Diversions is the central hub for news about the membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me.
Chitown! I spent a few unseasonably warm days in Chicago on a work trip with the NerdPress team. It was my first time meeting anyone on the team in person and I was happy that there was about a dozen of us that made the trip. In addition to the excellent weather, the team I’m working with is equally as sunny. They are a fantastic group of people and I’m happy to be working with them. The trip was very well planned, as are all things at NerdPress. We were sponsoring the Tastemaker Conference, Hubbub had a booth, and we did a bunch of activities for team building. Great trip.
The agenda for this trip was tightly scheduled, but I was able to steal some time to take a few photos. I posted a few photos that I snapped on the iPhone while walking around downtown in a snaps post I labeled as part 1. Look for part 2, which will be a few film photos (I took along the Canon AE-1 Program with me), sometime in the near future.
The membership is going better than I had hoped. Lots of people have signed up for both free and paid accounts and I’m very grateful to all of you that have. There is also a fair amount of spammy accounts coming through – which I suppose I should have expected. Right now if accounts are not activated via email they will be automatically deleted after a period of time. So, I’m hoping that will be enough of a stop gap to manage these spam accounts so that I don’t have to put other measures in place.
As somewhat of a teaser for you members; I recently had a conversation with master darkroom printer Keith Taylor (studio) which we recorded over Zoom. It was a lovely conversation. Browse Taylor’s website in preparation for that interview being published. He does lovely work and his personal projects are inspiring.
I also recently published an interview with Manton Reece (again, for the third time on this website) about the progress and plans of Micro.blog. I’ve always enjoyed our interviews and Manton is gracious with his time. Perhaps next year Manton and I can hop on Zoom to shake this up a bit.
If you haven’t seen it, Favorite Toots – a WordPress plugin that makes it as simple as possible to embed a list of your favorite toots from Mastodon on your blog – is now on the WordPress plugin directory. I wrote a little about the process of submitting a plugin to the directory.
Can you believe it is spring? I can’t. Somehow we managed to get through winter with just a single snowstorm that had any meaningful snowfall amount. I used my snowblower just once. I’m happy that we got plenty of rain through winter so that I don’t think we have to worry about drought conditions. On one hand, having a warmer than normal winter is a welcome event. On the other hand, I realize that it is likely a sign that the earth is in turmoil.
CCBUILT, my YouTube channel that I run with my brother-in-law Chris where we are buying, restoring, and selling vintage cars (among other things), has been on a bit of an unscheduled hiatus. Winter obviously has an effect on our desire and ability to do the work, but there was also a death in the family that was an enormous hit to everyone. We have nearly an entire episode ready to published we just need a few more bits. We’ve made a lot of progress on the 1979 Pontiac Trans Am that we’re currently working on. Look for a new episode fairly soon.
Wall space is limited in our home for hanging my prints. But every now and then I manage to sneak one in that Eliza lets hang on the wall for a time. The above print, Assateague, November 2022, was taken on an excellent fall trip to Maryland with friends, made in the darkroom several months later, and just recently I took some time to frame it and hang it in our dining room. I’d like to revisit the print as I see a bunch of things I could do better now compared to when I first printed it.
I feel like I’ll be doing that a lot – revisiting previous prints as my skills develop in the darkroom. Mistakes I’ve made in past darkroom sessions – which I was ok with at the time because I was learning – are starting to grate on me. I can’t look at a print without seeing those mistakes. And of course I feel like others can see them too when, in reality, it is likely that they won’t notice them.
Here are a few links I think are worth checking out. Until next time!
- The Grannies – Performance art within a game by finding its limits.
- Design Ah! (デザインあ) – Arun Venkatesan explores why Japan is so well-designed by watching a kid’s TV show.
- Historic Present by Sungseok AHN – A photo exhibition and project “questions the memory of past”.