Another Flickr meetup

This is Bryan, or striatic as he's known on Flickr. He's been on Flickr since its inception -- in fact, since before its inception. At the meetup last Thursday, he gave me a long and interesting account of Flickr's history. Some of the pages, such as the login page, have a .gne suffix; I had thought that stood for something deeply technical. Turns out it stands for Game Never Ending. That's the original name of the Flickr site, and back then it was a kind of MUD, with no photos in sight. After that it was a chatroom site -- still no photos -- then the developers came up with the bright idea of creating an application that would allow quick & easy uploading of images into chat messages. Then the image thing completely took over.

Bryan takes terrific pictures, and is an enthusiastic ringleader of the Flickr community -- administering numerous groups, suggesting new interfaces, etc. (He organizes the Toronto meetups, as well.) He's become something of a Flickr celebrity. A friend of Stefan's painted the above picture -- based on Bryan's distinctive icon -- and sent it to him. (Bryan actually does wear that bowler hat much of the time.) And in June, he's embarking on an epic trip round the US, where he'll be meeting and staying with dozens of people he's met through Flickr.

I also got to meet the equally interesting Erin, Bryan's girlfriend. She just graduated from a film production program, for which her thesis project was a five-minute stop-motion animated film called "The Frog and the Faery." Bryan took a lot of photos of the film's production, and the level of detail looks just amazing.

At one point during our meetup at Supermarket (the restaurant, not the nearby Freshmart), someone noticed that there was a dance rehearsal taking place in Xspace across the street, and some of us went over and tried to surreptitiously take photos. Here's my peering-around-the-curtain shot:

I have no idea what they were practicing for, but I sure want to see it when it's ready.