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You don't know that all of those people don't care. I have no idea how Wint feels about Ari keeping pictures of his kids. Or of Usagi saving pictures of his kids.

Not that it matters. I didn't say that everyone on the board thinks it's creepy. I said I think it's creepy. Why is that silly?

Well, alrighty then. It makes no sense, but whatever. I mean, if you want to defend Ari, then just say so. Given how I feel about posting my picture, I would think that it makes sense for me to find that creepy.

You reminded me of this

No no, when you're an over-protective, ultra-conservative, *******, anything goes...it's only a matter of time before children's photos are prohibited from the internet for their own protection.

Nexa

Edited, Mar 6th 2009 6:37am by Nexa

*Sigh* Belki and Turin are entitled to feel creeped out by me saving out photos from threads, since it breaks their own behavioural conventions.

(Just as an aside it kind of appalls me the way a lot of young or naive people don't think through the publicity and manipulative possibilities of electronic data. Once it's on the net by convention it's fair game to do pretty much what you want to do with it, unless it's copyrighted. And legally speaking you have even less rights over stuff you put on the net than convention gives you. Unless you're very careful, odds on are things are going to get back to your parents or employers and police if you have a run-in with the law, and haunt you for decades.)

This probably won't excuse or normalize my photo collecting behaviour to Belkira, but I'd like to explain how it started, which may possibly make it more understandable to her. I'm explaining just because I don't like to think of Belki feeling creeped out. (Turin can take care of himself ) I'm not explaining because I feel like I've done anything wrong, because by my own behavioural conventions, I haven't. That right click and "save" option is right there on every single net photo. If someone explicitly asks me not to save something out or not pass it around to anyone else, then of course I abide by their wishes.

Three things occurred in roughly the same time period, it's hard to say which happened first.

1. I realised I had no photos of myself or any of my friends between the ages of 21 and 33. This is because when I first moved out of home to a separate city to go to uni, my parents were splitting up and could not give me any financial support, since they were putting together their own new households. Me and my later partner lived a very full and happy life, but part of how we did that was living just exactly within very small means as long-time uni students. Which is also what our friends were doing. We were too busy having fun and studying to think of lay-bying a camera, and then shooting the life we were living.

I then got more financially supported right when my body headed so far downhill that I literally could not carry a camera with me to parties. I'd had to change over my leather purse and wallet (Handbag and purse in Ozzie terms) to very lightweight silk ones. I abandon carrying any coin change if I can possibly do so, and remove or throw out any cards/paper as fast as I can. I finally acquired a tiny phone with camera, (everything must be lightweight, lightweight, lightweight) but I'm only just getting into the habit of using it.

It makes me sad that I don't have any visual records of the time when my life was young and fabulous, and I've sworn to document more things in my life.

2. I opened up my FFxi scrapbook, and I have a list of 30 people in my LS who I wrote down at the end when I switched games. I had such fantastic times with them for 2 years. I thought I'd never forget any of them. Anyone who's played FFxi knows there's so much downtime that LSs get very tightknit because you have so much time to chat with each other. 3 years later I've discovered I can only remember any details about 3 or 4 of them. Every other name is an utter blank to me. This may be a consequence of my condition, I've certainly felt like I've had worse and worse memory problems the more I head downhill. But it was a nasty shock for all these names to mean nothing to me, no details about any of them coming back to me, when we all spent so much time talking.

Most regulars in the OOT aren't nearly as close to me as my LS buddies were. I'd class most of you as aquaintences, rather than friends. Although I certainly have several of you I class as friends. You know who you are.

But I can tell you it's nasty when your brain betrays you utterly by drawing one big blank on something that you bumped into almost daily for YEARS of your life. Even if most of you on the OOT and Asylum are just "faces in a crowd" and I'm a "face in the crowd" to you, so that you all may as well be a building, or architecture that I'm walking around in for these few years of my life.... it's well possible my brain will forget every single last one of your names and details several months into not visiting Allakhazam any more. It's a scary thought to me, like as if one day I completely and utterly forget what my Primary School, or my Secondary school looked like, or a childhood home. Incidentally for a decade and a half I DID forget a childhood bedroom I'd had for 3 years. It was strange, wonderful and terrible when I finally remembered about that bedroom's existence again. I'm starting to document things a little more as my memory goes. As last ditch memory prompts.

3. Quite a while back I started group skyping fairly regularly with Annabella, Mindel, Melody and BT. As part of that social process we posted links to each other, and started also swapping photos of ourselves. A couple of them even prised a single photo out of me. They were in my friends circle, even tho we could only keep in contact over VOIP or text. Having a couple of photos each of them was nice, and I started thinking it would be nice to have a photo of others on the OOT that I particularly liked and got on with when I swapped PMs and skype texts/VOIP with them. So whenever they posted a photo of themselves in a thread, I took the opportunity of saving them out. It's a funny bunch of OOTers that are my net buddies now, but I love you all. What's amusing is that several of you don't get on with each other in the OOT at all. I'm the only common denominator.

So there you have it. I have photos of some of you because I love you as friends. I have photos of some of you because I like you as friends. And I have a whole bunch of a photo each of some of you so that in years to come I'll have memory prompts for the years 2007-2009. Not necessarily memory prompts about YOU for your sake, but memory prompts about you for the sake of remembering ME and my life.

Edited, Mar 6th 2009 8:57am by Aripyanfar

But you know, if I was that kind of girl, I could be totally ******* off to each of those photos.

You know Mindel and BT have, right?

Edited, Mar 6th 2009 8:52am by Aripyanfar

You could just ask Mindel for copies of her collection.

Ari, you don't have to justify yourself to me. And I know that several people dislike me now that I've said something even slightly negative about you. And I'm not surprised you have some long post detailing why you're keeping photos of people.

I can't begin to understand what your medical conditions are like. Losing your memories must be one of the hardest things in the world. And I understand that the internet is one of the only ways you can socialize because of your condition. What started out as me sort of teasing you turned into something much larger than it should've, as Ash sort of put me on the defensive. I should've known better, though. A lot of people feel really protective towards you, though you seem to be perfectly capable of holding your own!

You are? I thought I was just too defensive.

How freaked out would you be if I really did this? Seeing as I do have your address.


I know, I still haven't sent your chocolate, feel free to hate me until I do.

Thanks for the support about my illness. And actually a stalker joke IS funny about me. It's even a very small meme, from a long series of posts I did recently with photos, bringing Pinkylady up to date with what she's missed in the OOT over the past year.

I like to defend myself for my own comfort, but in reality, there's no requirement that everyone likes me, or approves of me, or holds the same morals or conventions I do. Especially since I can be a little Avante Guarde, sometimes. And undeniably weird, other times.

I heard a statistic from a psychologist. 40% of the people we meet will like us. 40% of the people we meet will dislike us. And 20% of them won't care one way or the other. I suppose that would go similarly for political and moral agreements too. Anywaywhat I'm saying in my long-winded way is that we can totally be friends while I creep you out.