21-VII-2013.
The Gugao changed the rules on Panoramio for the fourth time. Don't know what was it this time, I just had enough. Perhaps some bullshit about them keeping the right to sell my content at will and pay me nothing, while nominally allowing me to keep implicit copyright, or some such legalese bullshit. I've seen one of my pics from 2008 adorning a house reseller's website, I probably made a shot while waiting for Lena in one of those affluent neighborhoods where some of her friends lived, those parts where they keep the forest and build between the trees, not raze everything and then add a few token trees, which then topple in the next hurricane.
So I decided to write off my investment of time and effort, by adding two more hours of it - I removed all my 900-some pictures, one by one (they didn't have an option to do more at a time). The view counter was at 750.000 at the time. Fuck off, Google, you are disowned.
Managed to do that before the (almost) annual meeting of rasejani, this time in zanatlija. It was a bit complicated navigating, because the place is in a back yard and doesn't have much of a façade, but then at least I was able to explain to pLazić that it's "know where Sonja school is? Right across the street". Even so, I had to get out to show them the door - they were parked 4m from it and still didn't see it.
So, the usual bunch - Škrba with his kum Kunta, Stinge, pLazić, Zlotvor, ajVar and 2-3 more guys, so I almost had a majority: Go, Neša, Lena.
The highlight of the day was the nearly worlds record of Canon cameras per person at a restaurant table - five big ones (Škrba, Stinge, pLazić, Go and I) plus someone had some pocket version. We did a real mexican standoff - stand in a circle and everyone shoots everyone else shooting everyone else. I even made a good autostich from that. Škrba had a t-shirt with "fuck google, ask me!"
The band was a bit too assertive, we did our best to fuck them off and then reduced the tip because of them. We did tell the waiter we don't want them near, we meet like this once a year and want to talk, not to sing and get into sevdah (which nobody does at noon, unless it started the night before), but no, they had to come near. Which is why we didn't go the usual way when paying, just throw the money on the heap until we exceed the total, no, the tip was minimal, near roundoff error, and we wrote on the back of the bill that it would have been larger, had the band been more efficiently kept off.
After the lunch most of the gang dispersed; we went to zelenozvono on the main square - Škrba, Kunta, Stinge, Go, Neša, Lena and I, plus probably ajVar, to meet Joška, who is Škrba's brother by photography, they seem to have similar habits, approach, technique... to an extent*. They see each other much more than I see either of them.
Whole evening the oldwave was going endlessly about „2013-07-21 19:30:16 Re: [Oldwave] Hiren's Boot DVD 15.2 Restored Edition v2.0“ and other old style software tools to help revive various „blind cat“ (whatever that meant) and other almost dead machines. The warrior's gear. Turns out one of the guys (whom we met last year in Niš) has a 5,25" floppy drive... and he did send it to me. I later copied about one third of the archive; the other two thirds were DSDD formatted to 720K, which is a format which lived perhaps in DOS days, 1988-1995 or thereabouts, and now even if I find a BIOS which would accept a floppy, it wouldn't recognize this format.
I needed to transfer these floppies to disk, to retrieve various comments, and who knows, even some important files, to serve as the material for this Byo. And they did, to the extent I could read them.
The images started coming the same evening - mostly hosted on minus.com, which soon proved to be a major fuckup, they simply vanished around 2014 or 2015, and all the hundreds of pictures we hosted there for suština were simply gone. It's not that we don't have the originals, it's that we'd have to find them again and reupload too. Ouch. pLazić put his on dropbox, which is where I also ended up, after a brief dalliance with copy.com, which had an even shorter life than minus.
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* the extent is the subject: while Škrba shoots landscape, ambience, detail, Joška shoots young, inscenated and arranged, cuntware
Mentions: 04-XI-2021., Byo (Byo), Dragojlo Kuntić (Kunta), Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Gugao, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Joška Apro, kum, Nenad Berger (Neša), oldwave, pLazić, rasejani, Stinge, suština, zanatlija, zelenoZvono, in serbian