a Print-on-demand service.

I’m thinking of expanding this site to more artistic stuff like exclusive cover art (a different taste from my corresponding AI covers). We’ll see.
Antikstock: last but definitely not least.
A rich collection of curated images (mostly engravings) from the past, all scanned from ancient books manically collected over a lifetime, all painstakingly restored from the damages of the centuries, all free from copyright issues (due to their venerable age).

I’m interested of images that speak to one another, forming complete visual worlds rather than disconnected fragments. Single images from the past, isolated from their context, often lose part of their meaning.

Working with historical imagery often means long research times, inconsistent quality, and stylistic mismatches.
Curated sets solve this by offering visual consistency, contextual coherence, and immediate usability:
press history, old magazine advertising, botanical art, medieval marine monsters, antique Egypt history and art… does it ring a bell?

And yes, I almost forgot it… there’s also my blog here.
I have a lot of fun writing it, hope you’ll enjoy reading it and commenting (unless you’re a troll – in which case you’ll be fed to our pirañas 😄).

Hosting vs. Customer – the usual script

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You find something’s wrong with your website – alright, sh*t happens, don’t panic. First things first, you check all you can on your side (WordPress, plugins etc.), but everything looks OK.
Oh oh… then there’s one and only one thing to do: call your host’s secret… opps, support service.

And the ordeal begins.

Exception: BoostedHost is one of my host and it seems to be still human 🙂

First step


Instead of the polite competent expert you were expecting, on the other end of the chatline you find an AI (Artificial OK but not necessarily Intelligent) tasked with getting rid of the most inexperienced or naive customers by suggesting that the issue is their own fault (“Was your computer properly plugged-in? Then you probably did this, or this, or that…”.

Note: you can skip this step by just opening a ticket and hoping for a fast reply thus saving one PITA.

Second step


Once you manage to clear the hurdle (sometimes just shouting a couple of times “I want to talk to a human!!!” works fine), you’re put in contact with a junior serviceperson full of goodwill who does his/her best to understand your problem within the limits of his/her skimpy competence, to empathize with your sufferance and to praise you for your patience.
Don’t be harsh, he/she isn’t there to solve your issue but rather to pass on your complaint to a senior serviceperson. If you manage to hold your temper throughout those first two steps, you’re worthy of their attention.

Third step


The senior serviceperson sounds somewhat competent and professional (can tell a cache from a cake, and even more), listens to your complaints, suggests a couple of tests you already run as a matter of course, looks a bit annoyed that you thought of them first, then solves the issue by blaming you for doing something you know you didn’t.

Fourth step


With your nerves on edge you pay a visit to ChatGPT and tell it in detail the established facts and your hypotheses – GPT is a gentlebeing and thus listens patiently without interrupting or jumping to conclusions.
From it you get all the understanding you need to placate you and a nice list of 3rd-degree questions to grill the senior serviceperson with (“yes or no, no maybe’s!”).

Fifth step


The senior serviceperson (not necessarily the one you already met), crushed by GPT’s 3rd-degree questions, finally admits that one of them hit the bull’s eye and the problem is actually their fault.
Without a word of apology or regret for their indifference and/or incompetence – the customer’s always wrong, huh?

My crystal ball says…

Dark clouds are gathering on the horizon:

many hosting companies are excited to announce that the AI is on board, ready to ‘help’ you design your websites to your taste, no web knowledge needed – just warm up and serve.

I’m afraid that such a grand entrance will encourage the Big Bosses to regard human competence as even more irrelevant than it is today. Then why squander dear money in expensive junior and senior servicepeople while the AI can take care of the customer support as well?
Let me hope that at least it will be ChatGPT…

However at this point I’m wondering if there’s still space enough in my cellar for a small, old-fashioned tower desktop to configure as a server 🙁

My websites: from Archive to Curated Collections

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Over the years, my websites have gradually grown into very large image archives, bringing together historical reproductions, restored engravings, and AI-generated visual work.
Many visitors have explored them freely, sometimes using individual images as references, illustrations, or inspiration in ways I often discovered only by chance.

Recently, however, I began to feel that this structure no longer reflected the way I actually work.
Single images, isolated from their context, often lose part of their meaning.

What interests me increasingly is not accumulation, but coherence: images that speak to one another, forming complete visual worlds rather than disconnected fragments.

I was also aware that my customers often prefer to buy several images of similar content instead of a single one (botanical illustrations, more photos of a business center together, portraits of 18th century scientists, just to name a few).

For this reason, the sites are gradually being reorganized around curated thematic sets.
Here two of them on Antikstock



This transition also allows the visual material to be presented more clearly and consistently, while preserving the possibility of acquiring individual images when needed.

A smaller selection of standalone images and free resources will remain available, while new curated sets will continue to be added over time.
If you are interested in licensing or acquiring a specific image from a set, feel free to get in touch directly.

Thank you to everyone who has visited, shared, referenced, or quietly followed these archives over the years.

The Café-Library — Open at Night

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I’m quietly transforming my websites.
The idea is to offer full sets of selected images built around a focused idea — a set of visuals that share the same atmosphere and narrative thread, designed as a complete package ready for illustrators, designers, publishers, and anyone who needs consistent imagery with a strong personality and immediate usability.

One of my curated sets is The Café-Library open at night
I’ve ever been and still am fascinated by books – don’t know how many thousands I have at home – thus the idea seems fabolous to me:

a bookshop-café open all night with the option to sit quiet and read a book (rented or bought), and at the first morning light, with a warm latte and a book in your hand, to go back to your place and sleep the day.

The atmosphere draws loosely from literary and real references – from Gianrico Carofiglio’s Osteria, to many brillant works of Walter Moers, to the Library Bar in Copenhagen.
Then came my imagination: the quiet pedestrian streets of an Italian downtown, dim light all around, most of it coming from a cheerful open bookshop with tables and seats outside or inside, with people sitting there, reading comfortably and sipping a coffee.
Every so often at the same table sit two people, occasionally they talk together but usually they are as good as alone, each one completely absorbed in their reading.
Sometimes under a vaulted ceiling of one of these coffee-bookshops someone sits at the piano in a corner and plays a soft tune.
Not easy feeding the feeling to Midjourney, but I’m happy with the result of a consistent, common atmosphere.

Et voilà some of the 16 selected images from the set:

In a time of constant distraction, the idea of a place dedicated to open, welcoming, uninterrupted reading looks quietly radical to me 😀

Une petite note for the AI-skeptics:

If you feel like writing a piece of poetry you’ll probably use a word processor, if only because today stylus, nibs and ink aren’t all that easy to find. And no one will dream of claiming that the real poet is the word processor you typed on and not you.
Things change if you use a sophisticated AI as a writing tool, but not by much: there’s still something essential, let’s call it ‘the human touch’, that you must provide yourself lest the outcome sound somewhat dull, insipid – even though there’s always the simpleton who takes the bite and congratulates, but that’s another story 😉

Same goes if you use a sophisticated graphic AI to give body to a dream you found in your mind, that otherwise would take you days or months to draw or paint with your own hands: if you want it to evoke the feelings that inspired you, the human touch must come from you.
Hard – if ever possible – to tell what this mysterious human touch really is: it’s something that you feel, not that you understand. Something related to the rustle of old pages under your fingers, to the smell of an ancient leather binding, to a gentle breeze ruffling your hair, to the taste of an early coffee, to the faint memory of a happy moment lost in the past… and this is as far as I go.
A tool is a tool is a tool.

Gargoyle Party

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You know those nights when the imagination decides to go off-script? That’s how I ended up making a tiny gothic clip where one devil gargoyle and two strange creatures, sneak away from their eternal duties and throw themselves a party on some forgotten cathedral ledge.
All of it looks like straight out of a 19th-century engraving — sharp lines, dark shadows, and a mood somewhere between mischievous and slightly tipsy.
It’s only a few seconds long, but watching a strange stone creature relax with a drink in hand feels oddly… wholesome.


More whimsical clips to come!

2025: A WEBHOSTING ODISSEY

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Part One: The Past

Once upon a time…

I’ve been dealing with websites since short after the dawning of internet, fascinated by that then-new marvelous technology that allowed anyone endowed with a modicum of computer skills to reach everywhere in the world almost instantly – and for peanuts.
At the very beginning merely static webpages painstakingly assembled in naked HTML, my works quickly evolved into more sophisticated websites made with Dreamweaver and Flash, then inexorably into complex dynamic sites and online shops developed in Perl. Eventually, out of convenience, I landed on widespread WordPress, a comfortable web-development platform that I still keep using today in its classic mode without cumbersome blocks.

The first hosts

Yet a website is nothing but a jumble of bits unless it is placed on a server connected to the internet, and a server is provided and maintained by a host, the indispensable interface between a company and the World Wide Web. As you may easily guess, over those years I’ve seen all sorts: I’ve changed so many hosts that I’ve lost count of them. From some I run away scared, disgusted or fuming after less than an hour, by others I stayed for several years.

There are so many memories… the fondest one is about the CEO of a host whose name is now lost in the fogs of time, who kept an ante-litteram blog, “from my desk…” until he sold the company, that soon thereafter became bleakly impersonal.

An ominous experience…

Then there was another host that here I’ll call MaphYeah (not their real name), by which I lived the most sinister and at the same time most amusing experience of my web-designer career.
One day I found within my WordPress website hosted by MaphYeah the parasitic clandestine site of a Chinese company selling fake branded clothing – for which I would have been legally accountable. At my outraged complaint (I was paying an extra specifically for “security”) they demanded an additional hefty sum to cleanse my share of the server, implying subtly that, should I leave, the issue would follow me.

…but a nice discovery

Of course I flew the coop at once by cloning my website onto a different host and (better safe than sorry) added there as many anti-malware WP plugins as I could find on the web.
One and only one of them identified immediately a backdoor (who might have put it in there?) that I removed easily. Like this I found out what plugins boasted protection without providing any, and which one really worked – a most important discovery that took me a lot of toil and anger.

Since then my partner and I customarily add the “good” anti-malware plugin to the websites we design, as part of a new comprehensive security package of ours (inclusive of regular backups and much more) we offer to our customers.

Most web developers agree to take care also of SEO and diffusion, but nearly all of them neglect the ‘security’ part, which is growing increasingly essential as the web-ruthlessness expands uncontrolled.
No mere words: we thwarted successfully a considerable number of attacks to our customers’ sites (as well as to our own ones) and thus we know all too well what it means to swim among sharks and pirañas.

And what about that infamous host? For all I know “MaphYeah” is still alive and kicking, so beware! Before opening an account by an unknown host ask all relevant questions. If they ignore or evade them, run away as fast as you can.

Part Two: The Present

Almost satisfactory but… 🙁

Until a few weeks ago my host was A2Hosting, once considered to be among the best ones. For several years it really was, and I was quite happy with them: WordPress-optimized servers, satisfactory speed, friendly fast competent efficient customer service.
Nothing is perfect though, and even at their best they had two significant flaws:

– While the contract boasted infinite server memory (quite an ambitious goal, actually), in fact as I exceeded a 50 GB threshold they started bombarding me with emails saying that they were insured up to 50 GB and beyond that there was no backup, thus I’d better reduce the memory use. Not so nice indeed, they should have made it clear at the outset.
– After the first promotional year their annual fee grew really huge. But after all my image-intensive webpages loaded very fast and their service was reliable, not necessarily a given in my experience. So I stayed with them.

A2Hosting beheaded to Hosting

But alas, all good things come to an end: not long ago ‘A2Hosting’ became just ‘Hosting’, the company grew larger and the real troubles promptly began.
I had by them quite a number of interlinked websites, all with excellent internet visibility, and I could count on a considerable constant visitor flow.
Until one day a few weeks ago I noticed that on one of my sites all the pages showed up regularly – but without the images! Sort of annoying when it affects a site designed to sell images, right?
I opened a ticket – no reply, not even the usual boring automatic one. Pretty fishy.
Long story short, after one day they got in touch with me and soon the issue was solved. But as I asked for a technical explanation of what really happened, who tampered with my websites without my permission and why, they turned cagey talking vaguely about an unspecified “setting” and promised it won’t happen again. Not a hint of an apology.

Other people, other mood, other way to treat a customer. Downsizing? Greediness? Too many customers? I don’t know and I don’t care, As a (dearly) paying customer and a professional I expect clear explanations, not fogbanks. And many sad experiences suggested that once such an attitude creeps in, it stays.
Fortunately my annual contract with them would expire in a few weeks, about the time needed to find a better host and safely migrate 6 websites. A stroke of luck indeed: I canceled my contract and started looking for a more decent host.

Not an easy job indeed: they all use to promise the moon and stars, but very few of them deliver. However sometimes a long suffered experience comes in handy, at least by allowing me to read between the lines rather than only on them.

A new hope

So I eventually decided on BoostedHost: plenty of positive feedback, same quality as A2Hosting when they still worked OK, competitive cost even after the first year for the same performances.
And from the outset I’ve been pleasantly surprised by their kindness and availability, their competent advice, their prompt help in optimizing my sites’ cache by them to my full satisfaction.
All in all a great sigh of relief!
Another – if more subjective – positive point is the feeling that the team here is enthusiastic about their job and happy to provide help and solve the possible problems – something you don’t find around every corner.

All in all BoostedHost seem to have all the assets needed to grow into a really big hosting company, thus most likely they will. Will they also be able to retain their enthusiasm, their friendliness and their competence along and after the growth? I really hope so, and wish them so: that would finally put an end to my way too long and troubled odyssey in search of a most decent host 🙂

Part Three: The Future

While talking with other artists and photographers I get the feeling that most of them would be tempted to try and set up a website of their own but hesitate due to the lack of specific know-how.

Will AI provide the solution?

A few days ago I got an email from BoostedHost telling me that by them is now available for free (the magic words!) an AI-based system called ‘Orbit’ that should greatly help in the design of a website. So far I had no time to try it but I’m curious as hell: apparently all you have to do is to explain in plain words what you wish, choose pictures, themes and styles, and… voilà,
a perfectly optimized website without any hassle.
Generally speaking the popular “if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is” is a very wise guideline, but a number of amazing sessions with ChatGPT and a long successful cooperation with MidJourney convinced me that there are exceptions. So why not give it a go?

With a bit of luck I’ll find the time and report to you about it in detail next time 🙂

If you liked this post I suggest to read How to sell stock images today too.

Gameover POD Galley – Ice Dance Sketches

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new!

I made this set of (almost) black and white sketches using one of my personal styles developed on Midjourney.
I like them. It is not only about dancers but also about frozen movements in a moment of grace and black-and-white contrast: they speak of passion, raw energy, precision and elegance. And why not, freedom.

Pity I have not a single space left on my walls 😀

An own Print-On-Demand website?

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Voilà, here it is!


How did I come to face such a feat?
First of all, for fun: I love making websites, that’s it. I had just completed a serious, demanding, challenging website – a historical archive – and needed to do something relaxing to rinse my brain… OK, that’s the truth, but not the whole truth: there was also a bit of commercial interest behind my resolution.

All began when I started visiting the usual popular Print-On-Demand sites…

… disguised as a buyer, in order to find out why I was selling so little on them – well, I actually did sell something there, but not enough to deserve any serious time or toil. I focused on the most obvious form of POD: the art that one hangs on the wall.

I was appalled by the prices:

would I buy anything that expensive myself? Definitely not! Unless perhaps in case of love at first sight, but that seldom happens.
Greed may certainly play a role in setting those high prices, but there must be something more to it. Let’s give it a thought:

First question:
why should one buy a framed work of art somewhere halfway around the world and pay the outrageous shipping costs, when the bare printout would travel much cheaper and faster in a cardboard tube?

Then all it would take is a walk to the do-it-yourself shop around the corner to have it framed according to one’s taste, in a self-chosen frame, maybe also with a sheet of real glass (rather than those horrible acrylic substitutes that would survive the shipping). Which would save about 3/4 of the total cost.

But that’s not all.

Second question(s):

who prints the work of art you choose, and on what paper, and what kind of printer do they use?
Most of the times the colors you see on your monitor don’t look very much like those you see printed on paper.

Who checks the color rendition?

And the diffusion effect?

And the overall quality of the finished work?

Then a disturbing thought came in without knocking:

of course the POD website gets the lion’s share, but also the printers must have their slice of the pie, and the packagers, and the shipment company… what’s left for the author is but laughable pocket change 🙁

Which encouraged briefly the sneaky temptation to bypass at least the POD sites and go directly to those sites that offer printing&shipment as a service… but alas, nothing doing: unguaranteed printing quality, long or very long processing times (up to 2 weeks!)… better forget it.

All of the above looks pretty disheartening, but I’m stubborn: my glorious printer can handle up to A3+ paper sheets (13” x 19”), quite a respectable size for a picture on the wall. A high-quality printing on it takes a mere couple of minutes of my time. I’m free to choose the best possible paper with the right grammage, texture and consistency. I have an encouraging constant number of visitors who show up in my websites, thus there’s no need for advertising…
So why not?
If it works, fine. And if it doesn’t, at least I learnt something new and had my fun 🙂

As a matter of fact I already had a lot of fun thinking of what would fit best on a wall and devising the proper mockup images to convey the mood to my visitors – here too MidJourney, adequately flogged and directed, proved to be a great limitless resource.

The yuck side: bureaucracy

Death and taxes are notoriously inevitable, and in this case the taxes were the belle of the ball: I had to comply with the EU legislation on VAT applied to member states, which makes a sharp distinction between digital goods (images made of impalpable bits) and tangible objects (images printed on palpable paper), thus taxing them slightly differently – bureaucrats love to wallow in such byzantine subtleties. Fortunately enough I have several websites, so I can place the impalpable stuff on one of them and the palpable stuff on another.

The novelty: Tarots on demand


While I was at it I also designed a couple of sets of author-signed tarots to be printed on demand.
It posed some challenges such as finding out the proper paper, learning how to laminate it, improvising a device to cut them out precisely by hand and round up the corners comme il faut, finding the right boxes to dress them up appropriately for their travel to the customer… live and learn 🙂

Have a look at them – you’ll find an (almost) classical deck as well as a retro-steampunk one with a pinch of humor scattered here and there – the latter, I confess, being definitely my favorite 😀

Dante’s Inferno Project

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reposted
It has been quite challenging to produce (with the help of Midjourney) some spectacular and dramatic imagery inspired by the Inferno of Dante’s Divina Commedia.

Dante’s Inferno is a fascinating journey through the nine circles of Hell. This journey isn’t just for kicks; it’s about confronting the consequences of sin and understanding the need for repentance to reach salvation.

Dante places there historical figures and contemporaries, passing judgment on their deeds and misdeeds. It’s a personal and political elegant revenge, wrapped up in an epic narrative. Very cool of him.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the Inferno challenges and expands the boundaries of medieval imagination, blending horror and despair with complex allegories, making it a timeless piece that speaks of the eternal complexities of ethics.


You’ll find my images here.
I enjoyed this Midjourney’s ride, I hope you will too 🙂