why i miss buffy (no. 137 in a series)

Continuing the Buffy theme that I am sort of going with today.

Actual, legitimate and semi-professional thoughts about YouTube are forthcoming. As in, maybe tomorrow if I feel like it.

i know that already because i saw it on your facebook

Oh, Facebook. As previously noted, I was quite determined not to become one of your minions. Er, I mean users. Social networking sites are a dime a dozen these days, and a girl could get a headache trying to keep up with them all. Or, just by trying to remember all those passwords.

But if there's one thing I learned from watching Star Trek (TNG all the way!), it's that resistance is futile. You tell yourself that you're just going to register to find out what all the hype is about and initially you are pretty unimpressed. Slowly though, you start to enjoy the constant string of information. Oh look, she is having pizza for dinner tonight! He is attending a rugby match! I bet I can answer more questions about The Goonies than him! Can thousands of Stephen Colbert fans really be wrong?

Almost without even realizing it, you are logging on a dozen of times of day, hoping desperately that someone has played a move in one of the ten Scrabulous games you have going. You find yourself thinking that crafting your profile is a good way to kill two hours. You upload pictures. You consider this a valid form of communication between friends. You feel like, gee, I bet we'd have a great time hanging out because Flixter says so and we have so much overlap in our iLike profiles.

And, it's like totally legit, because people are networked by their schools and employers and NPR did a story about it.

Maybe it's a facade. Maybe, probably it will fade.

But it hasn't yet, so feel free to look me up there. Especially if you play Scrabulous.

feeling like a neophyte

So, even though I've been on flickr for ages, I must confess that I've never really played much with the apps or enhancements. I think I browsed them, briefly, oh so long ago. But they mostly seemed to deal with searching more efficiently. And, hello? I'm a librarian. I spent much too much of my graduate school career working the Boolean operator and thus I think of myself as a pretty decent searcher.

Seeing how you can play around with images though? I'm all about it. I'm thinking that the color fields pickr might be useful when I want to do some decorating. Because I have these random postcards of lucha libre over my sink and, as much as I love them, it might be nice to look at something else when I'm doing the dishes. And the calendar maker could be handy at Christmastime - how old school is it that I can distinctly remember having one of these made for my mom one year at Kinko's?

Today though, I'm feeling artsy. And I hear that the NYLA conference is going on right now. I didn't go this year, perhaps obviously, but I did have a great time there last year, when it was held in ever so lovely Saratoga Springs. One of the things I noticed about that town is how many great old motel signs were around, just begging for a retro-fiend like me to glory in them. This particular sign was right by the much more modern (and not nearly as full of character) hotel where I was staying and we walked by it everyday as we were going to meetings and such. To commemorate, I've Hockneyized it and am pretty pleased with the results.

Interesting to note: when I first read about this particular exercise, I was very keen to learn how to add notes and captions to their photos, as seen here. After lots of app searching and googling, I realized that it wasn't an additional application but an option right from your flickr photo page. There is probably a lesson there about learning all the built-in features before you go looking for outside toys, or maybe just in not making things more complicated than they have to be.