… although my sleeping patterns are all skewiff again. A meme going around at the moment is to take a picture of you right at this minute, and post it. Here we go:
You can see the endless fractal of Photo Booth glare in my glasses (I booted into OS X to watch something, and haven’t rebooted). I’m in bed, as I have been for the last few days, ailing. I’m pretty sure that beard is going away in the next few days, as I’m filming something on Tuesday and my rule is that beards are weird on camera (though half-tanned faces are kind of strange also). There may be some Ritz cracker crumbs in there, but I think the resolution saves you that. The headphones are playing (or were, my music is on the Linux partition) the latest Frontalot album, which I can heartily recommend.
Here’s me from my first home page, in 1994, back when Photoshop was exciting, and resolutions were low. It was taken with one of the first consumer digital cameras, in Britain’s first Cybercafe, which me and Bill Thompson had somehow finagled out of Pipex and shipped up to Edinburgh for the festival. One of us thought that spraying yellow in my eyes was cyberpunk.
I ended up happier, and with slightly more hair than I envisaged back then. There, I was 25 and fairly sure that I’d blown it — too old to do anything but wait for my number to be called in. Also, I thought I was really unattractive. How was I to know that there would be a future of girlfriends looking at old photos of me and saying how they wished they knew me back when I was cute. Dude! It’s me from the future! You’ll never be hotter! SLEEP WITH AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN!
This holds true of any boy in their twenties I think.
Okay, this is weird. I will stop looking at photos of myself, and encouraging them to create counterfactual asshole versions of me.
Also my mum reads this.
September 19th, 2008 at 4:58 am
I’ve currently running what remains of my few random VHS cassettes through a Neuros OSD and am re-experiencing random bits of 90s telly again. Yesterday I watched you talking about old arcade games on “The Net”, and an interview with a couple of Stanford students about how easy it is getting VC cash for their search engine site – they were given a check for $100,000 before they’d even set up a company. (“Pfft”, I remember thinking at the time, “why would anyone switch from altavista?”)
September 19th, 2008 at 11:35 am
“It was taken with one of the first consumer digital cameras, in Britain’s first Cybercafe”
A digital camera which had just had the lens licked by a couple of local kids no less. I believe those were my photoshop skills on display (not that I should really be seeking attribution on something I would these days laugh off as ‘programmer art’). A formative period for us both, that appears to have manifested in us sharing the same glasses.
That was my first encounter with the web (having previously sacrificed my education to an NNTP addiction that I was going cold-turkey on). I recall spending most of my time trying to get back out of the Principia Discordia, and thinking that it was promising stuff, but that there must be a better way of finding things on it.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
YMM “beards are AWESOME on camera”. HTH, HAND.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Hugh Laurie with beard? Excellent. David Tennant with beard? Excellent. “Beard are weird on camera”? REFUTED.
September 19th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Hello Phil! Wow, it’s good to hear from you after so long!
Wait, is this like writing on each other’s “walls”?