Flickr: The Candle In The Wind

Flickr announced recently that they're changing free accounts from having up to a full terabyte of data (along with some upload restrictions on file size and frequency) to a total limit of 1,000 photos. I've barely used Flickr in years and have 937 photos, which I could easily cull down to 900 if I felt especially picky. Maybe if I did more photography, I could justify the 50 per year for Pro. As subscriptions to web services go, I consider 50/year set-and-forget. That said, I have enough sets and forgets as is between Patreon and Playstation Plus, much less the handful of streaming services and storage apps I pay upkeep to. Flickr would just be one more on top of that pile. While the changes to Pro and Free accounts are essentially not going to affect me, I am a tad bummed that maybe some of my Favs will get axed. 
Typically when these kinds of throttles get rolled out for sites, there's a kind of grandfathering system. Your total number of uploads stays the same, but you can't add more until you get below the threshold. A free account could have 2,000 photos, and they will all stay up, but if one gets deleted, it's not going back in the photostream. 

While starting with the oldest makes sense (why would you cut new uploads?) I have to wonder how many people are going to go through their 1,000-plus and leave the first handful of uploads untouched. I also wonder how many people are going to be too late and find their early stuff gone. Hopefully they have it backed up somewhere. You can never have too many backups. As we all know, there's two kinds of backups: those that fail, and those that haven't failed yet. 

Instagroan

I'd avoided Instagram for a time, mostly for the sake of efficiency. Between Twitter and Flickr, my photo sharing platform needs were covered. There's also the hipster part of me who turned up his nose as Instagram's whole "we make vintage/experimental photos easy" modus operandi, presenting themselves as a digital version of Lomography. As someone who owns a Holga 120S and has developed his fair share of film, I felt a little disgusted at the pushbutton setup of Instagram. Over time, this bias cooled down to a tolerable indifference, though I still never bothered signing up.
Recently, though, after downloading Nintendo's Miitomo app, I ended up giving in and expanding my Facebook account into the virtual Lomo service. My impression: yeah, it's all right, I guess.

Going back to the "Lomo App" image, it is somewhat comforting that Instagram has admittedly never tried to offer themselves as a replacement to gimmicky film cameras like Holgas or old Polaroids (that was more the work of some of its fans, for which no one can really be blamed), but rather a tribute to the medium, one that embraces the flaws of vintage/amateur photography and, much like Lomography, markets those flaws as features. Light leaks and poor color and double exposures are considered technical shortcomings that would have been the bane of any pro's career, but to artists and people less discerning of their photos' presentation, it's character. It's rough and unrefined, yet authentic and honest. This nostalgia even extended to their logo, a brown-and-cream-colored box camera complete with rainbow sticker. Right away, from that logo, you knew you weren't getting some high-end "unleash your phone's true potential" sort of app. You were getting a virtual version of that old Polaroid or Instamatic you or your folks had growing up, and that's okay.

So, what the Hell happened?

A few months ago, Instagram changed out the off-white bakelite logo for something that not only looks like the lazy byproduct of someone trying out the gradient tool in a drawing program, but also completely deprives the app of any sort of identity. I think it's a mistake for your app to be partly cut out or translucent in any way. App tiles always look their best when they look like plaques or badges or buttons. The old logo was especially cute because it looked like a physical object. Specifically, it resembled an old instant camera from around the late 60s to early 70s, the kind where you had to wait a few seconds before peeling away a bit of sticky tissue paper away from your photo. The new logo looks like nothing. It doesn't resemble a real camera, and doesn't evoke any particular time period. The magenta and yellow gradient has an early 90s vibe to it, but the die-cut, simplified outline is distinctly of this decade (which, bear in mind, we've only got four years left in). It simply reeks of pandering and compromise. It plays it safe and tries to be liked by everyone at the expense of its personality.
What I suggest is that if we use the original logo as a baseline, why not simply push forward ten years? Sure, some of us might be sick of the 80s retro love heralded by Adam Sandler's Wedding Singer and the more recent Far Cry spin-off Blood Dragon, but maybe Instagram is the one place no one would mind it. Hell, they might even embrace it.

Bring on the chrome, Tron graphics, and neon cursive.

Quo Vadimus: The State of the Scroll

October never fails at being a particularly hectic and utterly draining month for me. I don't know if it's the onset of the winter holidays, which carry their own baggage, or that it's the month that follows my birthday, which manages to get more depressing despite my efforts to make it otherwise. Somehow, though, this is the month when it feels like things fall apart, even if they're perfectly solid. 
Following my anything-but-amicable encounter with an eBay buyer (who never lived up to the "buyer" portion of that title, among other shortcomings), I went up to Wisconsin for a few days to see my dad and some of my family, including my aunt. I'd been planning on going up anyway for some time, but after what happened with my aunt's health, I wasn't sure if I'd be going. It's hard to talk about, so this will be brief. In addition to back problems since young adulthood, my aunt recently had trouble swallowing, which she found out was due to a tumor at the base of her skull. It was also starting to have an unusual effect on her voice, a kind of breathy falsetto I got to hear when I called her a few days before her surgery. She'd been run through all the worst-case scenarios of the surgery, and was doing her best to keep a smile on her face despite it all. The good news is that the surgery went very well. 
The bad news is that she had a stroke shortly after. The nurse was moving her from one side of the room to the other when her entire right side fell limp. After being virtually comatose for what seemed like weeks, she began to slowly, painfully come around. She cannot speak, has all but zero control over her right side, and her overall communication and comprehension skills are sketchy at best. When I saw her, there was certainly no questioning her awareness, which I'd heard was the biggest improvement. She had no trouble recognizing me, and seemed utterly ecstatic, even if she couldn't say so. 
In the months approaching her surgery, she'd commented on Facebook how much she liked much of the artwork I'd been posting there, especially the BaRoW and Punch Cards. I'd brought along some blank cards of bristol and a small assortment of my markers. I ended up making three cards while there, with the intention of leaving them with her (I took a few quick snaps of them, but I don't intend to post them; they're too personal). I'll never forget the smile on her face when she saw the third of the bunch. I placed them on a shelf above her bed, next to another drawing I'd sent her (a remake of another black-and-red drawing I'd done, Rubeno Florajoj) that my other aunt had gotten a nice frame for. I gave her a big hug and told her that I loved her. 
I drove back home the next day. The last I'd heard, she was back in the hospital due to some swelling around her incisions, possibly brought on by a bad fall she had a few days before I arrived. I haven't heard any news since then, which can be good or bad. I have no idea what will happen to her, and as hard as it is to talk about what's happened, it's even harder to think about what's to come. 
Since I've been back, I haven't been particularly productive, except for the occasional post to Tumblr or even Flickr (mostly about cooking projects), but apart from a quick stick figure comic about an online gaming ad, I haven't been terribly visible on DeviantART, something that's honestly started to bug me less and less the more I think about it. During breaks at work, I'll break out my little notebook I always carry with me, but rarely will I put anything in it beyond a few random thoughts or a doodle I only find myself doing out of some desperate attempt to feel productive. As I said before, there's really no shortage of ideas (my to-do list is ever-growing and I'd initially only thought to make one card while visiting my aunt, getting ideas for two more while there), it's the other step of the process that tends to get the better of me. It's never fun to miss your own deadlines, and while I've been somewhat ahead of the curve here compared to DevART (my goal here being one entry a month, whether I've got anything or not), I still feel like I've been neglecting this place, which I like to think of as my main site.That is, should anything happen on my other pages (like if I get banned from DA for whatever reason), this will be the fallback. 
So, as much as I hate writing journal entries that are simply, "today I did this/tomorrow I'll do that/yesterday this happened" I guess there's nothing wrong with writing a simple update entry every so often, especially when things slow down, giving everyone a chance to get on the same page and assure everyone these sites are by no means abandoned or even neglected. Trust me, if that happens, there will be a notice posted on the door, a "Dear John" if you will. It's a kind of rule/courtesy I got from a past relationship, that if we ever broke up, we at least owed each other a goodbye letter. Luckily, for anyone who regularly follows my work, this is not that letter. 
Thank you all for your patience. 
Good night, and good luck. 

GODAMMIT

I don't expect things to be easy for me. I really don't. I know Murphy's Law is always looming overhead and I actually both appreciate and welcome the humility that comes with his tidings. When it comes to making videos, however, each and every one I make is a whole new challenge essentially no matter what process I take or how many times I repeat it. In short, I can't repeat myself, so I can't apply what I learn. 

What's brought all this on is Yahoo! Video, the last people I expected this issue from. The past two videos I've made have been successfully uploaded to DeviantArt, no problems whatsoever. In fact, the only headache DA gives is registering to be able to upload videos in the first place; you can't just sign up for an account and start uploading. You have to upload a video to another site, then contact an administrator with a link to the video, and if they like what they see, your account is 'unlocked' and you'll be able to upload videos just like any other deviation. Video sharing sites like Y!Video and YouTube don't bother with such a formality and are more like the former description wherein all you need is an account. Y!Video, however and of late... 

So the newer videos I'm making are more like V-Logs, so they're not really fit for DA. However, as posted in other weblogs (namely DA, but also Multiply, the new home of my Y!360 account), I have ultimately no desire to post anything of mine to YouTube. I won't go into exactly what makes up my hatred for the site beyond that for every five minutes for which I'm genuinely entertained or even moved by something there, there's an attached block of three hours for which time I'm bored out of my brains. To put it another way, remember when mp3.com and napster.com were new? Everyone seemed to think (and state in their ironic defense of those sites) that it will allow people to hear from small and unsigned bands or discover out of print records that may lead to being discovered or reissued by major labels, and yet the most frequently shared file was Metallica's black album, notably in print and far from obscure. 

Back to the issue at hand: The problem is that Y!Video is basically not allowing me to upload any more videos. Sure, it acts like it's going to, albeit it first tries to throw me off by making the "browse" and "upload now" sections of the upload page look as if I can't select them. The only way I honestly knew that it was allowing me to browse a video was that it would open a window displaying my available files which I could then select. Once I select the video and hit "upload now" the screen grays out and we then see a progress bar where it presents the upload progress as a percentage. Five hours and it did not move past zero. Even on Dial-Up, zero percent at five hours for 100MB is a joke. This didn't used to be a problem, but now it is. For the sake of science, this process was repeated using Firefox instead of Opera with the same result. Then, we tried again using Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on my roommate's windows machine. Same apparent lack of progress on Firefox and Opera, but Internet Explorer managed after six hours to get to 37% before an error window popped up saying "our robots advise that you try uploading later" (I don't remember exactly what it said, I was too angry). At first, I thought, maybe it's because I'm using Linux instead of Windows or Mac, but that can't be the case because DA and flickr's video section didn't have a problem (I used another file for flickr, because the video I want to upload is about ten minutes in length). Besides, all their warnings about non compatibility with Linux have more to do with playback than uploading, and I've been able to peruse Y!Video without any problems. I don't think it can possibly be the connection, either, because like I said, DA and flickr work just fine. Posting a question on Y!Answers has yet to yield a result (to be fair, it was posted only about an hour ago) and trying to get help through Yahoo! support yields no result as they'd rather try to guide me through troubleshooting steps having nothing to do with my problem than give me a way to contact someone and get a more direct answer. 

So that's it, I've had it with Y!Video. All I wanted to do was upload a video and yet that is apparently impossible for no obvious reason beyond that of the purely arbitrary. 

APPENDIX: On the subject of help from Yahoo!, what is the point of listing Help and Contact Us separately if they just take you to the same damned page?