Brilliant Corners

Welcome to the next phase in the evolution of Fotolog.

Wow. Fotolog is back, and it’s actually running smoothly (finally!). I stopped posting to my own Fotolog just about a year ago because the site performance was just horrendous; the site crawled along, and it often took five attempts just to upload a single photo. At the same time, Flickr was really starting to add some great features and gather momentum, so I moved house. Now, it looks like Fotolog finally has the rapid growth handled (as well as adding a much nicer archive display). Sadly, I think Flickr still has the better system and community, but perhaps I can start putting photos at Fotolog from time to time.

manhattan: tony bones show
Originally uploaded by Polish Sausage Queen.

Well, what do you know. The local graffiti artist that I’ve come to know as “soler” and “soyler” also has another name: Tony Bones. I came across the photo above in one of my Flickr friend’s photostream. Apparently, she attended an art show featuring the non-graffiti art of Tony Bones/soler/soyler. Here are some other shots that “Polish Sausage Queen” took at the show.

Here are a few other links I’ve now dug up relating to this artist:

• soler on dallaspolice.com
  
• Tony Bone’s personal homepage?
  
• Tony Bones at Dallas Arts Revue

I love his little drawings all around Dallas, and it’s certainly interesting to see that there’s more behind this graffiti than I originally thought.

Originally uploaded by billturner.

I have never been a heavy fantasy or horror fiction reader. I had my Xanth spell in junior high, and I re-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy before the films came out, but that’s about it. But recently I came across something, somewhere, that heaped praises on Kelly Link and her short stories. So, on a whim, I decided to pick up her first short story collection, Stranger Things Happen. It became one of those books that I had to pick up whenever I had the smallest amount of free time, just to read as many paragraphs as I could. It was that good.

Yes, they are horror and fantasy stories, but they’re so much more than that. They’re funny, clever, poignant, sad, a little creepy at times, and definitely unlike much else that I’ve ever read. Her writing style-at least in most of the stories-makes it feel like she’s sitting right next to you and telling you the story herself. You can find plenty of praise for Ms. Link all over the place, and while I normally roll my eyes at such things, I actually agree with all the great things being said about her work.

I more recently picked up her latest, Magic for Beginners, and have already read the first few stories. They’re just as good, if not better, than those in her previous collection. You can even read the first story from Magic here: “The Faery Handbag”. Go on, give it a try!

Update: Finn has pointed out that her first book, Stranger Things Happen, is available as a free download here. Awesome!

Eliot of slower.net just released a neat dhtml widget to display a Flickr RSS feed. See it in action on the sidebar on his site.

Here’s a great page to see some of the most commented and favorited photos on Flickr within the last 24 hours.

There are quite a few steps to get this working, but once you do it takes only a couple of clicks and to add geotags to a Flickr photo.

Here’s a screencap of the result on the Geobloggers site for the first photo I geotagged:

Pretty neat!