Prisma is a photo filter app released earlier this year that lets you apply arty filters to your photos, sort of like a more advanced version of Instagram. Some of the filters are fancy, a few are underwhelming and a special selection allow you to transform innocent portraits into the stuff of nightmares, as with this selfie I took in a hotel room in Nashville in October 2013.
I really have nothing to add. Enjoy your dreams tonight!
In an effort to get in 31 posts for August (an average of one per day), I have been forced to crank out six posts on the last day of the month. This has by necessity put the focus on quantity over quality, but I look at it as a sort-of extended free-writing session, something that will stimulate my creativity and ultimately lead to something better, even as anyone reading the current results is left confused, angry, bored or a combination thereof.
I promise to put more thought and effort into September’s entries.
My promises don’t always stick.
But I try.
Also, here’s a picture of me with a freaky filter from Prisma applied:
How I miss my green organic hat. 🙁
(Trust me, it really was green, not decorated like the bus from The Partridge Family.)
(The bill split open when I washed it and MEC doesn’t carry it any longer, so it’s gone forever, like the dodo or your favorite dinosaur.)
Here you go.
This photo was taken at the college library a few weeks ago. I believe I have captioned it appropriately.
In my case, it greatly improves my appearance. I submit the evidence below.
NOTE: Images may frighten young children. People with heart conditions should use caution.
Exhibit A
Student Identification card, 1980
Age of subject: 16
There are many things wrong with this picture. First, I want to clarify that the off-center right-side is not an artifact of the scanning. The card was printed that way because technology in 1980 still lacked the ability to make straight lines.
Now, as for me, there’s the acne. Unfortunate, but a common part of being a teen for many. My grad photos have the acne airbrushed out, but it wasn’t an option for a mere student ID card.
The weird tilt of the glasses suggest my head is as horribly misaligned as the graphics on the card. This is not true. At the same time I have no good explanation for why the glasses are not sitting straight. The tinted lenses were annoying and I ditched them shortly after this photo was taken. Possibly after seeing this photo, when I finally stopped crying.
The slightly-parted lips show my teeth at their worst, making them look uneven and British. Which they were. I apologize to the British with nice teeth.
The hair. It looks like it is slowly making its way around to devour my face. I compensated for its thinness by growing a lot of it instead. It was a pain to groom so I mostly gave up, as you can see. I graduated high school with enough sense to have somewhat shorter hair than pictured here.
In summation: yech.
Exhibit B
Self-portrait without flash, 2010
Age of subject: 46
As the caption notes, this picture was taken without a flash on a digital camera, so there’s a bit of noise as a result of my tampering with the brightness and contrast.
Let’s compare and contrast with the student ID photo.
The acne is gone. In exchange I am a 46 year old adult instead of a 16 year old goofball.
No tilt to the glasses because I opted not to wear them for the shot. But they wouldn’t have tilted anyway because by 2010 the Earth’s axis had been corrected or something.
Mouth closed so teeth are a delightful mystery, as intended.
The volume of hair has been reduced by 400%. Some hair has slipped to the chin and upper lip. Ears are proven to exist. The overall effect is pleasing, though the onset of male pattern baldness is plainly visible. To my credit I’m not especially trying to hide it, either.
The bright yellow shirt pops out at you. It’s friendly and inviting. It got me a date.
Overall, then, I went from an ugly duckling at 16 to a full-grown duck starting to lose its feathers, but knowing how to highlight its remaining plumage in a pleasing way. That analogy may suck, but all analogies do.
I generally don’t take good photos but nearly all of my school photos post-puberty are hideous. And that is why I share them, to teach the young kids of today to not be hideous. Wear your glasses straight. Wash with soap. Use a comb.
Today Jeff and I went for a walk around Burnaby Lake, the first time I’ve been there in over two months and since The Big Blow of 2015. It was cooler than August but not really wetter, if you don’t count the lush athletic fields being giant sponges of water.
I wore my newish Peregrine 5 runners to give them another testing and they clearly do not get along with my weird left foot, as said foot started hurting almost right away. This makes me sad because I hate shopping for shoes. The pain was more annoying than anything, at least.
As we approached Hume Park, Jeff pulled out his iPhone and began setting about finding a nearby geocache, which are basically little goodies stashed away outdoors and contain sheets you can use to record that you have found the cache. The first one Jeff found was the weirdest, a wooden stickman that looked like a prop from The Blair Witch Project. Here I am holding it with my best goofy face on:
Jeff ended up finding five others but none came close to the clever and odd design of the stickman. They were mostly water-logged sheets of paper rolled up inside leaky pill bottles.
We looked for a few caches along the Brunette River but didn’t have much luck there. We did notice the river was replete with salmon returning to the lake to spawn and die, as is their tragic lot on life. Many were quite big. Others were big and dead. And stinky. We didn’t linger.
Less stinky were a bunch of ducks near another geocache at the lake. I have never before observed a group of ducks all lined up on a tree branch before. I have now:
We also watched as a gaggle of geese nearly flew into someone’s model airplane buzzing over the athletic field and enjoyed the newly resurfaced stretch of trail starting near Silver Creek. This has always been my least favorite part of the lake trail for runs, as it is very uneven and has steep sides that all but whisper, “C’mere and twist your ankle!” No more! It is now a smooth pedestrian superhighway. I expect erosion will take care of this in time but for now it’s a nice improvement. It also looks conspicuously unnatural.
Alas, by the time we reached the halfway point of our journey ’round the lake we both had sore feet and elected to take the SkyTrain back from the Sperling/Burnaby Lake station. We still covered about 11 km, though, so not too shabby for my first real walk in months.
Next time I’ll don better footwear or use some kind of magical orthopedic device that will make my left foot feel happy and non-hurting. I hate that foot.
I am having brain freeze tonight, unable to decide what to write. I’ve done all the easy stuff on the blog lately:
It’s time to wing it.
Today is Labour Day, one of those self-ironic holidays (“Celebrate labour with a day off”) and I’m tending to a mild cold, feeling a bit down about things beyond my control, lamenting the sudden demise of summer after the big windstorm (seriously, it’s like someone flipped a switch. We’ve had nice days since, including today, but it feels all different, like fall jumped in a month ahead of schedule the same way summer did. It’s all this new-fangled climate change, I’m sure, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it) and generally feeling blah and writing run-on sentences as a result.
My neck is itchy. I shaved my head today (I do this every two to three weeks, not because I’ve suddenly joined a cult) and touched up my neck, to keep the neckbeard thing at bay, but I apparently did it all wrong because the neck, as I said, is itchy. I can’t blame this on climate change but at least I started a new paragraph to whine about it.
Here’s a picture from either 1974 or 1975 of mom and a goat at Knott’s Berry Farm, I think. Farms often have goats so that seems right. Mom is clearly not impressed by the goat’s attempt at self-emasculation. This is really one of those “Write your own caption” things, so go ahead, write your own!
You know how some people look better when they’re younger and some look better when they’re older after they’ve grown into their bodies, gotten sensible haircuts and no longer treat fashion as alien science? This photo of me going out for my grad ceremony in June 1982 clearly demonstrates I am in the latter group.
I did my best to fix the photo in Lightroom (it had a lot of noise thanks to the 1890s camera technology used) but there is no image manipulation program that can fix the hair, glasses or all of those dismembered heads on the wall behind me.
I took a photo of a woman smoking in front of a No Smoking sign at Metrotown. She got up and left after I took the picture, though I don’t think she actually saw me (I was not close by).
I see smokers doing this a lot. I wonder if they are simply natural born rebels (“You can’t tell me smoking is addictive, smelly and expensive!”) or if smoking somehow causes them to read signs and interpret them in the opposite manner (“I must smoke here, I see the little cigarette symbol.”) or if maybe there are so few places for people to smoke now that they just smoke anywhere outside because nicotine/addiction/etc.
Mostly I just like the juxtaposition.
Here’s another one I took in Central Park. This is a nice place to go for a leisurely stroll, especially if your hip isn’t stupidly sore. I hadn’t been there for awhile and went to consult the map to find the little duck pond so I could look delightedly at the ducks. The map was kind of a “make your own adventure” thing:
I eventually found the pond with the ducks and noticed it was also stocked with zombie fish. You can’t really tell in the shot below but if it was animated it would look no different because these were the least active but not actually dead fish I have ever seen. Given that it was recently confirmed that this July was the hottest since they started keeping records (and also the hottest month ever) the fish are probably swimming in the equivalent of warm soup. I felt bad for them, even though their hips would be perfectly healthy if, you know, fish had hips.
By the by, I realize I have the photographic eye of a tree sloth. If I was feeling a little more limber and daring I might have tried climbing a tree for a more dramatic angle on the fish, but I was sore (the hip, you see), it was hot and why risk falling on the fish and making their lives even more wretched? Plus I wouldn’t put it past myself to drown in two feet of water. I am not Aquaman.
This is the image a retailer uses in their ads to entice you to buy phones. Based on how smartphones have evolved in the few short years they’ve been around, I am projecting that this phone will exist in 2017:
While leaving Burnaby Lake Regional Park after today’s run I saw this.
I’ll give these cyclists credit, though. After studying the map intently for several minutes they actually turned around and left.
Two other cyclists on the trail were not so courteous. May geese have nipped their tires flat.
It seems that one of the updates of the NextGen Photo Gallery plugin I use on the blog reworked things to the point where most of my gallery pages were nothing but a spectacular mess of exposed, broken code. While interesting in an abstract sort of way it was not very practical for the viewing of photos.
I finally went through and cleaned up most of the pages and broke off Hiking into its own separate category. Still to come are better descriptions for each page and improved old photos, as I realized a lot of them were scanned with particularly poor brightness/contrast. But it’s a start.
The general Photo Galleries and Hiking may be found by clicking on the words you just read.