“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
—Herman Melville, MOBY-DICK
Media Log
“There is now a little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds, our lives are largely shaped by how we use them.”
Sam Harris
In other words, we are what we consume. I want to create a monthly1 maybe? log of my media consumption that tracks my passivity, and cultivates my creativity. Example: If I go further, I could map how reading a book sparks a desire to see a show based on it for a broader perspective. A podcast could point me towards a book I otherwise would have passed up.
I’ll attempt to track the shows and movies I stream (no cable service for me!), books I’ve read, podcasts/music I’ve listened to and the rare YT video I watch. Don’t judge me. I’ve been in bed for almost three weeks nursing an ankle issue(!) I may even expand this log to web links I’ve enjoyed and favorited for future use 2eventually. To kick off, I’ll just log what I can remember from April and May of this year.
Viewed
- Suspicion- Apple TV
- The Machine That Kills Mean People- HBO
- Severance- Apple TV
- Outer Ridge- Amazon
- Devs- Hulu
- Tehran- Apple TV
- Frasier- Hulu
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds- Paramount
- Star Trek: Picard season 2- Paramount
- Star Trek: Discovery- Paramount
- Star Trek: Generations- Paramount
- Reservoir Dogs- HBO
- The Book of Boba Fett- Disney
- The King’s Man- HBO
- The Batman- 1/2 in theater, 100% on HBO
Read
- Ghost Fleet
- You Are An Artist
- The Nowhere Man
- Orphan X
- Reliquary
- Kaiju Preservation Society
- The Return
Listened
- Not Lost
- iPhoneography Podcast
- Dialogues
- Focused
- Mac Power Users
- Music- I borrowed a lot of compact discs from the library to transfer music to my iPod. Remember those?
Notable
Interesting conversation at micro.blog about what people use to take notes. Me?
- Handwriting in notebooks (usually Field Notes™)
- Marginalia in books
- Plain text notes on the computer
- Voice recordings notes in .mp3 format (the plain text of audio)
- Begrudgingly- Bear Notes and Apple Notes
I want my notes to be future-proof and platform-agnostic.
Domesticated or Wild?
Domesticated animal or wild predator? If you’re a stuck-at-home person, you may be considered as a domesticated herd animal. If you prefer to be out in the real world then you may consider yourself a wild predator, untamed.
This pandemic has me feeling more and more like a domesticated herd animal and less a feral, wild, untamed animal and I don’t like it.
Now I know what a predator in a zoo feels like and one can empathize.
Technical Issues
If you think technology will solve your problems then you don’t understand technology – and, you don’t understand your problems.
Laurie Anderson
Find the best tool for a specific job and stick with it. This is better said than done for me since I enjoy trying all the new shiny tools to play with out there. I am getting better at this and narrowed them down to a select few for writing, post-process photography, etc.
Take Charge
“Nothing about the Internet is fixed, permanent, or inevitable. It is malleable, shape-shifting, and constantly evolving. And it increasingly comes with more responsibility and risks for guarding our own data and taking charge of distributing our words and images.”
EI Skyers
This sums up nicely what I’ve been referring to when it comes to owning your platform. Build a blog, delete your social media account(s), dump Google mail and get your personalized e-mail address, and distribute your words and images your way.
3 Rules
My three rules about existing as a hobbyist artist/photographer:
- Just keep making pictures.
- Your work will be seen when it’s ready to be seen.
- Network gracefully.
Photographic Form
“…taking pictures is incidental. It’s a by-product, in a sense, of everything else. What you’re really doing is giving form—photographic form—to a thought, to an opinion, to an understanding of the world, of what is in front of you.”
Someone