Tag: photographs

#oneaday, Day 333: Internet Games #1: The TwitPic Game

You’re sitting in front of your computer right now. You’re either working, or bored, or wondering what on Earth you should do with yourself. You probably wouldn’t be reading this otherwise.

So today, I present to you a simple and fun game which you can play whenever you’ve read the whole Internet and are at a loss for what to do next. It’s a simple game, and there’s no real “winning” as such. But it can be played solo, or as a social game with the aid of additional participants on Facebook, Twitter or the social network of your choice. You can even play local multiplayer with people in the same room, either hotseating on one computer, or with a collection of different computers.

The game is very straightforward to play. The image-sharing website “TwitPic” is used to share images on Twitter. The URL format for TwitPic is http://twitpic.com/stringoflettersandnumbersgoeshere. You can probably guess the rest, but for those of you who haven’t cottoned on yet, simply replace “stringoflettersandnumbersgoeshere” with a code of your choice (keep it no more than 5 letters or numbers in most cases) and then see what out-of-context images you can discover.

Here’s some samples from a quick go today:

http://twitpic.com/spack comes up with this delightful image of someone’s dinner. The plastic tray and plastic cutlery seem somewhat at odds with the battered shrimp, corn and unidentifiable green shit in the corner.

http://twitpic.com/felch comes up with this image, with the caption “THIS. My cousin is me all over”, worryingly, though as the astute commenter beneath the picture observes, there is no actual felching in the picture.

http://twitpic.com/crunk displays this disappointingly dull image of someone on their way to Charlotte for training. Unless Charlotte is a person, in which case the implied “training” which will be going on can take on an altogether more interesting meaning.

http://twitpic.com/arse gives us more food. People really love to show each other what they’re eating on Twitter, it seems. It appears that one of the stereotypes about Twitter users is true.

http://twitpic.com/butts gives us a sleeping man. Why is he asleep? No-one knows. But the cameraperson is certainly very close to this sleeping man. Sleeping man also appears to not be wearing a shirt and have slightly flabby shoulders.

And finally, http://twitpic.com/dirty gives us a collection of jazz music, thereby confirming something we’ve all known for a very long time: the fact that jazz music is dirty. The internet has proved it.

This game also works with a variety of other sites, including imgur, yfrog and numerous others. For the truly brave, you could also try it with URL shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl. There’s no telling where you might end up with those, and so that, dear friends, is a game we shall save for another day.

Found any awesome TwitPic URLs yourself? Do let me know. That’s what them thar comments are for.

#oneaday, Day 106: Crystallised Memories

It’s funny how certain objects come to have memories attached to them. Inanimate, unremarkable objects. They could be an item of furniture. They could be a book. They could be a piece of technology. They could be a stuffed toy.

Look around the room you’re in right now. Look at some of the things that are sitting in it. And not just the big things, or things which are specifically designed to evoke a memory, like photographs.

What memories are attached to, say, the lamp by the side of your bed? Or the clock radio? Or the bookcase? Or the books which lay discarded on the floor? Or that mark on the wall? If you think about it, you can probably attach a memory to every tiny little thing that you can see in any room – assuming you’ve had the time to “get to know” that room, of course.

When you move on to a new place, sometimes other peoples’ memories are left behind. They may take away the things that can be carried, packed into boxes or loaded into a van, but some things can’t be taken away. A whole room can hold memories, both good and bad. And it doesn’t have to be just one memory at a time. In the room where I am right now I can see things which represent good times, things which represent bad times, and things which represent the very worst of times. Some objects in this room represent more than one thing. Some things hold conflicting emotions. Those things are confusing, but the important thing to remember is that the object holds all of those memories, not just the bad ones.

It’s easy to let bad memories and bad experiences colour everything that you do. They say bad experiences and bad memories help to make you stronger. It may well be true, but it doesn’t make them any easier to live through, or to relive. But, as received wisdom has it, it’s the sum of our experiences that make us who we are. And it’s by examining the sum of those experiences that we, ourselves, can learn to understand who we are.

I’m not sure I really know who I am. I’ve drifted along for so long, wondering if I’m doing the right thing for myself and for other people. I don’t feel like I’ve found it yet, and recent events (which I won’t be going into detail about here) have made me think that no, clearly I’m not doing the right thing – for myself, more than anything else. It’s a selfish attitude to take, but when it comes down to it, the only person’s destiny that you have any control over is your own. You can’t always live your life for the approval of other people, least of all if you’re not happy yourself.

So that’s why when some of these crystallised memories disappear, when some are left behind and some are taken with me to wherever life takes me next, I know that’s just another step. There have been missteps, and there have been backwards steps, but they’re all steps nonetheless; steps on that long, arduous, exhausting and frankly irritating journey that they call life.

I’m kind of ready to get where I’m supposed to be going now, thanks. I thought I was already there for a while, but there actually seem to be some significant engineering works in the way. Where’s the nearest replacement bus service?