More Thing 40

From http://www.flickr.com/photos/spixworth/, 1903 photo found on Life In Grayscale


Another Flickr mashup I enjoy is Life In Grayscale. It searches old photos in Flickr, based on the years that interest you. You can browse pictures on a sliding timeline from 1900-1970. This is heaven for a history loving browser such as me. Once you find a picture that you like, you can save it under your Flickr favorites. A couple of things keep it from being perfect, however. Many of the photos that come up aren't really in any way connected to that particular year. Luckily, you can flag those pictures to be reassigned. More frustrating, though, is that once you enlarge a photo to view it, there seems to be no way to close only that window. When you close it, you close everything, and you have to entirely reenter the site. Still, it's interesting enough that I'll have lots of viewing hours ahead of me.


The Flilliustrator illustrates stories that you create. I collaborated with Carol Has Her Nose in a Book on this one and our "story" is "the gorgeous librarian fell in love with an ass." We like the results, which won't post here. It went The (photo = attractive green fly), gorgeous (dramatically lit arched train station), librarian (woman with her head on a stack of books), fell (mountain & lake scene), in (guy sticking his head out of a subway car), love (black & white street scene, kissing), with (bearded soldier with white cat), an (striped green caterpillar), ass (this one caused problems, but we clicked through a donkey with a couple kissing in the background). It had a save option and it may have worked, but the directions were very vague.