Day 83: The House Stood Alone

2026-04-30

Hello!

The title comes from my high school English project, where we made a "short film" in the style of La Jetée — still pictures, mostly black and white, with one section of motion picture. We could have made our own original story, but I got lazy and copied the story from Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains.

The story has no humans, and is just the day in the life of a futuristic, automated house of robots. The only living being, a dog, froths at the mouth and dies.

I'm not showing the video project, because I'm not the only one who worked on it, and it doesn't feel right to bring a shared school project onto this website. But I supplied most of the pictures for the film, and one of the coolest ones is of this house in a field. All the photos I took were then stripped of all color / saturation, creating about one hundred monochrome photos.

I took a lot of photos with the intent of using them in this project, and I set up a few angles that would tie the whole thing together. But this photo came from a regular walk, and the view just appeared without me realizing it. As soon as I saw this house in a field, I knew it would be perfect for the project (whose deadline had crept up sooner than I thought...!)

Finally, some more birds. I promise that colorful kingfishers bonding and mating in Central Bohemia is more interesting than it sounds — and it sounds pretty damn interesting on its own.

Cheers,
David