SOME WONDERFUL CATS

My cat Blue, wagging is tail and giving me that look because he hasn’t been fed in 12 minutes. What a scamp.

This little guy came to say hello while I was out for a walk, and thankfully had my camera ready for such a treat.

FIND THE FOG

I planned on visiting one park, but the highway was closed off, so I just kept driving. Eventually, I saw a hill and some fog, so I drove towards the fog and found this park.

It was wet, cold, and gross, perfect for keeping other people away.

I’m also a sucker for views without much of a view. Overcast sheets of nothing are good for my soul.

COMFORT SHOES

I don’t know how I got on this email list, but I can’t look away. It’s atrocious in every way. All images. It’s a train wreck.

I can’t unsubscribe from this nightmare.

CHASING SHADOWS

The sun was going down, so I grabbed my cameras (my god, I can’t believe I’m writing that) and headed outside. It was in the low 40s but for whatever reason, I really enjoy going out and seeing what I can see. The above was taken with the NOMO CAM INS W.

Shot with NOMO CAM 135 GR.

Not shown here is the few shots I took with my Canon P Rangefinder. I finished up my first roll of film with that. Can’t wait to get that developed and see how bad I did!

I also took a few shots with my point and shoot film camera. That roll is almost done, too.

Just last month I sent off one roll of film to be developed, and now this month I’ll be sending off THREE ROLLS. Who the heck am I?

NO GOING BACK

Here’s the terrifying thing about the state of music in 2024 (from The Verge):

“The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.”

Like, that happened 20+ years ago and we’re still recovering. All the music knowledge, the time we spent going to those stores, the jobs that were cut and lost… the digitization of music is an atomic bomb that I don’t think we’ve recovered from.

Back when we paid $16 for a CD, yes, music review sites were crucial. And of course, yes, music critics are of course needed, but they’re not valued (as we can see).

There was a time you could write for an online outlet and make a few bucks. There was also a time when you could write for a newspaper and pay the rent.

Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist. 

That’s from Defector (above).

When I ran Noisecreep in 2008 we were paying writers $50 a post.

A few years later, I was writing posts for $5 a post.

Now Yahoo for Creators isn’t even paying per post, but they “offer a competitive 50/50 ad revenue share from ad placements in your articles as well as e-commerce benefits like affiliate revenue share.”

CPM display ad placements. On blog posts. It’s 2005 all over again.

TRY AND LIVE IT OUT

“We also, by the way, need family, friends, colleagues, customers, clients, everyone around us to help us understand what it is that we do better than anybody else because we can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out.”

Kevin Kelly

Yes, the “1,000 Trust Fans” Kevin Kelly.

I love this part so much:

“We can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out.”

Maybe some folks can figure it out on their own, but holy moly I’m pushing 48 and I’m finally starting to feel like I’m getting close to what it is I really seek to do.

And how did I get there? Like Kevin Kelly said, “friends, colleagues, customers, clients…”

SOCIAL MEDIA LOSES POWER WHEN WE BUILD COMMUNITY IN OTHER PLACES

Social media rotted our brains on the instant gratification racket.

“I accept defeat,” I repeat after HINDZ from a recent video, “I accept that billion-dollar corporations have invested millions and millions of millions into the psychology and understanding how to keep me on these devices on their platforms, and it works.”

It’s not enough that social media gobbles up our attention – it tricks us into thinking we’re nothing without them.

This is made worse because “the creative status quo has made us lonely content machines.”

We are isolated, working on projects alone in our studios and rooms. We are so in our own heads that when we get together to discuss these things, we can cry.

We’re trying to figure this out on our own, thinking we’ll beat the tech bros with better-crafted hashtags, disguising our “link in bio” text, or churning out vertical videos to appease the social media overlords.

If we just read one more social media strategy guide, or watch more one more YouTube video then we’ll crack the code.

No, thanks.

I’d rather spend my time in deeper connection with good people.

Start reaching out to fellow zine writers, artists, photographers, and designers – get on a phone call, plan a meetup, gather in secret in remote parks, commandeer several tables at the local Denny’s, plan your own hyper-niche flea market, write a short skit.

These are things made outside of isolation.

Spending more time around creative people will do us more good than if we just sit on our hands and wait to be saved by the next tech-bro platform to deliver us a new magical marketing machine.

Are we so powerless to change the current situation that we sit back and hope somebody else fixes everything?

And then what? That person will sell the company to a Nabisco+Tide hedge fund subsidiary, and we’ll be back where we started.

Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.

The answer is other people, community, and the exchange of ideas away from the supposed champions of our “creator economy,” which was here long before the silicon valley dorks showed up.

You can wait for things to change, but reaching your fans on social media will never get any easier. NEVER. I’ve been saying this since 2021.

Find some other weirdos, form your own band of misfits and start having the conversation about living in a post-social media world, ‘cuz baby it’s coming.