While Seated, Date Ascending [004]
Obama’s Wetfish, Nixon Knew, Surfing Lightroom Filenames, and Hockney’s iPad Art … Or Not
20160318 — We’re no longer descending. Pure aspiration from here on out. Date ascending now, cause that’s life (on the down-scroll).
20160320 — This weekend, after polishing-off House of Cards, we kept running down the theme of political corruption with a historic double-feature of “All the President’s Men” and “Our Nixon”.
20160320 — I wrote about three photographs of Air Force One landing in Havana today:
20160321 — If you find yourself listening to this great Politico podcast with Jill Abramson and you’ve never heard Jill Abramson speak before, you might end-up on this Google search. I honestly wondered if she was ok. She’s ok!
20160322 — There are a bajillion app ideas, so here’s one more: I’d like to create a Google Alert-style notification for a particular search term (a person’s name, say) but I don’t want to receive updates about it for a specified length of time, like a year.
A year from now, I’d like to receive updates about Tony Pettway, the Air Force airman who beat-up Bryan Sanders at the Trump rally in Tucson this weekend. I want to know how the fight affected his career & life (or didn’t!) and generally want to know what he’s up to, but not until some significant time has passed.
Wait: isn’t that journalism? Do journalists enter future events in their calendars to revisit old stories on an annual basis to see if they’re worth a significant update? Maybe all I’m asking for is a more robust version of the current (stuck-in-2004) Google Alerts.
20160322 — That moment when you realize: as much as you love and appreciate experimental film, and have had some of the best experiences in your movie-watching life at screenings for experimental film (e.g. “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Caught Brief Glimpses of Beauty” at Pacific Film Archive, 2003-ish; or Cremaster 2 at Grand Illusion in Seattle, 1999) you also can’t stand how “about itself” it is. Like the worst of language poetry.
Like standing in a phone booth shouting about why you’re standing in a phone booth and how no one can hear you. Possibly interesting & insightful, also a little bit crazy and easily dismissed by the rest of the world.
Felt that way when I abandoned watching 88:88. I tried, but the hill to enjoyment felt too steep, and each step I took, I slid backward. I’m sure there’s something good and worthwhile in here, but my nutcracker’s rusty.
Never thought I’d see an email survey for “craft” beer label copy that doubled-down on a decades-stale Lewinsky joke. Then again, it’s from Sweetwater; the same marketing communications team responsible for Happy Ending with tissues.
20160322 — Or that moment when you’ve been thinking about how the future will bring a Presidential election in which the outcome will be affected by a YouTube video, and then you remember Mittens and his 47% remarks from 2012. Oh, Mittens.
20160322 — Tonight I saw an out-of-order photo while going through my Instagram timeline. On the web client. A new photo (1-minute old) appeared at the bottom of the stream, rather than the top. A date-ascender fighting the date-descenders.
I had Instagram years ago, when it was an eerily-quiet iPhone-only app and felt like a secret society (an app-based digiworld w/o a website) which I liked. Then I got rid of it for a few years, before they sold to Facebook.
I’ve been back for awhile, but can’t shake the ambivalence.
20160323 — This should be a screenshot of the tweet I deleted where I asked Medium if there was a way I could use a classic, old-school html link — the “A Name” link — which would allow me to easily link deep-down in this “article” to this screenshot of the tweet I deleted where I asked Medium if they allowed a classic, old-school html link…
20160324 — I put something together last night for ACP about Nicholas Felton’s new book, PhotoViz, which is a remarkable idea that’s found its way into print. I love the idea that obscure folders on your desktop of odd collections that make sense to you can become book projects.
I’m way more interested than I should be in the idea of strapping colored LEDs to a kayak paddle for a time-lapse.
20160324 — A few years ago it was possible to search for a specific phrase in a close-captioned YouTube video. In the last year and a half, YouTube pulled that functionality from the site.
20160324 — More terrorism attacks, more security measures, more doubling-down, more security measures, more terrorism attacks, more handwringing, more security measures, more legislation, more security firms, more terrorism, more security, more terror, more, more, more.
“…the ultimate goal of 9/11 attacks was to provoke the United States into this endless campaign of militarism and military spending that would essentially weaken and ultimately bankrupt the United States, much like the Soviet military adventures in the 1980s helped to bring down the Soviet Union. And we seem to be happy to play into their hands.” — GG
So many other great quotes on this; so little time and inclination to paste them here.
20160325 —Stumbled into a new photo game for your digi-archives. Plug in any four-digit number from 0001–9999, say 5087, and see how many times that auto-generated filename appears, across time.
Using 5087 — the file-name of a screenshot of that time-traveling car photo, above, I came up with these, from the last 13 years:
- Carnaval in the Mission, San Francisco, 20030525
- Goatherding in downtown Addis Ababa from taxi window, 20041022
- Friends cutting cake, San Francisco, 20050827
- Epic family birthday party, Atlanta, 20070303
- Bridesmaid makeup, Rochester, 20090418
- Bill Hader at his best, screenshot, 20140518
- Time traveling car, screenshot, 20160319
Honestly interested in what your results might be — holler back @whileseated on twitter. Try “5087”!
