Writer's block has hit me, as far as posting on LiveJournal goes. My last post got two very thoughtful comments, which I do appreciate, and I have been intending to reply, but just haven't been able to pull the words together. Truth is, it's been a tough week, existentially. By that, I mean that nothing specific has happened, but all the things that are less-than-ideal have felt a bit more oppressive than usual. I hope this passes soon, because it's not a lot of fun.
Working with photos has been a bit of a ray of sunshine. I've been rescanning and retweaking some photos over the last few weeks and it has been very pleasing to see some improvements in how I do that. The photos aren't getting any better (well, they're between 2 and 20 years old, there's only so much they can do on their own) but maybe their presentation is.
Today, I copied a bunch of photos from my LJ Scrapbook to my Flickr page. This is mostly to continue the consolidation process I started a year or so ago. I also have to admit that Scrapbook is not a very enticing tool to use, and it's not getting any better, which is to say that I don't think they're doing any development work on it. Flickr gets so many more eyes because it's a destination site for photos, something Scrapbook isn't as far as I can tell. Yet it's so easy to take a Flickr photo and use it in LJ or another blog. I've not decided whether I'm going to edit LJ posts with photos to point to Flickr or not, but that's the sort of thing I can do over time if I want.
Apart from my own photos, I've been looking at good things on Flickr, especially the Explore/Interestingness/Last 7 Days page. (Yeah, I know, what the hell is "interestingness" anyway? But it works for me.) I also discovered some blogs on Tumblr—oops, I guess they're "Tumblogs" or something. I have a lot of misgivings about Tumblr (but then I would because I'm old; I think that's part of it), but there's some cool stuff out there.
Ramble, ramble, ramble. Maybe I should turn the computer off and go grocery shopping. After all, one can't download food and fresh air. But I'll re-share these pics, the cranes for altivo and the eagles for
tastyeagle for their comments to last week's post, and the panda for hellmutt, just because red pandas are cool.
Andanimist... how are the maned wolves doing, anyway?
Working with photos has been a bit of a ray of sunshine. I've been rescanning and retweaking some photos over the last few weeks and it has been very pleasing to see some improvements in how I do that. The photos aren't getting any better (well, they're between 2 and 20 years old, there's only so much they can do on their own) but maybe their presentation is.
Today, I copied a bunch of photos from my LJ Scrapbook to my Flickr page. This is mostly to continue the consolidation process I started a year or so ago. I also have to admit that Scrapbook is not a very enticing tool to use, and it's not getting any better, which is to say that I don't think they're doing any development work on it. Flickr gets so many more eyes because it's a destination site for photos, something Scrapbook isn't as far as I can tell. Yet it's so easy to take a Flickr photo and use it in LJ or another blog. I've not decided whether I'm going to edit LJ posts with photos to point to Flickr or not, but that's the sort of thing I can do over time if I want.
Apart from my own photos, I've been looking at good things on Flickr, especially the Explore/Interestingness/Last 7 Days page. (Yeah, I know, what the hell is "interestingness" anyway? But it works for me.) I also discovered some blogs on Tumblr—oops, I guess they're "Tumblogs" or something. I have a lot of misgivings about Tumblr (but then I would because I'm old; I think that's part of it), but there's some cool stuff out there.
Ramble, ramble, ramble. Maybe I should turn the computer off and go grocery shopping. After all, one can't download food and fresh air. But I'll re-share these pics, the cranes for altivo and the eagles for
tastyeagle for their comments to last week's post, and the panda for hellmutt, just because red pandas are cool. And
animist... how are the maned wolves doing, anyway?
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Tumblr? I don't get it. Perhaps because I'm old, or perhaps because I can't accept the "entertainment of the moment" view of the net that so many now have.
Tumblr is odd to me. I don't really know why there is a Tumblr in a world with all the blog services on one hand and Flickr/Picasa/Photobucket on the other. I think one of their selling points is the ease with which users can post content, and I can't evaluate that. Most Tumblogs I've seen strike me as very ephemeral, and very few give much context to their posts or their whole sites. Neither do they tend to give attribution for content they didn't create themselves. Having said that, I confess I'm being entertained by some of them, especially ones with, um, certain kinds of photos.
Tumblr seems to appeal to 20-somethings with short attention spans, as far as I can tell. They don't mind if it's ephemeral because everything is ephemeral to them. They make fun of blogs for being "all serious and emo" and besides "who has time to read that stuff?" Some of the individuals I know who were enthused about Tumblr a while ago have wandered into Google's Buzz and now seem to think that's all the rage. It's a sort of ADHD I think. Amusingly, a couple of them that I first encountered on LJ (where they used to write thoughtful and fairly lengthy stuff at times) completely abandoned LJ in favor of Twitter, then raved about Google Wave (which doesn't really DO anything as far as I can tell, being totally a beta product) and then switched from that to Tumblr and from there back to Twitter and from there to Buzz when it came out. They were all "Oh, Twitter is old now, Buzz is the thing." Amusingly, they seem to be back on Twitter. I guess the migration to Buzz wasn't universal enough. Since I completely blocked everything Buzz after learning more about it, I wouldn't know.
Well, if it gets them to write more than 140 characters in a row, I guess it's better than Twitter. It seems like it was designed as an antidote to Tumblr-poisoning, if you ask me. But I can't see what the big deal is about that either. Go back and USE your LJ accounts, folks. PFFBLT!
I know what you mean about the way it looks like ADHD is going on, with people jumping from service to service. I admit that I've been interested in some of the new sites, but then I stop and think about all the sites I'm already on, and that usually knocks some sense into me. Besides, it's not as if EVERYone is all switching to the same new site, so if I start following people all over the Internet, it'll take forever to keep up with them all.
It's easy to get distracted by new shiny things, though, I guess.
It seems, though, that all this flitting about is driven partly by a need to be "cool" and "up to date" with the latest "fashion fads." The irony of leaving a solid blogging site for Twitter or Buzz only to end up using 750words to make yourself write more than one sentence at a time is just too amusing.
Your move to DW wasn't a decision taken lightly, I could tell. And it's consistent with the mission of your LJ, as opposed to the "switch to Twitter/now let's do 750words.com" sequence.
Truth be told, a third reason why I'm copying most of my LJ photos to Flickr is in case I ever need to make a move such as yours. The most recent episode had me shaking my head, though I didn't say anything (except to Dave, that is).
p.s.: