if i only knew...

Light explosion

Here are a few more shots from my crossprocessed roll (more here and here). The first one is my hand, above a floor-light. The rest are lights of a concert.

Lomo LC-A, crossprocessed slide film

Harry Potter saturation

There's a good article on the Guardian site about the negative side-effects of the Harry Potter marketing phenomenon.

Yesterday while browsing for books on amazon.com i noticed their "harry potter meter" on the right sidebar. It displayed the running number of copies of the 5th book sold on amazon.com. I refreshed the page a couple of times in an hour and it just climbed, and climbed and climbed. Last time i looked it stood at 812000 something. And that's just amazon.com. Amazing. (Today the meter is gone, maybe they got into some legal disputes on it.)

The Guardian article quotes Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who swam against the flow and did not sell his soul to marketing managers. He retained the right to his characters and thereby saved C&H for eternity, as two silly cartoon characters with unbeleivable wisdom about life, funny cynism, and an appreciation for the little things that count in life. He says:
"Worse, hype like this sows the seeds of its own creative destruction. Bill Watterson, a famous American cartoonist, fought against merchandising for years. 'When cartoon characters appear on countless products,' he used to argue, 'the public inevitably grows bored and irritated with them, and the appeal and value of the original work are diminished. Nothing dulls the edge of a new and clever cartoon like saturating the market with it.' "

I can't help but feel this for Garfield and Snoopy. The characters are on everything from mugs to glow-in-the-dark pillowcases, and became just another famous character that decorates store shelfs. When you see Garfield stuff in stores, you don't think of the real beauty of the comic strip. You think of the cute character. And you don't buy the mug or the 157th decorated pencil because there's no point in buying it - not counting hardcore collectors of course. So in the end Garfield becomes just another pointless product on the shelf that lost its real, original and unquestionable value in the race to create a value in the marketing sense. The original Garfield - the fat, funny, lazy cat with a personality - gets buried somewhere, and its real value is now a thing of the past, nostalgia even. Same with Snoopy. They get reduced to a decorative item. To the level of Hello Kitty merchandise, being there for the cuteness factor, nothing else.

Now, back to the Harry Potter marketing phenomenon, the same thing happens to *the book*. If you got hooked on the HP books when the first one came out, was enchanted by the story and the world of HP - you're lucky. Because then you can appreciate the real value in the book. If you arrived to the world of HP after the hype got out of control, there's a chance that you become grinded up by the Harry Potter machine, and get alienated from the book and the world of HP, left with the feeling of redundancy and annoyance seeing the 400th harry potter special on TV, reading the 500th article in the press and seeing the 674th shopwindow dedicated to the little wizzard. And in the end, the real loser are the kids - robbed of a great childrens' book that had the potential to really open the world of reading to them. The thing with getting lost in a book is that everybody has their own Harry Potter in their personal movie theater. And by making Harry Potter so standardised and so ubiquitous, people are robbed of this image too. Your Harry Potter gets dimmer and dimmer, and gets replaced by the corporate version.

And it doesn't stop here. The Guardian article talks about the effect on childrens' books that get neglected and tossed into the storage room because of Harry Potter taking over childrens' markets everywhere. About the effect on small bookstores who lose out because of the book sold in unbeleivable quantities - and so large discounts - at superstores. And the questionable size of the book: 766 pages for a children's book?

For an ending, i'll quote the article again because this couldn't have been said any better:
"J.K. - an intelligent woman - had choices, despite the pressures. She could have insisted on less marketing, less security and less hype. And just as she didn't have to do it this way, nor do we. So this weekend, if your child asks for Harry Potter, take him or her to the bookshop and try and find something just as good that isn't the centre of a multi-million pound industry. Let's desaturate ourselves."

Photoblog layout linkography

I am working on the new photo-friendly layout for this blog, and thought i'd share a linkography for folks who are looking for photolog tools and inspiration:

I am playing with the idea of incorporating a lomowall into the blog. The movable lomo MT plugin looks promising for that purpose. I don't want it animated, or randomized, so it probably needs some tweaking, but it's a nice starting point.

I will be posting photos as entries in a second blog, but siplaying them in this blog. To do that i will use the brilliant MtOtherBlog plugin.

Other sources of inspiration:
Photoblog tutorial
PhotoStack - "an image organization system featuring template driven layout, smart caching, automatic thumbnail creation, RSS feeds, picture level EXIF date extraction, and picture level descriptions, all without the need for an SQL like database." (Which is also responsible for feeding our Hugo and Oliver addiction.)
Mt Photolog in 5 steps - a tutorial

Victorian visions of Y2K

Apparently, victorian postcard makers were a pretty creative bunch, they invented the moving walkways that we now use on every airport, and undersea tourist boats that take tourists' hard earned holiday $$$ at every single one of the globe's seaside resorts. Then there're also the rather entertaining thoughts of moving entire blocks of houses on train tracks by a locomotive...
A very interesting and enjoyable journey back in time, and then forward by postcards:
Victorian Visions of the Year 2000

blogstalking

And again a very enjoyable entry from lancearthur. I feel like a stalker linking him for the second time in a week or so. :) Anyway, his entry reminds me of two things:

1. San Francisco has the weirdest climate i have ever seen, when i was there in August 1999 it was as if i were here in Budapest in March. Nice weather, but coat and longsleeve T-shirt time. Of these i had one (1) longsleeve T-shirt and zero (0) coat with me on that Pacific coast trip, which means i actually wore that one T-shirt the whole week of my visit there. It is my fave T-shirt by the way, so i didn't mind. It would have been good to have 2 though. Point is: he is right. Bring a coat. And 2 longsleeves.

2. Making the first step on a crush (i realize i haven't used that word for years. am i getting old?) is the most painful experience ever. Or maybe, you need to be burned several times to actually be able to appreciate that one v e r y s p e c i a l time when your move actually works out good and you find your soul mate? Ok, then, it was all just the practice, and all is well. Although i probably will never recover from the humiliation caused by a certain love letter with underlined quotes from The Little Prince... Argh... shivers.

To-do list

To-do list before leaving for Canada:
- have Lomo camera repaired (it seems to have the infamous sticky shutter problem)
- decide on how many cameras to bring
- get ebay things wrapped up and update address on necessary online registrations
- clean out clutter from my room to make place for any stuff they want to store in here until i come back in November
- decide on what to bring to Canada: books, knickknacks, photos, bags, clothes
- decide on final thesis subject and compile needed research stuff
- wrap up nervousness.org projects and exchanges
- go to dentist and have 3 aching teeth done (yikes)
- get prescriptions from doctor and buy necessary medicine (but first figure out what i need)
- buy insurance
- buy plane ticket (do i have my priorities messed up a bit in this list?)
- tell parents what to do with bank account, cell phone bills, etc while away
- collect snail mail and email addresses for postcards and travelogues
- clean up computer and configure it for easy parent-usability

Tulip beauties

Shot in Vienna in April. Lomo LC-A

   

Blog birthday

I can't believe i AGAIN missed my blog's birthday. On June 6th, this blog celebrated (or rather... didn't) it's 2nd birthday.

Lomo sky shots... again

I can't stop shooting the sky even though i have tens of such pictures already, but how could i resist the urge to point my lomo to such beautiful clouds? Especially *knowing* that they will look this cool when i get the roll developed? I love my LOMO.

    

    

Ducks and Toulouse-Lautrec

I last posted photos on May 9th. More than a month ago. See my previous entry about usability issues for the reasons. It's still a very depressing thought. But here are a few photos to chear myself up and stop whining and actually post instead.

These are lovely ducks hanging out at Vienna's new Museumsquartier. We went to see the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, you can see the poster in the second image's background. It was nice, but i actually expected a bit more of his colourful posters. I saw them in the Vancouver Art Gallery at a temporary exhibit a few years ago, and they are wonderful. So much movement and color and sophistication. This current exhibit is more about his drawings, sketches and lithos, which are also interesting but there were so many of them, and so similar, that it kind of got boring after the second room.

(Lomo LC-A)

Pissing on your cat and other stories

This is a hilarious story about a man and his kitten's addiction to his bathroom activities. Yes, all activities.

Coupland news

Hey, Nostradamus! has its own website (with mailing list and contest!)

Uk cover art for "Hey, Nostradamus!"

Coming up in 2004: 2 new books!!! Souvenir of Canada 2 and Super City (scroll down to "2004") - i am especially thrilled to see Souvenir of Canada 2, i loved his nonfiction books as much as his fiction.

Famous peoples' blogs - actually interesting

There's Moby's, Jamie Oliver's (the naked chef), and Body Shop founder Anita Roddick's.