Today I bought a Selfie Pole.

Ed and I had seen people with these all around Europe, and we were both confused and irritated on account of being hit in the head by some dumb girl taking selfies atop the Eiffel Tower. Still, I was intrigued at the possibilities of the idea, and today when I stumbled upon The Selfie Guru, I thought “hey let’s do this” – so I ordered one.

And an hour later, I had it in my hands! Turns out one of the people behind Selfie Guru works for the same company I do, so when I entered my work address to be the shipping address, she just looked me up. All things should be like this, because INSTANT GRATIFICATION. Thanks, Stephanie!

I’m waiting for the Bluetooth remotes to come in (my plans for this monopod do not allow for timers), but in the meantime I tried several remote control methods at home. First up was the Belkin Live Action Remote, which was incredibly frustrating. I bought the remote some time ago, but never really used it because a) it only works with the Belkin Live Action app which sucks so much I can’t even form words to express my disdain and b) the app is so, so, so bad that it has no option to switch to a front camera, which kind of negates the whole “selfie” aspect of this experiment. After I burned the remote in a fire, I remembered that I have a Pebble that can do all kinds of neat things like tell the time and play music and control most of the things in my house. I researched, and sure enough there are several Pebble apps that’ll let you take pictures. Yay! I downloaded one called PebbleCam, and set it all up. For being the future, it works pretty well. You can’t really wear the watch while using the app and the pole, because you’d need three hands – but if you remove the watch from your wrist, you’re good to go. You can even switch between front and rear camera, turn on the flash, set a timer, and more. You still can’t use the default (or other) camera app, but at least it’s miles better than Belkin’s horror.

Using the monopod, my Pebble, and my iPhone, I took some invasive pictures of my cats:

a hot and frightened hobbes (rear cam)

a hot and pissed off lemon (front cam)

I amused myself by tormenting the cats for a while, then used the selflie pole to take some actual selfies (which you don’t get to see because I may have been mostly nude). Works great!

And then I realized my destiny.

See, I’ve been online for a very, very, very long time. In all my life spent on BBSes and the STS and IRC and Twitter and beyond, I skipped one rite of passage in particular – that of nude pictures. I often stood on my tiny high horse and said that naked pictures were stupid, but my scorn was actually hiding the embarrassing truth: my boobs were too big and my arms were too short to take any topless pictures. Oh, I wanted to – I have a great rack, remember – but there was literally no way for me to take a decent naked picture that would encompass all my bodacious glory.

UNTIL NOW. 

I am going to take SO MANY BOOB PICTURES. I have decades of lost time to make up for.

Thanks, Selfie Guru!