This was a long time ago, seems like, and far away, but it did happen, and hopefully not the last time. The first photo is all of the ‘outlaws’: those who married into this particular family gathering, including myself. I will note, now, that I’ve had a tab open with Robin’s newsletter. In my head, I keep coming back to two passages:
Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.
and
There’s a kind of grit required to get through creative failure, whether that’s commercial rejection or just your own frustration with yourself; you might be acquainted with it. This crisis demands another, deeper kind of grit, because this crisis whispers in your ear:
Even if you succeed, it won’t matter. That thing you do, it is not life and death, and everything now is life or death, one or the other, with nothing in between. Your pampered preoccupation is utterly trivial. It took a pandemic to make you see it, but it’s been true all along.
That little snake voice, the one that says “You don’t matter, your feeble attempts at art making mean nothing, they’re bad anyway,” is an emotion I know all too well. You don’t toil at a thing in relative obscurity for as long as I have without having those thoughts. It’s really part of why I can be so shy when I’m out with the camera; it’s easy to think that what I’m doing doesn’t matter and I shouldn’t bother people with it.
The workshop I went to last October had one of the questions aimed at this, sort of. The last day, the fifth question was: If today was your last 24 hours on earth, you’re leaving on a space capsule, and you only get to take with you the pictures you take now, what do you take? Now after we’d done the exercises, we were talking about the uses of the questions, and I asked, “How often are you doing ‘last 24’?” Sara, the instructor, said without hesitation,“All the time.”
And if you think about it, it kinda makes sense: all the time, it could be your last 24 hours to make art, to look and see, and be in the world. So to be thinking, is what I’m doing important enough to take with me? If it is, then dammit, there’s room for me to be here making it. Somewhere, probably instagram, I saw a poem that included the line “You are allowed to occupy space,” and that’s maybe something I didn’t always feel entitled to? It’s true, though: even though the world doesn’t always want to give it to you, it’s OK to be here and do your thing.
So, remember your Baldwin (emphasis mine):
For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Posted on 2020-04-13T09:30:56Z GMT
Our first stop on the road trip was Sophia’s Dad’s house in Santa Fe, or rather, a little bit outside of town? We were completely exhausted, but managed to make it there in one piece, and then in the morning, we had just one of the best meals you can have anywhere: a breakfast burrito from The Pantry, in Santa Fe. Alice, a friend of Sohpie’s from elementary school, joined us, and we had an interesting discussion about the mediated realities we see online. Maybe you had to be there.
{insert cliche here about feeding bodies, feeding minds that I don’t have the energy for because it’s 2am}
Meow Wolf is an art installation, but it’s also a story told as a house and a music venue and tourist trap? and also really weird. Just bananas. If the gift shop stocked more XL stuff, I’d have at least one new hoodie, and probably a t-shirt, but oh well. If you get a chance, go. It’s worth an afternoon to get the experience. I’m actually also looking forward to revisiting to check out all the detail, which I’ll be doing next time I pass through. Just lavish amounts of attention paid to story and character of all these objects and rooms.
After Santa Fe, we got a good night’s sleep (which we needed, still really tired from the 18 hour day on the road the day before) and had a milk run getting into OKC the following evening.
not to bore you with technical details, but I’m putting this here so I can remember as much as anything else: Why am I wrapping all the images in headline (H1) tags?
funny story: Markdown, which is sort of a shorthand-HTML language, has what we in the business call “significant line breaks,” which means that when you press the enter key, it does stuff. It also makes assumptions about block elements versus inline elements that aren’t, like, 100% true, but that play into this. The long and the short of it is that if you have image tags all by their lonesome, Markdown assumes they need to be part of a block element, and wraps them in a <p> tag.
Now, this would be fine if I wanted my paragraphs and my pictures to have the same style, but I do not. Paragraphs should be narrow for readability, and pictures should be big, for the same reasons (also cf. Shelah Wilson, one of my college profs, “More is More”). So, a workaround that took me years to figure out, that you can have for free: wrap your images in H1 tags, like so: # [alt text](image url here). Headlines are block elements. H1 is one I almost never use, and I can avoid it and scale H2, H3, etc to fit my needs. So I’ll probably never style it.
So there: today’s tip in working around the limitations of Markdown.
Posted on 2020-04-10T09:10:40Z GMT
or at least some real explanation. So I’ve been using a system called Jekyll to publish the blog for many years. It’s a great system for a narrow range of uses; if you’re writing from a computer, and have minimal image needs, and know git and the command line reasonably well, it’s easy and intuitive to set up and use on a little server somewhere on the internet. Since it generated static files, it’s very fast once deployed. It also helped that at the time it was written in my language-of-choice, and could use my flavor of templating language (textile, although I’ve since switched to markdown).
So here I am, 7 years later. I do most of my writing and image processing on my iPad, saving the big computer for things like heavy photoshop and ‘real’ work. Not that photo-editing and writing aren’t real, but they don’t need the big iron. (Yes I am totally a nerd that thinks of his computer as Big Iron, like a gun in an old country song). Actually, probably nothing I do really needs a ton of processing power; I always want for more but what I know I need instead, from years in the trenches of writing it, is software that is more optimized for my needs; this is pointed especially at the super laggy desktop versions of Lightroom.
So we come back to this here blog. I could compose it by hand in HTML, but we’re not banging rocks together here. I’m a damn software developer, I make rocks think for a living. Seriously, like I was saying above, what I need is a piece of software tailored to my needs. Now, all software is eventually tech debt, and really you should avoid writing it as much as practicable, but dammit, I wanted to blog from the iPad.
Since I started using jekyll, the world has moved on. I changed jobs roughly once a year, picked up some skills, then some more, then forgot a lot of it, specializing in a language called Elixir. Elixir has a few things going for it, mostly heavily technical, but the sum of those technical parts is it’s very reliable, and very fast. Something like an order of magnitude (that’s 10 times faster for those at home) faster than Ruby programs doing roughly the same thing (YMMV, benchmarks are not actual usage, etc etc). I built a system in 2015 to speed up a part of a system at {undisclosed employer} and it was a ton faster and everyone was happy. A month later, we got to looking at the memory usage graph, and saw a weird sawtooth pattern. The processes were dying every 36 hours or so because the box was running out of memory, and nobody had noticed for a month. The reason being the reliability I was talking about. The process dies, and the system that runs the code (called a ‘virtual machine’) just restarts it, and because of the rest of the architecture of the system, nothing was lost.
But Jekyll was working for me, and until recently, I basically thought, you know it’s just barely possible to blog from the iPad, if I make a big effort, I can do it. And I think a few of the posts since last September were part of that struggle. It was clunky. It was slow. It required 5 different apps, including ssh’ing into my server, to make it go, but it went.
And then, I didn’t blog for a while. Lots of reasons. The Ankle that took me out for several months. Travel, which should result in a ton of blogging, just didn’t. Maybe I was tired, but it didn’t help that I was fighting the tooling. It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools, of course, but a worse one that doesn’t recognize when there’s room for a better hammer.
So, a couple weeks ago, I started work on this, a new, streamlined blog, and a couple days ago, it went live. The first new post directly precedes this one. Old posts were imported, but old links have been broken. Sorry. It’s a pretty simple web app, with a login and some forms that create database entities that correspond pretty much exactly to what you see on the screen: posts and design and pictures. The pictures also got an improvement: they’re sized to fit your screen, instead of a static width. The visual design as a whole is a work in progress; changes coming there. I may add more features. Don’t expect comments.
(the photos in this post are from the first day of the road trip when we went home over the holidays; we drove to Santa Fe in one day, about 18 hours from door to door; the sunrise and sunset were great. I know, more sunrise/sunset, more golden hours, whatever. They’re next in the queue.)
Posted on 2020-04-07T07:22:13Z GMT
