Ode, snap.
Vol. 7, No. 3
I’m not a very good photographer. I tried to change that a few times in my life (as recently as last year, in fact) — I spent too much on a camera and got really into Flickr and hung out with (i.e., tweeted at) creative types who owned nice lenses and had at least a dilettantish interest in taking good pictures — but it didn’t matter, I don’t have a knack for it and I lack the patience and inclination to learn and improve. (More like F-Oh-Just-Stop-Already, amirite?)
Last summer, I handed my phone to a stranger and had them take a photo of me with family and friends. When I looked at the photo later, there was a woman passing behind us looking at the camera, as though she were with us, but not, like, with us. It was just odd, so for the first time in my life I tried out that thingy where you use your phone and your finger to erase a person. It took four seconds and worked great and felt… weird.
It’s not like photography doesn’t have a rich tradition of dishonesty, but I am concerned we are now spending too much effort creating moments when all we really wanted to do is capture them.
So now I’m a “snapshot” guy. There’s an app called Lapse, and it more or less operates like the iPhone version of a disposable camera — features that do more to mimic the spirit of those cameras than force fit analogue features for shits, kicks and giggles. It’s the good kind of nostalgia. (Lapse also seems to have a bit of a history going from simple app, to social photo app, to failed social photo app that burned though tens of millions of dollars, and then, incredibly, instead of just shutting down, they reverted back to the original concept. All of that happened before I found it.)
Opens immediately to take photos, stores them behind a button for me to review later (I like that feature a lot, and this button push is a much better implementation of it than Gudak’s wait for three fucking days while we pretend develop your fake film), and does a little voodoo to actually look like proper photograph.
Now you’re thinking, “the fuck does ‘proper’ even mean there?” Well, let me tell you: I am 48 years old, which means my sticky years were like 1992 through 1998 or so, so a proper photo looks like it was taken by a Kodak FunSaver — it’s grainy, there might be red eye, and everyone looks a little spooked but also like they are having the best day of their life. Also the date should be stamped on there in an unnecessarily digital-ass font.
(Also, I bought my kids each one of these and they are pretty great if you’re in good light.)
Housekeeping: Been a few weeks. Just assume I’m very busy working on the new book. / ✌️
Matthew / Kenneth Josephson / 1965
Confusions.
🏴☠️ Pirating the pirates. ❝Legally, this is piracy. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, merely breaking a Blu-ray’s digital lock to rip the video files is a federal violation, regardless of intent. The law makes no distinction between mass-distributing a movie for profit and preserving the historical record. To take part in these preservation projects is to take on significant legal risk, with admonishments from rights holders and cease-and-desist letters being common.❞ / 📖 Choose Your Own Adventure books for adults. / Not unrelated: how romance novels filled sex-ed gaps. / 📦 Don’t let anyone take away your big box of cables. / 🤬 Reddit is turning off RSS. / 🧠 Bad Brains are releasing their original demo tape. ❝The riff for ‘Pay To Cum’ started as a stream of punk rock vibes fueled by The Ramones, The Damned, and Return To Forever. The title actually meant nothing to us; it was just a fun-loving play on words.❞ / 🎲 Very jealous of these friends who are trying to play through all of The Campaign for North Africa, the most tedious war game ever made.
Extensions.
🗄️ Museum Of Endangered Sounds. / Museum of Time Based Art. / 🗂️ The Ikea Complexity Index. / 📐 Bastardica, a foundry for bastard web fonts. / 🎸 Tuner, for tuning. / Air Theremin. / 🛠️ Bento/Suite, presentation in a single browser file. / Normal Tools. / Bye Bye Paywall. / Blockr, see what your computer is talking to. / Butter Box, file sharing without internet. / Keeby, keyboard sounds. / 👾 Spaceships, you are not the ship. / 📍 The David Rumsey Map Collection.
Explorations.
📺 Hornblower, all of it. I do this every five years or so. / 🍿 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). I think I prefer the older one. / 🍿 Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Not terrible. / 🍿 The Wrong Girls is the stoner comedy we needed. / 🍿 Coyote vs. Acme. / 🍿 Zoolander. / 📺 Ted Lasso, because I’m a completist.