Photo dominos (74)

I used to be active on the photo website Flickr—until I was wooed to the dark side (which would be Facebook). Nowadays, I visit Flickr mainly for photo games. 

One suite of games that I enjoyed back in the day was in a Flickr group called Photo Dominoes. These "dominos" involved just what you might think: posting a photo, and then inviting people to free-associate, one photo after another, for 50 photos, the idea being, if possible, to "close the domino" by posting a #50 that somehow refers back to #1. 

That group has been more or less moribund for months, and in the case of some threads, years (ten in the case of the "Neverending Domino" ☜, which was revived just yesterday). Not long ago I sort of appropriated one of the various dominos—"Special Domino #12: No Rules"—for myself, which meant I got to free-associate using my own photos (the beauty of no rules!). Or at least, I thought that domino was all mine. But then one of the group administrators started popping in every so often with a submission of his own. And lately, some of the other, more rule-bound threads have been reactivated by yet another admin. So all of a sudden, I have several dominoes to think about. Delicious!

Here, for example, are a few recent photos in the No Rules domino, posted alternately by myself and a Brazilian player named ~murilo~:

 

And, skipping a couple of intermediary steps featuring black-and-white grids based on that black door frame, we have arrived here, where the game awaits the next move:

It's fun, and it allows me to sift through my 11,550 photos on the site and relive old times. I keep suggesting to myself that Flickr is actually a very valuable archive and I should still be using it. I do have photos from my last several trips—Madagascar, the Galapagos, Portugal and France, Israel, Italy—yet to sort through (somehow, many of my Antarctica photos managed to make their way into Flickr). One of these days maybe I'll remember and do something about that.

But for now, the site remains good for silly photo games.