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.

faceProbably 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

.

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...

5 People.

This is a list of five types of people I wouldn't mind seeing dead. 5. Condescending Bisexuals Have you ever run into these people? Bisexuals who seem to think that because they find both men and women sexually attractive they somehow, in some mysterious way, are more enlightened then the rest of us. You know, us common folk that only want to fuck one or the other. Truly they are the chosen people! Why? Well because they've seen past gender and appearance and found that you fall in love, not with the gender but with the person. Wow, isn't that inspiring? Granted of course that this non-gender-specific person still conforms to our culture's perception of beauty. I'm sorry but penises, to me, look horrendous. I wouldn't want one anywhere near either my face or ass. In fact, the first time I saw my own I attacked it with a shoe. Sexual preference does not equal moral superiority you smug bastards. Another thing; you don't get more options because you're "playing both sides", so to speak. What it comes down to, in the end, is how attractive the other person finds you. Not just appearance wise although that is unfortunately the most important factor. 4. Young folk who act older than their age This is especially prevalent among university students. People approaching their mid 20s that act as if they were in their late 40s. Wearing boring "adult" clothing, sipping lattes, conversing about what table napkins would be the best for their next couples get-together/dinner party. You'd think they'd be talking about something like "the Geo-political situation in eastern Africa" but no. They have so perfected this act since high school that they've realized that older people don't actually talk about that stuff. More on shallow and stupid people in their 40s later on. What happened to the energy of these people? All I wanted to do when I was in high school was to fuck on the floor and break shit. Thinking about it, that's still all I want to do now. Alright, that may not be entirely true. I do like having a good deep, fervent and energetic conversation about an interesting subject-matter from time to time. But if you actually try this on these yuppie offspring you quickly notice they're incapable of such thought. I suspect they've developed this intricate and boring lifestyle full of little fetishes like napkins, home decorating, couples dinners and other mind numbingly boring activities as a subterfuge for their lack of depth and intelligence. Crafty scoundrels! 3. People who grew up in the 60s and 70s getting tough on kids This is as much an objection to the reasoning as it is to the rhetoric that these people use. I will grant them that kids are insufferable bastards and need to learn some discipline. Hasn't that been true in every generation since the dawn of man though? And shouldn't that be something for the parents to sort out? The schools can only do so much. The main problem with slipping grades in schools all over the western world lies not with the children but with the poor quality of the grownups, the teachers. How to improve that is a different rant entirely but suffice to say that improving the status of the teaching profession and holding them accountable for results may help. What really makes me want to go into a self-induced coma is when these people who grew up in the 60s and 70s use harsh rhetoric and language. Words like grades, expectations, discipline, control and uniforms get thrown around. While they were handed everything in their youth. EVERYTHING! So when these pampered to middle aged, fat, comparatively rich, white motherfuckers come along and say kids these days lack discipline I just want someone to invent cyborg warrior bodies. So that their 80 year old parents can rip their damn heads off! Call it a really really really late term retroactive abortion. 2. Subcultures Stop letting your entire identity be dictated by things other people have created. Be it music, clothing, books, movies or video games. You're being a shallow cunt, stop it. 1. Bloggers and the people who read them Most blogs are about absolutely nothing of worth. They're just some ramblings from some teenage girl (either physically or mentally) about what they did today. And I'm not even talking about exciting stuff like teenage sex and drugs. No, negative, denied. It's always some meandering post about what they ate or what clothes they wore. I have friends who do this, if you're one of them consider this my way of saying; I like you, but for fuck sake! I know these pointless blogs have been an annoyance to many people over the years. I'm certainly not the first to bring this up. I did it however to set up a point. Could we please, please agree to stop reading these "celebrity" bloggers? These wannabe socialite journalists who live these fabulous lives revolving around gossip, fashion, parties and one has to assume rather boring sex. Mostly implied, naturally. They just seem too neat and well scrubbed to be having anything other than dull repetitive sex. In their luxurious penthouse apartments smelling equally as sterile and unnatural as their genitals. It's bad enough that they can't quite seem to string together a complete sentence, they make money doing so. These blogs are essentially the same thing as other personal blogs, only infinitely more sad. For all of us. What sort of vapid, soulless, asinine existence is that? If you're asking yourself how I can rail against this sort of thing and then myself slip in bits and pieces of my own life in this blog, well...you're just going to have to figure that out on your own.