eclecticism

As Prairie’s mentioned, work on moving into the new apartment continues, and we’re making progress. I’ve had to work just about every day (though I was able to get most of yesterday off to help), and Prairie and her family crew have done the lion’s share of the work so far, so in this case saying that “we” are making progress is really only strictly true for certain values of “we”. But still…progress is being made. At least I’ve got a day off tomorrow to pitch in all day long.

One side effect of all this is that both Prairie and I are going to be essentially out of touch for the next two weeks or so. As we use Speakeasy for our ‘net and our phone connection through VoIP, we need to get that transferred over to the new apartment…and, unfortunately, Speakeasy says that that can take up to two weeks. Not what I was hoping for, but pretty unavoidable, as all of this has happened so quickly.

We do have our laptop with WiFi access, so we may be able to check in from time to time, but it’s pretty much safe to assume that we probably won’t be reachable via e-mail or phone for the next two weeks, and certainly won’t be responding to messages in a timely manner. Not ideal, but that’s what it is.

About a week and a half ago, six teams of people with dance in their souls — if not their soles — gathered together for a battle royale at Dance Off 2007.

If you were there, you know the pure awesomeness of the spectacle. If you weren’t there (foolish mortal), then at least I can offer this photographic record of the event.

Truly, such fleetfooted feats (feets?) shall never grace a stage again.

Until next year, of course.

As I put a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice (Raspberry Blast) into the shopping cart next to Prairie’s bottle of wine, I turned to her and asked, “So when did we last buy alcohol?”

She paused, then held up a hand and started counting backwards on her fingers. “Seven, eight…nine months?”

Not exactly doing our part to keep the booze flowin’, are we?

I just had someone ask me through my Flickr account about my photography workflow and sales experience, and I figured I might as well put my response up here for…um…posterity? Ego-stroking?

I’ve not yet started to actually try to shoot for a living (though it’s a nice dream), as school and work take up enough time that I can’t devote myself to my hobby. Still, for what it’s worth, here’s what I can tell you….

What is your photography work flow?

These days, I shoot pretty much everything RAW. I haven’t had the money to upgrade to Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom yet, so I use iPhoto for organization and sorting, Adobe Photoshop for RAW conversion and touchups, and then the Flickr Export plugin for iPhoto to upload everything to Flickr.

The basic process is this:

1. Shoot (lots!) in RAW (with my camera set to the Adobe RGB color space).
2. Import into iPhoto.
3. Name and tag everything (I’m using Bullstorm’s Keyword Manager to help with tag organization and editing, as iPhoto’s built-in keyword management is one of the least useful aspects of an otherwise excellent program).
4. Do a first run through the shots, tossing what’s probably worth uploading into an album.
5. Do a second run through the shots. Most of this run is converting the RAW files and doing any touch-ups (which I keep to a minimum, generally little more than exposure and white balance tweaking, occasional cropping, sharpening, and setting the color space to sRGB), but I’ll also make some last decisions on which photos will or won’t be uploaded.
6. Upload to Flickr, assigning shots to sets or sending to one group during upload. Later set management or submitting photos to more groups is done online through Flickr when I get around to it.
7. Do a third cull through the shots, selecting the best of the bunch to be printed out.

[Where] or how do you market or promote your work?

I’ve never really actively done much promotion other than uploading things to Flickr and then telling people about it. When I can, I’ll let people involved in an event know about any event photos I’ve taken (sometimes by e-mail, other times through making posts in online communities focusing on an event or artist), or if I can identify and contact the subjects of shots, I’ll try to let them know directly. Other than that, I don’t do a whole lot.

Have you had any success with online promotion or selling your work through a website, if so which ones are you using?

Nothing major here, really. I’ve experimented with some of the services that have popped up online for helping people sell their work, but as I’ve never really taken the time to actively pursue anything, I can’t really report any great sucesses (or failures, really — I may not be selling much, but I don’t see that as failure when I’m not really trying to sell anything).

What few shots I have sold or had used elsewhere have happened more or less through blind luck — people stumbling on a shot through photo searches, deciding I had something that would work for a project, and asking permission to use it.

I have started getting a few people asking me to shoot events, but it’s not something I’ve started charging for yet (while it’s very flattering to have someone ask, I’m not entirely convinced I’m “pro” enough to ask for money…though I’m certainly not going to refuse if any is offered, either!). Right now, I pretty much just chalk it up to learning experiences, with possibilities for future benefit.

And if you can think of any other ideas for a photographer that is ready to start selling his work full time (my goal). I would greatly appreciate it.

Nothing much comes to mind, mostly because I’m not quite heading that direction yet. Good luck on your quest, though!

Those of you who’ve been (for some odd reason) keeping up with my little space on the ‘net for a while should be familiar with the saga of Xebeth. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Cliffs Notes version goes as follows: old friend shows up, all is happy; friend is found to have a serious, life-threatening disease, and all is not so happy, but Prairie and I do our best to provide support; ten months of emotional rollercoasters later, we find that the entire thing was a lie, and that not only is the old friend not dying, but nearly everything else she told us was a lie also.

It’s now been fourteen months since Xebeth first contacted me to say hello (and, as it turns out, also sent me the first of many lies), and four months since we realized what was going on, confronted her, and eventually cut off all contact.

Four months later, we’re still realizing just how much this has effected us.

Each of us regularly have moments when it’s all we can do not to attempt to contact her to try to figure out why she did this to us. If we ever actually thought we’d get an answer, we might actually do it…but it’s obvious that there’s nothing she could tell us that would actually justify how she treated us — and even if she tried to explain, it hardly seems likely that we’d be able to believe what she said. This doesn’t keep us from wanting an answer, but it at least keeps us from being so foolish as to try to actually get one.

The truly distressing thing about all this is how severely it’s shaken our ability to trust other people. Over the past few months, Prairie and I have found ourselves pulling back a bit from the world around us. Admittedly, we’re not always the most social of people out there, and balancing our jobs and my school schedule take a fair amount of time — but even with those factors figured in, we’ve been more reclusive than usual. While we’ve not cut off contact entirely — I try to get out to the clubs when I can, and had fun bouncing around Norwescon; Prairie’s had a visit to see some old friends and will be off on a trip with my mom and sister-in-law in a few weeks — we’ve both found ourselves far less willing to trust that the people around us are actually worth interacting with.

Basically, people suck. We were doing what we could to be there for a friend in need, and ended up getting stomped on. Hard. Repeatedly. In an incredibly cruel fashion.

Not terribly surprising, then, is that all this has introduced some added stresses to our home life. Neither of us feel that there’s any Impending Doom as far as our relationship with each other goes, but we have been recognizing that there are some new discomforts that weren’t there before.

Much of what we did last year is colored by Xebeth’s involvement. Until now, we’ve both thoroughly enjoyed going out to the annual Pride Parade…but as that was one of the events we took Xebeth to last summer, it’s lost some of its luster, and while the photography bug might pull me out there again, Prairie isn’t looking forward to it like she used to. It’s hard for us to talk about our trip to Vegas without feeling uncomfortable, as that trip was, in large part, supposed to be something of a “last hurrah” trip before Xebeth was going to be unable to travel any more.

I’ve always been an incorrigible flirt, and, while Prairie isn’t as into the club scene as I am, she’s never had any issues sending me off to bounce around and have fun, returning home later on to tell her tales of who I ran into, which girls (or guys, this being Seattle) inquired about my kilt, and other such sillinesses. Now, when I go out, I find myself second-guessing my interactions with my friends, and the “guess what happened tonight” stories aren’t as entertaining anymore. The trust in each other is still as strong as it ever was, but the trust in other people isn’t what it once was.

Rather sad how it only takes one psychotically self-absorbed pathological liar to destroy your faith in people.

So, if there’s ever any question as to why I’m not as talkative here as I used to be, why I don’t relate as much of my life as I used to, why we don’t go out and interact with people like we used to, and why we spend so much time solely with each other — it’s simply because right now, we’re the only people we can really trust.

The next step, then — and this is a large part of why we’re making this post (I wrote it, and Prairie’s read it) and putting all of this out in the public eye — is to get past this and to start rebuilding what we’ve lost in our relationships, with each other and with other people. It’s not likely to be an easy or particularly fast process, but it’s a road we need to take. We’re starting out on our own, and the conversations we’ve had over the past days are a big step (it’s something of a cliché, but recognizing an issue really is the first step), but it’s a start.

We don’t want to hate the world. We’ve just been running out of reasons not to.

Cindy, Woody, Royce and robots, originally uploaded by Royce.

Today marks the 34th birthday of Royce, whom I’ve known since 4th grade. He’s the one on the right, holding the robot that actually looks reasonably robot-ish, as does Cindy’s over there on the left. I’d be the one in the middle, doing my best ‘Kilroy Was Here’ over the (gargantuan) head of a robot that appears to be heavily inspired by ET.

Happy birthday, Royce!

Me and Prairie, Benson Beach, Cape Disappointment, Long Beach Peninsula, WA, originally uploaded by djwudi.

During our Spring Break trip to Long Beach. Photo by Prairie’s dad, Lon.

It’s International Women’s Day today.

International Women’s Day has been observed since in the early 1900’s, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies.

The new millennium has witnessed a significant change and attitudinal shift in both women’s and society’s thoughts about women’s equality and emancipation. Many from a younger generation feel that ‘all the battles have been won for women’ while many feminists from the 1970’s know only too well the longevity and ingrained complexity of patriarchy. With more women in the boardroom, greater equality in legislative rights, and an increased critical mass of women’s visibility as impressive role models in every aspect of life, one could think that women have gained true equality. The unfortunate fact is that women are still not paid equally to that of their male counterparts, women still are not present in equal numbers in business or politics, and globally women’s education, health and the violence against them is worse than that of men.

However, great improvements have been made. We do have female astronauts and prime ministers, school girls are welcomed into university, women can work and have a family, women have real choices. And so the tone and nature of IWD has, for the past few years, moved from being a reminder about the negatives to a celebration of the positives.

So make a difference, think globally and act locally !! Make everyday International Women’s Day. Do your bit to ensure that the future for girls is bright, equal, safe and rewarding.

So — hooray for women!

I missed this when it was first posted, but thanks to this (also excellent) post of Mike’s, I’ve just discovered a nicely concise explanation as to why I’m not posting about politics as much as I used to: Hatred Fatigue:

I also seem to be experiencing something that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call “hatred fatigue” — namely that, after over five years of abhorring almost every single action, day in and day out, the Bush Administration and neoconservative movement takes, there’s a part of my brain which is simply screaming “I can’t stand it anymore!” — it not being Bush and neocons, but instead the sheer weight of continued pessimism and fear.

Similarly to Mike, while my primary posts have lost much of their political content, my linklog is not exactly devoid of links tagged ‘politics’. As frustrating as it is to see what I see going on in this country, it’s hard to bother trying to make my voice heard when discourse today never seems to be a rational, respectful discussion of differing points of view — instead, anything that isn’t what we believe is to be damned, vilified, cast out, and exorcised, by any means necessary.

What strikes me as particularly troublesome…is how this incident demonstrates the uncivil demeanor of this country and our relationships with our political opposites. And my definition of civility needs some clarification: I do not mean prudish stuffiness. I mean the treatment of another human being with simple, decent respect, even as you acknowledge with no rancor that your position differs significantly from theirs.

It’s a rather sad commentary on our current culture that as a whole, we’re so intolerant of other viewpoints. There’s nothing wrong with other viewpoints, and neither is there anything wrong with disagreeing with other viewpoints. When we stoop to destroying people in order to destroy their viewpoints, however, there is something seriously, seriously wrong.

Bonus thought experiment that Mike brings up, but that I don’t have time to poke at right now (other than to say that at first blush, I agree with where he’s going):

The Internet is a powerful tool, and it has wired us all up to each other in metamorphosing ways that I still believe our culture hasn’t fully assimilated yet, and perhaps won’t for generations to come.

The Internet allows that intrinsic incivility — that Hatred of the Other — to be both concatenated and ring-led with no lag time or delay. There’s no organizational time needed; all that’s needed is a charismatic figure and its followers.

[…]

The Internet has done such great harm to us as a political culture because, viewing it on the much larger scale of societal development (as opposed to human lives), we’ve suddenly become wired up to each other far more quickly than we ever were before.

[…]

As a species, I don’t think we were sociologically equipped to be hooked up to each other’s beliefs and to handle the combined weight of Internet-scale movements and politically biased memes. I simply don’t believe that as a species we’re going to get an okay handle on this situation, wherein we’ll somehow, someday resort to a situation where we find an easy peace with each other. I think that unless somehow such vitriol and rage falls out of vogue, a possibility I find so small as to be nearly non-existent, we’re going to be culture-warring and meme-warring with each other until the sheer massive neglect of society’s normal business causes something catastrophic to grind us to a halt.

What do we do if the only way to combat this culture of hate is to unplug?

Me as an M&M, originally uploaded by djwudi.

As created on Become an M&M. Yay!

A bit of silliness on Flickr these days: if you add a note that says simply ‘ho ho ho hat’ to a photo, Flickr will add a Santa hat to the photo where the note is placed.

There’s a few people getting up in arms about the ‘defacement’ of their photos, but if you decide you don’t like this, you can simply delete the note. I see it as a harmless bit of holiday silliness.

And I like harmless silliness.

Frankly, I’d be more than a little surprised if nobody had attempted zero-g sex yet, no matter how strenuously NASA denies it. Still, if you’re looking to be the “official” first couple to give it a shot (and happen to be absolutely filthy rich), just give the Russian space agency a call!

THEY put the first man in space, then the first tourist. Now the Russians could make one wealthy couple the first members of the 240-mile-high club.

In its latest attempt to develop space tourism, Russia is offering a pair of newlyweds the chance to swap Venice or Paris for a cosmic honeymoon on board the international space station. For $US48 million ($65 million) - the cost of a pair of space return tickets - the couple could become the first to experience the uncharted joys of sex in zero gravity. “It would bring the mile-high club to new heights,” said Rob Volmer of Space Adventures, the company that has teamed up with the Russian Aviation and Space Agency to offer the trip.

<

p>(via GothicVamps)

Ever wonder about the people responsible for cramming your inboxes full of offers that you neither want or need? Here’s one of them — a “graying grandmother in a ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ T-shirt.”

Typically a marketer is tipped to Fox’s business by word of mouth and a deal is done on the telephone. Fox then taps into her list of 40 million e-mail addresses — 1,500 times more names than Slidell has people — for possible targets. She is paid based on how many prospective buyers she delivers to the marketer. Until recently she made a good living spamming, she says, pulling in $4,000 in a good week, $2,000 in a slow week. Some weeks produce no income.

(via /.)

[Note: This was originally a post to the alt.music.nin Usenet newsgroup. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]

I do suppose, while not being necessarily one of the ‘big names’ (with a gun? sorry…seemingly obligatory lyrics reference) on a.m.nin, I might as well pitch in…

Currently living by the pesudonym Woody…only my family and very old friends bother with my given name anymore, so I pretty much ignore it. 21 years old, and not currently in school. Thankfully able to avoid an @aol.com address, though due to a local provider, ended up with a mildy cool address. Yippe, lifes ambition is fulfilled. Or not.

At present, biding my time here in the frozen wasteland of Anchorage, Alaska until I can get my skinny butt out of here. Current future looks like I’ll be hitting Seattle roundabouts late March or early April, not through any great longing to hit that particular false mecca of the ‘90’s, but rather taking a chance to head down with a friend. Finally have a realistic chance to get out, don’t care where I end up. Yes, Anchorage is that bad. Bitch bitch bitch. There, that’s done.

Unlike the previous three posts in this that I’ve read, not currently a musician. Bummer. Classical vocal training as a child and a passing familiarity with the violin aren’t too high in demand these days. I wonder why…. I fill my time making lots of copies at the local Kinko’s. Work a swing shift, which means I get up about 2 in the afternoon, hit work at 4, off at midnight, and crash between 4 and 6 in the morning. Perfect for a night owl. When I’m not there, I usually move into the local Village Inn (a classier Denny¹s type place). Friday nights I dj for a local teen club’s ‘Alternative’ night. Currently being screwed over by the manager pay wise, but hey…I get six hours a week to play whatever I feel like really, really loud, and with no place else for the under-21 crowd to go, lots of people have fun. I can deal with being a bit of a sucker for that.

Musically, decently wide ranged. A collection of 300-some discs, ranging from Abba to Legendary Pink Dots to gregorian chant to KLF, Sisters of Mercy, Mary’s Danish…very into ‘80’s stuff, Jesus Christ Superstar, and have a couple of cd’s of German ‘indie’ music that goes over great at the club. Must admit to a bit of self-absorbed pride in being one of the only people here in Anchorage who not only listens to nin, but knows what I’m babbling about, much of which I owe to a.m.nin. Even hassled the local music chain for three months until they tracked down Demo’s and Remixes…and last I looked, they still had two copies of it, the better pressing even. The people up here just don’t know what’s out there…funny.

Computer wise, am a confessed mac fanatic. Hey…I can admit to being enough of an idiot to like the pretty little pictures. Course, some of those ‘pretty’ little icons were grabbed from Geiger scans, but hey…. Refuse to be dragged into a ‘my box is better’ debate, though, as I have a healthy respect for beemers, use the ones at Kinko’s a fair amount, and wouldn’t mind grabbing one, if a recent engine seizure hadn’t put me so far in debt. Just avoid Windoze like the plague. Gerf.

So hey, that’s me…take it or leave it. Fun fun fun.

[Note: This was originally a post to the IRN, run by Royce for a few years in the early ’90s. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]

#090 ACAD2A::ASRDW1 Tue 12 Nov 1991 08:24:00 ( 3/ 76) M

From: Royster
Subject: Well, how about this one -

(it’s about time)

If you met yourself on the street, what would you think?

#11 ACAD2A::ASMDH Tue 12 Nov 1991 17:35:26 ( 17/ 623) M

From: The Woodmeister
Subject: Re: Well, how about this one -

If I met me, poetry would spring to my mind (both of them):

A single rose
Shoved up your nose
You lick my toes
While in repose
My mother knows
Where Einstein goes
I’m in the throes
Of melanoma

Why? Because it is probably one of my few truly creative joint efforts with a friend, and as such, I am immeasurably proud of it, twisted though it may be. Therefore, when I saw me, each of me would remember the poem, start laughing, and go on our merry ways, only to have simultaneous nervous breakdowns at a later date, when the concept of the world having to cope with two of me actually beat its way into my intellect.