the big picture
Whew! Finally -- as of this morning, it appears -- Flickr is back online after being down for maintenance for well over 24 hours. The page they had in place during that time said it was just down for "a few hours," which is apparently a phrase they use very loosely.
I started thinking this morning about what kind of hold Flickr has over me now. I used one other photo hosting site for maybe a year or two before moving to Flickr in 2005, but cannot imagine having to reload all my photos to another site. I have 51,000 photos and counting (nearly 7,200, or 14%, of those are of Shobhit) at the site now. Embedded images in my blog posts dating back a decade and a half are hosted there. If Flickr ever goes belly up, I am well and truly fucked.
Also, right now, Flickr charges me $50 a year for my pro membership. I paid $25 a year for ages, so I wasn't particularly miffed when they doubled it recently. What if they double it again, though? Triple it? Quadruple it? I don't know what the threshold would be for me to abandon the only online place where all my photos, complete with cross referencing tags and photo captions, are in one place. In other words, Flickr has kind of got me by the balls -- or they could, anyway.
So far so good, I guess?
The embedded issue continues, incidentally. I really thought that after this major update happened, maybe video embedded in my posts would finally start playing again. No such luck. It's very annoying, but to my previous point: what can I do?
Shobhit had a work shift last night, during which I took transit down to Columbia City for my first-ever SIFF screening at the Ark Lodge Cinema -- a new venue for the festival, and the first outside of downtown Seattle that is easily accessible by Light Rail. The Columbia City stop is just a couple of long blocks from there.
I did make an error in my planning, though. I had the movie in my Google Calendar starting at 6:00, even though the digital ticket itself said 6:30. I could have gone home to feed the cats and maybe even eat something quickly myself, before hopping on Light Rail on Capitol Hill. Instead, because I was trying to get in line by as close to 5:00 as possible, I got on a #13 bus straight from Lower Queen Anne to the Westlake light rail station, and then rode straight down to Columbia City, arriving at about 5:15 -- only to discover I had 75 minutes until showtime, rather than 45.
Furthermore, this being a new, kind of out-of-the-way venue, the screening wasn't even sold out -- probably also largely because it was the third screening of the festival for this particular movie, Banana Split, which I enjoyed a lot. I thought a little afterward about how these "indie surprises" are basically the what the Seattle International Film Festival exists for. I've seen three of the films so far, and they have been pretty consistently quite good.
Anyway, considering the venue didn't even fill up completely, I clearly didn't even need to try arriving an hour early, let alone getting there 75 minutes before showtime as I did. I also had it on my calendar that the movie was two hours long, which was wrong; this means that I still got home about the same time I initially expected to afterward, because even though it started half an hour later than I realized, it was only an 88-minute movie and thus it ended around 8:00 anyway. It was about 8:45 by the time I was back home and writing my review, which I was still working on when Shobhit got home from work.
He had to make himself dinner, as with the delay before I know the movie was not two hours, I just couldn't bear not eating anything until after 9 p.m., and so I went across the street to the Columbia City PCC (and how I never realized it was so close to the Ark Lodge theatre, I have no idea) and got myself a "Tandoori Tofu with Asian Capellini" from the Deli. And it was very tasty, even though I found it kind of annoying the tofu was just in one large block that I had to break apart with my compostable fork.
[posted 12:37 pm]