Author Archives: plumpdumpling

Should I Watermark My Photos?

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So, I own ettible.com. (My last name is Ett, if this URL doesn’t seem immediately like the most clever thing you’ve ever seen.) I’ve owned it for a while now but don’t quite know what to do with it.

See, my friends have been getting their pictures stolen from their blogs. And I’ve had some of mine stolen, too. And truthfully, some of the theft has been very good to my traffic numbers. But some of it has also resulted in this one particular picture of Kamran being posted in all sorts of strange contexts, ending in great shame for him and his family.

Okay, I’m kidding about that last part, but seriously, the kid is famous. So I set out to mark my photos in some way and designed this logo for myself:

And seeing that it looked crazy when I actually slapped it on a photo, I developed this little watermark, too:

But I don’t know where to go from here. It’s one thing to paste a claim of ownership onto every picture on an actual photoblog, which I guess is what ettible.com is. But it’s another thing to watermark every single thing I post on my blogs.

This looks pretty ridiculous, right?:

And now imagine a whole post on donuts4dinner.com where all of the photos have that in one corner. A watermark really takes away from the best pictures, but of course the best pictures are the most likely to be taken.

So I’m torn. I don’t want to look like some sort of egoist who thinks my pictures are worth stealing, but of course I hope to become the kind of photographer people want to steal from someday. And you have to dress for the job you want, right?

(Says the girl wearing flip-flops to work.)

Favourite Finds from The Old Barn Antique Mall

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While visiting Kamran’s parents this year and last, we visited The Old Barn Antique Mall in nearby San Juan Capistrano, a nearly block-long building split into themed rooms and stuffed with oddities and antiques from flapper dresses to cowboys’ cast iron cookpots to, well, whatever these things are:


Groin!


Really? You thought Penetrene was much better than Penorub?

Everything’s fairly overpriced for anyone used to “antiquing” at the thrift store, but really, where else are you going to find your holographic posters that morph from babies into skeletons depending on how you look at them?

Californiaaaaaaaaaa! Here We Cooooooooo-oooooooome!

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See you on the 22nd!

Oh, Yeah, Remember When I Went to California?

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We’re going to visit Kamran’s family in Southern California for the second time starting tomorrow, and I thought maybe I should actually post some photos from our first trip now. This way, it seems like I’m not lazy but just, you know, holding out for the right time. Or something.

I’ve already made a few posts about California–what I expected to do, the one and only difference between L.A. and NYC, Laguna Beach, the lovely wedding we went to, and one-half of our trip to Disneyland–but here are the things I didn’t mention before:


The flight over the desert was pretty incredible. Growing up in Ohio, the colors were entirely new to me, and so was the lack of vegetation. Or vegetation that wasn’t brown, at least.


Kamran’s parents’ backyard happened to be a little oasis with palm trees, a fountain, roses, and bunnies, but driving for miles and miles and seeing nothing but dried-out brush and actual tumbleweeds and bare mountains was kind of awe-making for me; I couldn’t stop taking photos of lovely Saddleback Mountain especially. I absolutely loved the scenery but wonder how long a person can live there without noticing that everything around her is dying.

And seeing the landscape wasn’t the only first for me. It was my first time seeing what an absolute nerd my uber-cool boyfriend was in high school


and my first time being driven by him in a car, which he tried to make our last time by trying to kill us:


It was strange watching my usually-lovable gentleman friend for the past almost-five years become this lane-switching, aggressive-passing, going-with-the-speed-of-traffic maniac. (Just kidding, but seriously, I would’ve surely died my first time trying to merge onto the highway.)

It was my first time eating a giant beefy burrito at Albertaco’s, which Kamran claims all the locals call Alberto’s, but I think he was secretly just embarrassed by his evident illiteracy:


and my first time eating in a room full of people from California:


I had Wienerschnitzel for the first time


mousing over this photo may amuse no one but me


and learned what the big deal is about In-n-Out (the big deal is that it’s delicious, and I wouldn’t die if I had to eat that every day instead of Shake Shack, although obviously there will be a Shake Shack in L.A. in about .02 seconds):


We made Kamran’s friend’s wedding more about us than her,


Disneyland more about us than any kids,


and nights with Kamran’s friend Gary and his wife, Diana, into creepy family portrait time:


We walked around downtown San Juan Capistrano, which is like a little hippie village thrown into the middle of rich, Republican Orange County. We found an antique store that stretched a whole block, a movie theatre with maybe two screens, a pay-by-the-pound frozen yogurt shop that was evidently a new concept in California, and a new friend for Kamran just wandering the streets:


My friend Beth drove down from San Francisco, and we met our friend Bridgette,


who lives in the most stereotypically 1970s California neighborhood I can imagine,


for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, because I apparently have to eat there every time I leave the state. We sat on the water underneath portable heaters in the middle of August, and I couldn’t imagine liking weather more.

We left early one morning for Kamran’s old undergraduate stomping grounds, stopping at a shady convenience store with a wall that happened to be modeled after Kamran’s shirt:


We drove around Pasadena for a while:


and then stopped at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles for a lunch of Arnold Palmers:


chicken dripping with syrup:


and waffles soaked with both:


both chicken and syrup, I mean; not Arnold Palmers

Afterward, we went for a long walk around the Caltech campus, posing with Kamran’s old swimmin’ hole:


his old dorm hall:


and the room in the physics building that houses a copy of his undergraduate thesis:


This was the last time we would see the Caltech t-shirt he’d purchased in the gift shop an hour earlier.

We had a lunch at Pink’s:


which is known for its block-long lines full of celebrities (we saw no one remotely famous and were only in line for a few minutes for this cole-slaw-covered beauty):


We then spent the afternoon wandering around Santa Monica. Well, actually, we spent an hour in Santa Monica traffic and then had only enough time to walk to the Santa Monica Pier:



before meeting Kamran’s uncle for dinner at Joe’s, where we had delicious beef and a sighting of comedian Andy Kindler:


(this is not Andy Kindler)

We had lunches with Kamran’s family, where I got to try my first albaloo polow, or Persian sour cherry rice, and wildly saturated kebabs:


Kamran’s niece basically cried through the entire lunch, and Kamran’s dad had to entertain her, and I was reminded that I’m way more interested in food than children, but the kid sure is cute, snot and all:


I met so many of Kamran’s old friends (this particular meeting included fried ice cream!):


and had probably the best beach experience of my life, even when my bathing suit was coming off and Kamran was having to tell the children around us to shield their eyes:



But more than any of this, being in California was just feeling different. There’s so much about it that can’t be recorded in pictures, although you can bet I tried. It’s driving past the power station at night, where the sky’s filled with yellow light in the otherwise empty desert. It’s eating the foods from Kamran’s childhood that he didn’t even like back then but craves now. It’s trying to find a song we can agree on from his iPod full of punk music on the way home from houses of friends I’ve heard about for years. It’s the corner of Antonio and Banderas Streets and trying to remember my high school Spanish to translate the city names. It’s having perfect hair and skin every day and people giving up their parking space for you at the beach and all of the houses looking exactly the same but entirely different than any other houses anywhere else. I’m sure I felt the same way when I moved to New York, but the point is that it’s not New York.

Wait, Do You Find My Blog Annoying?

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After this

and this

and this

took place at Ulysses on Friday night after work, my friend Eric turned very seriously to me and said, “I have to tell you something, Katie.”

His wife-to-be looked at him like, “Oh, my god, what totally embarrassing thing are you about to say?”

It turns out he really hates my SnapShots. You know, the little boxes that pop up every time you mouseover an external link. Like this:

He said he understands that I use them because they make me money, though. But, um, they actually don’t. I put them there for you. So that you know what you’re clicking on before you click. And in the case of Wikipedia links, you can actually read the definition of whatever I’m linking to without even clicking on the link.

But that isn’t the first time someone’s told me that he hates it. Another friend said that if he didn’t know me, he would’ve exited my blog the first time one of those things popped up and never looked back.

So, how do you feel about them? Love them? Hate them? Never even notice them?