— पाँच हजार चार सौ इकतीस —
I'm already feeling a little nostalgic for the trip to Australia we took earlier this year—we got back from that all of four months ago. With all the big events from June over with, including our anniversary trip to Port Townsend and Pride Weekend, plus even being past Independence Day (about which I
posted yesterday), I am back to burning through photos from Australia, three shots at a time.
Whenever I do this, I like to caption the photos being used, on their individual Flickr page—just in case any reader happens to click through using the photo's embedded link. This helps me get more of the photos captioned, as I have literally hundreds from the Australia trip and have only managed to get a fraction of them captioned.
When I faced this issue after the trip to Australia in 2020, one of the few actually-convenient byproducts of stay-home orders during the pandemic was having a truly unprecedented amount of spare time on my hands. As a result, I killed time over many days by actually captioning every single photo from that trip. I have no such opportunity now, with life basically back to pre-pandemic levels of activities and events.
If nothing else, with virtually any event for which I send email travelogues, whatever captions I write under photos in those emails (which often also get adapted into blog posts, as in yesterday's for Independence Day), I copy and paste under the same photo on Flickr. This way, if anyone actually clicks through all the photos in their given album on Flickr, they'll come across enough text content in captions here and there to get a good overview of my trip or event, in narrative form.
That does still mean tabbing through a bunch of photos with no caption, though, and this morning I came up with an idea I never thought of before. I actually went through
all of the 31 separate photo albums I have for this year's trip to Australia (covering the Brisbane / Gold Coast, Kangaroo Island / Adelaide, and both Sydney legs), and in each photo album description, I added links to the overall, umbrella collection of photo albums for each leg; to the overall, umbrella collection for the entire trip to Australia,
and to the blog post travelogue related to whichever leg the album covers. That way there's an easy link to a narrative overview to whichever leg the photo album is from, and you don't have to hunt for it split up in captions under individual, sporadic photos.
Sometimes I wonder how many other people record and catalogue their lives to the extent that I do. One could argue that millions of people do: with cloud photo uploads from any random shot taken from a phone, that's a lot of digital coverage of plenty of random people's lives. I don't stand out the way I used to, say, with my LiveJournal. But! I do think I take this a step further than most people do: I don't just document virtually every aspect of my life in both prose and photography, but I have both extensively organized and cross-referenced. Surely I'm not the only person doing that, but I have yet to meet another person who does, and we are comparatively few—and also the people who, assuming servers continue running between now and then (assuming they will be is possibly naive), will make it far easier for anthropologists of the distant future to assemble a picture of life in the early 21st century.
See? I'll have a lasting legacy after all!
— पाँच हजार चार सौ इकतीस —
— पाँच हजार चार सौ इकतीस —
Anyway I never had a chance to mention what I did after work on Monday, which was leave a bit early to take myself to the 4:10 showing of
No Hard Feelings, which I liked a lot and is much better, in my opinion, than the decidedly mixed reviews would suggest.
I have a feeling a couple of comedies coming later this year will make me laugh more, but this one made me laugh plenty, and featured excellent performances—the latter being something rarely noticeable in studio comedies.
As for last night, after I rode my bike home and posted my draft travelogue (which I had already posted to this blog; I usually do it the other way around), Shobhit and I watched this week's episode of
Platonic on Apple TV+. One more episode of that, and I think we'll be done with that streamer for a while, and I can switch back to Netflix where I now have a backlog of things I'd like to watch, not least of which is the new season of
Black Mirror.
Having some extra time on our hands, though, and with nothing else to watch, I finally, after a few years of hearing about it, decided to give
Euphoria on HBO a try. I knew Shobhit's interest would be piqued by its reputation as a show that shows frequent penises, but I had always hesitated because of what I'd heard about it not being a particularly accurate depiction of contemorary high school life, especially with all the drug use. So far, though, after three very wel-made episodes we've watched, I don't find that to be the strongest argument—because this is about one particular high schooler with addiction issues, not about a high school with rampant drug use.
That said, I am also very ambivalent about some of its content, particularly in episode 2, when Nate beats the shit out of Tyler, after invading Tyler's own apartment, just because Nate's ex-girlfriend made out Tyler in a swimming pool. I found the scene depraved and disturbing, right down to Nate using Tyler's shower to wash off the blood, and dressing in Tyler's clothes while we see close-ups of Tyler's bloody eyes looking up at him from the floor. The show moves on and it feels somewhat like we're supposed to find a way to empathize with Nate, and I just can't; he's a fucking psychopath. And I texted Laney to tell her that if this show is just going to show characters get away with horrid behaviors like that, I'm not going to like it.
Not that I'm all moralistic about bad characters getting some kind of comeuppance for their behavior, like in some kind of 50s movie code. But, without something even skirting that sort of idea, why show that kind of content to begin with? What do I gain by watching a scene like that? I really hated it.
Zendaya's performance is already identifiable as excellent, though, and I love her developing friendship with a trans girl recently moved to town. There's a lot I already like about the show. I just really want Nate to see some sort of consequence, if not get completely fucked up, and I don't want the show to just leave Tyler as this victim of truly senseless violence. IMDb shows him credited in four episodes, though, so we'll see what any future appearances by Tyler will bring.
— पाँच हजार चार सौ इकतीस —
[posted 1:12 pm]
