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Something is afoot in the land of online imagery.
My Twitter account has come to serve as the CNN crawler to my RSS feeds’ feature stories and interviews: little bits and snippets of news with tinyurl pointers to the latest events. As I scrolled through my account this morning, I saw that at 5:31 PM yesterday, Derek Powazek tweeted “Are you resistant to change? Join the EVERYTHING NEW IS BAD army! http://www.flickr.com/groups/changeresistance/“, which was my first clue that something was up. I thought Derek was just being snarky, so I didn’t take the bait — but at 5:57, Matt Howie followed suit with “Man, just when you think nothing can top Livejournal user drama, Flickr “no video” people go and redefine the term ‘user drama'”. The topic died down for a while (evidence that my circle, now in our mid-twenties to mid-thirties, are getting more interested in things like cooking and kids than teh Intarwebs in the evenings), but then at 1:01 AM EST my photographer friend Rannie Turingan tweeted “What do you think of Video on Flickr? http://tinyurl.com/5qdqqw“. Molly Wright Steenson’s tweet “all your base are belong to Flickr Video” was the next on the topic at 11:07, followed by my “Holy crap Flickr Video” at 11:15 and Kevin Smokler’s “Flickr video kicked my kitten…” at 11:24. Right now the blogosphere is discovering something new and, like a bunch of curious kittens (thanks, Kevin) we’re poking it, prodding it and figuring out what we think of it.
A lot of the reaction so far has been negative, as Derek’s tweet seems to have foreshadowed. (This isn’t surprising; Derek’s wife Heather Champ Powazek works at Flickr, so both Derek and Heather are sitting at ground zero for this one — in fact, Heather posted a video on the official Flickr blog called ‘Video on Flickr’ that served as an official teaser for the feature on April 8.) Ryan Gantz posted an interesting Obama-meets-Anti-Flickr-Video mash-up image titled ‘leave flickr alone’, which is only one image in the pools We Say NO to Videos on Flickr (25,239 members), NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!! (10,544 members) and We say NO to Videos on Flickr UNCENSORED! (27 members). It’s the last one that’s particularly interesting; aside from the fact that yes, you do have to click through Flickr’s safety screen to get to it (Flickr’s CYA clause for NSFW images), it’s the only one of the three to have a number of actual videos appearing on its initial page. In fact, six of the thirty images on the pool’s initial page point to videos, all of whom seem to be illustrating the point that – shocker! – adding video to Flickr opens the door to questionable content. Actually clicking on them, though, shows that the content isn’t that questionable – the first one, a short video called ‘Genesis in Reverse‘ by a user called Claudia Veja is straight out of art school, featuring what appears to be a naked woman wandering through a city, but the film is shot in such a way that it shows no ‘questionable’ body parts aside from some ankle and some collarbone. The second, Easter Photowalk 2008‘ by ♥ shhexycorin ♥, is a hyperaccelerated autobio piece with the most questionable bit being a guy trying to kick a pigeon or two. PETA might be annoyed, but they’d be hard pressed to file charges. The third, Genesis in reverse part 2‘, also by Claudia Veja, is a continuation of the first that is somewhat sexier (featuring a risque outfit, a cigarette and, later, some cross-gendered makeup) but still isn’t what I’d deem NSFW. The others? A dog getting peanut butter off his nose, a cat drinking from a toilet and a dog named Gilligan running at double-speed around a yard.
Titillating stuff, that. So what’s going on here?
Pink dye in my braids streaks my fingers,
Fuzzy Pikachu pack strapped to my back,
String of Hello Kitty charms accompanying each step
With a jingle-jangle symphony of tiny bells.
My home is a continent where I’ve never set foot,
My mother tongue is something I cannot speak,
My seinen thoughts read right to left,
My dreams come with tiny white subtitles.
Would that I could replace my bones with steel,
Stretch myself into an Eva six stories tall,
Stride through oceans to the depths of the earth,
Or spread jetpack wings and soar through space
Unshackled, unchained, unbound, unleashed.
Like a rock concert in the middle of winter,
Like leather pants on a man old enough to be your daddy,
Like a convertible in a thunderstorm,
A pop reference still too recent to be retro,
A line from a sitcom nobody ever watched,
This is the way she would walk into the room,
Too cool to be cool,
More heebie-jeebies than CBGB’s,
Stepping way outside what my little mind could handle,
Refracting the culture of a thousand other places
Through the pretty pretty prism of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one,
Sashaying down the corridor like nobody’s business,
Standing in the street like nobody’s daughter,
Dancing in the field like nobody’s home,
Leaving in her wake a trail of nothing more
Than scattered, heartbroken, bewildered stares.
(Late due to veterinary emergencies yesterday.)
Tell me a story of swords and sandals,
Set in the Vatican, the Pope versus the Devil,
The streets cloaked in fog and the sun long gone,
Long sweeping shots establishing the mood
Just as keenly as the eerie tinkling tones,
Philip Glass in the background.
From V-1 to V-2:
The deep canals covered in moss,
The whispering trickles of water now still,
No boatmen poling their ways home,
No cats crouching on stone windowsills,
Time is frozen in this darkened silent second,
As still and as cold as blood,
Tricksters lurking behind darkened carnival windows,
Peering out from behind a hundred marionettes,
Winged lions aching to surge,
Waiting for word from the City of God.
I stand a hundred feet above the sand,
lifeline cinched about my waist,Â
feathers quivering at my fingertips,
the towering mast beneath my feetÂ
raising me up beside the deified dead.
The sunset horizon stretches out behind me,
casting we Totonac into sharp relief,
voladores silhouetted against the Mexican twilight.
I put my head down and stretch out my arms,
weaving my destiny between my toes,
and step off into my downward spiral,
a thunderbird or a phoenix.
Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.
(Inspired by a passage in Robert Callois’ “The Classification of Games.”)
Blink, no, too slow by far, not F-16 fast,Â
throttles full open and engines at full rip-roar blast,
still not fast, not ultra-fast laser fast,
moving an atom’s breadth, dancing in femtoseconds,Â
weaving and cutting and welding and building,
erecting great monuments on the surfaces of semiconductors,Â
entire civilizations on the backs of things too small to be perceived.
In Michigan 300 terawatts flex through titanium and sapphire,
primed to divide cell from cell, bond implants to bone,
change the limits of time and freeze electrons in motion,
actions so small as to be nearly infinite,
not unlike the minutiae that drew me to you.
Tiny bits and pieces of something removed,
Artifacts that hint at a larger thing, a greater device,
A clockwork the size of the sun, perhaps,
Its warmth and fire generated by eternally grinding gears,
Shooting plasma plumes each time a tooth catches,
Darkening sunbathers a million million miles away,
A cancer machine crouching between clouds
Growling and gnashing its comfortable jaws.
These are the pieces of it that fell to earth,
Tumbling in the wake of David Bowie,
Granting us hints at its true malevolent intent,
My daughter scoops them up in the folds of her dress
Snatches them up in tiny fists,Â
Ignoring their heat and their smell,
And rushes to my office to thrust them into my hands
And insist that I string them into a necklace,
Sunteeth jewelry to impress her friends at school,
And I take them from her, one by one,
Holding them up in the light streaming through my window,
And they glint as they are reunited with their parent radiation,
I swear they glow red and gold with trembling frustration,
Yearning to gnaw through my fingers, the sky and space.
They’ll make such pretty, hateful things.
Oh, man.  This is going to be an expensive week.  First Laura and I spent the afternoon shopping for supplies at the mall today, then I came home to find that Jim Butcher’s next Harry Dresden novel, A Small Favor, comes out on Tuesday, as does the new album by R.E.M.  Both of these I knew were coming soon, but I wasn’t sure exactly when.  And then someone brought this to my attention: the new MindStyle statue of uRac the Scribe from The Dark Crystal is now available.  I’ve wanted to buy something from that movie for a while now, but only now has just the right thing come across my radar.  From the listing at Entertainment Earth:
 The Dark Crystal, comes this superbly detailed and hued statue of uRac the Scribe. The decidedly collectible polyresin statue from Mindstyle is large (it measures 5-inches tall x 10-inches wide) and is a limited edition of only 1,500 pieces. It comes in a matching full-color box that is suitable for display, as well. The prayers of Dark Crystal fans and collectors alike are answered with this marvelous sculpture!
I mean, seriously… Â How perfect is that for my office?
This is sad: after five years, What Do I Know?, the weblog of designer extraordinaire Todd Dominey, is closing its virtual doors.
What he says is true – the site has been a virtual ghost town for months. Yet still it had a place of pride in my Inspirations folder, the collection of blogs from designers, thinkers and other creators that I would load up every time I was jonesing for a kick to the brain cells. To see it shut down completely is a bigger loss to me than if boing boing were to close.
Oh, well – like he says, he’s still Twittering, at least. As my own erratic posting here but more semi-consistent Twittering testifies, that seems to be what people do when they don’t have time for regular blogging. I still hold out hope that this blog will pick up as I dedicate more time to writing (more on that soon), but we’ll see – once April gets rolling, a more formal schedule should hopefully emerge. Hopefully!
Open your eyes as wide as you can,
Make your pupils islands in the middle of moon-white seas,
And count the shades of blue you can discover in your periphery
(Cerulean, turquoise, navy, aquamarine, etc.) —
Be specific, be minute, be exact and precise,
Tick them off on your fingers and toes and follicles,
Rattle them off in your native tongue or in a language politely borrowed,
And consider the mosaic you could create if you could reach out your hands,
Carefully slipping a nail behind each tiny, perfect shade
And prying it loose of its containing world,
Collecting each sample into a tiny velvet drawstring bag,
Jumbling the hues together and mixing them up and rattling them around,
Listening to the shika-shake rhythm of one section of rainbow.
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