This Facebook thing

There’s something ominous about the sheer momentum of facebook. I’ve never seen an internet phenomenon affect this many people before, and, at least momentarily, really affect their lives. I’ve been on for just a few months and it seems if anything the rate at which I’m seeing people who I never thought I’d hear from again join up and find me is accelerating. When is this going to stop? Is there going to come a time a year or three hence when we’re all, “facebook, remember that? what happened to that thing?” or is it going to change things, like the Web before and after Google, or for that matter, the Internet before and after the Web? (Or more cynically, the Internet before and after the September That Never Ended?)

Will I soon get a facebook friending from Eddie Bresnahan, my best friend who lived next door to me in LaGrange, Illinois, and whom I last saw when I was five, sometime before my family moved to Michigan in 1975?  About whom the only clear thing I remember is that his family owned a Gnip Gnop?

How about Timmy Bolt, who acted up in Kindergarten at the Lutheran school I went to in LaGrange, because his mom was the teacher (and that’s the only thing I remember about him except a vague impression of his appearance)?

How about the little girl named Katie that my mom babysat when I was about four?  How about Becky, the daughter of my mom’s best friend in LaGrange, whom we lost touch with when we moved?

None of the above would surprise me at this point.  I’m expecting friend requests from previous incarnations soon.

Adpology

Things are tough all over these days.  I thought it’d be worth at least checking to see if I can earn anything from adsense on the blog.  It looks like butt and has sleazy pharmaceutical ads, though.  I’m going to leave them there just in case they do any good, and recommend Adblock Plus to anyone they annoy.

Erik Rinehard Hates Your HDR

Flickr HDR:

The image is woefully over-compressed, with halos merging into random splodges. It is not unlike a large number of images posted on Flickr. It exhibits what some call the ‘HDR look’, and which I call a horrible set of unnecessary artifacts. It is highly unnatural and highlights the dangers of using Photomatix unless you know what you are doing. Please understand that HDR is not a style that you can either like or dislike. High dynamic range imaging has nothing to do with artistic freedom. What you see here is an artifact of the software that you choose to use, in combination with the parameters you choose to abuse.

I really enjoy a lot of pictures that have the “HDR look” he’s talking about.  But when I make them myself, I enjoy them less because I know the procedure to get that look using my software of choice (QTPFSGui) and it tends to come out looking the same, picture after picture.  (QTPFSGui is extremely versatile; it actually allows you to use Rinehard’s preferred techniques instead of the traditionally “HDR-y” looking ones.  Two of Rinehard’s algorithms are available in the latest versions of it.)

Lately I’ve been using exposure fusion instead of doing HDR strictly speaking, because it is more naturalistic, while still kind of interesting.

Reading Rinehard’s piece makes me want to do two things:

  • use his algorithms to make naturalistic cool HDRs he’d approve of
  • use the other algorithms to make wack artificial HDRs he’d hate

In approximately equal measures.

The Comic Book Panic

The 6 Most Insane Moral Panics in American History | Cracked.com.

Cracked.com has entertaining and often surprisingly informative humor articles.  This one includes a note on the “Seduction of the Innocent” comic book panic.

Fredic Werthem was a respected psychologist who fought to integrate the mental health care system, refused to serve in a racial-segregated army and was a pioneer in working with troubled youth. Having conquered all of the real world problems, he then decided to devote his life to bullshit.

During his time working with young offenders, Wertham noticed that many of them were fans of comics. Forgetting his education and lifetime of experience as a scientist, Wertham assumed that comics must be somehow responsible for the trouble these kids were in.

His 1954 book, Seduction Of The Innocent, outlined what he saw as the depraved effect of comics on kids. Granted, some comics in the 50s–especially the horror comics published by E.C. Comics–were pretty gruesome.

That’s a bit of an understatement.  In any case, I’d always thought that Wertham was just some weirdo busybody (having seen his book in, of all places, my high school library), until I learned something about him:

Earlier in his career, he was the chief defense witness for Albert Fish.  Don’t click on that link and read about Fish, even on Wikipedia, if you value your lunch.  Think of all the real and fictional serial killers/torturers/rapists you’ve ever heard of.  They were all wannabes; wannabe Albert Fishes.

If Wertham was Fish’s court psychologist, he stared deeply into the face of hell in a way few of us ever will.  If he found it alarming that gruesome and apparently perverse things were growing popular among America’s youth, he of all people should be cut a little slack about that fact.  He earned it.