As Forrest Gump never said, “Momma told me life is like a box of yams…” Nope that does not work, just the morning brain on free association.
For those not reading ariound here before, my love of taking and sharing photos is not centered in making money or getting anything from my photos, and this is the 9th year in the experiment of what happens when I shared some 70000+ photos under open licenses (the majority CC0)?
Let’s say its Arizona yams showing up in Hungary. Just a moment, I am getting there.
I use the Flickr Pro perk of connecting my photos to Pixsy mainly a site aimed I guess at “going after” people who reuse photos without permission. Since I don’t have anything under the category, it still serves an interesting use for me to get a sense of where the photos have gone. Here’s the stats on my dashboard:
I guess I could speculate about all the piles of cash lost when it indicates 1989 commercial uses. I am not sure what that classification is based on, maybe its one sites it identifies as commercial businesses.
But I get more value out of seeing where the yams have gone. I will reveal!
I comb through the results quickly. A large number are actually hard to find, the web sites listed are gone. Often they appear to have been used as feature images, and the link to an archive has long passed. I cant make any sense of “finds” it reports in Pinterist or LinkedIn. But usually I can find a few real and I add a comment to my own photos identifying the reuse and add the photos to my album of Reused Photos, maybe 250 of them I have tracked.
It’s just curiosity to me and that is the best feeling worth giving some time to play out. Here are three in the latest batch Pixsy reported.
Yams in Hungary
I can see the photo was taken January 20, 2012 in Payson Arizona, I can guess that time of year it was not a farmers market, but a display in the grocery store. Sometime later or maybe it was because of it, I have it assocaited with one of those fun, whacky DS106 Assignment Bank item called “Yam Yarn” — with the detailed directions “Add a yam to your favorite movie and make a picture.”
If you are in a class where you remix images of yams with something from a movie, well it sure feels like 2012.
Pixsy finds it on a post on a site in Hungrary as Hogyan segíthet a mexikói vad yam gyökér a n?knek? or as Google translates “How can Mexican wild yam root help women?” – fascinating as to why a post about yams from 2016 is still available on the web. The site is called “Csapnivaló” (something to catch). I am not 100% sure of the purposes, It’s not encrusted with ads, and seems more publishing links to products for Google SEO juice (as recently as December 4 about mattresses).
It kind of tickles my yam that someone went to the trouble to search, and of all the photos of yams out there, they chose mine. I will not quibble about the lack of attribution, not following the creed of the CC BY licenses. To me licenses are never an enforcer and why do I really care? I’ve for more things to find.
The Mighty Book Tower
It was hard not to take an interesting photo of a series of art pieces I was shown by Andy Forgrave in PIcton, Ontario in a store called Books & Company from a visit in October 2012. I have in my caption notes (this is why I write caption and do not just dump photos named P45237.JPG in flickr) that the store owner told me these were made from discarded books (see also the Book Snake).
its obvious of image interest, this Book Tower snagged almost 25000 views. What do I get for that? A warm feeling… and seeing it put to great use on what Pixsy found in a searchable collection, Bibliography of Articles and Studies Related to Labyrinth Research that includes 187 items. Note the ideal attribution.
The bibliography is organized by the Labyrinth Society a volunteer organization for “all those who create, maintain, and use labyrinths, and to serve the global community by providing education, networking, and opportunities to experience transformation.”
And there is a loose connection, as this wires me back to one of my early web projects at Maricopa, that my own archive keeps as A Web of Labryrinths. This was built to support the teaching ideas of Mythology faculty Liz Warren at South Mountain Community College. She taught her students about the history and meaning of labyrinths in mythology/culture but also the students co-create physical labyrinths on campus.
I was seized by the idea of building a labyrinth. I decided it would be an excellent project for the students who would be taking my Mythology course in the spring of 1995. I had imagined our labyrinth with walls, and thought that we could use wooden stakes and butcher paper to make them cheaply. I didn’t know that most labyrinths are flat, so as to better appreciate the beautiful pattern. When I presented the stake and paper idea to the students, they were unimpressed. They had envisioned their labyrinth as something larger and grander. They wanted fabric walls, which they reasoned could be used again.
https://mcli.cogdogblog.com/smc/labyrinth/project/index.html
Yes, I made a web site, but Liz involved me with the project and the Labyrinth festivals they organized. I ended up seeking them out when I traveled. The Labyrinth metaphor lived a long time for the publication our office did on educational technology in the 1990s at Maricopa.
And it’s still in my mind, as Cori and I have a spot marked on our front field where we plan one day to build our own labyrinth, in fact we refer to that part of property as the “Labyrinth Field”.
This stuff is all interconnected, back and forth through time, the best links.
One more Pixsy find…
Insulin Vials and Student Writing
I took this photo marking the time living in Arizona, where as an independently employed geek, I was so so fortunate to have health care by the [Now Almost Un]Afforable Health Care Act. Still, there were costs to be calculated, and I found it a bit cheaper to order insulin that got shipped to me than the cost from a pharmacy.
A few years later when the Republicans were forming to take ACA down, I started a period of trying to do something I created a web site, powered by a TRU Writer powered SPLOT – the domain I thought was clever 30millionlike.me:
Are you among 30,000,000 Americans who are facing loss of access to affordable healthcare? If not, I bet you know someone who is, because the number of people affected is 15% of the population.
This web site 30millionlike.me was built by one person (me) among many who fear about their future thanks to a new Congress that wishes to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act because… why ?? because they made a campaign statement?
I want those pondering decisions to take away health insurance from 30 million people to know directly the people whose lives they are spinning into undertainty.
If you or someone else you know is facing potential devastation of their health, well-being, and way of living, please encourage them to add their story here.
30millionlike.me archived at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/30million/
It maybe garnered less than 20 stories, but shrug. I tried.
But Pixsy found my 8 vials of insulin photo on a relevant published 2025 post “Insulin: Death by Cost, not Diabetes” From what I can see this is part of the Arak Journal, now in it’s tenth year:
An Anthology of Student Writing at the University of Delaware
Research projects in English 110 are designed to afford students the opportunity to choose and explore complex topics, deepen their knowledge about those subjects, and develop their informed perspectives into thesis-driven essays. The seven winners of this year’s Arak Award have taken full advantage of that opportunity, and we are pleased to share their exemplary work with a wider audience.
https://english.artsci.udel.edu/arak-journal/
This is rather extraordinary, an ongoing program of students in a first year English course doing research, and only a handful of essays are selected to be published, and all of them addressing current topics: “Our winners chose to pursue a range of topics, from safety in national parks, to medical plastic pollution, to religious music in the music education classroom. These authors engaged deeply and personally with challenging topics, and they approached those topics in nuanced ways.”
This is an astounding project by the English department at the University of Delaware– hold the bus! That is where I did my undergraduate degree (Geology BS85)! What a wonderful coincidence I chose to look at this reuse of the photo (there are like 10 more).
I could do this all day 😉 It’s not just my own ego I am stroking here, but I see all of these as trend breaking examples of the ongoing rant of how ruined the web is and everything is a burning pile of poop.
In just one hour I have dived into just a tiny fraction of living, breathing web sites doing with the founder first intended. It’s the SmallWeb that’s alive and well. Get out of the Big Box Social Media Malls, and go exploring.
Be more yam on the web. y’all.
Featured Image: Yam Yam Yam flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license
