claudiablood

My latest illustration in my Zombie Girl series. Might play around with the blood, put it on her skin or something…

The blood I took from my zombie film box set, ‘box of blood’.  It has a screen with fake blood in it, so I tipped it about and took photos of that, then converted it to vector, made the white bits transparent, simplified the paths, cut it down to about 3 colours, then superimposed it on a black background behind Claudia.

The image of Claudia is from two pictures – her hair from one, her face and shoulders from another.  She’s supposed to look a bit like a ‘bust’, but might just look like a thalidimide person.  I’m not sure…  :/

Read my review of Brighton club night It Came From The Sea on the BBC Southern Counties website.

Who else has drawn a map of everyone they know and all the connections between them? Friendster used to do a ’shortest connection chart’ between two people, showing how many ’steps’ you were away from someone. That’s something MySpace always lacked. Now there’s an interactive 3D visualisation of everyone you know on Facebook. This is something I’ve wanted someone to create for years, even before the L Word ‘make-out’ map.

The Interactive Friend Thing was created by Gordy French. Here’s a snapshot of my facebook friend map:

You can zoom in… ” Since people with more connections end up closer together, the various social groups you’re in become quite apparent.” Here’s a snapshot of my Brighton friends (not because they’re in the Brighton ‘network’, they just got grouped together because they have lots of connections between each other):

Then, you can click a person’s name and it shows you the connections between your mutual friends:

I think the numbers indicate how many mutual friends you have with that person.

This is actually the most fun application I’ve seen in a long time. Probably because I’ve wanted it for so long.

It did get me thinking about an extra use of it, which I’d also dreamed up a while back: since Facebook records ‘hookups’, you could either do a separate chart showing this information, or make the connector lines different colours for different kinds of relationships… could come in useful if someone got an STI… a direct trace of potential infection! Haha.

When someone imports their email address book into Facebook to search for friends, they can invite those friends who aren’t already on Facebook to join. However, if one of your friends has multiple email addresses, and already has a Facebook account registered to a different email address than the one you’re ‘inviting’ them with, they get an email asking them to sign up (again) to be your Facebook friend. If they’re already signed in, they get redirected to their facebook homepage. I don’t understand why it wouldn’t just take you to the facebook profile of the person who invited you.

So, I get an invite to Facebook from ‘Tom Mackenzie’ to my personal email address.

My facebook is registered to my work email address. I even try adding my personal email address as an alternative email to my facebook account, but nothing new happens. I don’t have Tom Mackenzie’s email address. The only way I can find his Facebook profile is to do a search on his name. This brings up 3 pages of Tom Mackenzies, many of whom have no photo or their photo is too small to tell who they are. So I don’t know which of these are my friend!

That brings me to Facebook’s other annoying feature – you can’t see people’s full size photos, or personal details unless you are in their network. I don’t see any reason why someone in London’s network would want me to see their profile any less than someone in Brighton & Hove’s network!? Surely if I’m planning on a bit of e-harrassment, it’d be worse if I was local?

What even is the point in blocking regional networks that you’re not a part of? Or even of only letting you join one regional network at a time! I really don’t understand.