While surfing Facebook, I happened across this post by Anne – and did a doubletake. It was her talking about how much she enjoyed a recent play she had just attended, a production of The Chinese Lady, by Lloyd Suh, at Tipping Point Theatre.
When I saw this – a question entered my brain of “Wait, Lloyd?” And after a split second, I had a follow-up thought of “Of course, it’s Lloyd.”
Initially, it was surprising to see that there is a Memorialization settings option. But I guess it makes some degree of sense. What was most surprising to me is that this setting is one of three options, under General profile settings… and something at the very topmost level.
It’s a little spooky that whatever algorithm keeps track of my history, and has decided to show this to me now. Perhaps it thinks I’m the kind of guy that wants something like this as a holiday gift.
The Follower is a great combination of open cameras, social media, and digital voyeurism. It takes publicly available camera data, Instagram photo data, and produces a snapshot of when a particular Instagram photo was taken.
“A simple way to get started training this ability is to frequently expose yourself to boredom. If you instead always whip out your phone and bathe yourself in novel stimuli at the slightest hint of boredom, your brain will build a Pavlovian connection between boredom and stimuli, which means that when it comes time to think deeply about something (a boring task, at least in the sense that it lacks moment-to-moment novelty), your brain won’t tolerate it.”
As an example, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have a combined market cap of $1,306,180,000,000 (that would be 1 Trillion, in case you get lost counting the zeroes). Which is a number greater than the GDP of South Korea.
In the early years of this blog, I would find myself taking photos at parties in a frantic attempt to document the event. Over time, I realized I was taking myself out of the very thing I was wanting to remember. I want to think I’ve gotten better about such things, but it’s difficult to avoid the pull of social media – wanting to tell everyone Hey, look at what a great time I’m having!.