“Selfies”

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Your hot selfie reveals all

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, March 11, 2014

WHAT'S your default? What’s your favorite go-to expression? Don’t be coy; you know you have one.

Sweet smirk? Goofy grin? Smoochy duck-face? Maybe you’re more of a bored hipster sneer, a coy Mona Lisa or a sultry come-hither, like you just had sex with a giant chocolate Jesus and someone took God’s name in sweet, sticky vain. I like that one, too.


This is how. And why.

Wait, let me be more specific: What’s your default selfie expression, the specific look you toss off when you hold your smartphone out at arm’s length and click a self pic, adding your favorite little preen, maybe a head tilt, a little whatchoo-lookin’-at sex bomb, and then post it to InstaFaceGramChat. Got one of those? Of course you do.

Selfies! The thing to do. The place to be. 2013’s Word of the Year, after all, which means they’re not just for self-obsessed Millennials named Dylan and Mylie and Katniss. The pope does it, big-name celebs do it, models and porn stars and politicians, too. It’s now the Internet of Everything: posting a selfie is the new cogito ergo sum.


So cute. So empowering.

It’s true. Unless you’re over 60 or under a rock, odds are fantastically good that you’ve already shot a selfie or ten, maybe a thousand, maybe enough to have one of your smoochy duck-faces counted among the over 650,000 selfies that the kids over at SelfieCity recently gathered from a half-dozen countries, culling them down to a few thousand ideal examples before running them all through a facial analysis measuring software algorithm thing.

And why? Because it’s 2014, silly. This is what we do now. This is what we deem important. Because life is nothing if not futile, ridiculous and wonderful, all at once. Haven’t you heard?

Gauged by their selfies, Russians seem pretty miserable. Brazilians and Thais, on the other hand, seem pretty happy, smiling a lot and not taking it all so damn seriously.


What’s next, female priests? Condoms?

Also: women take more selfies than men, and they like to pose more dramatically when they do it. Overall, humans take fewer selfies than you might have been led to believe. Except for young people, who take them all. The damn. Time.

Fascinating! Sort of! But does any of it matter? Do your selfies actually reveal anything worthwhile about you, anything emotionally or psychologically interesting? Sure they do. Maybe. Why not?

It can be quite a curious practice, after all, to examine your own habits, your own persona, your go-to presentation of self. But even more importantly, it’s revealing to delve into why — what, exactly, is driving that leer or grin or smooch? What desires and fears, doubts and longings go into the faces you show the world? Has it changed over time? Do you smile more or less than you used to? Are you angrier? More shy? Scared? Whiny? Doomed?

In other words, while it’s true that selfies can seem entirely vain and absurd, we’re also in an era that fetishizes rabid individuality and demands everyone be their own micro-brand. A selfie can reveal more than just your ego’s twee posturing — they can speak to the tone and timbre of a nation’s attitudes, gender stereotypes and afflictions. They’re another piece of the grand human puzzle that will never be complete, because it’s not really a puzzle at all and more of a swirling kaleidoscope made of love and blood and whisky and death. I mean, obviously.

The popularity of selfies might also be related to another tragic condition I’ve read about recently, an absolutely terrible disorder suffered largely by otherwise completely innocent, unsuspecting women.

Have you heard of it? It is called RBF — Resting Bitch Face (or Bitchy Resting Face, depending).


RBF. So tragic. (via CollegeHumor)

Exactly what it sounds like, really: RBF is when your relaxed, unpremeditated, I’m-just-sitting-here-reading-a-magazine expression just so happens to looks exactly like how someone looks when they want to disembowel a large ham with a chainsaw. Or they just smelled something really bad. Or they just got stabbed in the kidney by an angry elf.

“What’s wrong?” “Are you OK?” “Did you just get stabbed in the kidney?” These are questions RBF sufferers regularly endure, given their endlessly sour-looking expressions. Of course, most often, nothing is wrong. Most often, they have no idea they look that way, until someone tells them. Poor things.

The question, then, is the same for RBF sufferers and selfie addicts alike: How did that face get there? What forces, events and attitudes conspired to slowly, inexorably turn your face into a sexy love doll, a soft beacon of light or a nasty rictus of “meh”? More importantly, what can be done about it?


There’s never a bad time for a hot selfie.

(By the way: Plenty of men suffer an equivalent of RBF, hereby defined as RJF — Resting Jerk Face. It’s a lazy, flaccid sneer or perhaps a macho, shameless leer, completely unbecoming of real men. Problem is, RJF is still more expected of the male of the species, and therefore more accepted, at least among the desperate and the lost. Just look at the GOP).

Recently, a depressed RBF sufferer wrote in to a advice columnist asking what to do about her sour countenance. The suggestion: Go to a mirror. Start practicing. Work on your facial muscles, lighten up the eyes, unfurrow the brow, create some new habits. After all, the face is just like any other set of muscles — it can be retrained, relaxed, made wiser, softer, more revealing of joy and intelligence and light.

Good advice. But it also misses the profounder point, no? Isn’t the default expression you give most frequently really a manifestation of your innermost being, your true nature? Or rather, shouldn’t it be?

And if your expression appears endlessly dour and angry, or if it’s dictated solely by desperate ego preening or a need for a million Instagram likes, isn’t it perhaps time to do some deeper work? Re-train the spiritual muscles, perhaps? After all, it’s one thing to just throw some fresh paint on that decrepit shack and pretend you’re bright and happy and full of love. Quite another to strip it to the studs and rebuild the foundation in a whole new, incandescent way.

Put it this way: The calmest, most grounded, awake beings I know — in life, in selfies, in resting expression, whatever — are the ones most connected to spirit, more free of the ego’s death grip, more deeply and happily at home in their skin. They are most definitely not walking around looking as though the very air was attacking them like a swarm of locusts.

So maybe forget about the face. Forget about mere expressions of self. Maybe we can go a little deeper, and little more authentic, more honest, and therefore more obvious and effortless. Call it Resting Luminous Self. Works beautifully for all occasions, no guile or preen, awkward posture or nervous smirk required. Shall we try it?

• Email: Mark Morford

• Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/03/11/your-hot-selfie-reveals-all

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

   (click on the photo to read the news story)



Now take a look at this “shallow” female teenager taking a “selfie”....

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

   (click on the picture to read the news story)

[shef]]

so where is your selfie TJ :}

[guest49]

Shef!  Welcome back!

[nitpicker1]

shef]  ?   where's yours?

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

   (click on the picture to read the news story)

[Alicat]

so where is your selfie TJ :}

Wahoo! Nice to see you back

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

This short movie perfectly sums up the Selfie Generation

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 3:00AM PST - Thursday, September 25, 2014



HERE IS this ironic and deeply amusing short film, “Aspirational”, by Matthew Frost, shot for Vs. Magazine, a publication I know little about and a film which apparently has something to do with fashion. It stars, as you can see, Kirsten Dunst, as herself, along with two perfectly numbed-out, modern day, selfie-obsessed fangirls, doing what fangirls do, only worse.

I didn’t really research exactly why it was made, or what it’s supposed to sell. Does it matter?

Doesn’t really matter. Just watch. You’ll understand immediately.

In sum: Two fans drive by Dunst, who is waiting for an Uber. They stop, ask if it’s really her. She says yes. They dash out of their car, cellphone cameras ready. Dunst looks bemused. At first.

But the girls do not perform the usual celebrity dance. They do not offer adoration. They do not gush, or chat, or appear humble and nice. They merely rush right up to Dunst, without asking permission, and start posing for selfies, grunting out fangirl grunts as they do it, oblivious to anything but the act of taking the selfie itself, after which they both immediately start tagging and posting the photos as fast as possible, before dashing away, thrilled at all the new, random, anonymous followers they are sure to get on Instagram as a result of their treasure. Dunst is nonplussed. “Melancholia” indeed.

The reason the film is so perfect? Because I have little doubt scenes like this actually occur in, you know, “real life”.

Apple just sold 10 million iPhones in three days. A lumpy GoPro sits stop the skull of every “hardcore” skier, mountain biker, surfer dude, bungee daredevil in the land. Been to a concert lately? Half the crowd has a cellphone camera waving in the air, taking video. The other half is ignoring the show completely, busy posting their last concert action shot to Facebook.


Dude! Wherever you GoPro, there you are.

Welcome to the Selfie Generation. Welcome to a time when getting the shot is equally, if not more, important as having the experience.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. A new shift has occurred, and it’s something rather extraordinary. See, for Generation Selfie, the two — life and the recording of it — have now officially merged. The experience is getting the shot. Life and its record are the same thing.

Behold, we have reached Singularity. Or at least, a weird taste of it.

Sounds horrible, right? Shallow. Stupid. A sad diminishment of what it “really” means to be human. You’re so busy taking pictures, you miss your entire vacation. You’re so obsessed with social media, you never actually experience anything interesting… to post on social media. You’re so busy taking selfies, you miss actual human warmth and connection. Awful.

Or is it?

Here is your hot ponderable du jour: In the age when everything is recorded, filmed, documented, Instagrammed and then instantly posted somewhere for all to see, when getting the shot of the sunset, the barista, the orgasm, the fantastic meal, the dick pic, the hotel room, the yoga pose (ahem), the celebrity, the crime scene, the child’s first IPO, is equally important as enjoying the experience itself, is there a possibility for a new perspective? Despite the vapid hideousness of the fangirls in Frost’s film, is some weird new mutant form of life right now emerging?

Let’s pose it this way: Maybe we’re entering an age when the “true” experience of a thing actually contains taking a photo or video of it. Maybe we are, right now, redefining human experience, adding a new flavor, on the fly and devil-may-care. You think?

We are adding a strange new element. We are saying, “This moment is not really complete unless technology and social sharing are somehow involved.” We are saying, “Who’s to say an experience is any less real, felt, loved, enjoyed or appreciated if I videotape it while it’s happening?” We are saying, ”If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to Instagram it, did it really happen?”

Laugh all you want. Cringe all you can. The Selfie Generation is already there.

• Email: Mark Morford

• Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/09/25/this-short-movie-perfectly-sums-up-the-selfie-generation

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

   (click on the picture to read the news story)

[ssweetpea]

What struck MrSp and I on our recent trip was the number of tourist (mainly of Chinese extration) with "selfie poles" and their little digital point and shoot cameras on the end.

Okay, we also took a couple of selfies. We are old school and used a DSLR on a tripod and the timer delay function

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Do not take a selfie with a rattlesnake

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 7:20AM PDT - Friday, July 24, 2015


Humans! Devising new and impressive ways to humiliate the animal kingdom since, oh, 6000BC.

DID YOU hear the one about the not very bright yoga girl who jumped down into the DC Metro subway tracks to snap a sassy hand-stand pose, oblivious to the extremely electrified, extremely deadly third rail, mere inches away?

How about the one about Disneyland — along with just about every other theme park and major tourist attraction worldwide — banning obnoxious selfie sticks? Because people are sort of dumb? Because some people might think it clever to bring a long metal rod onto, say, a rollercoaster, and right when it’s careening around a curve at 45MPH, out comes the stick and whoops, dropped it, and suddenly the gears jam and the coaster contorts and 50 people are hurled, screaming and WTF, into the other Magic Kingdom? Now that would be a selfie.

The casualties, you can be assured, are mounting. Text-walking, head down and oblivious, straight into a tree, telephone pole, open manhole? Happens every 3.2 seconds, somewhere in America. Following the GPS so blindly that you run the car over a cliff, or straight into the ocean, out into the deep desert, never to be heard from again? Too many times to count.


If Jesus were crucified today? This would TOTALLY go viral.

And of course, “texting while driving” is fast approaching “juggling live grenades” as Most Embarrassing Misuse of Karma.

But that might soon be surpassed. It might just be selfies, more than any other recent human compulsion, affliction, disease, weapon or Republican presidential candidate, that spells our imminent — and, to many, much-deserved — doom.

And why? Because we are, you might say, obsessed with taking photos. Addicted to the point of mental illness, to near-hysteria, to the point where there is no moment of human experience — not birth, not extreme sport, drunken vacation stunt, exalted beauty, dazzling sunset, car crash, hurricane, disaster, gunshot or deep eye gaze with a new lover, that we do not say, “I gotta get a picture of this.”


GoPro or your stunt didn't happen — right, bro? Evs.

Here's the real question: Have we hit a tipping point yet? Will selfies soon join the list, along with guns and heart disease, of preventable tragedies that thin out the American herd the most?

We might be getting close. Behold, yet another tale (it's happened a few times already) of a hapless Mississippi woman and her daughter who, upon encountering a giant, huffing, one-ton bison in Yellowstone National Park, did not think “Let us now get a bit further away from this ginormous, prehistoric animal that can run 40 MPH and gore us like watermelons,” but who instead apparently chanted the new American mantra: “OMG, let's get a selfie!”

Things did not, as you can see from the video below, go well.



But while the American bison is very large and very dangerous, it is not, so far as we know, poisonous. Its bite is not as deathly paralyzing as that of, say, a rattlesnake, such as the one encountered by one Todd Fassler of San Diego not long ago.

Reminder to all readers: What is the proper response when encountering a rattlesnake in the wild? That’s right: Back away slowly, as quickly as possible.


Go ahead. Pick it up. Maybe call 911 first.

What not to do? That's right: Pick up the rattlesnake and try for a selfie, as Fessler reportedly attempted to do.

Fessler is, if the New York Post is to be believed, damn lucky to be alive. His hospital bill? Just north of $150,000, which tells you as much about the abysmal American health care system as it does about Dumbest Selfies in the World.

You're familiar with those dumb warning labels everyone loves to mock? “Surface might be hot” on an iron, “May cause drowsiness” on a box of sleeping pills, “Do not use while sleeping” on a hairdryer?


This is why God invented telephoto lenses, OK?

It might be, sadly enough, smartphones' turn. “Do take selfies with feral wildlife. Do not turn your back on a snorting bison. Rattlesnakes hate your stupid Instagram feed, bro. Taking ‘daredevil’ selfies atop skyscrapers and precarious peaks is for morons and very stupid Russian males.”

More importantly: “Taking a selfie of a moment and experiencing that moment fully are two very different things. Choose wisely.”

And, last but not least: “This phone, its camera and all its apps, will completely cease to function inside a coffin.”


Most Obnoxious Invention of the Decade?


Note: Not Bison. Selfie approved. Go for it.


What, this? No no. This is fine. Totally safe, pleasing to the gods. The *beneficial* kind of selfie. To be encouraged. Carry on.


“Dear dad: For best selfie results, turn camera around!”

• Email: Mark Morford

• Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/07/24/do-not-take-a-selfie-with-a-rattlesnake

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Durango Herald....

Please, no selfies with the bears

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | 8:18PM - Friday, September 11, 2015


Three bear cubs climb a tree Thursday evening at Nancy Horton's River Ranch,
north of Bayfield. A fourth bear cub on the left side of the tree is a sculpture
made by Mancos artist Dave Sipe. — Photograph: Courtesy of Nancy Horton.

LYTTLETON — Suburban Denver's Waterton Canyon remains closed because of foraging bears, and officials say part of the problem is that visitors have been getting close to the animals to take pictures with selfie sticks.

Brandon Ransom, Denver Water's manager of recreation, told KMGH-TV that some visitors to the recreation area had been getting as close as 10 feet to wild bears to try to get a photograph of the animals.

Denver Water and state wildlife officials closed the canyon on August 28th.

The recreation area offers hiking, fishing and horseback riding.

Wildlife officials say two sows with twin cubs each have been foraging in the canyon along with other bears. The canyon is in Littleton.

In New Mexico, state wildlife officials are tracking down a bear that attacked a runner near Los Alamos.

KOB-TV reported the runner encountered a female bear and her cub on a trail Wednesday night and tried to make noise to scare them off. The bear charged him, knocked him into a stream and attacked him.

He was taken to the hospital with deep wounds and scratches.

New Mexico Game and Fish officers were looking for the bear to test it for rabies.

Read more on this topic:

 • Copycat bears

http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20150911/NEWS02/150919903

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Washington man accidentally killed himself
while taking a selfie with his gun, police say

By SARAH KAPLAN | 1:06AM EST - Thursday, March 03, 2016

IT wasn't the first photo the 43-year-old Concrete, Washington resident had taken with his gun. But it would be the last.

The Skagit Valley Herald reported on Wednesday that the man, who officials did not name, fatally shot himself in the face while attempting to take a selfie with what he thought was an unloaded gun.

The man's girlfriend, who was with him when the gun went off, told authorities that the pair had taken several selfies with the gun throughout the day. The man unloaded the gun before each photo session, then replaced the bullets when they were done.

But before the final photograph, he apparently left one bullet inside the gun.

The man's girlfriend was with him when he died, Skagit County Sheriff's Office Chief of Patrol Chad Clark told the Skagit Valley Herald. Police are investigating his death as accidental.

The Washington man is not the first to accidentally shoot himself while taking a selfie, or even the first to die doing so. Last fall, a 19-year-old from Houston died while taking pictures of himself with a gun and posting them on Instagram. He too thought the gun was unloaded when he held it to his head for a photo, police told KPRC.

It has been reported that more people die while attempting to take selfies than in shark attacks.

At least 27 people died in “selfie-related” incidents around the world last year, The Washington Post has reported.

The problem seems to be worse in India than anywhere else: the country was home to half of those 27 deaths. To confront the apparently growing public health hazard, the Indian government decided to ban some selfies outright.

No-selfie zones have been established around some large religious gatherings (where organizers fear that selfie-induced bottlenecks could lead to a stampede), beaches, ledges and other treacherous spots where narcissism might turn deadly.


“A cool selfie can cost you your life,” the Russian interior ministry warned in a brochure advocating safe selfie-taking.
 — Brochure: Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In Russia, where a woman almost died after inadvertently shooting herself while posing for a photo with a gun she had found, Russia's ministry of internal affairs published a brochure instructing citizens on safe selfie habits.

“A selfie with guns kills,” read the warning next to an image of a stick figure holding a camera and a gun, slashed out by a red line.

“Along with all the advantages of the modern world there appear new threats,” Russian official Yelena Alekseyeva said at a press conference, according to CNN. “We would like to remind the citizens that the chase for ‘likes’ in social networks can lead to the road of death.”

• Sarah Kaplan is a reporter for The Washington Post's Morning Mix.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related news story:

 • Bison selfies are a bad idea: Tourist gored in Yellowstone as another photo goes awry

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/03/wash-man-accidentally-killed-himself-while-taking-a-selfie-with-his-gun-police-say

[ssweetpea]

Selfie with gun reminds me of a film - I think it is called Intolerable Cruelty, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Cloony.

It has a scene where an asthmatic hitman pulls out his hand gun with one hand and his inhailer with the other, puts one in his mouth and points the other at his intended victim and pulls the trigger on both... hitting his victim with a spray of Salbutinol...I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of the theatre seat and gave myself an asthma attack. Best bit of the entire movie.

[Alicat]

Selfie with gun reminds me of a film - I think it is called Intolerable Cruelty, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Cloony.

It has a scene where an asthmatic hitman pulls out his hand gun with one hand and his inhailer with the other, puts one in his mouth and points the other at his intended victim and pulls the trigger on both... hitting his victim with a spray of Salbutinol...I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of the theatre seat and gave myself an asthma attack. Best bit of the entire movie.

That was a good movie.