Lots of Monkeys

Some of you have heard of me talking about how news reporting will become personal responsibility.

Read Interdictor’s LiveJournal.

Minute to minute update of a guy keeping an ISP running down the street from the New Orleans Superdome.

What’s amazing are the comments of the hundreds of people reading his journal currently. They’re not just wishing him luck.

They’re feeding him information from around the world, giving him direct numbers to people that he needs to get in contact with to keep his network connection up, giving him tips on how to keep a diesel generator running, and mirroring the images that he’s been taking of the disaster.

In short, he’s calling on the internet to assist him, and it is responding.

I want a new camera.

I look at all the wonderful pictures that people have taken on Flickr and I recall all the good times that I had with my Canon AE-1. I remember apertures and shutter speeds and depth of field and film speeds. I remember capturing a two hundred fiftieth of a second in full clarity, a neighbor’s hair caught mid spin as I called her name in the hallway.

Then I look at my point and shoot. For its size, it is doing a fantastic job of capturing the moment when I need it to. It’s a fine standby camera. But it is not something I can use to catch a friend’s smile from across the room.

I find myself wanting to go outside and just take pictures that capture not only the moment, but something closer to the experience of that sliver of time.

I toy with the idea of going back to film every now and again, but with film and developing costs, I might as well just save up.

Update: Working it out, I have estimated that I would have to process and purchase about two thousand four hundred photos (one hundred rolls of film) in order to break even on a digital SLR. Might be time to break out the relic and get a cheap scanner.

I think it’s reaching the point where not even I think it’s reasonable.

$2000 Xbox 360 bundle over at GameStop.

Click on, “THE OMEGA.” No, really, they call it that.

I went to Otakon this past weekend, and now I find that I’m featured in a webcomic. See if you can spot me.

Best. World of WarCraft Post. Ever.

Here’s a snippet:

Pardon me for hijacking the thread, here..

But, Brion – if you don’t want your mother to know you were up and on the computer at 3:29 in the morning – DON’T post on a forum that she reads.

Busted.
Grounded.

Busted, indeed. Hilarity ensues, the rest of which can be read here. For the non WoW players, this occurs at post number five, so you don’t have to read for very long.

Good to see families playing together though.

Moms 4tw!