I only untag the really bad photos of myself. Terrible, eh?
1: Solidarity high five. I'm all sweaty in like half of these. Vain, but I'll deal.
The pictures someone posted of me in 8th grade are really awful, but I haven't untagged them.
I just set it so my friends can't automatically see photos posted by my friends. I suppose if they have them set to public, they can be viewed by anyone, but most of them are either ugly photos of me as an ugly child or me drunk and in compromising positions at parties, which, well, it's Facebook, and no one should imagine that's something I don't do. My vanity, though, burns at some of them.
2: My sister posted a bunch of photos taken of us at a camping trip at Lassen. Unshowered, dirty, sweaty-from-hiking-at-elevation Parenthetical pictures have thus been untagged. I did leave up a few where I'm at least somewhat less dirty.
The pictures someone posted of me in 8th grade are really awful, but I haven't untagged them.
Indeed. I left those up because they are just too hilarious. Plus, it shows improvement over time. At this rate, I think I'll hit my peak at about 56.
It never occurred to me that someone else might have posted pictures of me on Facebook. For peace of mind, I'm going to proceed on the assumption that this has not happened. Or, if so, that they have misspelled my name.
I just looked back through all the pictures in which I'm tagged. I actually look pretty good in most of them, which is a little surprising since I don't generally think of myself as being very photogenic.
9: You'd be notified by e-mail if they spelled it right in tagging you (assuming you use your name and are on Facebook), so you're probably okay.
No, I'm not on Facebook. That's why I'm content to remain in blissful ignorance.
Also, I'm unspellable. I found out at the family reunion this summer I'm much more Polish than I ever knew.
There are very few pictures of me on Facebook, and I find the way some people I know apparently go to parties every week where everyone is taking photos the whole time a little weird.
13: Me too! I just don't hang out with people who take photos very often, so as a result most of mine are pretty outdated.
Or tell me I'm vain. Just tell me something.
Thou vainglorious braggert... you post pictures of yourself to the internet?
Anyways, Stanley, do whatever you want - there's no law that says you have to have a bleached asshole just like everyone else just because that's the moment we're in.
max
['Most people believe I'm a 17-pound dachshund.']
I'm much more Polish than I ever knew.
You and me and teraz stealing the blog for the Poles! (Except I'm not nearly as Polish as my real name suggests.)
I don't generally think of myself as being very photogenic
You are in error.
you post pictures of yourself to the internet?
No, and I know you're funning but, as comments suggest, it's other people tagging me in photos they've taken. I'd rather not have that happening, really.
I'm with Witt in 9. I don't expect anyone's posting pictures of me on Facebook, much less tagging me with my real name. I think they'd ask me first.
On preview, 13: Yes! This taking of pictures all the time, promiscuously, I might say, is odd.
I don't generally think of myself as being very photogenic.
You could either be successful or be us.
I have some Polish ancestry, on the mostly Swiss side.
There were very few pictures of me on Facebook but then my sister bought a scanner and puffed the dust from the covers of all the old albums. Now it is rife with pictures of me as a tiny, big-haired child. They're all happy memories, though, so I don't mind.
The first picture tagged as me was actually of someone else entirely. It was posted by a guy who persists in the belief, even now, in active ways, that he and I know one another when we in fact do not at all know one another. I've left it tagged as me, just because.
Speaking of photos on the internet, I just took at look at ogged's Flickr stream. Holy shit.
One of these days I'll have to sign up for Flickr to see what you all are talking about all the time. (I think I have an account I put a few photos on several years ago, but I've long since forgotten the username and password.)
I left those up because they are just too hilarious. Plus, it shows improvement over time. At this rate, I think I'll hit my peak at about 56.
I've posted a bunch of myself that showcase my utter adorableness as a child, followed by my slow descent into madness teenage awkwardness. Based on them, I'm back on the upswing, but I still have a ways to go before I catch up to where I was at age 3.
You can find public photos without a flickr account if you're willing to deal with the hassle of guessing usernames based on people's networks. I gave up on that a few years ago, but I think I still remember ogged's.
22: My first-year college roommate insists that the first thing I did upon moving into the dorm room was put that song on, which worried him. I don't remember this at all.
I think there might be a picture of my shoes in the unfogged pool.
29: When I first got that album and played it for my mom, I really thought she'd like it. Her response was, "Donovan already exists and did this better."
31: I do, for one. The water's kind of grimy.
||
Who is buying this Obama flag
via John Scalzi
|>
I don't wear them in pools, but in the Mediterranean they're pretty necessary. Sea urchins suck - spending your evening digging out spine fragments with a knife is not fun.
One of these days I'll have to sign up for Flickr to see what you all are talking about all the time.
Flickr is owned by Yahoo, so if you have a Yahoo account that'll work.
(I suspect that Josh and I are reacting to the photostream for different reason.)
38: I'm guessing not, actually. Or, more accurately, I'm guessing that my reactions are a superset of yours.
I'll spill the beans: Ogged is a turtle now. It's weird.
I'm guessing that my reactions are a superset of yours.
Sounds plausible enough.
Ogged is a turtle now. It's weird.
But what a turtle!
Wait, a superset? I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, but I find it highly implausible that you share all of my reactions. (We also may not be talking about the same parts of the photostream.)
I probably should untag some. There's some seriously unflattering photos of me looking sweaty and fat out there. But I've never bothered.
I don't put up many photos of friends on Flickr, though, except at music events or sports things where there's usually a presumption photos will be taken. I should take more, though, as, without blowing own trumpet too much, my photos taken at social events are somewhat better than most of my friends' photos taken at the same events.
35: I've done that (with a needle). Not fun.
At least a dozen people posted their snapshots of our wedding to facebook, and all of them tagged me. Within a matter of weeks there were hundreds of new photos of me, all in the same dress, some of them pretty much the exact same photos. I untagged almost all of them and retagged them with a different version of my name than the facebook one (included middle initial). I'm not averse to being labeled in those photos, I just don't want them to make up the first five pages of photos of me on facebook!
There was one extremely unflattering photo of me drunk on the beach, which I asked my friend to remove. Bikini + slouching over = unsightly rolls.
I tag every sweaty, bearded guy as Stanley.
I tag every picture of me drunk in a compromising position as Stanley.
I don't tag pictures of anyone unless they are (1) me or (2) dear friends prone to tagging pix of themselves so that I am sure of their not minding.
There is only one pic of me on FB (of which I am aware) that was unflattering enough to give me pause, but (1) eh, whatever, it isn't that bad and (2) the person who took it and tagged it, while a very very good friend who would like nothing better than to help me move a body, has . . . minor frenemy-ish instincts, and it isn't exactly surprising to me that this is the only pic she's tagged of me.
There are a couple high-school era pix that I put up that I'd bet some folks aren't so into being tagged on, but I didn't tag them.
Bikini + slouching over = unsightly rolls=hott.
I don't generally think of myself as being very photogenic.
I'm sorry, teo, have you seen the pic in the Smokey hat? Hott.
Basically what I'm saying here is that I think you're all hott.
I've untagged a couple of photos of myself. One showed me in the vicinity of some activities that, you know, don't need to follow me around forever. The other one went way, way beyond unflattering, and well into the territory of "oh holy fucking christ NO you said there were no cameras this picture must not ever see the light of day EVER."
I think untagging is perfectly reasonable. I dislike the practice of taking candid pictures of people and making them public. It seems to me obviously intrusive and douchebaggy, but I gather there are people who don't understand it that way. I avoid these people and do not relax around them. I had a friend who was particularly obnoxious in this regard, and it's one of the reasons he's an ex-friend, as it was part of a pattern of disrespect and low level bullying disguised as humor.
55: I was tagged (for less than a minute) in a picture my so-meth'ed-out-he-is-no-longer-functioning high-school friend took of his meth-making! I mean, we live on opposite coasts and I am not in the pic, but I and a couple of others were tagged on a pic of what looks like The Crystalline Entity growing on some kind of pan. I didn't really care*, but since this person is ON PAROLE I thought he should take it down and emailed him to say so. He took it down.
*I would have untagged, though, I am sure, if it had stayed up.
34 has not engendered sufficient puzzlement.
I am puzzled by the linked image.
58: I think that for some people in the South the Confederate Battle Flag is merely a symbol of regional pride, divorced from its association with treason and slavery.
Yeah, there have been a few pics of me uploaded, I presume, out of a desire to take me down a peg. But mostly, I think (a) loving friends think you're cute even when you think you look fat, drunk, or ugly, and (b) most of my friends are not academics who are paranoid about the job market, and it does not occur to them that a picture of me making a lewd gesticulation might be troubling in any respect.
OTOH, I have a vast collection of polaroids from our constant parties in Cleveland that those friends have begged me to scan and tag. They are great pictures, but there is a lot of nudity and making out in them. Oh, to be 22 again.
I tag pictures of the Confederate Battle Flag as Stanley.
Speaking of photos on the internet, I just took at look at ogged's Flickr stream. Holy shit.
Where is this found?
Basically what I'm saying here is that I think you're all hott
Unfogged: Here the hott people go to pretend to be schlubbs.
Sifu--I sent you an e-mail.
Umm, I don't even have my picture posted on facebook. I've thought of putting up a cartoon or a flower. I'm kind of paranoid about it. My name's not on the flickr stuff. My BF has tagged me, and I'm pretty sure that I'd have to talk about it if I untagged myself, but I don't really want my pictures up there. I think you have to be his friend to see them, though.
Unfogged: Here the hott people go to pretend to be schlubbs.
I mostly try to avoid cameras completely, out of neurotic vanity. I think I'm fairly attractive in person, in a late-thirties kind of stocky maternal sort of way, but pictures of myself always look horrendous -- blotchy pink and moon-faced. As long as I don't have to look at pictures of myself, I can preserve my inflated self-image.
I feel sort of the same way, LB (though I don't think of myself as matronly, and neither should you). I like the way that I look in the mirror for the most part, but I always notice my high brow in pictures.
As a close approximation, the more pictures you have tagged of yourself on Facebook, the more parties you've been to/more friends you have --> the cooler you are. For this reason, the question of whether or not to untag a picture is always a complicated one - is it worth decreasing your View N Photos Of number by one for all eternity, just so people won't see that one ugly photo now? (Because in a couple years those ugly tagged photos will be pure good - no one looks at your 233d photo out of 312, so it's just one more photo to add to your count.)
Apparently there's an age at which one stops thinking about this shit?
What's wrong with matronly? It's a look. (It's funny, I've called myself matronly before here and gotten pushback -- I wonder if it's got harsher connotations for other people than it does for me.)
I don't know whether there's anything wrong with "matronly," but you don't look matronly to me.
Do you wear heavy dresses with little bolero jackets in matching fabric? That is matronly.
I think that I associate the word with being plump, which you're not, LB.
I associate the word with someone who would tell me to get down off of that and eat my god damned spaghetti. Outfits and body types vary by region.
62: Here. I can only see the public ones, so I don't know what's producing the "holy shit wow" reactions.
We may need a cleanup there--I dunno that ogged is too public with that account.
74: I think the neighborhood burning down is pretty "holy shit wow."
Yeah, it's under a different name, because he gave it to people who don't know about the blog too.
75: I don't know either. I assumed that the good stuff is set to private.
What are people holy-shitting about? He's on my contact list [but not as a friend or family member].
I was hoping for pictures of naked boobs tagged as "matronly." Fortunately, LB's link made up for my disappointment.
82: [I am assuming] A change of locale, a big fire, that he stole his neighbor's dog.
re: 85
Ah, I noticed all of those, but am prob. missing something re: the holiness of the shit.
85: And the location resonated for teo in particular I assume.
He - "we" - moved to a little house in New Mexico, people.
And now I feel it's too explicit. Let's stop talking about ogged. Let's talk about how stupid Stanley* looks in internet pictures.
* Yeah, I know, wrong instrument.
Shouldn't Ogged be LESS likely to have his house burn down now that he's gotten married and moved to Farmington, New Mexico?
Or tell me I'm vain.
You probably think those pictures are about you.
65: I feel the same way -- though it often depends on who took the picture. There are some photographers who apparently can draw out my warmth and pleasantness. There are an awful lot, however, at whom I apparently tend to glare.
65: I feel the same way -- though it often depends on who took the picture. There are some photographers who apparently can draw out my warmth and pleasantness. There are an awful lot, however, at whom I apparently tend to glare.
In my experience people who derive a large part of their charm through their animated movement and wild gestures often look like ugly dead things in still photographs. That's my story anyway.
Keep up the animated movement and wild gestures, DK!
I can look in fairly good shape in some pictures, and grossly fat and unhealthy in others, even though the pictures were taken moments apart. Needless to say, the latter photos class with my self-image.
95: No, I actually look just as much like an ugly dead thing even in motion. It's tragic.
I can look in fairly good shape in some pictures, and grossly fat and unhealthy in others
Such is the progression of photos taken at my brother's week-long destination wedding. Note to self: all-inclusive all-you-can eat does not pair well with swimsuits on the beach.
I am the opposite of photogenic. I think I'm a relatively non-hideous person but in most photographs I am a moon-faced mental patient. It's very traumatic.
93: There are some photographers who apparently can draw out my warmth and pleasantness. There are an awful lot, however, at whom I apparently tend to glare.
Have them take lots of pictures. Discard all the ones that suck, which will be most of them. Voila.
max
['You too can be a professional.']
Is 98 a joke? How much visible weight is it posible to gain in a week??
I think untagging photos of yourself is going to be short-lived. There are already tools out there that are half-decent at recognizing people in photos, or at least saying that face X is the same person as face Y, and sites like Facebook will eventually install such tech and let people search for "people computer-identified as X", and it'll work well enough that the only way to avoid it will be for no photos to exist.
How much visible weight is it posible to gain in a week?
Not everyone has a tape worm Brock.
I've only recently expanded my FB pool so that I am friends with fancypants department chairs and the like. It was sort of unnerving at first to think of them seeing the pix of me at 19 in microminis and exposed garters, but wev. It was all worth it to watch a well-known gender-and-sexuality-in-the-ancient-world scholar mock the birther-loon I went to high school with (even if she did comment to me "You're friends with a birther?!").
However, the software that automatically ranks photos based on how embarrassing they are and automatically shows the worst one is at least two decades off.
I am the opposite of photogenic. I think I'm a relatively non-hideous person but in most photographs I am
...not. Same here. It is sad.
101: I wish. I apparently have quite a talent. Of course, I gain weight exclusively in the belly, so 10 pounds consolidated to just that one area is much more readily evident than 10 pounds spread across an entire body.
106: Let's form a club that only meets in person and has no newsletter!
102: untagging might be the best way around that, should they implement it; if you untag a picture of yourself facebook won't allow it to be re-tagged, so possibly a preemptive strategy of searching for computer-tagged pictures of yourself and untagging them will be the way to go.
Doesn't help with publicly available pictures, probably since they can be searched with tools external to fb, but oh well.
Hey, I just emailed ogged to check on how he feels privacy-wise about this. Any information apparent from his Flickr feed is fair game in terms of chattering about it, just don't mention his username.
I volunteer come and take flattering photos. Like this one I took of a friend on a night out:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/75/165577850_913e0166a3_o.jpg
I just uploaded a photo of LB in some sweet aviator sunglasses to the flickr pool.
111: might want to clean up 74.
True fact -- I can't do it from work, but someone else should.
Thank you, Stanley, for reminding to untag (I think I like "de-tag" better) a recent unflattering picture. And, yeah, wow: yay for ogged! (Dude should really mow his lawn, though.)
I am usually the one with the camera so I end up not being in many pictures.
re: 119
I was kidding about it being flattering. The person in question hates the photo.
re: grainy -- well, yeah. It's hand-held, on 3200ISO film, pushed to 6400, and taken in near darkness while drunk.
Further to 121, I presume 119 was kidding anyway?
121: For me that would be a flattering pic.
121: I agree with 123. That's a nice pic.
re: 124
The photo makes him look more Shane MacGowan-like than normal, I think.
121: what exactly does the person in question hate about it?
Addendum to 9: After being informed this morning by a colleague that I once again absentmindedly left the binder clip attached to my shirt collar (I tuck them there for safekeeping when reading reports on the train), I admit that if there are any untagged photos that feature a woman with similar clips adorning her coat and/or shirt, it's probably me.
125 to 126
It makes him look older, drunker and more double-chinned than he'd like, I think.
12: re: grainy -- well, yeah. It's hand-held, on 3200ISO film, pushed to 6400, and taken in near darkness while drunk.
Ahem: fuck. And well done there - it's very nice.
max
['Where on earth did you get 3200 B&W?']
128: He doesn't look old or doublechinned particularly. Drunk, in a goony kind of way, but not bad looking.
re: 129
Ilford Delta 3200, and TMAX3200 are both 3200 films. Although neither are realy 'true' 3200 films. They are more like 1000-1200 films that push reasonably well.
I've had much less grainy results, to be fair, using a different developer than I used for that shot.
re: 130
Yeah.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/48/165577843_bd2e88e372_o.jpg
Same guy, same evening. Artistically out of focus [i.e. I was drunk]
130; IME, becoming friends with somebody often means finding out the details of how they perceive themselves/how they prefer to be perceived by the world. This is often pretty far removed from what one might assume, a la people with really serious body image issues. So in this situation:"Old" not by some objective standard, but "older than I like to think of myself as being."
My sister is appalled by the aforementioned binder clips because they are an overt reminder that I am inconsistent with her preference for how the world perceives her sister.
I'll claim the lack of focus is a tribute to pictorialism, and a blow against Ansel Adams, though.
It makes him look older, drunker and more double-chinned than he'd like, I think
All my pictures are like that. Unless I am going to stop drinking and start exercising more, I am going to continue to have the same complaint.
135: I had the same reaction. I think it's a combination of a slightly pouty mouth, and the way his hair is cut off by the edge of the picture makes it look like a pompadour.
Wow, I just found ogged's flickr account to see whether or not 89 was a joke. That is interesting.
stop drinking and start exercising more
These are not mutually exclusive. Just as gloominess and exercise are excellent complements, so are drinking and exercise-- drink too much and your exercise suffers. Exercise too much and you'll hurt yourself, creating ample opportunities to drink. Gloominess and drinking should not be combined though.
Gloominess and drinking should not be combined though.
Silly rabbit. Gloominess is for heroin.
Exercise enough, and you get the same buzz with less drinking.
Corollary to 141: Drink enough, and you'll get just as exhausted with less exercise.
142: Like going up a flight of stairs. Endorphin high!
Not to be contrary, but that didn't seem to work out too well for Kermit the other day.
I could just patchouli up and say I was high on life; a lot of this is driven by roadwork that's making cycling faster (not just nicer) than driving for me, and a friend's back having finally healed, so our long-joked about push-up contest via Skype will become a reality, and I want years of asinine smirking rights from a truly lopsided victory.
I was high on life
Works at first, but you build a tolerance almost instantly.
Further to 121, I presume 119 was kidding anyway?
Yes.
I was high on life
But my employer had a no-tolerance policy.
re: 146
Sometimes I'm not sure [although I was pretty sure in your case].
I've had some strange comments from friends who are used to using small-sensor compacts.
"Why is the background not sharp?"
Just for tedium, this was counterfactual. I could say I was high on life about as honestly as I could patchouli myself.
Exercise is a viable defense against both low-level unhappiness and a propensity to drink without eradicating either, just as well since both of these usually are hard to separate from perceptiveness. All the people I know who have a unified and dedicated approach to really frequent exercise are superficially low-key about it; the offensive talkers all seem to do it intermittently. And to cower before my mighty sinews, of course.
Are there attachments to point+shoots to decrease depth-of-field? The aperture is tiny, so there's no good way to do that short of carrying a real camera. Seems like it should be a solvable problem.
The mental image of binder-clipped Witt is completely charming.
Mental images aren't enough - we need to see a beclipped Witt in the pool!
132: Ilford Delta 3200, and TMAX3200 are both 3200 films. Although neither are realy 'true' 3200 films. They are more like 1000-1200 films that push reasonably well. I've had much less grainy results, to be fair, using a different developer than I used for that shot.
Ah. OK then. As for the grain, I like it.
141: Exercise enough, and you get the same buzz with less drinking.
Now with excruciating pain. Oh the endorphine rush!
151: we need to see a beclipped Witt in the pool!
Second!
max
['Offensive talker.']
re:149
I don't think there's any optical route to decrease depth of field, except either a longer focal length, or a wider aperture. So no, with small sensors you are out of luck. It can be sort of done in software but the results are never convincing to me.
There are of course (expensive) digital compacts now with very fast lenses, though. And good quality film compacts offer great depth-of-field control.
I'm disappointed to learn that 74 didn't always contain the link it has now.
Also, I wish I'd realized I could get away with not posting an actual picture of myself on facebook.
154: Of course you don't have to post an actual picture of yourself on Facebook. "Get away with?"
I must sound argumentative; sorry. I'm just thinking that having a Facebook presence is somehow becoming required in some people's minds, which is weird, and the notion that said FB presence is some kind of portfolio presentation, complete with headshot or something, is even weirder. Of course, if you use Facebook for professional networking or some such, it would be a different matter.
['I don't even have a Facebook account.' -- though I do]
Years ago I asked if you could post a non-picture and was told they policed that. It's in the archives of this blog.
And I in fact joined facebook when I went to work for a place that makes a big deal about social media - they even asked about what I used in the interview (fortunately, bookmarking sites was good enough for them). Then it turned out that their presence is bigger on other sites (like bookmarking sites) and I had no real use for the account. But people starting friending me and I kept it.
It's in the archives of this blog.
It's been said that the archives of Unfogged are unknowably vast.
156: No way. Huh. Well, if it was true, I'm glad they've changed it. I assume this is your profile picture.
if you use Facebook for professional networking
I have a high school friend who's been sending out increasingly frantic and exclamation-point-ridden notifications of the Mary Kay events she's hosting. It's kind of fascinating, even though it makes me feel like a jerk to say it.
158: Do this picture make my archives look unknowably vast?
149: You might be able to fake it with a Lensbaby and some manual dexterity but otherwise you're at the mercy of the tiny sensor and the slow lenses on most P&S cameras.
Looking back, it appears the issue was obviously fake profiles. So non-pictures might have always been ok as long as it was clear you were a real person. Non-name usernames were policed (and maybe still are).
And yes, I'm talking about the profile. It's just about the only picture of me online. The other ones I know of show the back of my head, as I work on a computer in the background.
Non-name usernames were policed (and maybe still are).
I have at least one Facebook friend with a non-name usename, so it seems it's not.
Does this, whatever it is, mean that Ogged isn't coming back?
Well, he IS dead.
max
['Tough to come back from that.']
re: 162
Yeah, I didn't mention lensbabys because I always associate those with SLRs. That might do it, though.
I'd imagine a compact with a fairly long zoom reach, and a fast max aperture -- the latest Leica D-Lux/Panasonic LX, maybe -- probably has reasonable control over depth of field at closer distances and longer focal lengths. But it's not going to rival full-frame [film, or digital] or [scary!] medium-format.
I took this recently:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3482/3936846195_c620fc2502_o.jpg
Not an especially interesting image, but I'd be surprised if there's a digital compact -- even micro 4/3 -- that can do that.
He did once before. Or was that just cancer?
168: He did once before. Or was that just cancer?
April Fools!
max
['It was the swingset that did it.']
I used to use just a magnifying glass glued into a lens hood for a macro adapter with an old SLR-- bad at the image corners, but centered macro images didn't suffer much. I like my P+S, especially being able to pocket it, I'll try a tele adapter.
OT: This looks right up Unfogged's alley:
You know how every non-fiction book in the last three years has been about the author doing one odd, life-disrupting thing for one full year and then writing a book about it? I'm reading one of those books a week for one full year and then writing a book about it.
This looks right up Unfogged's alley:
So does this.
Pictures.
Would it be interesting or disturbing to the foggedtariat to know that I haven't had one photo taken of me, that I know of, in 22 years?
http://saveuvugirl.blogspot.com/
http://www.mongolduu.com/
I'm very sorry to disturb you all, please, click through the links.
Thank you very much.
re: 170
If it's strictly macro type photography then the extreme close-up will create shallow depth of field, even with a small crop sensor, yeah. So your accessory close-up lens will probably do the job.
I thought you meant general photography -- portraits, and so on. In which case you need either a long lens, or a fast aperture, and the smaller the sensor, the longer the lens or the faster the aperture, for a comparably shallow depth of field.
Further to 177. That shot I linked above wasn't a macro shot. That was a normal focal length lens, at about 2 ft away from the subject. It's just a ridiculously wide aperture.
And the location resonated for teo in particular I assume.
Sorry, I kind of fucked that up there.
174: it would make me kind of sad, I think. Not disturbed, but I love looking back at old pictures of myself and my loved ones and it seems sort of sad that you don't have photos to look back at.
183:There are lots and lots of pictures, miles of film from the 50s and 60s and current digitals. Hundreds of pictures of the dogs, Family vacations and gatherings.
I am just not in them since the 80s. The family has learned to let me move away.
And I don't ever look at them.
I leave all my photos at national parks, but I take the footprints with me in plaster casts.
From the link in 171:
Representative Sampling"Self-Made Man"'s early chapters remind me of an experience I had a few years ago. I was in Atlanta for work, and I didn't know anyone down there, so I took myself to the gay bar near my hotel to meet some folks. (I don't remember what it was called, but probably "Illusions" or "Rumors" or something. There's a law.) I spent some time talking to a guy who had moved to the area a year before, and when I asked him what he thought of the city, he said: "Literally everyone in Atlanta is an alcoholic. Everyone."
"Where do you meet people?" I asked.
"In bars."
He and I went to a nearby club later in the night, where I met a friend of his. I asked her about Atlanta. "Oh, God. All anyone in Atlanta cares about is what you can do for them, and what you're wearing. It's so superficial."
"What do you do for a living?"
"I promote nights at clubs."
Nobody in Atlanta understands cause and effect.
186's excerpt is good. There's an ongoing argument of sorts around here about the relative virtues and vices of Baltimore vs. D.C., and you hear that sort of thing all the time, coming primarily from transplants between the two cities.
e.g. (from someone who works in D.C., couldn't afford to live there and moved to Baltimore and commutes daily): Baltimore is incredibly boring; nobody there actually does anything interesting there, people have just disinvested, and the place has like no money, people just go elsewhere if they actually want to do anything.
Et tu?
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Reading the sanctions order against Taitz. Footnote 7:
The Court does not make this observation simply as a rhetorical device for emphasis; the Court has actually received correspondence assailing its previous order in which the sender, who, incidentally,challenged the undersigned to a "round of fisticuffs on the Courthouse Square," asserted that the President is not human.
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Et tu?
Et moi, j'aime beaucoup le fromage dans mes pantalons.
189: I don't speak garbled french, but at a guess that says something about lots of cheese in your pants.
That's how good my french is.
It's perfectly clear to me. That's how good my french is.
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A question for the lawyers:
What recourse might person A have if person B (who is known to A) is using person A's personal email address for malicious purposes? Person B doesn't have access to A's email account, she just knows the email address. "Malicious purposes" would, for example, include things like filling in online "send a message to" forms* on realtor's websites, etc., in which person B pretends to be person A and sends a very rude and harrassing email.
* the kind of form that has a big blank space for "type your message here" and another blank for "type your email address here", and which presumably then generates an email that is sent to the recipient
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Actually, I realized that I'm less interested in the lawyer's responses to 192 than the layman's responses. No one's going to be suing anyone. Person A just isn't quite sure how to handle the situation.
Are you admitting to criminal activities, Brock?
IANAL, but I believe the custom is for A to challenge B to a round of fisticuffs on the Courthouse Square.
193
Actually, I realized that I'm less interested in the lawyer's responses to 192 than the layman's responses. No one's going to be suing anyone. Person A just isn't quite sure how to handle the situation.
The simplest thing would seem to be for person A to change their email address.
192: How about coming-up with a form letter that says: 1. Wasn't me. 2. You comment form is too easy to abuse.
And then having person A respond to all of his/her e-mail spam with a message saying "I'm very interested, but please contact me at a more private address" and giving person B's e-mail.
191: It's possible that it's a well-formed sentence (she says, after double-checking her pidgen understanding). Maybe I should learn french.
I embarrassed myself tremendously once in my ignorance of the language, so this might be something. To look into.
If 196 is indeed the simplest solution, that's not good, because that would be a gigantic fucking pain.
196: I would go through all sort of trouble not to change my main e-mail address.
Brock, can you say how person A knows person B is the one doing this?
200: Person B admits it. Person B is also a sociopath.
I don't speak garbled french
Here I took you to be saying that you speak the ungarbled, refined variety. At any rate, the only french coming out if me is garbled.
How did you embarrass yourself?
It'll probably all come down on Person B's head through his own gloating.
T.P. person B's house. See also: flaming bag of feces.
199
If 196 is indeed the simplest solution, that's not good, because that would be a gigantic fucking pain.
Well you could have person B killed but that would be wrong.
Person B is also a sociopath
If only Person B was an osteopath, because then I'd know what to do. My policy on sociopaths is to avoid them and wait for them to piss-off somebody more powerful than me. Or what text said in 203.
202: When I was 19 or so, I'd spent a couple of days with a friend of a friend -- just meeting a good friend of a good friend. No hanky-panky involved. We got together another time as well, for a somewhat fancy dinner. Late nights, lots of talking. I stayed overnight both times, as he was located a little way away from me.
Anyway, he sent me a postcard with the single line saying (if I remember correctly): Je t'aime.
I hadn't a clue what this meant and went off to ask people in my dorm what it meant. They, shocked, told me that it meant "I love you." Oh. Running this through a translator now, though, I see it doesn't mean quite that. Embarrassing, my failure to understand at the time, in any case; the look on my dorm-mates faces was unsettling.
If somebody says voulez-vous coucher avec moi it means they are selling insurance.
❤ La grenouille mange le pamplemousse, parsimon. ❤
But it does mean that, parsimon.
A friend of mine got a note from a guy who had a crush on her that read, "je tem". ROMANCE FAIL.
207: While the meaning might not quite be literally I love you, that tends to be how it is colloquially used (at least in my observation).
Person B is also a sociopath.
If this is literally true, then my suggested solution (outright confrontation and carefully calibrated escalation, with something humorous-yet-pointed) is pointless. My second solution, far less comforting is to stay very very quiet and still and hope that the sociopath gets bored and goes away. Usually this doesn't happen until they find a more appealing target, which is pretty revolting to find yourself wishing for.
I'd also keep a pretty careful log or diary, and tell at least one or two people in RL about this, so that you have documented the pattern of harassment, and established at least some minimal record that you are not the person doing this. And create a new e-mail address of which Person B is kept quite unaware (perhaps in a domain that you own, so that it's at least marginally harder to spoof), and send follow-up e-mails as advised in 197.
And then just pray really hard that Person B is stuck at the level of juvenile pranks, rather than e-mails to the White House or some such.
209: Cut that out! All I get from that is something about eating. Pidgen, I'm telling you, and not even that. Don't make me defensive, now.
I dated someone for a while who sprinkled his conversation with french, and it drove me nuts.
214.2: Reading Sherlock Holmes annoyed me for that reason.
A relative had a problem with stolen email and misdirected postal mail via fraud and bribery. Cut off contact, change all addresses. No direct communication with B; any response, even go away, will encourage them. If the email is official (a work address), bear it.
Request and log IPs so that any dispute is not A vs B.
See, the French don't have a special category of 'like' called 'love', and even their 'like' is questionable. Gallic indifference is really the best kind of attitude for people to have toward each other.
rather than e-mails to the White House or some such
This person wouldn't happen to be a libertarian, would she?
213: How about a restraining order?
I was trying to remember what I've been told about the difference between "je t'aime" and "je t'adore". Some web page says:
S'il s'agit d'exprimer tes sentiments amoureux, je te conseille "je t'aime".
Quant à "je t'adore", je l'utilise plus pour des personnes que j'apprécie énormément, amis proches, famille...
Which sounds about right. But it goes on to say that "je t'aime bien" means something like "I like you". So, to love someone well is to not love them at all, or something.
Several of you seem to have surmised that I am person A. Perhaps I should also mention that person B is my mother.
I dated someone for a while who sprinkled his conversation with french
I dated someone for a while who sprinkled her conversation with French in the manner of Audrey Hepburn playing Holly Golightly. She turned out to be crazy, of course.
220: Hm. I first encountered "je t'aime" as being used among family members, which does not fit with the usages offered there. I can't remember ever hearing an actual French person using "je t'adore," but I certainly have not made an exhaustive survey of this.
Yikes, Brock, that's so extraordinarily sad. Do you have siblings you can talk this over with? Does she let you have contact with her doctor? Can you get any kind of external reality-based communication going on through a neutral third party, in other words?
221: dang, I was thinking it was your wife.
Oh, hey, I was pwned. How 'bout that.
(And on a happier note, it is my experience that phrases can mean very different things to the native speaker to someone who came later to the language, or doesn't know it at all and is translating just a few words. So parsimon's young man may have been speaking as an American translating "I love you," rather than a native French speaker picking and choosing a phrase from among all the possible nuances.)
My sympathy Brock, but I really don't have any advice that I think would be useful.
223: You probably know better than some random web page and my vague memory of what some random person might have told me.
I don't know very many French people. I wonder why.
(I was thinking it was a woman with a crush on you trying to get your attention, which I've now revised to a woman trying to get your attention. The family relationship does make it more fraught in a lot of ways.)
My wife? Are you being serious?
I mean, I hadn't previously imagined she was a sociopath, but who knows: maybe she ate some eight-month-old tuna and went crazy.
It's a good thing you're confronting your wife's sociopathy, but really, why is she targeting your mother?
Semiserious. You did say that she was turning libertarian.
230: I was more questioning my own experience. And as Witt points out, I am sure usage varies. I've only been told "Je t'aime" by an actual French person in a friendship setting, not a romance one. Where's Jackmormon? She's dated French men, no?
French Eskimos have over a thousand ways to say "I love snow". Fact.
I can't remember ever hearing an actual French person using "je t'adore,"
Maybe they were doing that running syllables together thing and it came out as "shtadore."
le pamplemousse
There's a Canadian comedian who has a funny bit about his two favorite French words being "pamplemousse" (grapefruit) and "rembobinage" (rewind), and how he longs for someone to be telling him a story in French and then mention a grapefruit, just so he can say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Rembobinage. Pamplemousse?"
I'm not doing it justice, but it's very funny.
Thank you Stanley, for helping me learn the French title of "Be Kind Rewind".
A French teacher of mine has a story about students misunderstanding a sentence involving some phrase like "ces souci sont." They thought it was about sausages.
As a young kid, I recall being tantalized by a book of cartoons which illustrated humorous misinterpretations of French titled Fractured French. (This Flickr set has the cover and five of the cartoons.) They were slightly risqué (nude lady on the cover!), and the only one I readily recalled on my own was "Hors d'combat".
On the rare occasions when someone says to me, "shut the door!", my response is always "je t'adore aussi!".
245: Here are 24 of them on a set of cocktail napkins (scroll down). A lot of offensively casual sexism by today's standards--such as "Pièce de resistance".
246: I always say, "Get bent. I pay as much of the heat bill as you."
Plus, I'm the one that had to remove the dead mouse from the furnace.
175
Je t'aime just on its own does mean 'I love you'. J'aime something means I like something. Je t'aime bien is milder than I like you, je t'aime beaucoup means I really like you. Je t'adore can mean various things within the range of I really like you a lot to I love you, really really love you depending on the context.
244 If they were being really phonetic it could easily be confused with 'these coins here are'.
Way back upthread, I forgot to add to this:
I think there might be a picture of my shoes in the unfogged pool.
Indeed. Anyone who wants to see eb's shoes, circa spring 2008, just search "walking shoes."
I have new shoes now. So if anyone tries anything like in Est-Ouest, they will be thwarted.
247: The typesetter one is good. And I'm amazed at the Rouben Mamoulian reference in the one following. I guess he was a lot more famous back then. I saw his Jekyll & Hyde a few months ago on tv; I thought it was pretty impressive.
Re:Mamoulian
Love Me Tonight is extraordinary if not quite the genius of One Hour With You by Lubitsch. But it's close. RM, although using every directorial trick he had, always managed to convey a light tounch.
Two sublime masterpieces. For those not familiar with early 30s films, revelations on a par with the first two Tarzan movies or Duck Soup
The Power/Rathbone Zorro is another classic, with the best sword fight ever.
Garbo & Gilbert in Queen Christina. Wow.
Golden Boy with Holden and Stanwick.
It is really quite interesting to study the differences between the Mamoulian/March and the Fleming/ Tracy versions. Late 30s Hollywood achieved perfection in craft at the expense of art. With the unbelievable studio support, Fleming could whip out 2-4 good movies every year, whereas Mamoulian or Lubitsch did one a year, or one every two years.
The craft could become transcendent, as in Casablanca or John Ford's Hurricane.
Because no one is interested, TV tonight was an History Channel hour on the Homestead strike, where they blame Berkman for the current Financial crisis. Damn anarchist destroyed the labor movement forever
Followed by an excellent hour on Rothko. I have had 100 Morris Louis jpgs on heavy wallpaper rotation for a couple months.
Followed by Marley and Me. My intuition was that they lost Grogan's particular voice in the movie.
Hot & humid;can't sleep.
I read, I think at TCM's site, that the makers of the 1940s J&H tried to acquire and then destroy all prints of Mamoulian's version, I guess for competitive edge or something. By that time the Mamoulian version could no longer be exhibited because of the production code (and I guess wasn't shown again in a theater until the 60s or 70s).
re: 254
Yeah, historical fencing buffs often go on about Rathbone, as an exemplar in movies.
Good god, I hated Marley & Me. I saw it on a plane - sadly, it was the best offering - and thought that maybe they were trying to induce suicidal feelings by showing it.
258: I thought it was terrible. My boyfriend's family loved it. Nice light entertainment. Even the cousins who had been honors English majors who everyone was sure I would like. Of course, you know, the book's much better.
And the response to my somewhat rudely expressed disgust was, "Well, it was based on a true story." What are the stupid life lessons anyway?
how does one dive into the unfogged pool
Wow, it was just a stupid dog movie. It was just on, and ended at the right time. I don't watch many dog movies, but I don't hate dog movies.
I suppose I could troll about Synecdoche NY instead.
Wow, Brock. I do think changing your email address is something that you're probably going to have to do eventually, but apologetic emails to anyone who contacts you saying "I'm so sorry, I have a tragic situation with an elderly relative who is [doing what your mother is doing]," do seem like a good idea. I think bringing in the 'elderly relative' aspect may help in turning away wrath, as would formalish phrasing, or whatever it takes to make your prose style sound very distinct from your mother's.
Is there anything to be done at your mother's end? I have a somewhat rocky relationship with mine (not at anything like the same level), and I haven't found much of a way to fix anything other than total capitulation (I can't always figure out how to capitulate -- I had a capitulation failure last weekend). Is there anything she wants that would make her stop? Or, conversely, cut off all contact and treat her as a harassing stranger?
257-9: Oy. The kids wanted to see that, so I did. Awful. Hated everyone -- the couple treated each other badly, were unpleasant parents and bad dog owners. I was cheering for the dog to die.
A Marley 'n Me/Old Yeller mashup would really be something.
apologetic emails to anyone who contacts you saying "I'm so sorry, I have a tragic situation with an elderly relative who is [doing what your mother is doing]," do seem like a good idea
Of course. Sometimes I've done phone calls instead of emails, which seem to go over better.
And yeah, generally, total capitulation is what's required for appeasement. It's not exactly clear to me what she wants in this instance, other than for me to "love her more" (which I generally never do enough of, and haven't since I wanted to start sleeping in my own bed at about age 6).
Argh. I really don't want to change my email. What I think I was really hoping is that someone would have an ingenious technological fix, but that's probably implausible.
257: I remember a funny interview with Rathbone, bitching about not having leading man looks, which meant that he had to lose most of his movie swordfights to prettier men like Flynn, despite their total incompetence as fencers.
re: 266
Yes, but his appearance is now fixed in everyone's heads for all time as Sherlock Holmes, so he has that going for him.
Huh. According to Wikipedia, Marley and Me holds the record for largest ever Christmas Day box office.
TV tonight was an History Channel hour on the Homestead strike
Bob, where that strike was is where the Costco, Target, Lowe's, etc. that I go to are. Of course, I knew of Homestead as "where P.F. Chang's is" before I heard of the strike.
269: I happened to be there last night for a work function at Dave and Buster's. Gah--although I actually hated it less than other times I've been there. Then and now.
I came for laundry soap. I stayed for labor history.
Dave and Buster's
Aka "Chuck E. Cheese's for Grownups". God what an awful place.
Until I get a house with a basement big enough for skee ball...
272: That is my general view as well; if Hunter Thompson was right that The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war, then Dave and Buster's is what the whole unhep world would be doing. But as indicated in the comment, this time I actually had a bit of fun as a rotating group of us collaborators boisterously played a six-person shoot the striking steelworkers incoming WWII aircraft game. They just had the sides mixed up a bit.
271:I of course knew some about Homestead, including that the union controlled the local politics, but the show did remind me about the sense that the skilled steelworkers viewed themselves like a craft guild. The only mental comparison I had was to a medieval or early modern European town, where capital and ownership of the means of production was almost irrelevant, or very secondary to the craft/guild halls.
The Homestead union chapter was almost unique in making efforts to incorporate the unskilled plant labor on a near equal basis.
A different kind of labor management dispute than the ones we were used to in the 20th century, and that was the point. I should have remembered this third branch from histories economic, labor, histories of socialism there was always this dialectic between skilled/craft/piece labor and wage labor until capitalism turned all labor into wage labor. It is the core of Marxism.
The Homestead strike was about much more than unions, and labor/management, it was about politics and social history. and the doc makers were pretty good about it. Too bad they hated on the anarchists.
One point of Homestead was that the factory workers controlled the politics, the Mayor and councilpersons were all steelworkers or wives/widows.
The modern change to where the politics are controlled by the professional class (doctors, lawyers, teachers, small businessmen) is critical to the hegemony of capital and destruction of labor power.
Old and obvious, socialism 101, but I had forgotten. Or at least had forgotten that it had ever been different.
The one time I was in Vegas, I sent to the Circus-Circus solely because of that Thompson quote. That is one of the greatest sentences in the English language.
