8 Years, 8 Members, 8 Stories

February 10, 2012 10:42 AM

mathowie is featured on the flickr blog today as part of "8 Years, 8 Members, 8 Stories".

For our eighth anniversary series "8 Years, 8 Members, 8 Stories" we contacted Flickr members who joined Flickr in February 2004. We asked them what the best thing that’s happened to them since they became a Flickr member, what it is that they love about Flickr, and what their eight favorite photos from other Flickr members are. We will publish the eight installments throughout the day.

posted by blaneyphoto to MetaFilter-Related at 10:42 AM (22 comments total)

ColdChef will be featured as well, apparently!
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:44 AM on February 10 [1 favorite]

Plus I got to plug ColdChef's amazing photo.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:46 AM on February 10 [5 favorites]

Neat! So far, if ColdChef is included, I know four out of four of them. Is it a little weird that they're all "oooh eight stories" but there are only three of them up now, or am I just a twitch nerd with unrealistic expectations?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:50 AM on February 10

Ha! I have that same light fixture and dammit if I couldn't figure out how to get it open when I needed to replace the bulb! Sad part is I'm the one who installed it to begin with.

I just bought my first dSLR, partly inspired by some of the shots I see on Flickr, including all those shots Matt takes of cyclists.
posted by bondcliff at 10:52 AM on February 10

Is "twitch nerd" a real thing, jessamyn, or did you just make that up?

I like it.

It sounds futuristic.

"When you slowcrawl the gravshaft, look out for twitchnerds in the quantum integument," Captain West growled, her steely eyes flashing.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 11:06 AM on February 10 [3 favorites]

I am so twitchy I twitched right over the Y!
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:07 AM on February 10

I was going to say "no, jessamyn, you're right -- it is a little weird," but then realized that I wouldn't actually be a great control for any experiment meant to identify "twitch nerd with unrealistic expectations."

And jeez, ColdChef's photo is just amazing. I only know good photography based on what I like, but that one really got me.

Also, like many things in life lately, Flickr being 8 years old seems incorrect - but I don't know if that's because it seems too much in the past or not enough. The passage of time gets really weird somewhere around 32, I think.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:11 AM on February 10 [1 favorite]

I will be incorporating "twitch nerd" into my everyday repertoire of nerd descriptors.
posted by slogger at 11:18 AM on February 10

You're a twitch nerd
and you've gone too far
'cause you know it
don't matter any way
posted by bondcliff at 11:25 AM on February 10 [2 favorites]

Twitch Nerds sound like a BAMA Sprawl gang who get into rumbles with the Big Scientists and Panther Moderns.
posted by griphus at 12:03 PM on February 10 [3 favorites]

I remember when flickr was a thing.
posted by cjorgensen at 12:36 PM on February 10 [1 favorite]

You're releasing ColdChef from of the safe confines of MetaFilter? Dear Lord, the world will never know what hit them. I'm going down into storm shelter and hope that I will somehow be spared as he and his ferocious offspring lay waste to the planet. At least humanity will perish with these words on their lips: "The cuteness! The cuteness!"
posted by Kattullus at 12:52 PM on February 10 [4 favorites]

Cool. I love ColdChef's photo and when I saw it I thought- I wonder if they'd consider doing one of these stories on him? So it's neat that that's actually happening.

Someone should register an account called twitch nerd and jump the gun on everything. Or maybe a twitter account tweeting half formed sentences.
posted by Secretariat at 1:05 PM on February 10

ColdChef's photo is just amazing.

Indeed! I think I like this one even better, though.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:26 PM on February 10 [2 favorites]

Glad to see "twitch" is getting some respect in this thread. Many's the time I've mentioned that, along with "thud", it's one of my favorites of the English language! Also, "twitch" and "thud" make the perfect pair, don't you think? They complete each other, one might say, in the same way as the sound of a kick drum and a snare drum complete each other. Boom and chick. Kick and snare. Thud and twitch. Immutable laws of nature. Or something like that.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:56 PM on February 10 [2 favorites]

Twitchthud is the new dubstep.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:33 PM on February 10 [1 favorite]

Calumny, Horace; thudtwitch is the choice of the discerning ear with unrealistic expectations.
posted by hattifattener at 6:43 PM on February 10 [1 favorite]

Heh. I'm not being featured, I think my name was just included because mathowie featured one of my pictures.

It's funny. Out of all of my pictures on Flickr (15,517 and counting), this one really never stood out to me. I was in a cemetery after a funeral and the cemetery was on the edge of a cornfield. I take shots of interesting names on headstones. But I asked my dad (now deceased) and my brother-in-law (now ex) to stand in the corn so I could take a quick picture of them. And I never gave it any thought after I uploaded it.

Then, this morning, I noticed that I'd gotten a few favorites on it. And I thought, "That's odd, Why are people favorite-ing a pic of my dad from 5 years ago. This week was the third anniversary of his death, but none of the favorites were coming from people I know. Huh. So I just chalked it up to weird and moved on. And then it got another favorite. And another. And I was perplexed.

And then later today, I saw Matt's posting and I was all, "Okay, well that's where the favorites are coming from. Still, I don't see what the big deal is. It's just two dudes standing by a field. I don't get it."

And then I just looked at it. I never really looked at it when I took it, because my dad was still alive and my brother-in-law was still married to my sister and it didn't seem like much of a shot. But I looked at it this morning.

And there was something about the look on my dad's face. Dad was always the family photographer. He'd always take funny pictures of his friends or make us kids do silly things. And I got my love of photography from him. I didn't take a lot of pictures of Dad while we were working (sometimes I did), but that day that I took this one...there's something about the way Dad is looking at me. I never noticed it before today. There's a look on his face as if he's thinking, "My son is now ordering me around and making me stand still." I never noticed that look on his face or that gleam in his eye.

I don't know, maybe I'm projecting or imagining that look. But there's something there. And there's also something in the way that my brother-in-law can't seem to figure out what the hell I'm doing that says just about all you'd need to know about him.

So, thanks, Matt, for making me take a second look at this picture. It's been a difficult week, and I've been missing my dad. But what you made me see in my own picture by really taking the time to see what other people are seeing...well, I can't tell you what it means to me. So, thank you again.
posted by ColdChef at 9:00 PM on February 10 [37 favorites]

A light fixture perplexed him, and friends helped him figure out how to change the light bulb.

Cue "How many geeks does it take to change a lightbulb jokes"....
posted by philipy at 5:05 AM on February 11

Glad it sparked a new look and helped you deal with feelings Coldchef. I had a similar realization when looking at my first photos to flickr and realizing they were of my cat which we had to put down after several years of kidney trouble and the last two weeks of not eating. We had a good 14 years together and we still have his sister who is in perfect health, but seeing those photos of him in his prime 8 years ago kind of threw me for a loop.

When I was going through my favorites to pick shots for this interview thing, I started at the earliest of the 3200 and worked forward. It took me about 3 hours because I was pausing on photos for a minute or two before moving on. I hadn't remembered marking the first two thousand as favorites since I hadn't seen them in 5 years or so.

This shot from Coldchef was firmly in that group. I never recalled seeing it before, but it's just got great weird facial expressions in an odd setting, it feels like a famous shot from someone like Robert Frank taking weird slices of life across the USA. Anyway, I love the shot probably more than any other of my pics because there's something almost arresting about the image, even without knowing the backstory, but the backstory definitely reinforces it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:56 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Holy shit, Flickr is still around?
posted by entropicamericana at 11:06 AM on February 11

entropicamericana: "Holy shit, Flickr is still around?"

It's a pity what Yahoo! allowed to happen to Flickr. The site is ridiculously slow to browse and the last update to the UI was probably in 2005. It's a shame could have been a great service, had it stayed independent.
posted by falameufilho at 12:57 AM on February 12