Inside the sausage factory: Flickr favorites

Alright, a little peek inside how my brain works, god help you for wanting to see. I started a Flickr account and am saving things that catch my eye to my favorites. I saved some stuff I'd come across recently, and right now I'm looking at the stream of pictures as they're being uploaded, plucking out what salmon look fat n' juicy, and hitting F5 to get the next batch.

This is kind of how I start; I get some pictures from the Web and save when I see something that I like, and might need to swipe from later for a painting or print or what have you.

I very much like random pictures one after the other. (And text--on my old, old Mac I had an After Dark screensaver called, I think, Nonsense, that spewed more or less syntactically correct sentences, but randomly put them together from lists of nouns, adjectives, etc.: "Mrs. Johnson instigated the azure suitcase." I loved that thing.)

I tried the Random Personal Picture Finder ^(tm) by Diddly.com, and various LiveJournal picture-scrapers, but the former gives you a lot of birthday party pictures, and the latter a lot of "What kitchen appliance are you?" Another trick I used to use was searching Google Images for "the" or "e" or other sort of generic bits of text, to get a wide range of stuff.

Anyway, I find a bunch of pictures to go through, and I pluck out the ones that resonate with whatever miswiring I've been saddled with; I have a big folder of saved pictures on my hard drive. When Odin says it's time to make a painting, I go in there and dig around and see what tickles my brain.

So now I'm sort of doing this with Flickr, in public. But! The added thing is I'm not just saving stuff I might use for reference for my own pictures; I'm also looking at it like I'm curating, like I'm assembling these photos in a group like a filmmaker might use found footage. So instead of, like, "Oh, hello. Look at one of the pictures in this album I've assembled. Isn't it nice?" I'm kind of saying, "Lookit lookit thing thing thing thing!" Which is EXACTLY how my brain works when I hit that F5 key. I get a little hopped up. Have you ever seen Concrete TV? It's the best thing ever. I want this to be like that, if you go look (thought with odd animal and half-sensical pictures instead of car crashes and strippers). Maybe the best way to think about what I'm trying to do here is to look at 'em as a slideshow, with the speed set as fast as possible.

So please, enjoy the group of pictures; don't think too hard about this one or that one. I certainly didn't; my enjoyment barely makes it up out of my lizard brain, and then only so I can function enough to click the mouse button.