hiding childhood memories in childhood memories.

While going through my mom's photo library, we found a series of pictures I made with my toy camera when I was little.

After some digging, I found the software I was using in the photo: Kids Cam Sticker Factory. It was a piece of software that came bundled with a toy camera marketed to kids in the early 2000s. Surprisingly, I managed to find a copy on the Internet Archive. It's Windows-only, but it ran mostly fine on my mac using WINE.

I added clipart to some of the other childhood photos my mom had sent me. KCSF's clipart feature splits images up into categories with significant overlap (should a picture of a family watching TV be put in 'Together' or 'People' or 'Entertainment'?), so I had to search through every sticker to find one I wanted. Doing this a couple hundred times lulled me into a kind of nostalgic meditative state.

I made a little soundscape from Celeste samples and a video I made when I was 10 and hid it in the photos using steganography.

Original	Stegified

To listen to the soundscape, use stegify to decode the images:

stegify decode --carriers 'everythinghidden.jpeg gunslingerhidden.jpeg' --result 'childhood.mp3'
open childhood.mp3

If stegify isn't available on your system, the audio is up on my website.