daily ruzz { full thoughts, links and photos }

the daily ruzz has moved!

ruzzdotorg — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:05:59 -0600

as the ipad takes over my daily web life, using email as a posting tool makes the most sense. and since the best service for that is posterous, i’ve moved this blog to there. update your links!

the new site

to make life simple, i imported all the old blogs from here to there, and now you can use facebook connect to like, comment, etc.

it’s quite possible i may move all my tumblr blogs over, but for now just this as a trial.

breaking the chain

ruzzdotorg — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:40:56 -0600

or how i learned to love no desktop

as some of you already know i’m not the most adaptable guy in the world. I carry with me a collection of psychological idiosyncrasies and a variety of physical ailments and sensitivities that to some extent have molded my computer experience.

in an effort to kill the desktop i’ve tried:

moving my computer to the couch. monitor on coffee table
routing my computer through the tv
switching to laptops
switching to macs
switching to mac laptops

and each failed for various reasons of either physical discomfort ( early arthritis in the shoulders ) or just a general ability to modify my mindset to using new devices in a regular way.

enter the ipad.

first lets review the main functions my computer serves for me:

programming and web application development + server administration
photo editing ( lightroom )
social interactions (email, blogging, twitter, facebook, ~~flickr~~, chat )
online reading ( blogs, technical reading, photo browsing, research, videos )
playing music
watching video ( yes, it’s mostly porn—i port real video to my xbox )

with that now mapped out lets review the typical start to a morning:

review + respond to emails
get updated on facebook, add witty comments to otherwise boring streams
review twitter
use netvibes to catch up on the 150 or so sites i follow via rss feeds

while all this is going on there is a constant play of either reviewing related content such as related web pages or videos and the subsequent web spiral of focus that goes on as one link leads to another, etc, and folding new found content back into any of the possible outlets like facebook, twitter or blogging.

i’m also almost always listening to music. which is coming under questions as i read ( on my ipad, thanks kobo ) “In pursuit of silence”.

this entire process, depending on the quality of inward data flow, and the urgency of work can take anywhere from 10 mins to 2 hours. it’s also repeated in mini-form throughout the day as new data flows in and new opportunities to mock @doug_springer become available.

because i’m a geek, and an information addict ( my daughter calls me ruzzipedia ) my information consumption may be higher and more fluid than yours. results vary but i think a safe estimate is to say at least 3 hours a day is spend consuming, ordering, sharing, exploring and digesting information of some sort. that may be work related, or it may be learning about a new type of bug, or following the moment by moment changes to #nodejs. but it’s spent principally upfront at the start of the day—then in small bursts throughout the day.

i have no problems with this amount of time being spent. I enjoy information and knowledge, and following trending ideas is part of what keeps me employable. the bulk of my life is a digital life. i have no qualms about that. you spend your life how you want, and i will tweet. fair?

since i lost my main text buddy recently the largest part of my interaction with friends now occurs through facebook, twitter, and gchat. some people congregate and consume alcohol then stumble home, i prefer to share 140chars and move on.

i get my kicks above the waistline, baby.

back to the entrance of the ipad though. When I purchased it i had no expectation it might change my day in any meaningful way. i thought it would be a fun gadget that would serve mainly the following purposes:

allow me to convert to electronic books. i have about 600 paper books and it grows by 75-100 a year. becoming a serious space hog and don’t even get me started on moving
serve as a couch-side way of reviewing a lot of more indepth online reading that i never get to on the desktop
serve as a couch-side browser for real time lookups of stuff as im watching movies or tv, or playing xbox.
serve as a couch-side way to tweet, facebook, browse the web
serve as a couch-side way to browse my photos, etc.

that’s principally what i expected from it and with the addition of a few key tools it’s doing all those things:

ReadItLater (for bookmarking on the PC, reading on iPad)
twitterific
wikipanion
imdb
kobo ereader (i want to write a seperate post about the ipad ebook situation so check back on that)
reeder (for my news feeds, but didn’t expect to use it much)

As i explored the terrain of ipad applications my ideas of how to use it for things i hadn’t considered started popping up everywhere

as a digital sketchpad (Autodesk Sketchpad Pro is like crack)
for mocking up applications for work (iMockup)
for finding/making recipes (epicurious)
for editing photos! (tiffen photo efex ultra, shakeitiphoto, etc)
as a digital note pad (penultimate)
to read comics and online magazines
to watch video anywhere i feel like plunking my ass
as an application planner and planner in general

the exciting ones are sketchpad and editing photos, obviously. but more valuable to me is the cohesiveness of using a touch device to interact with media and the readability of the ipad. these two things change the mental focus and effort required to mine massive information streams and filter then use (distribute) them.

readability

reading anything on the ipad is much more enjoyable than a computer screen. i’m not sure if its a contrast issue, or size, or format. but i’ve found i no longer dread longer documents in the same way. i find less eye strain, less internal friction to the media and that means more focus and clarity.

cohesion and mental clarity

I saw a lot of complaining about how the ipad can only do one thing at a time. i heard everyone go on about how this constraint made it somehow a less interesting device but i’d like you to consider how most developers have responded to that. by creating deep delving apps that handle different data types while staying inside a single application.

take any example you like for localized app data on the desktop, like tweetdeck, or a news reader and you find you’re spawning browser tabs all over the place. each tab breaks the cohesion of the data flow. each tab is a huge distraction from the flow you were following.

apps like tweetdeck for the PC do have built in handlers for things like photos or websites, but i find them very slow, and the implementation visually is painful. you feel like you’re boxed into a secondary app inside a tweet app.

on the ipad, in my reader (reeder) for example, i can quickly click a link from a feed and it just opens to the page with controls to do something with that page in context to reading a feed, i can share it with every service available in one or two taps then quickly return to exactly where i was in my reading.

this cohesion means more sharing, less distraction and reduces the cost of following links, following thoughts to next to nothing. back in the early days of windows there were many times users would get so many windows open they couldnt figure out where they began, or where they were. I believe this model translated to the tabbed browser. you’d get so many tabs open you’d get lost. not lost in relation to a start point, but lost in relation to a stream of focus.

if you delve deeply into web reading on some level you may build up an internal resistance to clicking that link at a certain point. you can have open in your mind only so many useful nodes before the next one scatters everything.

this is where link garbage collection comes into play and sites like delicious or ReadItLater find their customers. open a tab, mark it somehow, close it and promise yourself some sunday you will get back to it. it almost never happens and you find yourself with an impossible list of links that you no longer remember context for.

readability, cohesion + breaking the tether

improved readability causes less eye and mental strain. cohesion causes less mental strain and less reluctance to information as the cost of exploring is very low. breaking the tether from the office chair + desktop means potentially more physical comfort while doing all of the above.

readability, cohesion, breaking the tether + touch

lets just accept that human beings are touch focused. there’s little need to go into how on some primal level we are all comfortable with touching things as a means to interact. swiping pages, tapping, etc, these are all muscle memory activities. great athletes in any field will tell you the more of your game you can commit to muscle memory the more focus is free for precision and “flow”.

it’s impossible to commit mouse actions into muscle memory because it’s always more or less the same action with a different visual context. because of that it requires visual focus to determine the correct muscle actions. this reduces focus. focus and attention are spent deciding what actions to perform rather than performing actions from memory.

readability, cohesion, breaking the tether, touch as salve

anyone who’s experience is primarily digital knows there is a residual effect of long term digital interaction on mental focus. clarity is reduced as exposure is increased and i’m going to assert this reduction in clarity becomes ingrained and expressed as a sort of non-specific resistance to new information or new data.

this non specific resistance manifests itself in mental fatigue, burn out, information overload, disorder, and a general malaise towards the vast array of learning opportunities available at all times through the internet.

combining the above features seems to act as a bulwark of some type. a salve for a constantly stimulated mind in fine degrees of improvement.

and now the downside

the primary downside ironically is touch. you touch objects. you touch things. and our digital world is primarily not objects or things. it’s words. and words mean we’ve only half escaped the existing model of computing.

we escaped the mouse through touch. as an interactive tool the mouse was focused but grossly limited. a device which expressed nothing in the terms of how humans think about things, and i think this is why touch is so immensely popular.

but we have yet to escape the keyboard. and i see no time in the near future when we do. and so we are now wedged half-birthed into a new world of computing. and this is where the downside comes to front.

while the virtual keyboard on the ipad is very usable, and functional for short bursts of writing i cannot see myself writing something this length with it. i’d be more inclined to write it with my micro-keyboard on my blackberry.

it seems a great irony that they did away with one limited input device (the mouse) and took away one expressive one (the keyboard) at the same time, replacing it with a non tactile simulacrum. i gained touch for navigation and flow, and lost tactile touch for the single most important part of computing. translating my thought to some digital form.

what next?

it seems very unlikely to me through a confluence of failure on the part of man to lift us out of the text editor as programming tool that i will be developing any sort of meaningful application using anything but a desktop computer. this means, while some part of my day is radically changed, the largest part remains the same.

it seems fascinating to me that the tools we use to build the most modern applications in the world (touch based apps galore) are written using words. we’ve created an object oriented development world but it’s only oriented. it’s an abstraction in the mind. there are no physical objects to interact with. it’s words pretending to be objects.

perhaps the breakthrough in touch focused devices will herald in a new generation of touch driven visionaries that can lift us from modeling code in text and bring us to modeling with touch. maybe the nascent field of touch will set off an explosion of imagination.

they say it’s turtles all the way down but in truth, it’s text. and until we can add a layer between the compiler and the display that understands real physical objects in 3D or even 2D space we’re writing novels not crafting sculpture.

and since we are writing novels we require keyboards as our primary method of input. which makes this only part one of what’s to come.

having said all that, part one is pretty fantastic.

bone, heart, womb (c) 2004-2010 i.im. ruzz

ruzzdotorg — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:25:25 -0600

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz playing with making digital sketches....

ruzzdotorg — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:48:48 -0600

playing with making digital sketches. first try. pretty interesting. I’m thinking i may try a pencil sketch.

safe by closure

ruzzdotorg — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:08:00 -0600

var my = function ()  {
  var real_heart = "xxxx"; 
  var fake_heart = "is_a_mirror"; 
  return { 
     heart: function () { return fake_heart;} 
   };
}();

>>> console.log( "my_heart " + my.heart() );

>my_heart_is_a_mirror

We Predict a Riot

ruzzdotorg — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:53:05 -0600

We Predict a Riot:

a speed chess implementation using nodejs, express, websockets, etc. snazzy.

SWDC 2010 NodeJS Talk by Tim Caswell featuring Connect (by...

ruzzdotorg — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:48:15 -0600

SWDC 2010 NodeJS Talk by Tim Caswell featuring Connect (by Patrick Liess)

points to consider:

wow. real time collaboration via a web page. exciting.
these node kids think a lot differently than i do.
where does real time fit in in our current web life?
pubsub stuff is seriously cool. but beyond chat, games, etc, where does it fit. how could i use it today to improve my clients lives?
these guys and their cleverness activates that old programming excitement for me.

reworking ruzz.org

ruzzdotorg — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:43:13 -0600

it’s kinda wizzy, but, i’ve temporarily redesigned ruzz.org using some CSS3 magics and a bit of jquery. i wanted to explore some of the new CSS stuff and i’m planning to reorg all my sites so this was a good morning spent.

long time running

ruzzdotorg — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 09:59:28 -0600

“People know you for what you’ve done, not for what you plan to do.” ~Author Unknown

it’s been 15 months and 3 days since my last ~~confession~~, er, unemployment. two and a half years ago i had a little dance with my own frailty, learnt some stuff about the consequences of living life in single-serving installments of cash. found the hard side of commerce as explained through the poverty that comes from a serious illness and the subsequent year long recovery.

before i got sick i had quietly worked as a contractor for nearly 10 years. building my skills, contacts and experience to the point where I was actually starting to thrive pretty well. A lot of those years were lean—read abject poverty—and only in the two years leading up to illness did I start making any real money.

I came through my little brush with death okay. it’s pretty easy to die. your body does all the hard work while you just sit there only partially engaged sorta interested in these new experiences. the hard work is living.

the hard work is coming back from being near dead. you come back a tenth of the person you were physically. emotionally you develop a keen desire for stability and security. I came back to nothing but pain and a world that kept on humming like it always did—churning out the usual costs of existing—while my ability to produce anything i could trade for money was dead for almost a year.

the physical recovery was hard but natural. it just happens. over time you recover. you live and your body comes round in time. maybe not all the way round, but round. but while you do that your whole world comes apart.

a year after I got out of the hospital i was still dealing with nearly crippling pain on a daily basis, had amassed a massive debt, lost many of the trappings of my hard work (my car, my camera, my nice home, my sexy little mac notebook, etc). and, more importantly i had lost the sense that I was in control of my own life.

i had always felt my experience was entirely determined by my will to craft reality to be what i wanted. but a year after, everything had changed for me. I no longer felt i had any access to that wellspring of energy and power to craft. moreover, i felt as though all the risks i had ignored without much thought—like living without a nest egg or an endgame—had literally come home to roost.

so i made a pretty simple decision. get a job. a day job. a nice stable, two cheques a month day job. no more fighting it out daily for my existence. no more challenging myself to be smarter than the world. trade those challenges for the challenge of commitment, of not getting border or antsy. of swallowing down my reluctance to be directed or used for my energy and just settle into a job.

it turns out i lucked into a pretty good job. i got to work from home which made keeping my life pretty much what it was. I had a good manager who cared about the end result which meant i could do things like set my own hours and more or less work when i felt inspired to work. he gave me lots of room to determine my experience in exchange for delivering on my promises. sometimes that backfired, but on the whole it worked because i also lucked into a position that offered an endless stream of challenges. tight little complexities that needed to be untangled. possibilities to use creativity and experience to solve actual problems for users. and the freedom to draw on my experience to help shape the future we were building.

a heady combination. almost unimaginable in a job that gave you nice regular pay.

but it turns out running things like that isn’t the most sustainable business model. we spent over a year chasing the whims of our boss; trying to be everything to every customer. we had no core focus for our work, and while each project built upon what was already the lack of focus made it practically impossible to get to the point where we were taking cash off customers for our hard work.

meanwhile, our competition hacked out some pretty crappy code that was focused, and was ready for users and made money.

then they bought us.

oh the bittersweet ironies of the market economy. I literally lived the experience of having a better product beat by better marketing and better senior management (better at taking money off people, at least).

I wouldn’t have hired most of their developers to program my PVR yet they won. they owned us and the expression of our best ideas. that stung.

when they offered me a position with their company, apathy and probably mourning the change compelled me to take it even though i knew it was a horrible mistake. I was being asked to develop in a platform i felt was all but dead even if it produces cash by the truckload. I had to step away from my core technology stack. step away from a merit based employment. step away from freedom. step away from my experience and skill mattering. but, at least i still had regular pay, right?

i made it a total of three paycheques before i quit. I have no replacement for that income. i have no clear plan on how to survive. I don’t even really know what i want. I just know what i don’t want. I don’t want to be a cog in the machine. I don’t want to be divorced from everything i’ve learnt about programming over the last decade. I don’t want to give the best part of my day so some ass-clown can drive an escalade and live in a 4000sq foot house.

so maybe i didn’t die after all.

this may sound more principled than it really is. an important facet of throwing yourself into the unknown is couching it in a romantic ideal of some sort or other. it comforts the terror that rouses when you watch your bank account dwindle with no real plan for filling it back up again.

in truth, selfishness played a much larger part in this than i’d care to admit. Arrogance too. Its a flaw of my character that i can’t take orders, direction, or it seems pay from people I feel are less intelligent than me. I can’t submit my will to what i think are stupid choices, wrong-headed intentions and i can’t seem to quell my ego to play nice with someone above me in the food chain just because they happen to be higher than me in the food chain. I have to respect how they conduct themselves. I never had a single problem like this in my 13 months at my old job.

that’s the surface level reaction anyways. below that was deep sense of dissatisfaction at having parts of me i’ve worked very hard on just dismissed as not relevant to their cash objectives.

primarily, my experience building applications for over a decade in many languages and platforms. my experience working with users and customers on usability. this new company felt it was more important that i log into msn right at 9am than i wrote extend-able, clean, elegant code. they thought it was more important i did things the way the little dictator who ran my app thought things should be done usability wise than if i knew anything about usability from working with tens of thousands of real users for over a decade.

i felt so deeply negated and interchangeable. i went from feeling like a vital part of the future of a small business to a faceless code monkey. paycheque or not, i couldn’t do it.

so now i’m unemployed again. first time in 15 months and 3 days. my mother is filled with terror about my future. my mind is fighting the conditioning of thinking i have another tidy cheque coming in a few weeks. my heart feels anxious but rewarded.

i’ve outgrown the childish rebellion of just doing what i want because i want to. after getting sick i really internalized the value of security. you could say i learnt how cold this world can be to your need and i never want to be back there again. and as i sit here, free to do what i want, poised as i am on the ledge of complete uncertainty i am wedged neatly between my desire to define my own experience and my complete terror of not being up to that task.

i’m doing it anyways though.

i may be the old man on every programming team. i may not absorb new technology as fast as i used to, or have endless months of 18 hour days left in my body. but i learnt one of the hardest lessons you’ll ever learn as a programmer. that writing ideal code in a bubble will get you bought by someone writing crap code with a good sales team.

and i think that little gem is one you can only learn by flushing a years worth of your best ideas and most beautiful work down the shitter. I also think it’s the lesson you need to learn to draw hard lines around where good enough is good enough and not living in a fantasy world.

so now i’m going to embark on a couple things that can put that lesson immediately to work. one my pet project which i’m still not telling you about, and the other is doing contract work again. I always failed at contact work because i was being paid to get something done, and i was trying to get something done perfectly.

the two shall never meet.

more than anything though. more than the fear of uncertainty and the unknown. more than a knee jerk compulsion to watch my bank account as i spend. more than my sneaking a look at monster for the comfy protection of a day job, im eager to see if i still have it in me to push myself to define my own life.

I walked away from myself after i got sick. i saw how frail and weak i could be. I lost faith in myself and my ability to fashion a the world the way i wanted it to be and i don’t know if i still have what it takes to force reality into the shapes i want it to be. I don’t know if i have the will, energy, and motivation it takes to fight back against a never ending tide of entropy. but i’m willing to try. i’m wiling to ask the question of myself and give myself a little rope to answer it.

just don’t tell my mom.

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz model: kara yerex still have a lot of...

ruzzdotorg — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:03:08 -0600

still have a lot of photos that are ready to show, so I will probably dump them here.

amat-ooo-eeer

ruzzdotorg — Sun, 23 May 2010 12:53:04 -0600

thinking about the cult of the amateur lately. again. i think amateur generated content is only a legitimate threat to workers in an industry that meets these two criteria:

the act of generating is fun, interesting or automatically rewards ego and vanity (film making, photography, et al)
the initial curve to “reasonably okay” artifacts is either shallow or readily accessible technology can make it shallow. meaning: easy and quick to get up to “okay” level of quality (fancy $300 cameras anyone?)

i think it would be astoundingly rare to see amateur plumbers begin to threaten the plumbing industry, or how about ditch digging? also, it’s unlikely your mom will take up brain surgery any time soon.

and it seems the people most offended by amateur content are the same people who came to a particular field out of an interest but without formal training and put in the work to beat the curve and elevate themselves. writer’s are offended by bloggers, photographers by nearly everyone with a camera-phone, and film makers by all these innovative indy kids wanting to make shorts with their iphone.

these three professions, as examples are all relatively fun to be involved. they are creative industries. the amateur mortician seems an unlikely combination of interest + vocation.

it seems to me that if the men and women gaining financially are interested in their industries for legitimate interests in things like film, or photography, or writing they should welcome the growth. they should feel excited by the addition of so many new viewpoints and people unconstrained by tired conventions (because they’ve yet to learn them).

admittedly much of the things created by amateurs will be dreck (much like this blog post you’re reading) but floating in that sea of dreck are rare finds of innovation and uniqueness that can alter a given field for ever.

take nan goldin for example. amatuer who defined an entire medium of photography.

or take the many bloggers who’ve rose through originality and passion to give clear new voices on important human issues.

to feel otherwise suggests not only a selfishness, but a clear failing of logic. if bean counts are what you’re really concerned with (ie. money, and the loss of revenue streams to less qualified individuals) one would think you’d focus on an industry with more concrete commodity definitions. ala making toliet paper, supply, demand and no frilly subjective elements.

you want your cake and you want to eat it too. that’s fair. we all do. however, the generation of “professionals” who came before you regarded you as under-qualified, brash, industry destroying bastard children of the modern age and yet you somehow found a way to become a part of the established field.

the creme as they say rises to the top. this is true in all functions of skill, talent and expertise.

i once played a set of 9 ball against a much greater opponent (he was a world renowned money player who i won’t name here) and i was on, he was off. I got to the hill (3 games a piece with him) and he ultimately won. but i felt at the time i could have taken that set. only a couple years into focused pool and i was very close to taking a set off a very well established, trained and experienced player.

however, what you learn in tournament play is that on a short curve luck and momentum are powerful tools to use against an superior opponent. you may take 3 games of a seven game set but play a race to 21 and you’ll get destroyed.

because it’s in the long term that these minor disruptions of luck and momentum are hammered out and the real factors of skill, experience, and craft become deciding factors.

and i think this seemingly unrelated lesson applies to the above mentioned issue of amateur created content. industries will lose the low hanging fruit to be sure. stock photographers are learning this. if any trained monkey can create the shot, then that means any enthusiastic amateur can too.

and they will lose some mid-game opportunities, as many wedding photographers are learning. the power of an unqualified customer base plus cut throat amateurs is going to slice a mainstay of photographic revenue right out of the picture.

but on the long haul—the public will become educated and truly skilled people will still have customers. you won’t see vanity fair turning over it’s green issue to some kid of flickr any time soon. the vector for real profit in any industry is creativity + talent + experience.

if you are living off any jobs that could be performed by any two of those you’re going to lose a lot of work. but if you find the spot in an industry, that respects those three qualities and understands their value you will be in a unique position where the flood of the amateur changing the industry and infusing it with life, new ideas, new constructs only improves your work—without threatening your income.

you cannot fight the amateur directly. they are too many and too willing to win the fight of attrition through numbers and dumb passion. better to position yourself to take advantage of what they bring, and insulate yourself from them by understanding the larger picture.

rosa parks was no kierkegaard

ruzzdotorg — Sun, 23 May 2010 09:01:31 -0600

it’s a quaint idea from a quaint little historical figure. however, it misses the real point. fear is GOOD. fear is a positive force in life. every other animal on the planet lives in a state of fear from alertness to full terror and it keeps them alive. we obviously don’t have physical risk like most animals anymore, but we have as many or more complex emotional deaths to avoid daily and fear is the key to solving that problem.

doing away with fear is not the objective. understanding what the fear tells you about yourself and your ideas on life then challenging those ideas is the objective.

never take philosophical advice from someone whose greatest accomplishment was inaction (she stayed put on the bus, folks.).

temnafialkasinsandstorylines:

““I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does AWAY WITH FEAR.””

—

ROSA PARKS

Parting is such sweet sorrow – or why I quit flickr

ruzzdotorg — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:25:48 -0600

This is it folks. The photo you see above is most likely the last photo I will post to flickr. I say most likely because I hate declarative statements. I hate feeling bound by things I used to think. I used to think flickr was a fun way to share pictures and meet some interesting folks. Now I think it’s just a crutch for me to lean on in absence of any real endpoint for my efforts.

When I started flickr way back in the glory days ( aka long before Yahoo consumed it ) I was overwhelmed by the talent I saw. It pushed me to take my pictures more seriously. It pushed me to learn and grow. Back then there were obvious ways to see the impact of improvement. There was a small community of devoted amateur photographers all interacting with one another, all encouraging and challenging one another. They’ve all moved on in one way or other.

I also learnt a lot over the years about media and media consumption. In part from my own habits, and in part from watching the cycle of people following my stream. I learnt humans are voracious in their capacity for newness. They feel strong connections immediately when they find a photographer that speaks to them, but they also tire very quickly.

I’ve seen this in my own tastes and I’ve seen it in the comings and goings of people who engaged my photos passionately for short periods of time then moved on. I think this tendency echoes a long exhibited tendency in all media. We all know the Hollywood stories of the fickleness of fame and celebrity and we’ve all become enamored by this or that “IT” guy or girl only to wish them dead for putting out 12 movies a year.

You can survive this by commodifying your work. Flickr provides an endless base of users who’ve never seen your particular take on the world and if you can gain access to them you can ride a constant wave of new enthusiasm for your photos almost indefinitely. However, if you cannot gain access to them through prohibitions placed on you through flickr your stream will stagnate and even the most loyal, most fascinated viewer will tire and watch on ambivalently.

It’s my belief—which has no valid explanation or proof—that flickr has an internal system for flagging users that may be dangerous to their shiny happy scrapbook persona. I believe this is applied to anyone who has ever been moderated even if their moderation is removed. My conspiracy theory suggests that such a flag will effectively exclude you from the main source of new viewers. Flickr Explore.
Before I was moderated, 1 of 4 of my images ended up in explore. Since I was moderated, though I no longer am, none of my images has made explore. How is that possible?

I realize this may look like I’m crying foul here that the internet doesn’t love me enough. I realize I’ve called you folks out for being too quiet and too passive in the past and now it will look as though I’m taking my ball and going home. And, to a small extent this is true.

I’m not a commercial photographer. I make no money from this work. I do it because I enjoy making pictures. Objective number one is the experience of making photos. Meeting people, interacting, learning light and being constantly reminded that life and beauty are so much bigger than I think they are. I get that fix every shoot.

However, there comes a time when you must ask yourself some hard questions about how you spend your precious energy. That time is now, and I’ve asked that if I refuse to commercialize my images, and refuse to have exhibits, calendars, books, or do stock photography, what is the logical end point of my work?
Flickr.

If you look objectively at my process you’ll see I am buying gear, arranging shoots, shooting, processing, storing, archiving, and all the other stuff I’m doing and the only real use of the photo is to share it here on flickr. I use them on my websites. Models use them in their portfolios. Every now and then someone wants a print. But on the whole flickr and this community is the “target” for my work. I didn’t plan it to work this way but this is the way it works.

I’ve spend 10s of thousands of dollars on equipment, spent years working studiously on light, pushed myself on almost all fronts and the result is I post work that I think far surpasses my previous work—previous work that was much more successful in terms of views, comments and favorites which I will argue is the only way of measuring the impact of a work that essentially was born for this specific medium—and I will sit patiently waiting for some way of knowing beyond my own judgment if the work is worth the effort.

I post an image I care about to flickr, and watch as it gets picked over (viewed) by hundreds of silent flickr users who are too lazy to engage. They consume my efforts in their daily quest for eye candy or in the case of nudes, titillation, and move on without so much as a hello.

This is endemic of flickr’s construction. It’s mean to be a way to pass the time. It’s a way to masturbate your eye while you have nothing else to do. There is no reward for the viewer to spend any effort; more over there is a small penalty. The longer they spend on a single image is the less time they have to consume their next.

Flickr users are image sharks. If they stop viewing, they die.

This is not what I signed up for. Flickr has changed. The types of people using it have changed. The end goal has changed. And what was once a place to learn about how my work felt to others has become a daily exercise in frustration

Sour grapes, I know.

But I’m no different than any of you. I want my hard work to amount to something. I’ve chosen to keep my work from being commercialized and so I have to seek payoffs other ways and knowing someone felt something when they saw my work has value to me. If that makes me petty, or small, I can live with that.
Flickr’s lack of offering anything to keep me interested has allowed me to see holes in my own thought process. Made me realize how great an effort I expend, often at the expense of more meaningful work, for virtually nothing.

It’s also allowed me to see how I’ve used flickr to avoid facing the pointlessness of making images that don’t have any commercial application. It reveals how fetishized photography has become for me. How reactive and habitual expressing myself in terms of photography has become. Am I still gaining more than I’m giving by this process? Am I still working from passion or has the score sheet come out?
Making photos is still very satisfying for me. I still feel the thrill and internal joy of discovering a beautiful image. That has not changed. But I can do that on a much smaller scale than I have been and still get what I need from it. I can disengage from this machine and still make enough pictures to fill my needs.

I’m tired of giving daily to the destruction of the power of imagery in the human mind. I’m tired of being part of the flood of sensation consumed for the sake of consuming.

I’m aware I take things too seriously. That I internalize things I shouldn’t, and I can trick myself into living in service of things through habit and routine that no longer have value for me. My defense against these shortcomings is to periodically review parts of my life and cut off limbs that no longer function to the good of me or my life.

Flickr is one of those limbs, and photography as it exists in my life is also one. I’ve got a lot to offer. Many talents and passions and somehow I became a photographer.

I accidentally became a photographer.

I ask myself, given the things I have to share with life, the capacities I have, if this a good use of my time, energy and passion and the answer is a resounding no. It’s esteem masturbation for me. And eye masturbation for you.

I’m taking this moment of clarity of my motivations to act.

Step one is to end flickr.

Step two is taking an extended break from photography.

ah life..

ruzzdotorg — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:46:34 -0600

Wictor says: I'm still fixing some small issues with xxx right now

ruzz says: there are no small issues, only small developers

(via laurataylor) haha. obviously because thats how girls like...

ruzzdotorg — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:27:12 -0600

(via laurataylor)

haha. obviously because thats how girls like it :P

imagine

ruzzdotorg — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 10:30:23 -0600

a repost from a private blog i read. I think its worth sharing so i’ve obscured where it came from so you can read it.

Dear Imagination,

I tire of hearing the conversations you think might happen. It bothers me that you think I am so angry and vindictive. The false self you’ve created is reflects nothing of the characteristics I hold dear about this being. Your addiction to catastrophe and abandonment is annoying, at best. I am far more skilled at responding to situations than you’d have me believe. I brought you in my life for a reason, and this is not it.

You are here to craft my escape, to build my empire, to add layers of meaning. Your images of soft grass, close lovers, and eternal childhood are what draw me to sleep. The elaborate romances I have with my various selves would not be possible without your attention to detail. My curiosity about death would not exist without your skill. However, we have strayed.

This is a chance for us to communicate about our needs. I understand that I’ve neglected you, left you bored and uninspired. I promise to bring you new films, more books and a new selection of music. We can sit down in front of a sketch pad, at least once a week. I’ll let you write when the computer fills my time, which I know you loathe. I will take risks and learn to share what you create. Ask of me, and I will give.

We have the opportunity for a wondrous relationship full of delight and mischief. Together we can plot and create the time and space to find full expression for this burning. Our inner world can fill up and expand in to our physical space. This is our world. Lets work towards harmony so that we may discover this thing called Peace.

Much love,

-xxx

the mad ones.

ruzzdotorg — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:41:57 -0600

tasha: So you like em crazy then hey?
ruzz: yes, but only a particular type of crazy. crazy with wonder about life, not crazy with wonder about their own mind or heart.

my god, i thought i was the only anne sexton fan in the world....

ruzzdotorg — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:07:40 -0600

my god, i thought i was the only anne sexton fan in the world. she wrote one of my all time favorite poems.

serenamatthews:

Rare footage of Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Anne Sexton.. who, after repeated failed attempts, sadly took her own life by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1974.

In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with “two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.” She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death.

To watch her recite poetry is like walking into a lonely old dream and wishing upon every star in the heavens for a chance to stay there.. just awhile longer.

"and be nice to your sister she was having a bad day,"

ruzzdotorg — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:42:08 -0600

“and be nice to your sister she was having a bad day,”

- incoming facebook message from my moms. i spit coke all over myself i liked that so much. haha.

uhm

ruzzdotorg — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:09:00 -0600

carla: I will let you pick. Something new though!
ruzz: lets eat caviar off nude models.
carla: done
ruzz: You bringing the models or am I?
carla: You have a model built in. I vote M.
ruzz: Yeah but I eat off her everyday!

carla: I only get to eat her in leons dreams.
carla: Oh snap! Only took me 10 minutes.