Holy crap! Three years in the making! I uploaded the pictures from the 2006 Japan Expedition!
Thrills! Chills! Lots and lots of pictures of Japanese people!
Want to see a picture of me looking cool, on the Tokyo subway? Pow! A lot less cool, while at a woman's college? Bam! Me and Peter looking suitably impressed by a bottle of what I think is Pocari Sweat? Wham! A pair of Shibuya cosplayers? Some Kyoto schoolchildren? This awesome exhibit at the Toyota museum? Hiroshima schoolchildren accosting me in the Peace Park?[*] Clifford the Big Red Dog carrying an umbrella? Crunky, the chocolate bar? The uncropped picture of me from my about page? KitKat in a jar?[**]
*: Backstory! Japanese students learn English as a matter of course, and it's helpful to actually practice it on native speakers. And if you're in Hiroshima, where are you going to find a bunch of Americans feeling intensely awkward, but in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park? Check out their cheat sheet!
**: The Japanese endearment with vending machines is well known. But did you know, that they're always drinks, or cigarette vending machines? And nothing else, ever? I found one vending machine that dispensed food, in two weeks, and that was self heating curry, not the candy bars, et al, found in American snack vending machines. Thus, you end up with oddities like the KitKat-inna-jar, which are actually vended from drinks machines, thus the odd form factor.
Why are there pictures of the same thing, but scattered through the gallery? And why are the file naming conventions completely different?
There were three of us who brought digital cameras, Lucy Liu, Peter Cho, and your gracious host. Matt brought a film camera, because he's a jerk. Lucy's photos begin with "dsc", Peter's begin with "kif", and mine begin with "p". This also means the ordering is all fucked up, chronologically, but it's taken me three years just to get this far. Insisting that they be in the proper order would have delayed them to 2012, if you know what I mean, har har har.
The EXIF data says the largest versions still aren't original size!
Yeah, no, I'm not uploading a bunch of giant JPEGs. If you want the original file, send me an e-mail, and, like, two bucks.
Where are all the embarrassing photos of you?
The camera I used to take all (my) photos is adept at taking what appear to be well focused and unblurry photos on the tiny LCD on the back, photos which reveal themselves to be garbage at full resolution. So, I went through everything, deleting the crap.
Unfortunately for the stalkers, my standards are set high. There are many, many, I say three times, many ways for a foreigner to embarrass himself in a foreign land. There are photos among the uncounted legions that document moments so acutely unpleasant that, at the time, I longed for death, may it strike swiftly and with great force so that I may be shed of mine mortal coil and my everpresent stupidity.
The gallery's neat. What did you use to make it?
JWZ's gallery.pl to generate the gallery, a one shot bash "script" to scale the originals down to a thousand pixels wide, (for f in *; do echo "Scaling $f"; convert --geometry 1000 $f $f; done) and GQview to go through about a billion friggin' files.
Put that way, it makes you wonder why it took me so long. Anyway, enjoy.