Perhaps I have been reading just a bit too much Neal Stephenson lately, but it seems to me that humans are dangerously susceptible to “infection” by ideas and images. Once a thought enters a human mind, willfully or otherwise, it sinks into the subconscious and cannot be forcibly removed — it asserts itself consciously in convenient circumstances until it is peacefully forgotten.

A perfect demonstration of this occurred on Wednesday, July 6th, 2005, when five people whose minds were (and are) unhealthily saturated by the ideas and images of the online photo-sharing service and mind-composting machine Flickr assembled with the primary goal of shortening the hair of two of their number. After the carnage had subsided, cleanup began, and, anomalously, the discarded hair formed itself into two circular wads of contrasting color.

I can’t recall for certain in which relatively independent sub-totality the idea arose (probably this one, though). The saturation of Flickr-imagery acted as impenetrable noise. Eventually, the group began nudging the wads of hair around and snapping successive photographs. They produced an animation that is simultaneously a novel and clever echo of something beautiful , at least from their perspective, and the most disgusting GIF animation of the year:

I’ve begun actively using Flickr. It’s truly an amazing service, which is not to mention the equally amazing people behind it. My photographs are making the slow progress from hither to yon, and I’ve posted my portrait project as a photoset there (if you’re in the mood, I’d be complimented by any criticism you could offer by commenting here or there). I’ve also written an adaptation of syndicated to put the most recent few photos in the right-hand sidebar here at Capra hircus. I may release it in the near future.

Beyond this, however, my new understanding of Flickr has enabled something far overdue to precipitate at last:

If my obsession in analog photography is overexposure, my obsession in digital photography is the synthesis of contrast using Curves. Click to view the photos at Flickr.

I took this photograph with my PowerShot SD10 with my right hand while applying lipstick with my left. If you’re curious, I’m not exactly in the habit of applying lipstick; a muse just whispered in my ear. It’s also worth noting that the grayscale variation (number six) is just the the red channel of the one to its left (number five).

• Underwear IV (144k): A man in a suit examines his new polyester underwear.
• Flour shadow (150k): My foot is outlined on the floor when I drop some flour onto it while baking.
• Flying, closer (99k): An opportunistic visual gimmick, but cool nonetheless.
• Kevins (97k): I can’t say why I enjoy this photograph so much. I think it’s the positions the people were caught in. Its subject matter makes more sense if you were there.
• Chai pattern (79k): Today my Chai mixed strangely with some soy milk in a way that reminded me of miso soup.

So, it’s been an inexplicably and gruelingly long process, but I have finished labeling, cropping, and HTML-ifying my photos from the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua. I shall leave the back-story of the trip a mystery to those who are not RL-beings, most of whom are probably well-acquainted with it. So, sit down, shut up, and, as if you were staring into the spectral, vicious eyes of the concept of a vacation slide show narrated by a logorrheic aunt, attempt to resist a blood-curdling yelp and a dash for the door.

It ought to be noted at this point that Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on Ometepe as of this writing, and it’s even unlabeled on the map of Nicaragua there. The frustrating thing is that, because of the nature of the wiki, I have no one to blame but myself.

Anyway, processing each individual image took a huge amount of time off and on since I returned from my trip in early April. Transforming the images into a gallery took about six or seven hours today and very heavy and mind-bending use of regular expressions. Absurdly over-deserved hails and thanks are due to TheCodingMonkeys for implementing regex search-and-replace into the latest version of SubEthaEdit. Despite the collaborative effort of SEE and myself, the gallery is quite ugly and definitely not standards-compliant so I’ve placed it on its own page, so as not to clutter the order that I like to believe blesses this blog.

You didn’t want statistics, but I’ll relate them to you anyway. Three hundred two photographs were imported from my camera and 214 remained after careful inspection. The index page itself weighs in at a hefty 74.6kB. The thumbnails on that page total 1.8MB and the 214 full-size images make up 29MB of data. This puts me 31MB over my storage limit of 50MB on my host, but they don’t seem to be too protective/attentive regarding quotas. We’ll see if they notice. On the off chance that they do, does anyone have a suggestion regarding a good place to host this blob of useless bytes?

With no further ado, I present to you an emotionally self-therapeutic but generally misanthropic overdose of media and information.

At the left is a small clip from an unintentionally disturbing photograph that I will be using soon for some RL business. It was taken with an accidentally huge depth of field, lending a surreal quality to the night. It was enlarged too far and shot with relatively fast film, and is thus extremely grainy. The white stuff at the top is dust on the negative; I don’t recall if there were any stars visible. The original photo at Flickr.

So, although I’ve never done this before, I have decided to blog some photos. Woohoo!

Roll over photos to see my inane narration. Click photos to enlarge.