Interests Collage, excessively analyzed
I particularly like this meme, because it involves looking at a page full of pretty pictures of things I love.
Create your own! Originally Written By ga_woo, Hosted and ReWritten by darkman424
Caught by the images, I spent entirely too much time on this; half of that time was spent picking the prettiest and most telling pictures, and the other half was spent trying to figure out where the generator is getting its images.
Sometimes I think they're pulled automatically from the web. Even my most obscure interests (like "Robert Kegan") summoned their requisite 10 pictures each, which seems unlikely if the images were pre-selected by a person. These interests also summoned fairly boring pictures. The photos for the more esoteric academic topics were often simply the covers of relevant books, or photos of writers or theorists.
At the same time, many of the more popular interests offer a selection of aesthetically pleasing images, with varied content where relevant. "Crafts," for instance, featured fairly attractive pictures of ten completely different types of handcrafts (none of which, as it happens, is the kind of work I do). "Calligraphy" elicited examples of both Asian and western calligraphy, and each image shows a distinctly different style. In some cases, such as "drawing" and "world religions," the default image is also a particularly iconographic one.
I suppose one might manage to get these results from a websearch, but the quality of results makes me suspect that there is at least some hand-picking involved. Perhaps someone took the time to compile image sets for common interests, then left the rest to be automatically drawn from the web? That seems like a lot of work, but stranger things are known to happen. Or perhaps I underestimate the quality and variety of images that might come up on a websearch?
The signs of human intervention made me more interested in some particularly poorly-represented words. "Love," for instance, came with a fairly inane image selection... several cards and inspirational posters, a Japanese character, an abstract image of wine-purple swirls in a void, and a handful of human couples in such romantic situations as bleeding on a rock and drinking beer in front of a porta-potty. Nowhere was there a simple image of two people hugging or kissing or holding hands. The closest was a sketch of a young couple sitting together, one thinking [heart] and the other thinking [upside-down broken heart]. This was either the work of a random computer search, or a particularly cynical mind. And just for the record, these are definitely not the top ten results of a Google image search on "love" (not that those are much better).
The "bisexuality" options particularly irked me, because they mostly showed exclusively same-sex interaction. I chose the one and only picture from which I could infer both same- and opposite-sex attraction. [Edit: One of the other images is actually better, but I can only tell that from looking at the full-size image on Google; at this size, it seems to be all men.] I know that bisexuality is often categorically overlooked or misunderstood, but still -- if that's the one and only keyword in the search, wouldn't you think it would get better results than that?
But with all of that said, I still find this to be an altogether pleasing array of images to look at. Behold, a variety of things I love.
Create your own! Originally Written By ga_woo, Hosted and ReWritten by darkman424
Caught by the images, I spent entirely too much time on this; half of that time was spent picking the prettiest and most telling pictures, and the other half was spent trying to figure out where the generator is getting its images.
Sometimes I think they're pulled automatically from the web. Even my most obscure interests (like "Robert Kegan") summoned their requisite 10 pictures each, which seems unlikely if the images were pre-selected by a person. These interests also summoned fairly boring pictures. The photos for the more esoteric academic topics were often simply the covers of relevant books, or photos of writers or theorists.
At the same time, many of the more popular interests offer a selection of aesthetically pleasing images, with varied content where relevant. "Crafts," for instance, featured fairly attractive pictures of ten completely different types of handcrafts (none of which, as it happens, is the kind of work I do). "Calligraphy" elicited examples of both Asian and western calligraphy, and each image shows a distinctly different style. In some cases, such as "drawing" and "world religions," the default image is also a particularly iconographic one.
I suppose one might manage to get these results from a websearch, but the quality of results makes me suspect that there is at least some hand-picking involved. Perhaps someone took the time to compile image sets for common interests, then left the rest to be automatically drawn from the web? That seems like a lot of work, but stranger things are known to happen. Or perhaps I underestimate the quality and variety of images that might come up on a websearch?
The signs of human intervention made me more interested in some particularly poorly-represented words. "Love," for instance, came with a fairly inane image selection... several cards and inspirational posters, a Japanese character, an abstract image of wine-purple swirls in a void, and a handful of human couples in such romantic situations as bleeding on a rock and drinking beer in front of a porta-potty. Nowhere was there a simple image of two people hugging or kissing or holding hands. The closest was a sketch of a young couple sitting together, one thinking [heart] and the other thinking [upside-down broken heart]. This was either the work of a random computer search, or a particularly cynical mind. And just for the record, these are definitely not the top ten results of a Google image search on "love" (not that those are much better).
The "bisexuality" options particularly irked me, because they mostly showed exclusively same-sex interaction. I chose the one and only picture from which I could infer both same- and opposite-sex attraction. [Edit: One of the other images is actually better, but I can only tell that from looking at the full-size image on Google; at this size, it seems to be all men.] I know that bisexuality is often categorically overlooked or misunderstood, but still -- if that's the one and only keyword in the search, wouldn't you think it would get better results than that?
But with all of that said, I still find this to be an altogether pleasing array of images to look at. Behold, a variety of things I love.