Some may be aware that the art installation of thousands of LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge recently went dark with no word on if or when the display might ever return.
Here’s a link.
(Sorry it’s written out but all the options like italics and hyperlinks are all missing from the site currently.)
BUT TONIGHT THEY ARE BACK ON!
What’s really weird is I can find absolutely NOTHING on the web about this. I only know it’s lit back up again because I can see it from all my windows.
ETA: I just took a picture but I don’t want to set up a picture-sharing account on google or whatever just for this
(I forget how to make it show up here in this post).
Also, just to reiterate—the interesting thing to me, and the reson I started this thread–is NOT that the lights are back on (interesting if you’re in SF but otherwise???) but that I can find nothing about it. Nothing on Twitter or InstaFace or whatever. Nothing from any of the local media. And two of the main TV stations here (KPIX-5 and KGO-7) are headquarted within 100 yards of me so they also face right out onto the Bay and the Bridge. If I worked at either of them I would have immediately had the news up on the website. Wierd.
That’s a bummer that it’s a glitch. I always liked those lights, and they dressed up the workmanlike Bay Bridge.
I’d heard on the news that the lights were shutting down and they were looking for donations to keep them on. From the thread title I thought they’d secured funding for the lights, but, alas, no.
RE: the thread title–when I looked out my window and saw them on again my first thought was that TPTB (the artist and the City) must have decided they’d turn the imperfect lights back on–even if in a slightly degraded appearance, with patches of non-working lights–until funding could be secured for the renovations.
But that was just a guess so I immediately went to the web to see what the deal is but I could find nothing anywhere. That’s what led to me creating this thread. Not even a random tweet about it for hours, I think.
So, I made the thread title not yet knowing that it’s some glitch that’s turning them on, not a deliberate decision. Make’s me a bit sad. I liked my momentary idea of them bringing back the lights, imperfect though they might be. Because even a bit broken, the display is too nice to turn off, warts and all.
This somewhat suggests the glitch is making the lights turn on and off randomly. But looking out at it right this moment I can report that’s it’s operating just like it always has–unique and unpredictable displays.
But, it also has serval sections where the lights don’t work (like they haven’t since I’ve lived here) resulting in some square dark patches.
To have the pic show up as a visible picture, just put the url of the picture on a line by itself with no surrounding punctuation. The hard part when the image is on an image sharing site is you need the url of the picture, not the url of a page containing the picture. And often the image sharing site doesn’t make that easy: they want to show ads & such to visitors, not host pictures for free.
This is what happens when I post the same url you did on a line by itself:
Because that’s a link to a page, not a pic, Google generates an intro that Discourse shows us.
The problem is that when I try to follow your url, I get a Google log-on prompt. Which suggests to me that you didn’t make the photo publicly available so Google won’t show that photo to anyone but you.
The process for setting the photo to publicly available and/or getting a link to the photo that’s publicly available differs on each brand of phot-sharing site. But needs to be done if you want someone to see your handiwork.
A thorough explanation. On imgur, it’s easy to get a link to the page with the picture (which is called an album), but not so intuitive to get the URL for a given picture.
On my iPhone, opening the album and then a long press on the picture yields the ability to copy the URL for the picture.
When I provide the URL to the album, it shows the first picture but it’s a little truncated. The viewer has to click on the album, and they’re taken to imgur.com where they can view the picture. A bit clunky and not as clean for you, the viewer. But when I provide the picture’s URL, that URL ends with ‘.jpg’ and Discourse (this board’s software) shows the full picture, not truncated.
Here are examples. The first is the album and the second is the picture.
