TheOneRingnet is trying for 60,000 likes on their Facebook page before Comic-Con begins on July 11. I give you that date in case you have been under a rock somewhere in RA universe.
This is my good faith effort to hopefully encourage you to “like” the page and get your friends and family to do the same. As of this post, there are 56,892 “likes.” So 3,108 more. Just making the number clear for the action fans. ;-)
Okay, the good faith effort:
[click to enlarge]
and a commitment to more and better shots if we get that FB page to 60K and soon.
Some of you may think this is cruel, since you’re so starved for new Richard Armitage photos. Trust me; it’s going to be worth it. :D
And this is the least we can do for TORn, who is going to bring us such good coverage of Comic-Con – including RA’s appearance.
Any longtime readers of this blog know I have little love for Facebook. However, I realize it is sometimes a necessary evil on the Web. Perhaps the day is coming when that won’t be true, but for now, we’re stuck with it. And if you’re on FB and have not checked out the new Timeline, you need to do it before it’s thrust on you next week. Yep, FB is once again making a major change which compromises privacy. Aren’t you weary of this? I am and was a long time ago. When I heard about this on Mashable yesterday, I groaned and decided I wasn’t even going to talk about it. But a FB post from Grati prompted me to say something.
In my original daft of this post, I started listing the issues with the new timeline and became so irritated, I chucked it. I’m going to cheat and let someone else tell you about it:
Facebook Timeline mandatory rollout: You have 7 days to scour your past
By Mike Wehner, Tecca | Today in Tech – 21 hrs ago
The time to edit your online persona is now
Facebook is the virtual home to more than 800 million active users, so any change to how the network operates is a big deal. And nothing could be bigger for the social hotspot than completely revamping everyone’s front-facing profile page, and that is exactly what is happening today. Starting this morning, the new Timeline feature — that up until now has been an optional switch — is now mandatory.
The Timeline differs from the default profile pages we know and love in several ways. Now, rather than showcasing only your most recent posts, your personal front page can be scrolled back months or years at a time. Most importantly, this change can offer visitors a glimpse at your entire social networking past, all the way back to the day that you joined up. The revamp can be both a blessing and a curse for seasoned social networkers, as it can produce a bit of pleasant nostalgia, but also drag up some of your less proud public moments.
Left untouched, your Timeline may remind of you of breakups, job troubles, or even a few unfortunate party photos that you have long since buried. Depending on your settings, these black marks on your digital past could allow new followers — including friends or business associates — to see a side of you that was better kept tucked away.
Isn’t Facebook fun? But hey, if you really want some of the old stuff back, there is almost always a way. If you read that link and say, “But Frenz, I use Internet Explorer?!!” we need to talk.
Of course the usual comments will be made, “you shouldn’t have posted there in the first place,” “or I don’t use Facebook [with the implication being how smart they were to avoid it in the first place]“. No offense to those potential commenters, but this post is not for you, and those kinds of comments do nothing to repair someone’s timeline. Although I heartily agree with you, and it should be common sense by now that anything posted on the Web (no matter how secure it supposedly may be) is subject to being publicized. If someone doesn’t agree with this, you need to know that Mark Zuckerberg considers the age of privacy over (interesting how the video where he said that is no longer).
Do you think this might be one very good reason Richard Armitage has avoided social media? Smart boy.
The best laid schemes… Oh how they can blow up in our faces. Thankfully, since I’m not a man, I must be a mouse. Not sure yet, but for a few minutes a couple of nights ago, I could have put my fist through a wall. This morning I’m still a little unsure of myself but less so as the clock ticks. And the clock ticking is what started all of this here. You thought it was Richard Armitage? Hang around, and I’ll disabuse you of that notion although there might be some confusion when posts like this appear.
I still can’t look at that picture without blinking my eyes and shaking my head to clear it. Ironically, that really might be his sexiest picture.
And since I usually muddle up the paragraph breaks in my posts not to mention all of my other grammatical sins, I might as well do it up right and just place them wherever I want and hope you understand my convoluted mind. Honestly, I never have known the best way to place paragraph breaks; topic sentences mystify me. So glad that hasn’t stopped me. Now for the awkward transition.
Sometime last weekend an item from RAFrenzy inadvertently posted on my personal Facebook wall, and if you need to heat some coffee or tea, you can place it next to my head where the steam is coming out. Previously I just disliked Facebook, now I despise it. This has jeopardized my anonymity to a degree it has never happened during the life of the blog. Yeah, I know some of you know who I am because I’ve let you know, and for all of you other RA fans who may have guessed, I’m not concerned about you. It’s the family I don’t want reading. SO and the kids are not so much the problem. I mean the extended family. They would not get it, so I don’t want them reading and possibly giving input. If I did, they would already know about it. Wait! Some of them now do. Damn Facebook.
So how did this happen? Oh, I’m going to tell you so I can give this rant full vent and also give you a heads up. It happened on my phone where I haven’t mastered the ability to control scripts so I only have running the ones I want. For the uninitiated, scripts drive the web page you’re on, and sometimes scripts include all sorts of nasty things that you don’t really want running. For me Facebook is nasty, and especially so when the Facebook mobile app will not let me log out, and I have to clear my data every time I want to make sure it’s not logged in, and even then it’s not a sure thing. Can you see that steam now?! Let me make this really plain. If you’re logged into Facebook, and you are on a site that has a link to Facebook, you can inadvertently post a “Like” to your wall. Given that links to Facebook have wormed their way onto virtually every site on the web, there is a vulnerability you might be posting things to your FB wall that you never intended [waves hand vigorously in the air while saying 'choice' words]. Same thing with Twitter, which I still like, but I may ended up despising for the same reason.
And I wouldn’t have been on my phone if I hadn’t been determined to work on my blog post about Richard’s back. Okay, enough of that rant, but just know that despite my irritation, I’m not letting this keep me from blogging. On to the good stuff.
I did promise some more pictures, which I really was about to post a couple of nights ago before I got rattled.
His size and vantage point scream masculinity, but that’s not enough to make these pictures so compelling. His attentive nature is still evident. Man, I really have a bad case of CWS. Who woulda thunk a set of pictures of his back would bring on such a bout?
This one really does make me think I can reach out and hug him:
This one almost looks like a kid trying to get the lay of the land:
It is amazing to me how he can still convey a purity without using his facial expressions. Yep, I have a raging case of CWS.
My oldest child is taking third year Spanish in college. Before this class, she had never taken any formal language classes and knew no one associated with the language program at school. A couple of days ago she finally made a visit to the language lab where she logged onto one of the computers and cruised around the school’s language site to see what was there. Some external links were listed under helps, so she clicked on one of them. It was a YouTube channel designed to teach Spanish, and just for grins, she clicked on one of the videos and then sat open mouthed a minute later:
At about 1:20, there are two girls in black and white, and there is a sink behind them. Those two girls are my oldest and youngest children, and the sink is my kitchen sink, yet my daughter doesn’t know the owner of that YouTube channel nor does anyone she knows personally. After SO and I finally realized she wasn’t pulling our legs, we sat stunned as well, and then all of us set about trying to figure how the channel owner would have come to have this picture and use it to represent sisters. We speculated and ruled out all sorts of scenarios and then came to one that makes such sense.
The photo in the video was posted on my daughter’s Facebook page a couple of years ago, and she had labeled it “hermanita”, which is translated “sister” from Spanish. Although my daughter doesn’t have quite the tight security on her FB account that I would like, her account is not completely open. Doesn’t matter. She posted a picture on her account where friends could see it. This implied a right for them to post it to their FB pages, and apparently someone did. Once this was done, that person then extended a right to all of their friends, and if one of their friends decided to post it, the right was extended to all of their friends. Yes, I’m saying that if you put up a picture on Facebook, you can potentially lose control of it. Isn’t Facebook grand?
None of this is news to me. This can happen to any of us who are on Facebook, and I’ve known that since I was first on the site. The protestrations from Facebook about privacy and respecting copyright are immaterial. If it’s out on the web, and Facebook has a way of propagating information the likes of which would make your head spin, the potential to be taken from you is enormous. Most people say to themselves, “Why would anyone want my photos?” You just never know why.
Although some of you may know this, it still amazes me how cavalier or ignorant or both people are about this site. So I bring this post for those of you who are still enamored of Facebook but don’t quite realize the vulnerability it creates for you. Facebook is everywhere and gives someone the ability to lift all sorts of things about you not the least of which are your personal photos, and it does not matter about your privacy settings. Well, unless you have no friends on Facebook which would defeat the purpose of the site. And I won’t even get into Facebook wanting to trademark the word “f*ce” and how invasive that may be. You can read about that here.
Obviously, what makes this case bizarre are the great odds of my daughter ever seeing herself this way, but it should beg a question of everyone: are there any photos of me somewhere I’m unaware of? Probably.
By the way, this is one of the reasons I will never post pictures of Richard Armitage in a family setting that he has not intentionally made public. I will not participate in the breaching of someone’s privacy. It is not my place to do that with anyone’s photos — be they photos of the famous or not. Sadly, on occasion I have been sent what appear to be stalking pictures, and at one time I had a picture of what I’m pretty sure is part of RA’s family. That ran a chill up my back, and I couldn’t help but think of my family. But I will admit part of me wishes I still had the picture. Thankfully, the better part of me who lives by the Golden Rule got rid of it. May the better part of me always dominate.
I did tell my daughter I was going to be posting this video and that I wanted to post some other pictures of her. She’s of the generation that expects to have their pictures and videos plastered everywhere, but I’m of the generation that is still compelled to ask. And this should probably be a post just about her, but I’m not sure one blog piece would do justice to her. She has a lot of energy and is almost always smiling and laughing. It’s hard to get a picture of her when she’s not:
She is also larger than life but doesn’t realize it. Everyone who knows her can see it, and many of us think this photo captures it perfectly:
This was taken somewhere in Europe where she spent half the summer and managed to miss Richard Armitage in New York. She screamed on the phone when I told her. She’s been a fan almost as long as I have and would have definitely gone to see him.
Note: it occurred to me when I was drafting this post that I never did post my experience watching ‘Captain America.’ I’ll have to do that sometime soon.
I thought this objectification phase might be passing, and then the Russian site comes with this:
I had to throw in the chair to give your senses a break.
Uh, yeah. That is all. No, wait! What was I saying about being okay with the maternal feelings? Nix that.
As usual, if you click on the pictures, you can see the big format. :D
edit: and now I remember why I made a Facebook page. It would take something like this to prompt me. LOL!
[Note: for those who don't know, the images were taken by the photographer David Clerihew. This is the same photographer responsible for the viral video which was posted on Vimeo by Sean Pruen, who is a motion designer/video editor and appears to have worked on the video. I wrote some about the video and Sean a while back and wasn't sure I could stop. Find it here, here, and here. LOL!
However, I haven't said anything about David Clerihew. I'll correct that mistake today. When I first saw the viral video, I went over and looked at his entire site. Fantastic. I love the stark quality to much of his work. I can see why he was selected for Strike Back, but I'm still not sure why the images were never used for promotion. I hope our little highlighting of them in some way is a help. But if Mr.Clerihew has a problem with me putting up those images so a few of us can fangirl over them, I'll certainly taken them down.]
Have you heard the news today that Facebook may eventually own the word ‘face’ when it’s used online in chat rooms or forums? Wow. I’m wondering exactly what that means. Sounds like they will have some sway over how the word ‘face’ will be used. Yep, that’s exactly what that means. And I’m sure they will charge for its use in some instances. Are they crazy to push for this word? They are already intensely disliked by many, and now we can’t even use this word without them involved? They need a good ass chewing. Where’s Mike Masnick when I need him?
This begs for the invention of a word to replace ‘face’ or perhaps an emoticon. Something needs to thwart FB. Yep, we need another word for ‘face,’ or the emoticon might be even better. Then someone could trademark it and become mega rich. LOL!
I wonder if FB will get ‘book’ next.
Off to load up Paint app (yes, my graphics editor is crude).
In the meantime, perhaps we will meet ‘headfront’ to ‘headfront’ one day. Yeah, it’s lame, but it’s all I’ve got right now.
I guess I should have made a Facebook page before this week. My hit count has gone up quite a bit from that link! So welcome to all of you who have come here from Facebook. I love you! It’s just Facebook that doesn’t thrill me. It’s a pain in the ass to get around on, and they (the guys who run that place) make the functions one way. There is no back out plan on some things unless you’re technical and have a crystal ball or you’re a bulldog. I’m technical but don’t have a crystal ball; however, I am a bulldog. Even though this is what you have to be if you’re going to run a “page” on FB, I hesitate to go into that mode. But for RA and all of you, it’s worth it. Hope you enjoy the blog. :D
Hmm. I almost hate to associate RA’s picture with Facebook, but I did post his picture over there several times now, and this is really in honor of all of you. So I’ll post one that some of you might not have seen. OH, and since snaffling seems to be the order of the week ;-), I snaffled this one from Mulubinba. Over here. Be sure to thank her! and frankly, she has a wonderful blog that’s thoughtful on several levels. Definitely one of my favorites.
I also need to say thanks to WordPress or whomever it was that wouldn’t allow me to embed that Strike Back Viral video on my first attempt. Yes, good can come out of bad. I’ve always known that, but Facebook had me doubting it.
edit:
I’ve added snaffle to the lexicon. I didn’t learn it from the RA fandom but would have never used it in a sentence if not for the British ladies I now interact with on a frequent basis. The context in this blog entry makes the meaning pretty plain, but hey, you need to read the lexicon if you haven’t already.
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