PhotoDude.com

Thu. Jan 01, 2004

Year End Review

Year End Review – It’s becoming a New Year’s holiday habit. I spend some time reviewing what I’ve placed on this site in the past 12 months, words and images, and in the process create a collection of some of my favorites.

You can view a page of my Favorite Piles of 2003, 32 subjective favorites chosen from the 269 Pixel Piles posted in 2003 (or, Favorites of 2001, and Favorites of 2002).

Reviewing my weblog, I wrote an awful damn lot in 2003. I can’t even tell you how many entries, never mind the number of words. Most of it may not have risen more than an inch above mediocre, but there’s a couple dozen entries I found worthy of the title ”favorite.” Read on for a list of links and teaser quotes.

Art Potty – Not posted on this site, but I was very honored to be chosen to curate a gallery of images selected from The Mirror Project.

Not Quite Dead Yet (January 16) ”The advertising business will die when people stop buying things.”

PhotoBloggie Nominations (January 26) ”Who knows how these awards will play out, but I decided to post my personal nominations, as they represent the sites of which I have the highest opinion.”

Remembered Distrust (February 6) ”My current anger goes directly back to Bosnia, the glaring failings of the Diplomacy Uber Alles approach, and the hundreds of thousands of lives it cost. I’m incensed at condescending advice from those who allowed genocide to occur again, in their own backyard, in the last decade. I’m triply incensed at those charged with defending them, who instead turned them over to their death rather than fight for what was right. I do not ever want my safety to be dependent on that source of advice, or on that kind of protection.”

Disturbing Things (February 25) ”The truth is, the past several days have been a bit … challenging. Yes, that would be an appropriately neutral word. In the course of these challenges, I’ve encountered quite a few disturbing things. And we’re just talking locally, not globally.”

Digital Self Reliance (March 6) ”But even back when my first computer was still merely a glimmer in my eye, I dreamed of the day that I would be able to afford an in-house digital darkroom. It’s a control issue; I wanted to own the whole loop, from image capture, to final archival print [...] The loop is now complete, and in house.”

The Revolution Will Be Embedded (March 26) ”I saw/heard more live coverage from within Iraq in the first day than I saw in the entire Gulf War in 1991. And I find it all absolutely astounding. Right down to Ollie North traveling with the Marines and possibly the worst quality videophone on the planet Earth.”

You Know Who You Are (April 8) ”As we face an unknown future of unknown threats, it would be good to at least know who has proven with their own words to be a ’false prophet’ (and I would personally include those who claimed this would be over in one week).”

Delivering the News Brand (April 15) ”In the end, I am left with a host of media choices, not just on TV, and the past weeks and months have allowed me to learn a lot about them. Each has revealed itself without my help, they just did it because theyre exhibitionist that way, often to their own detriment. None of them serve my needs, in total, and never have. But each one has lost some market share in my eyes. Their brand is dented, by their own banging about. I view each of them with a more jaded eye than I did two months ago.”

The R-S-C Factor (April 25) ”So when I hear celebrities howl about how dissent is being silenced because their sales/ratings are off, or they arent getting as much work as they were before, I find it painfully naive. Naive not to have known that was a risk before you made the choice, and naive to think that it is politically motivated or orchestrated. It’s human nature.”

Where Was The Plan? (May 19) ”It’s almost as if once the main invasion wave went through and the war was won, they expected to simply guide a self healing process of some type.”

Eric Rudolphs Fan Club, Part 2 (June 2) ”After September 11, a lot of Americans called on Muslims to speak out against the terrorism. It was said that they must police themselves from the inside, and publicly condemn those who claimed to be their peers, yet killed innocents. Well, I’m from North Carolina, and I’m from the same generation as Eric Rudolph (8 years separate our ages). And I’m here to tell you, he’s a cowardly terrorist, and those who supported him are at best, severely misguided, and more likely, scum.”

Fluid Costs (July 8) ”We humans value things in funny ways. Especially when it comes to fluids.”

The Greatest Singer You Never Heard (July 17) ”I havent been moved to tears by a musical performance in years. But I was on Tuesday night.”

A Royal Visit (July 21) ”His visit is preceded by careful instructions on how to prepare for his presence, and is backed up with hard copy documentation upon arrival. He arrives with several porters, or in the case of our home, sherpas, who tote his wardrobe, his entertainment needs, his special dietary supplies, and even his bed up the 42 steps to our home.”

It’s Official: Downloaders Don’t Care About Copyright (July 31) ”Saying they don’t care about copyright is the same as saying they don’t think musicians deserve their money. But, golly, they can’t wait for your next CD … to be bootlegged. They love the music. This palpable disrespect shown to artists who create the things you enjoy is mind boggling to me. ’Gosh, I love your work, here’s a kick in the nuts.’”

The View from the Fence of Centrism (August 25) ”Those who lean left often view me as a typical Warmonger with a Weblog, a foreign policy hawk with a dim view of Internationalism in the New Millennium. Those who lean right see a pro-choice, Ashcroft bashing, tree-hugging artist who is ’straight but not narrow,’ and admits he voted for Clinton in ’92. As I said, I’m not one of you.”

Technical Trauma Leads to Time Travel (September 2) ”I’ve got no digital camera. I’m connected to the Internet via a slow and nasty sounding analog device. It’s like 1999 all over again. I feel like Im caught in a time warp. It’s all so … primitive.”

Mad at the Messenger (September 12) ”You can be angry at Richard Drew for taking that picture, and you can be mad at Glenn Reynolds for publishing it again on the second anniversary, but then you exemplify the cliche about ’killing the messenger.’ You might think about redirecting your anger, not at the medium that presented you with the reality of that day, but at those who perpetrated it and put those innocent people in the position of having to make the most horrible choice you can imagine.”

A Day for Accounting (September 20) ”Anyone who really knows me also knows that lists, statistics, and ’counting’ are Things Reid Likes.”

Rambling on Religion (October 19) ”I came to think that whether a person is Baptist, or Catholic, or Muslim, or Hindu, they were put here by the Creator (no matter what name you use). People, animals, and plants were put on this planet in great variety and abundance, by a power greater than any of us. Rather than judge them on their differences from me, what better ’religion’ is there than to simply respect the many varied creations put here by a power greater than me, day by day?”

The Muse Is The Medium (October 20) ”Emese asks, ’Is photoblogging good for photography?’”

Bush, the South, and the Center (November 3) ”All I can say is that Im a white guy from the South, I drive a pickup truck, and it has a flag on it, so I suppose I must fit the Traditional Southern Stereotype. The fact Im that an urban freelance worker in a creative field, who voted a majority Democratic ticket in 2002, and have the United States flag on my truck are merely annoying inconsistencies. Because, otherwise, we Southerners are all alike.”

A Visual Question, Forty Years Old (November 21) ”If you travel to Dallas, and go to the Sixth Floor Museum, you’ll find a replication of Lee Harvey Oswald’s ’sniper nest’ at the infamous corner window. But you can’t actually look out that window, because the ’set’ is encased behind glass. However, on the Internet, you can.”

Cranky Americans (December 15)”Because we Americans can’t begin to understand what the capture of Saddam really means, to the people that really matter. We don’t have the context.”

Game Over (December 25) ”What happened next was really ugly.”