I'm trying to use it and it's stuck thinking about my image. I wonder if it's suffering the HN hug of death, or if I just selected a very difficult cat photo.

Did you do the catcha? It might think you're a cat and that's your selfie.

It reminds me of these two projects: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/le-myope-confused-camera/

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/layercamera/

it's actually not stupid at all imho... it's like.. conceptual compression

Yeah... that made me laugh. Clever / stupid!