Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
Put the word “Cock” into the description.
In the last two days my recently posted photo of Green & Co has had over 40 views from people searching for “cock”, “penis or cock”, “cocks”, “penis or cock or xxx” and other variations.
Seriously, if you’ve selected Flickr for your pornography needs you need to have a good, long look at your life choices.
Back in the day, the Red Castle Motel was the place to be in Perth. Situated just outside the CBD with river and city views, and on the main road to the airport, it was a medieval themed paradise. Many couples (this being in the days before cheap airfares made international honeymoons from one of the most isolated cities on Earth viable) spent their wedding nights there – numberless are the Perthites who claim to have been conceived with its walls. Not only a place to stay, the castle was also a well regarded nightspot, where you could dine beneath the watchful gaze of suits of armour in the revolving King Arthur’s Table restaurant, or wander the gardens where a hand grasping the sword Excalibur would emerge from a pond on the hour, every hour.
But alas, time moves on. Faux Arthurian medievalism went out of fashion as Western Australia slowly moved away from its British roots and started to look towards Asia. The Castle gradually changed from fashionable accommodation to slightly shabby, to a glorified truckstop, to a regular truckstop and eventually into a complete fleapit. The revolving restaurant struggled on under a variety of names before eventually shuddering to a halt and closing, and a fire that destroyed the penthouse level in September of 2012 was the final straw. The once iconic structure is soon to be demolished, and the site redeveloped for housing.
So naturally, as a badly decayed landmark that is soon to vanish I made some time today to go and photograph it.
The set can be seen here. The place is pretty well locked up. I would have been willing to try and find a way in, except for the fact that there was a car parked inside and some lights were on in the front building, so I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and just photographed from the street. Nonetheless you can tell that it would have been an impressive place back in the 60’s – particularly in sleepy little Perth. Burswood will never be quite same without that tower looming over the horizon, no matter how awful the establishment below it may have been.
It may be of some interest that among the photos is the 10,000th one in my photostream. How about that then?
I’m doing my best to reserve judgement on the Flickr redesign, but now that I’ve had the time for a good look around, and more information on the future of the site is emerging, I’m shifting towards really disliking it.
The entire interface seems to have been shifted towards “look at all the pretty pictures!” while making it a pain in the arse to see any of the meta-information – titles, descriptions, dates, locations, etc – that might have been entered about said pretty pictures.
Now, I don’t use Flickr to show off pretty pictures, I use it to store and annotate photographs of things that I find interesting, and other people might find interesting too. Without the context of the meta-information, a lot of my photos are pointless, so the redesign has made the site a hell of lot less useful for me.
I’m not making any rash decisions yet, but I’ll be watching Flickr very carefully over the next couple of months to see if things improve. If not, I may well cancel my pro account, pull all my stuff down and find somewhere else to keep it.
Flickr Community: Hey Flickr! You used to be cool but now you’re old and tired! You need to change! Flickr Sucks!
Flickr: We heard what you’ve all been saying – Welcome to the new and improved Flickr!
Flickr Community: What!? What is this crap!? Why did they change it!? Change back! I want to opt out! Flickr Sucks!!! SUUUUUCCCCKKKKSSSS!!!!!!!!
Generalised idiocy in the webosphere aside, I’m currently undecided on the new look Flickr. I don’t hate it, but I don’t yet love it. I’m going to give it some time to settle in before jumping on any bandwagons, pro or anti.
Now if I can only select a cover image without having to specifically upload something…
PS: Oh I meant to mention that SAVN are doing some sterling work regarding the Australian Vaccination Network.
One job down.
All my UK photos are now up on Flickr. Hooray!
Now I’ve just got to title, annotate, tag and geolocate them all 🙂
Later: DERP!! I somehow managed to miss over a week’s worth of photos!
On the plus side all the ones I have uploaded are now geotagged.
Blagh.
Been feeling totally dull, blah and pointless of late. In an attempt to do something approaching worthwhile I spent much of yesterday uploading the photos from my 2009 trip to the UK for Ali and Mat’s wedding to my Flickr account – which I’ve been meaning to do since the day I got back over two years ago.
The vast majority have no titles, descriptions or geotags – but I’ll work on it over the next few weeks. There’s also one day’s worth of wandering around Leicester left to go up, including my exciting and action packed investigation of the Medieval Packhorse Bridge!*
(*Not guaranteed to be exciting or action packed)
Those should go up this afternoon. In any case if you have an abiding interest in amateur photographs of unidentified English buildings, fields and street signs, please consider my photostream!
Back to work…
Driving up the hits…
Made this AMAZING picture over the weekend and hardly anyone’s looked at it. Boo hoo 😉
LATER: OK, I have now received praise for my awsum inkscape skillz and am sufficiently pacified. Carry on!
Temper, temper. You know Cousin Merl “ain’t been quite right” lately..
Wow, lectured on Creative Commons by Cory Doctorow – I don’t know if I should be excited or humbled and ashamed 🙂
