Journal – Page 8 – From the Desk of CJD

Type Art

July 11, 2024July 10, 2024 by Chris

There are many reasons as to why I was looking forward to utilizing my typewriter after I relocated. One, was to make art from it. I’ve been a long time fan of ASCii art but there are people out there that have taken it to the next level and then some.

After nerdscrolling and falling down a few internet rabbit holes, I’ve discovered so many type-art resources out there.

Such as a pamphlet from 1979 turned into a pdf from the Internet Archive entitled Typewriter Mystery Games.

Obviously this would utilize multiple ribbons, paper and practice but I’d love to explore this further.

Until next time,

Between < and >

July 10, 2024July 10, 2024 by Chris

I’ve had a pretty shit week. If I wanted to sugarcoat anything, I’d go buy a beignet. The amount of stress-induced breakdowns and resulting physical ailments I had these past seven days is taking a toll. It was mostly job stress, but also a lot of living in my head. Thinking about the what ifs, the whys, and the why nots. On top of it all, insomnia decided to pay a visit too.

Despite me resigning back in February, the relocating and the waiting, I need a day off from my thoughts. I need to relax and enjoy something but it isn’t possible.

I need someplace to call my own, where I can relax, be surrounded and feel grounded. A feeling I have not enjoyed since 2008- sixteen years!

I look around other’s homes and began to notice that there was stuff, art walls, tchotchkes, mementos, clutter, decor, unneeded items, cozy blankets, pillows, flowers, mismatched mugs and chairs, books, and photos – everywhere. I guess things make a home look lived in. Then I thought, Maybe I am over the essentialism and minimalism. Maybe I need something, or something’s to make me feel at “home.”

I thought about my own places that I have lived in the past 16 years and my own things. And I noticed that today, I have very few of these little mementos in my home, or none at all. Hell, I donated all of my furniture before moving. People barely collect things of worth anymore, I know I haven’t.

And why should we? All we need to revisit our memories is in the cloud. All photos are there, with a click of a button.

Not only does not touching a photograph, and not having any physical presence of it in my home makes it lose its value and to a degree its meaning, we also cannot derive any happiness from digital media without actively looking at it. How often do we look at those digital photos? Digital dust is all that they are.

Music, books, movies, and past memories used to be tangible things in our homes that ”sparked joy” without actively interacting with them. Digital media doesn’t do that. Digital Media creates minimalism

We were told that we had too much stuff, and that having said stuff was bad. Getting rid of all of my stuff, however, would make me free and happy.

Does it? Will having more stuff make me happier or sadder?

Art used to be visible, tangible, tactile, and it made a home feel like a home. Now art is small and fits on one tiny device, as if it isn’t allowed to take up space anymore.

I am rambling here, but to wrap it all up, as soon as I have the opportunity, I am going to fill my space with things that make me happy. Things that remind me of people I love and miss. It’s time to turn our house into a home. Now where is the nearest Ikea?

168/366

June 23, 2024June 16, 2024 by Chris

I set a photography goal for myself to shoot a photo with the Hipstamatic every day, for 366 images this (leap) year. Today is day 168. I had them all on my photo website that I recently took down but for now, I’ll just add a few from the past two weeks here.

Read-O-Matic

June 15, 2024 by Chris

I want to design and place a machine to fill up with books that people can purchase on the go as opposed to them buying a soda or a snack. I know we will all be a lot healthier.

They remind me of the Little Free Library stands all across the country, of which I used to be a curator of one back home.

They also remind me of the Art-O-Mat art vending I’ve seen in Las Vegas.

Retro Denbow

June 15, 2024 by Chris

As part of my mission this year to “de-bullshit” my life, I’ve been contemplating acquiring a dumb phone and with luck, my carrier has exactly one model. It’s features are the ability to talk, text and take crap-quality images and that’s it. The carrier representative must have thought I was mentally unstable for even thinking about it and maybe he’s right. I currently have the iPhone 15 Pro Max which, for only a few more months, is the best on the American market. So “why go backwards?”, he asked.

The 2024 TCL Flip looks like it came right out of the year 1999.

I love the iPhone, but apparently I love it too much and I want to reduce my dependency on it.

Then I got to thinking, why not remove all the apps off of the iPhone except for the phone, messages, the camera and photo apps? Why not have my carrier remove the data option from my plan and I pay less? Hmm.

Scroll Your Own Way*

June 15, 2024 by Chris

*with apologies to Fleetwood Mac

Scrolling is a tool of our current digital existence, no matter how much we dislike our dependence on it. This is because most people are scrolling on an app platform where they have little control on the content they see.

Social media algorithms mean you don’t see the posts of everyone you follow. You see only what is currently popular from some of them. Plus you see other stuff you don’t follow that their algorithm “think you might like”. Popular means engagement, so the original post is swarming with comments from strangers. You also see ads everywhere that often takes over the original material you are trying to consume. The interface itself is urging you to scroll! Like! Subscribe! Buy!

No thank you.

Digital life shouldn’t be this way. The best way to consume media is not with social media anyway. It exists on websites – blogs, news, magazines, opinions. Millions of new, and better quality articles created every week.

But you don’t want to visit dozens of websites to find out what’s new. What you need is a way to have the website content you choose come to you, when you want it.

This solution exists already in the form of a little known technology called RSS. It exists in the background of almost all websites. It’s a way for RSS apps to subscribe to that websites content and receive new articles when they are available.

In the RSS context, “SUBSCRIBE” doesn’t mean you pay, nor do you give your email. In fact the website owner won’t even know you’ve subscribed at all!

It’s like podcasts — but for reading.

This is not a paid sponsorship, but an RSS reader such as the no cost app called NetNewsWire. It shows you articles from your favorite blogs and news sites and keeps track of what you’ve read.

This means you can stop going from page to page in your browser looking for new articles to read. Do it the easy way instead: let a feed reader bring the news to you instead.

If you’ve been getting your news via Facebook and Twitter — with their ads, algorithms, user tracking, outrage, and misinformation — you can switch to your news feed reader to get news directly and more reliably from the sites you trust.

Take back control of your scroll. Scroll your own way.

Start with two or three sources. Maybe a news site and a couple of blogs you like such as, oh, I don’t know, chrisdenbow.website. His RSS feed is simply: https://chrisdenbow.website/feed

Give it a go, and after a few days, you’ll feel something magical happen. You have an app with a feed you can scroll through that you completely control. You decide what is in there. There is no algorithm. Just the latest posts from every site interleaved in reverse date order.

You don’t even need to leave the app to read. I subscribe only to full text feeds, so the entire article is readable within the app. No cookie pop ups or confusing menus to navigate.

There’s no comments or likes. If you no longer wish to see posts from a particular author, you remove their feed from your app and you never see them again.

Everyone should have the ability to scroll your own way.

While typing this up, I obviously sung this in my head the whole time.

Bring Your USB

June 12, 2024 by Chris

Say what? A social file exchange for designers, artists, DJs, writers, musicians,
researchers, engineers and anyone of interest. I’ve had a content club on the brain for the past few months and just discovered this. I am on the waitlist but from everything I’ve seen so far this will be a blast.

Frequency Illusion

June 12, 2024 by Chris

The frequency illusion, also called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias in which someone learns a novel word or concept—and then “suddenly” encounters it everywhere, whereas in fact it it is just more salient because it has been recently observed.
Psychology Today magazine

When we learn a new word, discover a favorite car, or unearth a previously unknown historical fact, and then come across it multiple times in short succession, the frequency illusion is at work.

This cognitive bias leverages the brain’s penchant for pattern recognition: We direct selective attention to our novel discovery and scan the world for matches. We choose what to focus on and confirm more sightings of it—involving another cognitive bias, the confirmation bias, as well.

For me personally, I was not overtly aware of this phenomena until I read the Rabbits novel series. After that and ever since, I have seen multiple references to rabbits everywhere without actively searching for them.

We remember what we prime the mind to attend to. If we select a new concept, we’ll identify that concept more often; the minds will actively seek out more stimuli related to that concept to seek confirmation.

Royal Pain

June 11, 2024 by Chris

Only one item was damaged during the cross-country relocation and that was my Royal Scrittore typewriter. I was looking forward to using it but apparently these things don’t defy gravity or react well with hard surfaces. I took it apart today to repair it and I have everything fixed so I thought.

The carriage return does not advance but the backspace does. Some of the letter keys stick but that can be poked back down. It may be time to look elsewhere and I do have my eye on this white typewriter from eBay.

It’ll go with the new decor so it’s justified(?) I’ll stew on it for a bit.

Finger Painting

June 10, 2024 by Chris

The glass tablet in my hand is not just a consumption device but also a creative one. I am limited in talent and funds to explore creating art with a physical canvas and physical globs of paint. And so in their place I am using technology to augment my creative practice.

To put it simply- sometimes I “paint” on my iPad. I’d say half of them are made with an Apple Pencil stylus and the other half by scrolling a finger over the glass. Finger painting minus the mess!

Reset

June 8, 2024 by Chris

Sure, the domain name is the same but the platform and the design are all new. The previous Ghost server was very proprietary and will not allow an easy way to export all of my writings there. Nor would it allow me to import decades worth of work into it. So, it had to go away even though I am taking a lo$$ on it. Because why write there when I cannot export?

I have imported the archives here from the previous years but not all of it. I still need to cut/paste from the former platform onto here. Grr.

This site design is a fresh, minimal look and inspired by the Mercedes F1 team colors.

This website is not complete and it will take a few days for everything to be up to my standards.

In the meantime, welcome! Have a look around. Let me know what you think in the comments after each post or from the “About” page.

October 5, 2024June 8, 2024 by Chris

Say hello to Radio Denbow!

This is a different component to this website. It is an audio journal that highlights photography, book reviews, geocaching and other areas of interest.

Episodes will be five minutes or less and distributed once a week on Apple and Spotify platforms.