Poynter.org published an interesting article by Sree Sreenivasan about web-based photo editors. These alternatives to Photoshop are not only a way to save $600, (or the trouble of finding a pirated copy, which I in no way endorse), but also mark the advent of full-featured web applications, accessible from any computer. This means traveling without your computer (why would you ever do that?) won’t prevent you from editing photos.

It also means people are finally finding better things to do with Flash than create annoying and ostentatious website intro animations.

Fauxto is one of four services mentioned in Sreenivasan’s article. The free app offers multi-layer image editing, text generation, and a few filters. Billed as “definitely in development and way beta,” it’s already showing some real potential.

I can’t wait for more of these to start popping up. Imagine a future in which your hard drive is squeaky clean because all the apps you use are online. Though it doesn’t yet support Mac’s Safari browser, the MS Word replacement Google Docs is another cool free web app.

Give Fauxto a try here.

I like to support my friends.

One of my friends is a really good film maker with so much potential it’s scary. His ideas are really good.

He makes horror / creepy movies, but not stupid, pointless ones. He likes to include the twist ending, which I am a big fan of. It makes me feel like it was worth sitting through a film to get a surprise at the end.

Anyway, check out my friend’s short movie here at On the Lot. Sign up and leave him some feedback, too, unless you’re scared.

I don’t really like watching movies. I think it’s my borderline ADD or something, but I just always feel like I’m wasting time.

I like telling people that, too. Some people won’t even know how to talk to you after they find out you don’t like to watch movies. You know the kind: the psuedo amateur film critic, who thinks watching two or three DVDs every night makes their opinion more educated or somehow otherwise superior to anyone else’s.

Watching the credits and memorizing the names of the director, best boy and key grip does not make you an expert, and does not make your opinion important to me.

Anyway, saying I don’t watch movies seemingly robs these people of every piece of interesting conversation they thought they had up their sleeve, and I find that fun to watch–more so than a movie. This is particularly interesting to me because it is usually these same people who self-righteously claim not to watch TV.

They imply it’s beneath them to watch television, yet their whole set of social skills revolves around films other people have made.

A white family watches the tube in 1957.

TV is cool. Let’s bring it back.

Reference this post, if you need to, and then read the following mail I got from Zade this morning:

I cleaned my computer screen today I always thought your computer was just brighter, but I guess mine is equally as bright when it doesnt have fingerprints on it !!!!

-Zade

I love my funny kid.