Antisocial Media

I feel drained after this week. So I'm lifting weights by myself in the exercise room of the ArbCo Common House, doing KenKen puzzles in between sets, and feeling really glad I shelled out $30 on a cheapo Bluetooth speaker. It's astonishing that something that fits inside my water glass is capable of being too loud. Aesop Rock, Haim, Mike Doughty, Paper Tiger, and Lorde: this next set's for you. To come: some recent pictures I've made that I like.

 This afternoon I am using my grandfather's camera to take black and white pictures of the snow drifts before they melt in the coming warmer weather. My hope is that they look like miniature Antarctic mountainscapes. If they wind up anything like these from my cell phone, I'll be happy.

The first orange blossom of the year helps take the edge off of a -22° wind chill.

A neighbor's farm artifact,  leaning up against a junction box

Around this time last year I stopped using Facebook. This was not a principled, or even conscious, decision: one morning I pulled my phone out, and as my finger hovered over the Facebook icon a deep and uneasy resistance came over me. After a few days the initial desire to log in faded and a kind of reverse inertia set in: not checking Facebook became as much a habit as checking it had been. It was a bad year, scandals-wise, for Facebook, but the haphazard nature of my nonparticipation kept me from feeling smug. Plus I'd really ramped up my Twitter use, and Lord knows that platform has its own issues. What's more, Twitter amplified a side of my personality in a way that Facebook didn't (or at least as much): mean-spirited, factional, shitposting. Anger is an important emotion, and expressing it is important; but there are times on Twitter where I just feel *hostile*. Unkind. Certainly unministerial. Meanwhile in the real world, I spent the last year diving much more deepl

I was happy with some of the images I got on Kodak with this lens/camera combo; the ones of the Japanese Maple leaves were my favorites, and I loved how the two red peony photos came out. But. The finer grain and richer colors of the Velvia took me to another place. You have to remember that, when I was taking these pictures, I had no idea how they would turn out. Because the TL-Super meters through the lens (TL standing for, "through lens," natch) I was pretty confident that they would be metered okay, and I could see through the prism that at least something was going to be in focus, but beyond that it was really a wing and a prayer. You can judge for yourself how things developed: Spittle Bug Bleeding Hearts Foxgloves I Foxgloves II Columbines Interest Flower Interest Leaves Little Wildflowers No Idea Big Red Boys Anise? Apple Blossom and Ant Purple I am terrible at knowing flowers Nope.