Over the Christmas break, someone in my Facebook feed shared a YouTube video of artist Seikou Yamaoka recreating “The Girl With A Pearl Earring” using an iPad. Before I go on, you should watch it too, just for the sheer beauty of it.
Amazing, isn’t it?
So I went to the App Store and searched for ArtStudio and was astounded to find essentially a $5 version of Photoshop. Seriously, layers, dodge, burn, color picker, export in .psd format, all the “Adjust” menus you can think of, filters… everything I ever used back when I had Photoshop, plus a bit more.
I spent most of a day playing with different paint brushes, specifying just exactly how wet they were, or how much lead and follow opacity I wanted. My little nephew spent long stretches of time on it and even learned to change colors on his own.
Mr 2 using “special pen on iPad”
I used a photo of my sister’s new family room to help choose new curtain colors for them. (The original curtains are pink, which, no.)
Red? Grey? Definitely red.
I used a photograph of my parents’ church to design a logo for them.
Building a logo from a picture.
I’m certainly no Seikou Yamaoka, but it’s wonderful to have such a powerful and intuitive art app.
Now, if only GIMP could figure out how to make itself as intuitive, I’d have a desktop image making/manipulation application… Sigh.
As with most stories involving hacktivism, major corporations, insanity, and backwater social media platforms, we will probably never know exactly what happened this past weekend when FriendFeed went down for a day and a half.
Theory One
Exhibit A
One perfectly plausible theory is that someone accidentally tripped over the FF server’s power cord down in Facebook Headquarters and nobody noticed until Sunday. Meanwhile an Anon thought this would be a good time to protest censorship, little realizing that this would make Anonymous a bit of a laughing stock.
Exhibit B
Evidence for this theory includes: A) the fact that someone at FB HQ could “push the button” that made FF go again, and B) the complete laughability of any Anon thinking FF was one of the biggest social networks in the world.
Theory Two
A snippet of Exhibit A (click to see the full crazy)
The other theory is that this misguided Anon really did throw an epic tantrum thinking that account deletion (and therefore content deletion) combined with buggy search equals censorship. Evidence for this theory include A) the continuing tantrum that this Anon is throwing over in FF over having had his account deleted as spam and having seen other content disappear and, somehow, images of the Boston Marathon Bombing and an over-representation of librarians on FF… (I believe the technical term is “batshit”)…
Exhibit B
…and B) the complete laughability of thinking “here’s a cause that nobody at FB HQ will care about — let’s claim responsibility because then they will PHEER US” when really, nobody at FB noticed until we told them.
Either way, Anonymous (or at least this Anon) didn’t do itself any favors. … And now I’ll probably be DoSed. Sigh.
Anyway…
Whatever the truth, we’ve learned a few things:
Back when FF was still its own thing and they were still developing and improving its code, the data that the search function used was all housed on one machine. Since then, we’ve generated a LOT of data, so essentially old stuff isn’t indexed any more. Probably some new stuff isn’t either. There just isn’t space. So that’s good to know for all of us.
Facebook let us live! And even revived us!
Anonymous, or at least this Anon, doesn’t seem to understand some fundamental things about life, the universe, and everything.
There is apparently an over-representation of librarians on FriendFeed.
It’s a good thing Iain Baker (of Jesus Jones) has an extensive social network. We owe him and his network a whole lot of thanks.
UPDATE for the lulz: The worst insult known to humankind.
Johnny is not a librarian. It’s just that Exhibit A for Theory Two started with this post:
Apparently, Anonymous has mistaken FriendFeed for “One of the biggest social networks” and is therefore venting spleen in the form of a DDoS attack. Why? Because hashtag searching for something Anonymous was interested in didn’t work and therefore must have been censored. Must have! It couldn’t possibly be that FriendFeed is actually the forgotten stepchild of Facebook and the search function hasn’t worked consistently in years for any of us…
Now, for those of us active on FriendFeed, it’s a huge part of our lives and relationships. But none of us kid ourselves that we’re operating on “one of the biggest social networks.” In fact, most of us are simultaneously pleased and baffled that Facebook has let us limp along for 4 years on our preferred platform even after the whole FriendFeed team went to work for Facebook instead. TechCrunch can’t figure out why FriendFeed even still exists to be attacked. I’m mostly worried that this whole attack will remind Facebook that they forgot to pull the plug on us years ago.
So while we wait for Anonymous to realize what a backwater they’ve chosen on which to take their anti-nonexistent-censorship stand, we can speculate about a) how little they actually know about the internet, b) how bored/drunk/high they were when they launched this attack, and c) what they’ll take down next.
Rodfather has a guess about question C.
UPDATE: After almost 2 full days of downtime, Facebook got FriendFeed back up and running at 2:30 this afternoon. Rejoice!!!
I realized it’s been at least 6 years since I last changed the look around here. Websites probably shouldn’t go that long between updates, so take a moment to remember the old, lush Pegasus while you explore the new site.
