Nothing personal against you tweeters; I just think LoudTwitter generates spam.
I use the LiveJournal friends page aggregator because it’s most convenient, especially when dealing with LiveJournal friends-locked entries (and, no, those don’t show up in LJ RSS feeds). But I don’t like spam, so here’s a first cut at a solution that mostly works for me.
LiveJournal’s style system permits a great deal of flexibility in markup, so this script won’t run on anything but the default LJ layout. I’m exploring ways of generalizing the heuristic.
I have placed the Greasemonkey script in the public domain. You’ll need Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.
The above link leads to some photos I took at the wedding I attended last week — which, as a side note, was great fun. Not all photos are present in that gallery; I’ll probably just send those out on DVDs to the concerned parties.
Username and password are directly related to the last — and probably most energetic — moment of the reception. Email me if you know I know you were there and you need another hint.
A lot of the photos are (retrospectively speaking) somewhat sloppy; I have to apologize for that. There’s also a severe imbalance in subject coverage, which I can only attribute to my own weak powers of observation.
(Good thing I wasn’t the official photographer!)
Technical note: Originally, I was planning on setting up some OpenID-based authentication mechanism for access control, but that was just too complicated.
There was another problem regarding OpenID URL ownership: most of the people who are viewing this are reading this blog’s LiveJournal feed, and would probably be most likely to use their LiveJournal OpenID URL.
Unfortunately, LiveJournal’s OpenID URLs have a serious problem. If you change your LJ name, your old LJ name is up for grabs — and so is your old OpenID. Whoever grabs your old OpenID can now log in to your accounts, assuming you haven’t disabled the old OpenID. (Nobody does that; it’s too much of a hassle to keep track of that information.) Oops.
Magnatune, my favorite record label, has offered pay-what-you-want-with-minimum-limit memberships for close to a month now. I visit Magnatune daily and leech off their MP3 streams while at work, so I figured that I should probably start doing that fair compensation thing.
Their payment distribution scheme has an interesting twist. Half of what you pay goes to artists, and then that half is divided equally among the artists whose music you listened to.
It quickly becomes obvious that this membership system can be a way of paying artists practically nothing, which puts us back in the bad old days: the share for each artist whose music you downloaded is roughly inversely proportional to the number of albums you download.
Now I don’t expect this to be the same for everyone, but this is an interesting way to use guilt on me. As I understand it, artists can see who paid what for which album. I don’t really have a problem with that, but I do have a problem with my name showing up with some ridiculously cheap amount next to it. That, more than anything, feels like robbery.
This, plus my generally positive view of Magnatune, had two effects on me:
I paid a large amount of money for the download membership.
I’m not sucking down every album I can find. Actually, I’ve only downloaded two.
Both of these actions are a result of me trying to maximize the factors [amount of money I send to artists whose music I like] and [amount of music I get]. It’s a fun game.
I think Magnatune is banking on this reaction from the majority of their subscribers. I hope it works out for them.
Most people reading this are reading it through a LiveJournal friends page. Occasionally, I receive comments on these pages.
I’d love to respond, but I can’t. The instance of the LiveJournal software that livejournal.com runs doesn’t permit OpenID users to respond to comments left on feeds (why, I don’t know), so I can’t leave comments.
If you have an email address on your LiveJournal profile, I’ll try to send a response to that. You can also contact me via LJ Talk by sending a message to trythil@ninjawedding.org.
Small life updates: went to Cedar Point with some of the IndyDDR crew; good times there. Heading to a wedding this week. Lots of mileage, though I’m not driving for the wedding. Also, I finished up the massive code change I described in the last week of September, which is nice: it’s great to actually finish such a large change on schedule.
For now, let’s leave aside opinions about whether this sort of quibbling is ridiculous.
I find this video interesting because I’ve recently been working through Posing Techniques for Location Portrait Photography by Jeff Smith. He devotes a chapter to the interplay between lighting and perceived beauty, and then (as you might expect from a book on posing techniques) discusses the goals and methods of posing.
One point that Smith really hammers home is Just How Much This Stuff Matters. Of course, you know he’s right in the sense of “well, of course, if you want to satisfy your client you need to make sure they look their best”, but (for me, at least) it takes televised mainstream media rants to really drive the idea home.
So. Back to the photograph.
The photograph interests me not because of the alleged imperfections it shows, which I haven’t confirmed, due to both the low quality of the YouTube copy of the broadcast and me not having seen a Newsweek cover in months. It’s more the lighting choices.
I’d like to know why the photographer and graphic designer made the choices they did. One guest on FOX News obviously believes that Newsweek has a Liberal Agenda To Destroy The Republican Ticket, but I’d like to hear it from the primary sources.
The photograph plays contrasting elements against each other; I’m not sure what the intent was. Note the dominance of light tones in the background and the visible part of her face. This is a classic high-key lighting setup for portraiture, and it’s usually used to denote youth, sprightliness, happiness. But then look at her clothing: it’s dark, formal. The intensity of this contrast might be magnified by the lack of fidelity in the YouTube reproduction (perhaps highlights in the black clothing are being lost by compression). So…is this supposed to be a portrait of a mature stateswoman who nevertheless has a youthful aura about her? An impostor who feigns friendliness but hides a dark agenda? Just bad clothing and lighting interplay? Something else?
Another interesting element is the choice of light placement. It’s not dead-on in front of her; it’s off to camera right. It’s also probably a small light, based on the abruptness of the highlight-to-shadow transitions. This emphasizes her facial features, and can have many interpretations. It generally makes people look weathered (as FOX News said), which sometimes makes people look ugly and deceitful. But it can also make them look experienced and wise. Photos of elderly people sometimes use this effect.
Perceptions of the subject factors into the determination of both items, and definitely more.
…and sometimes, what you think about photography says more about you than it does about the subject or the photographer…