Library of Congress puts thousands of photos on Flickr

Posted on By Wil

File this under Coolest Damn Thing I’ve Seen All Day: The Library of Congress put over 3100 pictures on Flickr:

Library of Congress staff often make digital versions of our popular
image collections available online as quickly as possible by relying
primarily on the identifying information that came with the original
photos. That text can be incomplete and is even inaccurate at times. We
welcome your contribution of names, descriptions, locations, tags, and
also your general reactions.

It’s divided into two different sets:

1930s-40s in Color:

These vivid color photos from the Great
Depression and World War II capture an
era generally seen only in
black-and-white. Photographers working
for the United States Farm Security
Administration (FSA) and later the
Office of War Information (OWI) created
the images between 1939 and 1944.

News events in the 1910s:

Welcome to the daily news scene from
almost a hundred years ago, as
photographed by the Bain News Service in
about 1910-1912. We invite your tags and
comments! Also, lots more identification
information. (Most of these old photos
came to the Library of Congress with
very little description.)

This selected set of 1,500 photographs
is from a large collection of almost
40,000 glass negatives. The entire
collection spans 1900-1920 and richly
documents sports events, theater,
celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters,
and political activities, with a special
emphasis on life in New York City.

I’ve only looked at a few dozen of these pictures, but they’re just astonishingly beautiful. Many of them have a haunting quality, as well, and would make great Ficlet inspiration.

I Propelled this link the instant I saw it, if any propeller heads wish to vote for it.

where is my motivation?

Posted on By Wil

2008 is the year of serious fiction writing for Wil, so it is also
going to be the year of reading like crazy to stay inspired and in the
proper headspace for writing. I’m quite excited for this, actually,
because it means I’ll be working through the stack of books (you’ll
find one in every house, you’ll see) almost as fast as I can add to it.

However, having finished my manga script and Penny Arcade foreword, I find myself massively unmotivated to do much of anything beyond Propelling links every day, burning through the Netflix queue, and catching up on whatever my DVR’s recorded for me in the last few months. And Xbox. And Nintendo DS.

This lack of motivation and focus is disturbing to me, and it’s dangerous, too. I’ve resolved to find my way out of Lazy Bum Town and back onto the Highway of Productivity before the end of the week.

Could it be that my brain wants to take a bit of a vacation? That I subconsciously need to just veg out and do nothing so it can recharge? Am I just undisciplined? Whatever the answer is, I need my brains back soon, because Andrew and I put together a 2008 release schedule for Monolith Press and — wait. That’s not right. I told Andrew about all the things I wanted to do this year and when I wanted to have them done, and he put together a schedule that is tough, but reasonable . . . if I can just get my damn brain into gear and find my motivation. Thank jeebus for Andrew, because he’s a hell of a lot more than just a good friend and a Red Pen of Doom.

I think the best way to get motivated is to give myself deadlines. And by "give myself" I mean "respect the deadlines Andrew set up for me." I think that I need inspiration too, though, and I’m going to get that by reading books I love, listening to audio books I love, and analyzing movies that I love. I got the idea to do what became Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot because I was inspired by This American Life and David Sedaris. I’m working on some original science fiction because I’ve been inspired by Scalzi, Joe Haldeman, and Phillip K. Dick.

But that inspiration, and the desire to do something with it, is having a tough time achieving escape velocity from video games and movies, so maybe the whole thing comes down to discipline, which I understand is one of the toughest things for freelance writers who work out of their house to maintain.

The Return of MST3K

Posted on By Wil

I was twenty years-old the first time I saw MST3K. I was sitting on the couch with a friend of mine, looking for something to watch on a Sunday morning, when she stopped on some crappy old horror movie.

"What’s this?" I said.

"You’ve never seen this before?"

"No," I said, "That’s why I asked ‘what’s this.’"

"It’s a show about this guy who is trapped in space with robots, and is forced to watch horrible movies. So he and the robots talk back to the screen."

It reminded me of this show I first watched on KDOC here in Los Angeles when I was a freshman in high school, called Mad Movies. I became a fan for life in a matter of minutes, and developed a list of favorites just as fast: Manos, the Hands of Fate, Rocketship XM and Lost Continent are a few that come instantly to mind.

MST3K’s Joel Hodgson once said, "We don’t ask ourselves, ‘will anyone get this?’ We tell each other, ‘the right people will get this.’" I was inspired by that philosophy, and when I wrote sketch comedy or did improv (both pursuits inspired by MST3K and the British Whose Line?) I used it, and I still use it today, even when I’m not writing comedy.

So now that there’s some context for how much I love MST3K, you’ll understand how excited I was when I saw that most of the original crew has reunited for Cinematic Titanic, which I believe can be safely called The Return of MST3K:

Cinematic Titanic is a feature length movie riffing show and is an
artist owned and operated venture created by Joel Hodgson, the creator
of the Peabody award-winning Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Cinematic
Titanic features the original cast and writers of MST3K, which is
Hodgson (Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (Crow), and J. Elvis Weinstein
(Tom Servo). Filling out the ensemble is Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester)
and Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank).

While this is exciting to me as a fan, it’s also inspiring and validating to me as a creative person who lives on the Long Tail. Instead of waiting for a network to give them the opportunity to bring their show to viewers, they’re distributing the show on DVD themselves. Between this and Riff Trax, we Misties have a lot to celebrate these days.
 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some rock climbing to do.