Facebook, and the amazing destruction of images.

I've been uploading some of my Photoshop/Illustrator work to Facebook lately. I find it to be the most efficient way to get people I know to see the stuff I've fashioned together, using only my inferior skills and less than acute sense of style. Getting people to pop on over to a blog every time I leave another brain dropping is not exactly easy. By plopping these things into an album on the FB (that's what the cool kids are calling it, the FB. Or so I have been informed) I'm sort of forcing them to notice it. They can't not see it. Cruel, I know.

Facebook does not seem to appreciate my artistic endeavors and chooses to utterly obliterate the image quality. Escalating what would have been a mild assault on the visual senses into a full scale ocular genocide. Is it not enough that I'm hampered by the cruel luck of the genetic draw? I have to get repeatedly molested by Facebook as well? Feast your eyes on this digital atrocity.

Probably not my best work ever.

Now, to some this might not seem like such an intrusive reduction in image quality. "Hey, that's only slightly more artifacts." a person might say. That person also doesn't notice any difference between SD and HD television and will be wondering what all the hubbub is about. He is also 57 years old, loves sweater-vests and owns the collected works of Tom Clancy. This person needs to leave the room immediately.

The reason for the re-compression is in all likelihood storage space. Facebook deals with millions upon millions of photos after all. That is a lot of data and jiggabits and hardspace disks and whatnot. And how much larger is the already compressed "50% quality JPEG" file than its Facebook counterpart? The answer: about 8% smaller. Bare in mind this image consists of three colours. Facebook's re-compression can't handle the colour red? Seriously? I could understand if there was some gradient effect tripping up the algorithm here, but these are three clearly separated colours. Would I have crashed the servers with this image if it happened to be some blue in there? Should I stick to cubist black & white pictures? I can only imagine what other optical horrors FB has in store. Check out a reasonably well compressed version of the actual image over in the Flickr-stream to the right, or here

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Digital chirping.

Probably meaningless, possibly uninteresting, positively enthralling. The joy of technology re-enters my life thanks to Mr. Stephen Fry.

Hello there Stephen. I thorougly enjoyed your series on America. Although you will never read this it needed to be said none the less. Tweet on my friend, tweet on!

Type my pretties, type!

Give an infinite amount of monkeys typewriters and let them randomly press the keys and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. At least according to the well known theorem. But what can a couple of million bloggers with some sort of purpose behind the frantic bashing on millions of keyboards create? Perhaps a novella by Hemingway? Hell, I'd settle for a decent Tom Clancy. After all, most bloggers are smarter than monkeys. Most...

Narrow, Shallow and Small.

Narrow Why does every debate and every issue have to revolve around gender? What makes men and women different, be it biologically or culturally, always seems to be the main focus. How has society separated and suppressed women this time? Granted, I myself have made such observations from time to time but I don't see it as the mainstay of my intellectual self. I have other things up there, in that noggin of mine. Other ideas and musings that do not touch upon feminist theory or opposing ideals. What sort of cognitive pretzel would you have to twist yourself into in order to make absolutely everything about gender equality? Shallow We all live in a miniature world. Everything is so close these days, and so fast. Immediately accessible to anyone at any time. This is mostly a good thing. One side effect though seems to be the ever decreasing attention spans and simpler trails of thought. Quite often people can't even hold one encompassing thought in their heads for more than a few minutes. Let alone two directly opposed ones. These aren't kids with ADD, ADHD or some other disorder, these are "normal" adults. It is quite possible that this has always been the case and that it's only become much more visible now that everyone has a way of expressing themselves to a greater number of people. The Internet is the great repository of this brain-goop. The great mental meltdown of society.

This is where we live.

This tiny little world we live in is all our tiny little plastic brains can handle. Everything is clear-cut, prefabricated and safe in its sameness. Selecting what you want to see and hear and feel. Not everything is going to revolve around what you take an active interest in. Not everything is going to be about child welfare, the environment or gender equality. Noble subjects as they may be. Human society and life is infinitely more complex than that. Small The entire concept of personal responsibility has utterly gone out the window. Like some fad that we've found quaint and discarded. Nothing is your fault anymore. It's your genes, upbringing, circumstance and society that's to blame for everything that's wrong with you and your life. Of course all of these different aspects play a role in shaping people. But you do have a brain with a cerebral cortex capable of reason and thought. It's a wonder anyone gets held responsible for anything anymore. You can't keep up with being a parent and working? Maybe you should have had less kids. How about you at least get the first one right before you pump out another one? A smaller house would mean less cleaning. Less frilly and expensive clothing would mean less laundry and less shopping. You don't need to be a top executive at a soulless corporation some day. So what if the lawn is untidy? Trust me, all these pointless activities and fads that you're wasting the best years of your life on won't mean anything. The one with the most toys doesn't win, they just leave behind more garbage to be thrown away and discarded. After all, we need to make way for more pointless shit. Are we really such small people? This is not as pointed or succint as it ought to be. I hope to one day be smart enough for that.