Filtered Photo Quotes

In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laugher, shoes lined up together dy the door. Eyes across a dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found nothing was there.

A problem with living in the twenty-first century..... we are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have only been to ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photo shopped and filtered.

I feel guilty looking at those "People of Walmart" photos you see on the Internet. It's not cool to make fun of pitiful people. You really think anyone who wasn't batshit crazy would walk out of the house in a camouflage mankini and a Confederate flag ball cap to go buy some new furnace filters? No, he's cray-cray.

one thing I do know for sure is that people’s lives are not always as perfect as the filtered photos or edited statuses they post on Facebook.

What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply didn’t exist. It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion. It’s telling that the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe.

Ma’s Instagram profile is classic Ma. She heavily filters photos of meals and selfies. She’s a total abuser of hashtags. #It #Is #Really #Hard #To #Read #Entire #Captions #Like #This. She noticed when I stopped following her.

In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticize romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones, and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets, and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Eyes across a dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found that nothing was there. A mirage.

How many times have you stopped midsentence to ask a waiter to take a photo and then spent the next five minutes fucking with filters to post it on Instagram? It’s as if we have this strange obsession with proving to the world that we are, in fact, cool. Look, I’m totally guilty of this, and I’m not sure I ever intend to stop. It’s just the culture we live in now, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

No, I have no online presence. The internet is a hoax.” “A hoax.” I arched a brow. “Tell me more.” “It isn’t real. At best, it’s a bunch of people showing off filtered photos of their lives and pretending they’re happier than they actually are. At worst, it’s a virtual townhall to bitch and moan and treat opinions like facts instead of the polished turds that they are.

The human heart was created in the context of the perfection of the garden of Eden. But we don’t live there now. This is why our instincts keep firing off the lie that perfection is possible. We have pictures of perfection etched into the very DNA of our souls. We chase it. We angle our cameras trying to catch it. We take twenty shots hoping to find it. And then even our good photos have to be color corrected, filtered, and cropped. We do our very best to make others think this posted picture is the real deal. But we all know the truth. We all see the charade. We all know the emperor is naked. But there we are, clapping on the sidelines, following along, playing the game. Trying to believe that maybe, just maybe, if we get close to something that looks like perfection it will help us snag a little of its shine for ourselves. But we know even the shiniest of things is headed in the direction of becoming dull. New will always eventually become old. Followers unfollow. People who lift us up will let us down. The most tightly knit aspects of life snag, unravel, and disintegrate before our very eyes. And we are epically disappointed. But we aren’t talking about it.

The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

Then, on impulse, I scroll back through my previous Instagram posts, looking at the photos of London cafes, sights, drinks, and smiling faces (mostly strangers). The whole thing is like a feel-good movie, and what's wrong with that? Loads of people use colored filters or whatever on Instagram. Well, my filter is the “this is how I'd like it to be” filter. It's not that I lie. I was in those places, even if I couldn't afford a hot chocolate. It's just I don't dwell on any of the not-so-great stuff in my life, like the commute or the prices or having to keep all my stuff in a hammock. Let alone vanilla-whey-coated eggs and abnoxious lechy flatmates. And the point is, it's something to aspire to, something to hope for. One day my life will match my Instagram posts. One day.

And they would avoid posting anything that perpetuated some of the new unhealthy trends on the app. They would never post a photo of anybody near a cliff, no matter how beautiful, because they knew that gaining a following on Instagram was becoming so desirable that people were risking their lives for perfect shots.

right now everyone is on their phones. Everyone has that ‘me, me, me instant gratification’ shit going on and so when the going gets rough in a relationship, as it always does, they bail. They bail because they have a million other people on their phone, on those fucking apps, all waiting for a hook-up or a date. A million people around the corner, with their perfect filtered photos uploaded, their bios updated and edited so they all represent the perfect fake versions of themselves. So even when you’re on a date with one person, you can look at your phone and go to the next person, have your fun, then go to the next. It’s not fucking dating man, it’s shopping.

It’s that right now everyone is on their phones. Everyone has that ‘me, me, me instant gratification’ shit going on and so when the going gets rough in a relationship, as it always does, they bail. They bail because they have a million other people on their phone, on those fucking apps, all waiting for a hook-up or a date. A million people around the corner, with their perfect filtered photos uploaded, their bios updated and edited so they all represent the perfect fake versions of themselves. So even when you’re on a date with one person, you can look at your phone and go to the next person, have your fun, then go to the next. It’s not fucking dating man, it’s shopping.

My mother is the same shade as Oprah or Maya. Some summers I have seen my big brother almost as brown as Idris but closer to Obama in the winter. Bob Marley was mixed, Jamaican and Celtic, same as me, his shade looks pale in some photos, sometimes much darker. You see, it all depends on the filter and the time of year, it all depends on the light, it all depends on the shade. It depends on what point people are trying to make, to advertise things, to sell you things, to make money.

It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Eyes across the dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found that nothing was there. A mirage.

Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves. "Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.

It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app—the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: “We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”7 The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. I know that seems simple, that the marketing lesson from Instragram is that they made a product that was just awesome. But that’s good news for you—it means there’s no secret sauce, and the second your product gets to be that awesome, you can see similar results. Just look at Snapchat, which essentially followed the same playbook by innovating in the mobile photo app space, blew up with young people, and skyrocketed to a $3.5-billion-dollar valuation with next-to-no marketing.

I come across a photo of a woman holding a surfboard on a beach. ‘Could I curl up in bed with you and watch TV? Could we travel together? Will you make me laugh on my darkest days? Will you be forgiving of my cellulite?’ I ask her photo. Her bio says, ‘I went to Paris for lunch once and I regret nothing.’ I love her instantly. Though I am also intimidated by her. Perhaps she will be my new extrovert guide. The app works like all the others: you swipe right on the people you want to meet (people with pets, people eating tacos) and swipe left on the people you’d rather skip (people at Glastonbury). I start off tentatively, trying to give attention to each woman, but soon become a callous lothario from swiping fatigue. Snapchat filters that transform you into cute animals in every photo? Next! Interests include spirituality and mindfulness? Next! Only kissy selfies? Next!

Systrom and Krieger didn’t want any of this to be on Instagram and knew, as the site got bigger, that they wouldn’t be able to comb through everything to delete the worst stuff manually. After just nine months, the app already hosted 150 million photos, with users posting 15 photos per second. So they brainstormed a way to automatically detect the worst content and prevent it from going up, to preserve Instagram’s fledgling brand. “Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.

The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7

Excuse me,” someone said, interrupting a lively discussion about whom they’d each buy a drink for in the cantina. The whole line looked up. There were two women standing on the sidewalk with bakery boxes. One of them cleared her throat. “We heard that people were camping out for Star Wars . . .” “That’s us!” Troy said, only slightly less enthusiastically than he’d said it yesterday. “Where’s everybody else?” she asked. “Are they around the back? Do you do this in shifts?” “It’s just us,” Elena said. “We’re the Cupcake Gals,” the other woman said. “We thought we’d bring Star Wars cupcakes? For the line?” “Great!” Troy said. The Cupcake Gals held on tight to their boxes. “It’s just . . .” the first woman said, “we were going to take a photo of the whole line, and post it on Instagram . . .” “I can help you there!” Elena said. Those cupcakes were not going to just walk away. Not on Elena’s watch. Elena took a selfie of their line, the Cupcake Gals and a theater employee all holding Star Wars cupcakes—it looked like a snapshot from a crowd— and promised to post it across all her channels. The lighting was perfect. Magic hour, no filter necessary. #CupcakeGals #TheForceACAKEns #SalaciousCrumbs The Gals were completely satisfied and left both boxes of cupcakes. “This is the first time I’ve been happy that there were only three of us,” Elena said, helping herself to a second cupcake. It was frosted to look like Chewbacca. “You saved these cupcakes,” Gabe said. “Those women were going to walk away with them.” “I know,” Elena said. “I could see it in their eyes. I would’ve stopped at nothing to change their minds.” “Thank God they were satisfied by a selfie then,” Gabe said. His cupcake looked like Darth Vader, and his tongue was black. “I’m really good at selfies,” Elena said. “Especially for someone with short arms.” “Great job,” Troy said. “You’ll make someone a great provider someday.” “That day is today,” Elena said, leaning back against the theater wall. “You’re both welcome.” “Errrggh,” Troy said, kicking his feet out. “Cupcake coma.” “How many did you eat?” Gabe asked. “Four,” Troy said. “I took down the Jedi Council. Time for a little midday siesta—the Force asleepens.

- How do you like my new photo with dog filter in snapchat? - Oh, this was a filter? I should say you don’t even need a dog filter, dude!

An old framed photo on my mother’s bureau pops into my mind: My parents standing on a tour boat against white rails, close but not touching. The Statue of Liberty in the background. My mother is graceful and thin with a sari draped over one shoulder and pulled modestly like a shawl around her back. My father, bushy haired and smiling, squints in the sun. The hopes and ambitions they must’ve had, newly married and in love. How impossible it would’ve been for those two young people to envision where their lives would lead them. I want to walk into the picture, take their hands, and say that there will be incredible and heartbreaking changes ahead, but that their lives here will be good.

With a comprehensive overview of the properties, advanced filters, rates, availability and both aggregated and native reviews, photos (and a worldwide coverage), why should a user exit the Google SERP and go on an OTA or (God forbid!) a brand.com?

Mac Photo Editor PixelStyle is an excellent photo editor for Mac with a huge range of high-end filters to eidt, retouch, enhance photos on Mac.

You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos, where you go on that vacation. It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon.

The biggest photo in the center of the page was of a gorgeous blond dog named Hudson who was posed with a smile and an irresistible head tilt. He looked like a Disney character brought to life, complete with a starry-eyed expression and a filtered halo of sunlight around his head. At first glance she thought he was pure yellow Lab, but the dark muzzle and oversized ears suggested that there was something houndy mixed in his DNA.

You agree that a business may pay Instagram to display your photos in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions without any compensation to you. It certainly sounded like Instagram was going to try to profit off the budding prominence of its photographers and artists. But Krieger and Systrom were just as shocked as the users were.

In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8 Future Feelings In a recent series of experiments conducted in our laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, we’ve explored unconscious nervous system responses to future events. Strictly speaking, such responses are a subset of precognition known as “presentiment,” a vague sense or feeling of something about to occur but without any conscious awareness of a particular event.9 The unconscious responses studied in our experiments took advantage of a well-known psychophysical reflex known as the “orienting response,” first described by Pavlov in the 1920s. The orienting response is a set of physiological changes experienced by an organism when it faces a “fight or flight” situation. For human beings, the response also appears in less dangerous contexts, such as when confronting a novel or unexpected stimulus. The classical orienting response is a series of simultaneous bodily changes that include dilation of the pupil, altered brain waves, a rise in sweat gland activity, a rise/fall pattern in heart rate, and blanching of the extremities.10 These bodily changes momentarily sharpen our perceptions, improve our decision-making abilities, increase our strength, and reduce the danger of bleeding. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because when our ancestors were challenged by a tiger, the ones who survived were suddenly able to see and hear exceptionally well, make very fast decisions, become unusually strong, and not bleed as easily as usual. It’s relatively easy to produce an orienting response on demand by showing a person an emotionally provocative photograph. Stimuli like noxious odors, meaningful words, electrical shocks, and sudden tactile stimuli are also effective. Because a person’s general level of arousal is affected cumulatively by successive stimuli, the strength of the orienting response tends to diminish after three to five emotional pictures in a row. In our study, to prevent participants from “habituating,” we randomly interspersed the photos used to produce the orienting responses within a pool of twice as many calm photos.

When I look back, Elizabeth Duncan's trial is linked inextricably in my mind to the sound of my father's voice--his dramatic, profanity-laced, sometimes humorous stories about witness testimony and crazy antics in the courtroom. Stories of blackmail, a Salvation Army man and a phony annulment, too many husbands to count, and Mrs. Duncan breathing fire to the end, often told in snatches between more chaotic attempts at home repair. I read every work of his newspaper articles, and I scrutinized the front page photos of all the trial participants. But his nightly accounts brought the bizarre and brutal characters to life around our dining room table. Daddy had no filter. I hung on every detail of his spellbinding tales, and although I'd never met any of these people, I knew them all very well.

Snapchat has a lot less social pressure attached to it compared to every other popular social media network out there. This is what makes it so addicting and liberating. If I don’t get any likes on my Instagram photo or Facebook post within 15 minutes you can sure bet I'll delete it. Snapchat isn't like that at all and really focuses on creating the Story of a day in your life, not some filtered/altered/handpicked highlight. It’s the real you.

Photos of leisure time are the new status symbols. People line up for hours to buy giant rainbow cotton candy at the Totti Candy Factory in Tokyo, or go to Purl bar in London for a cocktail served with a helium balloon or billowing honey fog, or pursue vacations in more picturesque settings like Iceland and Bali.

These feelings can promote a ‘compare and despair’ attitude in young people. Individuals may view heavily photo-shopped, edited or staged photographs and videos and compare them to their seemingly mundane lives.

I Am a Tinder Guy Holding a Fish and I Will Provide for You Photo No. 1 Behold my mackerel. I have caught it for you and it is for you to eat. Love me, for I shall fill your dinner table with many fish such as this one in the days to come. During our time together, you will never go hungry or fear famine. You will never want for trout, salmon, or otherwise. I will sustain you with my love and with my fish. Photo No. 2 As you may have suspected, my talents do not end at fishing. I excel in many areas. Working out, for instance. In this picture I display for you my abdomen. Abdomens are important for fishing excursions and mirror selfies, such as this one. I flex for you. What do you think? Photo No. 3 To get a better idea of me, here is a closeup selfie of my face with a high-contrast filter. In it, I make an expression like that young boy star Justin Bieber, but, rest assured, I am a man. I crease my forehead and raise my eyebrows, like a man. In my gaze, you can see the soul of a man. My mouth is as straight as the line I will walk for you. Peer into the depths of my heart, a small ocean of the meatiest haddock. Photo No. 4 Feast your eyes upon my Mitsubishi. In it, we will traverse the continent running your errands. Tell me about an appointment and I will offer you a ride faster than anyone has ever offered before. This and many other adventures await us. Name an ocean and I will drive to it and fish for you there. The farthest reaches of the shoreline are within our grasp. Photo No. 5 Worry not about the woman with the face scribbled out in this picture of me in formal wear. She is no one. Cast your eyes upon me as I might cast a fishing line into a bountiful river. Look unto my face, for it is chiseled. This is the face of a man who would never scribble out your face and upload the picture onto a dating app. This is the face of a man with an abdomen rock-hard and fishing rods numerous. Photo No. 6 Now I am spreading my arms wide in front of a landscape. Behold my mountain, my sky, my clouds, my wingspan. These are the arms with which I will hold you during long, dark nights. I will claim you as I have claimed this landscape, as I have claimed myriad salmon. I will fight for you as I have fought for the right to so many weight machines already in use by someone else at the Y.M.C.A. My arms ache for you, and I have nothing left but to stretch them out and fly home to your heart. For mine are the wings of an albatross that shall descend upon the water’s surface, pluck out the ripest flounder, and place it at your feet as a small offering of my love, if you swipe right.

When you've got your devices down to the ideal number, use these tips to minimize them and prevent distractions: - Remove as many icons from your desktop as possible. - Uninstall software you don't need. - Delete unneeded files from your Documents folder. (If you don't want to delete them completely, at least move them to an archive folder so they don't clutter your most-used folder anymore.) - Develop a simple but logical folder structure so that you can find documents you want easily. - Unsubscribe to blogs, email newsletters, and advertisements that no longer serve your interests. - Delete internet bookmarks, cookies, and temporary internet files you no longer need. - Delete apps you don't need, remembering that if you need them later, you can always download them again. Put only your most crucial apps (such as your calendar and your phone) on your home screen. Put the rest in folders on your second screen. - Turn off notifications, including social media push notifications and email audio alerts. - Make sure your spam filters are working. - Delete photos that are of poor quality or that you don't need. - Delete unused music and movies. - Subscribe to a password manager so that you don't have to keep track of a bunch of passwords.

Halfway through the day, Megan started dicking around on the internet. She made her browser window as small as she could, paused for a second, and then looked up “Carrie Wilkins.” She found Carrie’s website, and on it, this bio: Hi, my name’s Carrie. I’m 26. I make things. I paint and I write, but mostly I design. I like to make things beautiful, or creative. I make my own food and I’m trying to grow my own beets. A lot of people around me seem unhappy and I don’t understand why. I freelance because I know I’d go insane if I couldn’t make my own schedule—I believe variety is the zest of life. I know I want a dog someday soon, and sometimes I make lunch at 3 a.m. I believe in the power of collaboration, and I’d love to work with you! What a total asshole. What does she have, some kind of a pact with Satan? The picture next to Carrie’s bio had some kind of heavy filter on it that made it look vintage, and she had a friendly but aloof look on her face. She was flanked on both sides by plants and was wearing an oxford shirt with fancy shorts and had a cool necklace. It was an outfit, for sure, like all of Carrie’s clothes were outfits, which Megan always thought of as outdated or something only children did. The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy. And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little captions about how the products inspired her. Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out, but since it was an ad, there was no real way to smell the person and judge for yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated, hated most of all. I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrator? This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies! “Everything okay?” asked Jillian. “Yeah, what?” “Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were okay and everything.” “Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan. “It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?” “What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan. How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy? What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of twenty-yearolds, particularly, when this was the time in life when things were even more acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?

When I got back to my room, the people upstairs were having sex again. Rhythmic thumping against the wall. I hated it, but then I felt bad, because maybe it was two people in love. In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Eyes across a dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found that nothing was there. A mirage.

She sat back down to upload the photo to his various accounts, busying herself with a process she called “filtering the shit out of it.

In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticize romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones, and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets, and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Across every dance floor. I could see it, all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found nothing was there. A mirage.

The “Bring Newton Home” social media accounts had evidently gone into meltdown when the news of his recover had filtered through—well-wishers from all around the world had posted photos of themselves jumping for joy and holding NEWTON IS HOME!!! posters—and it seemed the little dog had become something of a celebrity, both at home and abroad.

Whether we are aware of it or not, there is a good likelihood that any preferences for how your body looks are shaped by media-influenced ideals.8 If you are surrounded by highly air-brushed photos in magazines, heavily filtered images on social media and TV programmes featuring wealthy celebrities who can afford cosmetic surgery procedures to keep them looking as slim and youthful as possible, it can make you feel a bit shit about yourself by comparison, you know?

IF YOU HAVE TO AIRBRUSH YOUR PHYSIQUE, YOU'RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG. SOCIAL MEDIA PHOTO FILTERS ARE THE MODERN-DAY BALACLAVA. IF YOU GO MISSING, EVERYONE'S GOING TO BE LOOKING FOR ANGELINA JOLIE, WHEN THEY SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR A BULLDOG CHEWING A WASP

Being seventeen in a modern world was tough enough without the introduction of so many different social media platforms. I often wished I had been born in a time before technology was such a devastatingly huge part of our everyday lives. I didn’t totally hate it—what teenager really wanted to live without their phone, after all—but every time I opened an app, I was reminded of just how much I didn’t fit in with the rest of the world. The false hair; faces caked in makeup; photos edited with ten different filters — everyone looked the same, and I didn’t look anything like them. I didn’t like drinking, partying or social gatherings; I was boring in their eyes and, if I was honest, in my own eyes too. It was cruel, really, for people to be subjected to such falseness.

Campaigns A “humble campaign” is very similar to Sean and Alan’s approach: launch a small campaign as your first project to learn the ropes, then launch a more ambitious project later. Humble campaigns aren’t meant to raise $100,000+ from thousands of backers, though. They have humble ambitions. Not only is this good for running the campaign itself, but it also gives you the opportunity to learn how to create and ship something without the pressure of thousands of backers. The other benefit of a humble campaign is that it’s not as all consuming as a big, complex project. You might actually get to sleep and eat on a regular schedule during a humble campaign. A prime example of a humble campaign is Michael Iachini’s light card game, Otters. In a postmortem blog post6 following his successful campaign ($5,321 raised from 246 backers), Michael outlined the five core elements of a humble campaign: • Low funding goal Keep the product simple and find a way to produce it in small print runs. • Paid graphic design Just because a campaign is humble doesn’t mean it shouldn’t look polished and professional. • Creative Commons art The cards in Otters feature photos of actual otters downloaded from Google Images using a filter for images that are available for reuse (even for commercial purposes, pending credit to the photographers). • Efficient marketing Instead of spending every waking hour on social media, Michael targeted specific reviewers and offered them prototype copies of Otters before the campaign. All he had to do during the campaign was share the reviews when they went live. • Limited expandability Michael offered exactly two stretch goals (compared with dozens for many other projects) and one add-on. In doing so, he intentionally limited the growth potential for the project. You might read this and wonder why you would want to run a humble campaign for $12K or $5K when you create something that could raise $100K. Aside from the standard cautionary tales about letting a project spiral out of control, maintaining a manageable project is like having a summer internship before jumping into a career at an unknown organization. It gives you the chance to poke around, experience the pros and cons firsthand, and make a few mistakes without jeopardizing your entire future.

It has been well established that television, films, and magazines distort people’s standards and perception of beauty.748 The photoshopped and filtered photos online and in magazines create an unrealistic expectation of beauty that is unattainable by anyone.749 Pornography has even more devastating effects on viewers. Watching porn literally rewires the brain in what is called neuroplastic change, and gradually affects the release of dopamine. Psychiatrist Norman Doidge says, “Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them.”750 What this means is that frequent porn watchers develop a “tolerance” similar to drug users, and then require harder (and weirder) porn in order for the same amount of dopamine to be released.751 Many regular porn watchers become unable to maintain erections during sex with an actual person, similar to how a drug addict is unable to get a good buzz from an average dose of whatever their drug of choice is.

I smiled to myself; actually, that wasn’t a bad story. But like so many of the other photos I was looking at, it would have stripped away so much and been all veneer, no substance—an illusion, life through a filtered looking glass.

My life isn’t a status update or a nicely filtered photo. It’s real.

National Geographic wrote about how Instagram was changing travel: visits to Trolltunga, a photogenic cliff in Norway, increased from 500 a year in 2009 to 40,000 a year in 2014. "What photos of this iconic vista don't reveal is the long line of hikers weaving around the rocky terrain each morning, all waiting for their chance to capture their version of the Instagram-famous shot," the magazine wrote.

You know what the problem is?” I tell him, gesturing to the bar, which is quite busy for a Thursday night. “It’s that right now everyone is on their phones. Everyone has that ‘me, me, me instant gratification’ shit going on and so when the going gets rough in a relationship, as it always does, they bail. They bail because they have a million other people on their phone, on those fucking apps, all waiting for a hook-up or a date. A million people around the corner, with their perfect filtered photos uploaded, their bios updated and edited so they all represent the perfect fake versions of themselves. So even when you’re on a date with one person, you can look at your phone and go to the next person, have your fun, then go to the next. It’s not fucking dating man, it’s shopping.