Pepper of the Earth - The Home Office Record & Mostly Daily Gazette

This was mostly a weekend for staying in, and as it happens I mostly stayed in this weekend.

Since I don’t already have enough ways to fritter away tinker-time on those Internets </sarcasm>, it’s a lucky thing Flickr came along. Flickr is a sprawling virtual warehouse e-complex for storing your photographs. It’s also a fantastic time sink, and a whole lotta fun.

Back in the old days when humanity used to shoot film — February, in my case — your pictures were those things that wouldn’t all fit into the photo albums and eventually got dusty and crumpled and tacky on the finish side from exposure and where did those negatives go anyway (YMMV if you are not a slovenly bachelor, or if you have lots of closet space). Now that we shoot pixels — they shoot pixels, don’t they? — your pictures are those things that won’t all fit onto the hard drive, so you conveniently burn them to CD.

My theory about burning things to CD is that it’s a really great way to open dimensional portals. It works like this. You take those 200 files you don’t really want — shy photos, what-was-I-thinking mp3’s, incriminating drunken email notes, Yahoo chat logs, whatever — and burn them to a CD to keep them out of the way, along with 5 or 6 important items you’d actually like to see again. These might be drafts, notes, ideas for Really Great Inventions, snippets of dialog for Really Great Stories. You put the CD away onto the Dimensional Rift Storage Spindle™, and let a few weeks pass. Then you wake up with a hankering to hear that mp3 of that song you suddenly like so much. You fish out the CD, toddle it into the CD tray, pull up a file menu, search through it. And voilà! 200 files you don’t want, and none of the good ones.

Dimensional portal. We’re working on harnessing it for future Star Trek spinoffs.

Anyway, for 25 clams a year and as many hours as you can yank out of a day, Flickr will store your photos. All of them. (With the free basic account, Flickr will store just most of them: thanks go to blogger buddy Paul Frankenstein for upgrading me to the awe-inspiring Pro account.) Between that and the first season of Deadwood on DVD, there went Friday, some of Saturday, and bits of Sunday. Now you can thumb through my pictures on Flickr. That, and has there ever been a character as deep and dark as Al Swearengen? I intend to talk like Al from now on, until someone points out that I’m acting like a jerk.

The image slices up above are crops of fuller photos you’ll find on my Flickr page: up top is lovely Harvest Moon and on bottom is glorious Miss Saturn, both of whom brought light into a dark rainy Saturday night. Between them is Bradford Scobie as Ukulele Louie, who doesn’t inspire raptures so much as paroxysms. But that’s another story for a different kitchen. Suffice it to say that Saturday night ended far into Sunday morning and the words “ouch” and “whoa, ouch” were not far from mind.

Jess and I went out for another in our series Bad Monster Movie Blogger Events later in the afternoon, chowing down on The Amityville Horror, a.k.a. It’s a True Story No It Isn’t Oh Yeah What Do You Know Well It Isn’t Just Shut Up Fine Bite Me. We should get this straight right away: it’s a pretty poor movie. And by the end we were clenched in our balcony seats, feet pulled up from the dangerous floor, tingled and flinching. Silly and shallow, yes: and that was some scary shit.

Next up on the Bad Monster Movie Blogger Events calendar: House of Wax, with Paris Hilton. Yay!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 18:08 and is filed under About Last Night. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.