I’ll be posting my photo archives 5 pix at a time. These are either currently online somewhere else, or used to be until my previous webserver – actually a friend’s – went down. (No Bryce, it wasn’t yours!) I’ll post new photos when I’m finished with the archives.

I’ll post artwork whenever I’m in the mood. Expect lots of updates about my video game because I’ve finally solved a huge bunch of issues re: character design a few days ago… so there will be concept art and even actual ingame art.

The first five pics from the archives are right behind the cut. I think I’ll put an image tag cloud/list in the right sidebar, too.

These photos are from 2005 when I started my photo blog at Livejournal. I love ranting about photos, so each photo had a quite long bilingual writeup. In retrospect, the Hungarian version was completely unnecessary, since pretty much anyone who was interested in my photos spoke English anyway, and it was very time-consuming to write descriptions twice.  After a while I got annoyed and just dropped the whole thing due to lack of time. It was also very annoying to try to keep some semblance order among the pictures, but I think the tag cloud now might just do the trick.

I think I like NextGEN Gallery’s default settings, they are sufficiently unobtrusive for my tastes… but I think I need tags to be displayed under each image popup, I’ll have to find a way to do that.

I’m pasting the original writeups here. My new comments are in square brackets.

Rumbach Street Synagogue:

This amazing facade is hidden in a narrow alleyway. Worse still, the actual building behind the facade is crumbling away even as I type this, because of an ownership debate. The huge synagogue is empty (save the debris) and unused. One party claims ownership but wants the state to restore the building, the other wants to purchase it from the state and restore it using its own funds, while the state… erm, does nothing. They say the two parties – two Jewish communities – should agree on matters first of all. [Reconstruction has been in progress since 2007, I haven't seen the results since I've moved away from Budapest... but if you're there, the Budapest Urbanist Association has an exhibition about the reconstruction.]

Rabbi Shlomo Köves:

This photo was shot at the circumcision of Bálint Nógrádi’s son Yosef Yitzchak, nine months ago, where Shlomo doubled as mohel. Action shot!! ;]

Vote!

The poster is a voting announcement from a 2004 referendum regarding the Hungarian citizenship status of Hungarians living abroad. (I made this photo back then.) The thing to the left is a selective trash collecting tray used for collecting paper – every house in our district has one. They shouldn’t be stored on streets but rather inside the house, but no one really cares and they linger on the streets, getting filled up with assorted yuck day after day.

What on earth is this?

It’s a piece of exterior decoration I’ve found in an alley in downtown Vienna. I wanted to post something abstract for a change, and, well, you don’t get more abstract than this LOL.

I have a pile of Vienna photos, too. I’ll upload one every once in a while but I’ll be concentrating on Budapest for the time being. I have taken a few photos in the new mikvah, and I’ll start posting them tomorrow. (I hope those of you fasting have had an easy fast today! I have survived, in any case – the weather has been fairly cool compared to the usual run this time of the year.)

The Seat of Prophet Eliyahu:

This photo was taken on the uppermost floor of the old mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) which is practically in ruins. Let me explain: the building on Kazinczy street which houses the new mikvah used to be filled with mikvaot but that is no longer the case. Only the new – women’s – mikvah on the ground floor functions, and there is also a men’s mikvah that is still used but is in rather bad shape, on the first floor. This image shows the second floor that hasn’t been used since the war.

Tomorrow you will see what the brand new mikvah looks like.

Eliyahu has nothing much to do with mikvaot, BTW. On every circumcision there is an empty chair that is traditionally reserved for the prophet Eliyahu’s invisible presence, so seeing this empty chair amidst all that rubble (there is even worse stuff, not visible on the photo) reminded me of that.

Anyway, while I was searching for a WordPress theme I came across the nastiest idea how to make money off your free theme, I thought I’d share (I was so angry!).

1. Make a super spiffy website with your theme
2. Make the theme available for free
3. Require a registration to access theme documentation
4. Let the registration have two levels, free and “premium” (i.e., paid)
5. Have users register….
6. ….to find out all of the documentation is “premium content”

I think this is really dishonest (especially since the theme was trickier than most WordPress themes, which usually don’t really need documentation… though IMO everything benefits from a few well-placed comments in the code, and WordPress is no exception). Why not just ask people to pay up front? Sheesh. Anyway, I settled for a different theme, Aerodrome. This also has a premium version, but I actually like the free version better, so I’m quite pleased, at least for the time being.

I hope no one is bored by my choice of brushes for the header art, but I really like both Dot Splatter and Splat Circles. I’ll try not to use them on a fourth site ;]

I’ve come up with a set of categories that will hopefully partition the set of my interests, in the mathematical sense… though I can already see “sci” and “tech” and also “game” and “art” overlapping. But I don’t want to use tags for something that basic, because then I’d end up with a million posts tagged with “sci” and “art” etc. and it would make the tag cloud useless.

I’ll try to post something in each category relatively soon, we’ll see how it goes… I think I’ll write a kind of introduction/assessment for each category, just to summarize what kinds of things I will post, what will be posted where, etc.