Date: 01/22/2024
Mood: distracted
Listening to: Na Moey Zemle - Arkona
An alt way to find images:
If you are annoyed by Instagram and Twitter sourced images, I have a few tips of how to find better stuff. I highly suggest learning how to use a desktop device to do these things. Mobile equivalent methods are inconvenient and slower to do this through. Or outright give different results that aren't as good. I highly suggest using an ad blocker, script blocker, and maybe even a VPN to prevent "local near you" results, Google invasion of data, and prying Russian sites collecting data, which will matter as you'll see. I always use a VPN doing this.
I have three suggestions that aren't the most common ideas. Because, I'll be real: Pinterest sucks to use and save images from. You guys are nuts for this and I'll never understand modern fandom accepting this utter suffering. It's clunky, awkward, terrible, loads extremely poorly on desktop, often has broken links or improper links to expired caches, and sometimes you get Satan's "jfif" files. Girl, bye on this one. Why are you torturing yourself with damned Pinterest?
I have more dignity than this. But then again, I'm from another fandom era entirely of old hags. I am over 30. I come from the era before Twitter, tumblr, Facebook ever existed. When I was in junior high and high school, MySpace was popular. I used Livejournal at its peak in junior/high school. I remember when fanfics were searchable with !exclamations and why this format of tagging exists. Many people do not understand what the ! was for. I am from old Internet's last dying breath. The last good sunset on that time period. We're built different in how we view obtaining photos because back then there was no "centralized search page" for this type of thing like Pinterest. You couldn't just type things into a tumblr search bar for 500+ pics and gifs. We learned to work around this ourselves with creative methods of sharing and gathering things. Making us more willing to jump hoops for content by default instead of expecting some website to drip feed it to us in a collective math and code "for you" page. If you wanted pics, you got your ass out there and hunted it down from every page on the Internet.
1. It's time to learn some Russian
How to type and read Paul's first/last name in Russian: Пауль Ландерс
I'll be nice and give you everyone else too:
Schneider, Кристоф Шнайдер
Olli, Оливер Ридель
Richard, Рихард Круспе
Till, Тилль Линдеманн
Flake, Кристиан Лоренц
This is going to be your lifeboat and keyword from now on. Get used to the Cyrillic shapes now and memorize the way it reads. Why? Because Russian resources > English or even German at this rate of a dying Internet that becomes centralized and broken as hell.
This is for several causes:
-VK.com is easier to navigate than Facebook and is searchable. you can browse entire galleries without being forced to log in. (Russia may change this someday, but for now...) Give it a try. Search Пауль Ландерс on VK.com. Have fun for 20,000 hours! It's better than the way Pinterest runs like it's crippled with scripts and you can save pics without hassles, jfif terror, or dead links.
-Pages dedicated to the band might end up being "dead" after a few months or years if a person forgets or does something else. BUT this has a huge upside despite sounding bad. Whatever they posted is "frozen" there and unlikely to be deleted or logged back in to make private. Making many pages pseudo-archives in moments of time captured in fossil states. I have found archives of pages from damned 2010 that haven't been touched since 2013 or something like time capsules.
-images on VK.com aren't cropped and resized like Instagram. They do not require forced work around or manual input like for Twitter resizing either. Whatever the person uploaded the image size at, is what it is. Many Russian VK.com galleries go back to pre-2015 with huge plethora of old content archived. This is critical when Photobucket, Imageshack, and TinyPic were all nuked post-2015 to cause massive amounts of old images to go "missing" (it's called formally linkrot) in English and LatAm spaces online. VK.com is now the last beacon of hope for some of these things.
-the Russians are extremely protective, dedicated, thirsty, and obsessive over Rammstein in general. So they are likely to be really organized, proactive about translating, and collecting things. Sometimes I find very organized galleries with dates attached to the images where someone is clearly very educated and dedicated to it.
-Paul is beloved in Russian women fandom because man lived in the country for like maybe a year as a small kid due to his father's work. Just this single thing alone causes a lot of pride and softness to him that other Western countries don't understand at all but some Russians feel. Whenever Paul speaks Russian or brings up his childhood, they lose it. They put this man on a whole pedestal and have entire "fanon lore" around him existing from this perspective. He's very loved in Russian women groups and they bias heavily to him in the right spaces and communities. It means finding stuff on him on VK.com is extremely lucrative and abundant than you'd otherwise assume.
However, there are some rare scenarios where you 100% will need to log in. If the VK.com page has this setting turned on of needing a login, it will make viewing their galleries difficult.
You NEED a number to a physical phone, unfortunately. Because it will require using a QR code and being on the app for a minute to verify. A phone number code service won't work as you can't use a QR scanner. I have used my USA number to make a Yandex account to use their Yandisk feature (it's like Google Drive/Dropbox) and it worked. VK wasn't much different either. Just make sure to correctly put in your country code. I am so sorry you have to use a valid phone somehow such as a burner phone or your real genuine phone number. That said, most galleries you do not need to log in for. If you see a "hey log in" prompt from VK, just click the annoying X and move on.
95% of the time, you can just ignore the "log in pls" begging. It's not like Facebook where you are brute forced to log in. I personally used an old burner phone number device than a real phone and suggest doing it eventually. It's just easier than to be nagged, gives you ways to some galleries otherwise locked from the public view, and gets you access to some site locked video content.
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2. You have to learn the "art of image search"
Now that you understand VK.com basics... you can now ask me "but Bree, how do you FIND VK.com galleries?" There is two methods. The one I said was search Пауль Ландерс. But there is a second way to find the weirdest and old stuff at sheer random draw out of a hat.
Ok, so say you have this pic from the hell known as Twitter, but it seems too small and as if a bigger version should exist. Say the pic is 200x350 and you're like in your head "no way, at least 500x700 seems more reasonable." How do you locate the potential larger version?
Reverse image searching. You can do this on Google and Bing. But there's a third option...just wait.
There are three ways to do this. They all suck, are annoying, and piss you off because big tech keeps making the technology for this worse every month in 2023. It used to be amazing at reverse searching and in the past year has turned to absolute trash. I swear it wasn't like this in 2022. Because now Google/Bing will show you "what it thinks you want" or "generic Paul results" instead of exactly what you asked it to find. Even though I know years ago it didn't have this issue at all. The technology for this exists and did its job well for a long time. It's not like I am asking the bot for the impossible. Companies are just actively making the product worse and have less features than it already had functioning.
So if I search an image, Google/Bing will show me "this is Paul according to my AI detection of celebrities. here's random pics you didn't ask for" and this is the "what it thinks you want but not what you asked it" phenomena of identifying people/objects in photos. But the thing is, I am NOT trying to identify the subject. I am trying to look up instances of this photo on the Internet. Google/Bing seem to severely misunderstand why a lot of people used reverse image searches to begin with. "Google lens" should be for 'identification of subjects' and reverse image search should be for tracing copies of photos uploaded the way it was for years! You used to be able to find instances of pics on Blogspot, tumblr, Livejournal, Pinterest, random sites, etc.
Unfortunately, while Google/Bing used to be AMAZING at doing this it has gone to a disaster in less than a year. Sometimes about 50/50 chance, it will find copies of the photo still. But 50% of the time this dumb AI will just say, "this is Paul! congrats!" and show you nothing of him related to what you're wanting. Yeah no damn way, buddy I know this is him. That's not what I asked you to do.
The thing is when Google turned to a disaster on this, Bing became the new amazing thing that did Google's job just as good. Then Bing said after about three months later, "omg no! copy everything Google does!" and now Bing is just as worthless as Google to be 50/50 chance at getting anything you want.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel that ties into #1: learn Russian sites. That is why I suggested that as #1 to ease you into this.
YANDEX!!!!!!!
This is the Russian equivalent to Google and it still functions well about 70% of the time to do genuine reverse image searching. The biggest caveat is this: it searches mainly Russian websites + Pinterest + sometimes random European originated sites. I have also found it sometimes will archive tumblr!! (only sometimes??), Livejournal (makes sense...), and Diary.ru. It has an English facing site so you don't have to read Russian but it helps to read his name to make sure you're where you're supposed to be in the right places on VK.
However, as you learned and should know: Russian fans are obsessive over Rammstein, many Russian women like Paul, and being a Europe based band is helpful to be on Europe based sites that Yandex combs that Google wouldn't prioritize being American brain website corporation. Meaning the chance of getting a hit/match is really really strong on Yandex.
Here's an example of how it works and the rabbit hole it can send you down:
I am going to search this Autumn 2010 era photo,
that I know is popular enough a Rammstein time period and modern enough digitally in good lighting conditions that an AI should figure it out.
As you can see, this worked beautifully!
What it did:
a. found copies of this image on VK.com galleries to send you to obscure fan pages as I suggested for #1
b. Found other sizes. If you click the sizes listed in the grey box, it will automatically load the jpg and save you time going to the website manually. So you can avoid ads and other garbage things by just getting the direct jpg.
c. found images from the same time period to give you more variants and related stuff to how the picture looks. The Yandex AI said "you want Paul with tank top and sunglasses? well I got more of that."
d. accurately identified this as Rammstein and Пауль Ландерс
These variants are where the rabbit hole begins.
If you click on any of those variants, this is what happens:
You get important search tools of "similar" which reverse searches your reversed searched images. This can cause you to easily get sucked into a "oh no I'm twenty clicks of 2010-12 images deep. help how did I get here on my 100th MiG tour photo??" layers of image searches. Not ony can you get similar, but you can also instantly see size variants and open the image for saving. Google and Bing used to be amazing at doing exactly this and now sucks so bad. Yandex the god among men now.
The text at the bottom of your search with an arrow downward is basically a "related images, see more akin to this" feature.
If you go down this rabbit hole, you'll be here for 100 hours minimum. It'll feed you hundreds of Paul images every time you press one. Pulling up a new similar results / related pics cache every time. Where you can then get "similar images" functions each time you click one and resizing options all the same. Sending you on never ending image after image after image hunts. As you can see 80% of results are accurately Paul related. You can seriously end up doing this for hours and weeks. Or is it just me?? As I said, Bing especially used to be amazing at this on par with Yandex. Now it's trash because they decided to mimic Google who gutted these features from being any good anymore.
So then... if you noticed on our reverse image search, you saw VK.com right there. Twice.
You can then click this and end up on various gallery pages. Which can usually lead you to more and more images of him or the band etc. That's how I end up in old ass galleries from 2011 or something with 50-2000 images just sitting there for years untouched by time. I seriously found a gallery that was like 5,000 images deep ran for several years to accumulate in reverse timeline order. It seriously was like 5k images going from 2019 to 2012 in reverse timeline order. It was crazy dedication for 7 years. Pinterest code math doesn't have anything on that level of genuine fan curation effort imo.
I'd rather get photos from a real flesh human who loved this band for 7 years of online work, than an AI bot trying to make me click ads and feed me things based on code guesses. Sorry. I pick human crafted via passion > sterile robot. Even if it's 'more effort'. Reject modernity of "bot feeds", embrace tradition of "saving thingies via random searches".
Sometimes random images can send you to like 5-8 gallery VK results and not just two of them. It's wild!! Even if you don't want/need to reverse a specific image you have, search it anyway! You never know what cool things you'll find in those galleries associated to the picture rather than wanting that specific image itself.
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3. I have this ridiculous suggestion about old content from pre-2006.
Bestie, I mean this 100%: look at extremely old fansites in the Internet Archive or any archival method you know. Including forums. I have found the wildest stuff in those places that was otherwise missing elsewhere. You'd be shocked how many forums still exist and sit there in fossil states with content on them for pages and pages for some reason. Sometimes when Google/Bing isn't acting very stupid, it will lead you to web rotting forums with content on them sitting there.
Do you see a watermark from 2002? Find archives of it and pray something works. I found tons of stuff that way from Old Internet era being archived in time. Combing Geocities sites from before it shutdown also works to find stuff. Huge portions of Geocities was archived before 2009. You have no idea how amusing it is to read old blogs before the invention of YouTube and streaming media. They are another concept of things and ideas I swear. They vibe so different than today :3
There's also ways to search via Blogspot and Wordpress sites using basic search engine filter parameters known by now by many. They host content natively, with Blogspot being backed by big Google servers, that the risk of being a dead link is uncommon if not hosted on PB, Imageshack, etc. The Russian places to look as this equivalent is diary.ru (basically like LJ 2.0) and Livejournal too. Tons of stuff is sitting around there too in fossil condition of old blogs with living and working image links since the tech behind those ancient blogs isn't dead yet. I have spent hours on diary.ru looking at things to dig out obscure images from 2005 era hosted by their own servers and not dead.
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In conclusion:
Russian Paul fans >>>> doing laps around English speaking fans of him. The Russian women are super mega serious about him. That is why #1 is my advice: you have to learn to cope with Russian sources of media for him and dig into things. They are better than the rest of us at this pace in a strange way that's hard to understand 'why' if you're not them.
As my final thing, here's a starter link to a fun retro R+ page that is inactive now. But they have tons of cool content organized for you to browse as your first time trying to learn to use VK and get a feel for it. Retro to this page is anything from the first three albums fyi with an emphasis on the first two.