Ploafmaster General

Today is my wedding anniversary and, as the title indicates, I’ve been married to Valerie for 17 years. I don't have anything profound to say this morning, so I'll share an anecdote. Yesterday while the kids were at school, we went out to lunch and enjoyed great food and beer in some glorious weather. We followed lunch with some relaxing at a cafe sipping coffee and passing time with conversation. It was a real treat to have such calm and unhurried time with my wife to talk, take in a meal, and be comfortably idle together.

We're taking a weekend trip in two weeks to truly celebrate, but days like yesterday are what reinforce how much I still love my wife and the years we’ve had together.

I think Apple's silicone MagSafe case might be one of the more comfortable cases I've ever used; soft to the touch but not squishy, good grip, and rigid enough that I'm confident it’s protecting my phone. I'm a big fan of orangey-pink tones that we frequently call "salmon" or "coral", so I got the similar "pink pomelo" color that seems to complement my pale blue phone.

I didn’t really step outside today until I grabbed my Chipotle delivery off of Robert’s porch. As I said yesterday, he had to teach today so I was mostly heads down sneaking in some distraction-free work. Once he wrapped up his day he dropped my at the airport shortly before boarding. I got lucky on the first leg and had a two-seat side of the row to myself. Now I’m just wrapping up a layover in Philadelphia before the final leg back to Richmond.

This has been some of the best travel and friend time I’ve had in ages, but my bed is going to feel great tonight.

About to Eat (or A.T.E.) is a relatively young YouTube channel from some of my favorite Buzzfeed food people. The channel essentially features a number of themed series based around interesting concepts such as cooking only one type of food for 24 hours, examining the different ways the hosts cook certain ingredients or dishes at home, or one of my favorites, the "Day in the Life" series. Day in the Life is produced by Alvin Zhou (who has his own channel that is a true delight) and shares his experience in the kitchens of various restaurants in New York City across a variety of cuisines and styles. I love this series because a) the videos center almost entirely on the chefs and restaurants featured, b) you get an inside look at highly skilled people making delicious food, and c) I think Zhou's genuine curiosity and enthusiasm come through in each video. If that video at the top of this post doesn't make you want to find the nearest Ghanaian restaurant, you aren’t hooked up right :-D

Today was Portland day! We headed out early for the long drive from Bangor with a two-pronged morning mission: Montreal-style bagels from Forage and a coffee crawl involving some of Robert's favorite roasters in Portland.

Let's start with them bagels. These were cooked in a wood-fired oven as befits the Montreal-style process, and while they vary a bit from the NY-style I grew up with in the Tristate Area, they were no less delicious. That characteristic crisp, chewy skin was still there, yielding to a tangy sourdough interior that had fermented two days prior to baking. One sesame and one sea salt, each with butter, and I was in my happy place. I haven't eaten bagels this delicious in a couple years. Seriously.

Then it was on to coffee, and we had to start with Tandem Coffee Roasters. Did they bit a little style from Richmond's own Lamplighter with that bike theme and converted service station cafe? Who knows, but their coffee was delicious, and the pistachio cake I shared with Robert was incredible. It tasted like a lemon poundcake with pistachio meal, and crushed pistachios, lemon juice, and sugar syrup on top. That pic at the top of the post was my cappuccino. Next up was Speckled Ax who—completely new to me—wood-roasts their coffee. This cappuccino was even better than Tandem's and I bought a bag of some fruit-dried Ethiopian to take back to Richmond.

Side note: yes, two cappuccinos in a row, no sweetener added. I normally prefer espresso or pour-over, but in Portland as in Richmond, the shops are still using disposable only cups and no dine-in. I feel like paper cups mess with the flavor of espresso, so that’s out. And none of the shops we hit in Portland were doing pour-over because of the time involved.

We interrupted our coffee crawl for a surprise stop at Portland Head High and Fort Williams Park on Casco Bay. If my film turns out okay, the shots I got at this park will be some of my favorites, I think. For now, check out this vertical pano of the lighthouse, and the registry plaque.

Our final coffee stop was Bard Coffee in the Old Port neighborhood, and boy was that great. One more cappuccino, and also a nitro cold brew. The cap was certainly tasty but the nitro was some of the best I’ve ever had. All the rough edges were rounded off and while most nitros have that "virgin Guinness" taste of toast and chocolate, this stuff was still fruity and crisp.

With so much caffeine in our systems, we headed out of Portland to Freeport for a visit to the massive L.L. Bean campus in Freeport. They had pretty much everything you could imagine, including a pair of stuffed moose that had been found dead in the woods with locked antlers. Macabre! After a little light shopping (and not buying) we drove a short hop to Maine Beer Company for some truly delicious beer and pizza. Our final beer stop was Side by Each Brewing Co. in Auburn on the way back. This brewery takes care of their people and makes delicious beer, so it was a fitting final brewery on my trip.

The vacation part of my trips is pretty much over now since Robert has to teach starting at 8:00 tomorrow. I'll be sneaking in a work day where everybody thinks I'm off so I can get stuff done without distraction. Then around 4 PM I'll head back down south to Richmond. Not sure whether I'll publish a final post tomorrow, but I can tell you it’s been a helluva time up here in Maine, and I hope to return before too long.

Addendum to yesterday's statement about "too much delicious food and drink to recount": let's just say I had enough to drink that my sleep was transient last night. I woke up sore and tired, but excited enough for what today would bring that got dressed right away and sat down to chat with Robert about what today would bring. The weather looked iffy, so we decided to start with breakfast at a great gas station diner-like place called Dysart's.

As I was eating a tasty breakfast sandwich with French toast for the bread, we decided to chance the rain and head up to the relatively new Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in north central Maine. It was a long drive to the park and along gravel roads, but road trips are the way Robert and I love to hang out. The photograph at the top of this post was taken within the park, and there are (hopefully) some choice photographs shot on my Hasselblad to be seen at a later date. We eventually made it to the picnic area with an expansive view of Katahdin itself and numerous other peaks at the top of the Appalachian Trail. We got some great photos, but we could also see some serious weather headed our way.

So what did we do? We hit up some more of Maine's fine craft beer offerings, like Bissell Brothers in Milo. We snagged some suds and enjoyed the rapidly cooling weather on their covered patio while the rain picked up.

The staff were friendly but the bathrooms were another story...

We returned to Bangor and grabbed another round at Bangor Beer Co where we ran into some of Robert's delightful colleagues, then decided to take a chance on a newish barbecue joint. I won't name it because then I’d have to shame it, because it wasn't great. Us two Virginia boys knew what we were getting into, but had to take a chance just in case it was actually good. So with the smoked meat a failure, Robert called an audible and we wrapped up the evening with some seriously good ice cream from local joint, Gifford's. So tasty.

Tomorrow is my last day of exploration with Robert (I'm here all day Monday, but he has to teach all day) before heading back. The rough outline includes Freeport, Portland, loads of coffee and beer, and more glorious exploring. Whoohoo!

Today started with a casual and delicious breakfast in Bar Harbor before heading to Acadia. The weather was perfect the entire day and started chilly enough to warrant wearing my flannel shirt. Summer sticks around until the 22nd, but it already feels like autumn in Maine. Bar Harbor is a fairly cute town even if it occupies a "wealthy tourist" slot in my mental filing cabinet. Visiting the ocean shore always feels like home, and the gulls, sea air, and site of boats helped as well.

The highlight of the morning, however, was our visit to Acadia National Park (my second National park of 2021) and climbing around on the top of Cadillac Mountain. The views were beautiful and expansive if not always photogenic, but I felt so alive up there in the fresh, cool air. Robert knows his way around and we managed to explore quite a bit of the summit while avoiding the more crowded tourist walkways. After Cadillac we took in the sites around the loop road, stopping at various overlooks before parking near Thunder Hole to take a look around. Yeah, I smirked at the name, too, but at high tide the waves crash into a rock formation in such a way that it sounds like thunder. The rock formations were breathtaking and I can't wait to see some of the film shots I exposed around the park.

What comes after a busy morning of hiking around and taking in the sites? That’s right, taking in the lobster.

I had a hot lobster roll - only lobster and clarified butter - with chips while we relaxed after the park. It felt recklessly indulgent but, if you visit Maine without eating lobster, have you even visited (Yes, yes you have)? It was pretty tasty, and just the right amount to fill me up for a late lunch.

After lobster it was time for some breweries and hang out time at various locations from Belfast to Bangor. We hung out beside the Passagassawakeag River sipping brews from Marshall Wharf Brewing and watched birds and boats drift by.

On the way out I caught a short video of a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture:

The rest of the afternoon and evening were filled with too much delicious food and drink to recount, but we returned to Robert's house with the sort of contented exhaustion you only get after a full and enjoyable day. I think I'll sleep a bit better tonight than I did the night before. Tomorrow? Miscellaneous adventures all over the map from Freeport to the deep woods while the weather is unpredictable.

Today was the first travel day. I actually used a packing checklist this time which means I’m pretty sure I have everything I need. My 8 year old daughter was pretty upset I’d be away for several days, but I’m so excited for this trip that I had to console her the best I could while tucking her in last night and heading out the door this morning. My flight started late in the morning which made security quick and easy. After a pleasantly uneventful flight I’m finally in Maine visiting my best friend Robert.

He’s a bio professor in Bangor and, while he’s been up here for years it hasn’t been possible for me to visit until now (he’s come back home to VA plenty—it was my turn to get on a dang airplane), so we have big and adventurous plans for the next several days ahead. But today itself was a bit of a whistle stop tour of Robert's highlights of Bangor, Orono, and the surrounding area. We enjoyed some beers from a few local breweries, drove around a university campus (where we stopped to admire a huge wind turbine blade!), and finished up with some incredible dinner at a brewpub down by the Penobscot river.

Almost all of my photos will be on film, so it will be a while before I can share anything, but I’ll try to sneak in an iPhone shot here and there like you see in this post.The leaves are changing, there’s lobster to be eaten and beer to be drunk. We’ll be covering a lot of actual territory from Portland to Acadia to Lubec, and maybe even Stephen King’s house. I can’t wait to report back tomorrow.

My kids were so pumped for their first day of school, and I can't blame them. Maddie just loves school (a growing nerd like her dad before her) and is particularly pumped to be going back to her school building to see her friends in person as she starts 3rd grade. She doesn't mind the COVID mitigation policies, she’s just happy to be back in the school she loves for the first time since early March 2020.

And Wilson! My sweet little boy is starting kindergarten today! It feels like the end of his "little kid" years as heh starts his time in elementary school. I can't wait to talk to them about how each of their days went after we collect them from the bus stop this afternoon.

My kid's school uses an app called ClassDojo to manage intra-school communication and light social features. Teachers and staff post school-wide announcements and photos to share, teachers post messages to the parents of their students, and parents can communicate directly with their children's teachers. It’s pretty useful and, to the benefit of underfunded school systems everywhere, it’s free to use. But a crucial fact remains that my wife and I don't choose to use ClassDojo. We feel compelled to use this app because it is what the teacher uses, what the principal uses, and we would feel distantly out of the loop should decide to abandon it.

Why the heck would I mention that? Because ClassDojo utterly abuses their captive audience by frequently attempting to upsell parents on out-of-school features, paid access to "memories" from prior school years, and other premium features. I'm not interested in any of that stuff! But I can't ignore the app if I also want an effective line of communication between my house and my kids' school. This is dirty pool in my opinion.

Geez, eight years, right? That’s how long my daughter has been around now. That’s how long my wife and I have had the privilege (and frustration, and exhaustion, and wonder, and anxiety, and joy, etc.) of experiencing Madeline in our lives. This kids who is somehow an athlete. This kid who is absolutely a nerd like her dad. This kid who still surprises us with her generosity, curiosity, and humor.

She starts 3rd grade next week. She’s genuinely excited about learning cursive and more multiplication, and any science she can get her mind on. Over this past year she’s weathered school at home away from friends. But she’s also grown smarter. She’s come a long way with both her gymnastics and swimming (front flips off the diving board!). She has turned into an absolute rollercoaster enthusiast. I think a lot of parents expect to be thrilled by the rapid, early childhood developmental milestones. But I don't think we talk enough about the ongoing joy of experiencing the ways our children continue to grow and mature. It’s really something.

Happy birthday, kiddo.

Today I realized it was over SEVEN years ago that my friend Phil introduced me to Project Binky (itself having started summer of 2013), the baffling and exciting car project from Bad Obsession Motorsport in the UK. This marked the first time I subscribed to a YouTube channel and, because the videos were nearly always longer than 20 minutes, also marked the first time I started treating YouTube videos like other screen entertainment. Ultimately, this series probably fits under the heading of "competence porn" wherein you watch highly skilled people perform highly skilled work that’s presented in an engaging format. Over the years my YouTube subs have certainly grown to include a whole lot of that.

At any rate, yesterday these two blokes from Bedford dropped episode 36 in which they fired up the engine for the first time. The series isn't over (I could see there being at least 2 or 3 episodes more), but I think we're nearing the finish line. It’s been a helluva thing to watch a project of this scope (the complete restoration and enhancement of an old Mini while at the same time retrofitting it with a fully restored and enhanced Toyota Celica drivetrain!!!) from the start up to this point.

I'm not even a "car person", for what it’s worth. So if you like watching skilled people do impressive stuff with some dry British humour laced throughout, give it a peek.

My kids go to Richmond public schools and, until this year, elementary students started latest in the region: 9:15 AM. This year that changes and the first bell moves up by 1.5 hours to 7:45. As you might expect this means a pretty big adjustment for the entire family who has worked around particular wake-up and departure times for a while.

In hopes of reducing the negative side effects of this change, today was the first day of family practice for the new schedule. Well, really last night was the first evening. The kids picked out today's clothes last night while Valerie and I got their backpacks in order (except for meals of course), and then we made sure to get to bed by 10 PM ourselves. Our kids will most likely get on the bus by 7:15 (or get in the car around 7:15 if the bus is a vector for COVID spread 😬), so my wife and I get up at 6 and focus on getting the kids ready first. Get 'em dressed, get 'em fed, and throw on whatever clothes we're okay with wearing out of the house because, honestly, we’ll have plenty of time to get ready for our days after we say good-bye to the kids.

And today worked pretty well, actually. My rising 3rd grader was slow to get up (she’s normally out of bed any time between 6:15 and 7 AM), but she gets dressed pretty quickly. The rising kindergartner was a snap, but I gave him direct supervision. Since the kids aren’t actually getting on the bus this morning, now they have a bunch of time to relax and watch cartoons before they start their days, and Valerie and I are ready to roll earlier than usual.

In the long term I don't know whether Valerie or Maddie will ever quite adjust to the earlier wakeup time, and my ongoing struggle will be to put down the dang phone at night and stop playing sudoku so I can go to sleep. I bet we run in to some bumps between now and September, but I can't imagine just switching to this new routine when the kids actually need to make it to the bus stop and get to school on time. I'm hoping this means we’ll have somewhat adjusted by day 1 so that we're less wiped out after a stressful first couple of weeks back to in-person school with COVID protocols and fear of the Delta variant grinding us down 😐

YouTubers, please. This editing style of machine gun jump cuts to clean up sentences or whole spoken passages makes my eyes dizzy. It’s a visual medium! Why ruin the visuals to fix your audio? Are you so fast in your video editing suite that this is more efficient than practicing and recording a few takes of each paragraph?

Sorry, no photos this time. Not much to photograph from the driver's seat all day :-P

If you’re one of the few people that regularly reads my blog, you know I haven't written consistently for years. I certainly never do this sort of day-by-day travel diary. I wanted to try something different for a couple of reasons:

1. I take a lot of photos of my travels and activities, but I don't usually record much more than that. As I get older and think about activities I share with my family, I want to remember more about it than a handful of my choicest visuals. This doesn't mean a thorough, super accurate recollection of every day; my details will be pre-filtered by my moods and sense of what's important at a given time. I just want more data, so to speak. I want to remember some more about what we did, how it felt, and the impact some choices had on a given day or the rest of the trip.
2. Speaking of those photos: I usually only post my best pictures online when I can help it. If it’s on Flickr, or gets its own post here on the blog, it’s because I’ve been super picky about my own work. Most of the pictures I shared these past few days are unremarkable (I do like a few quite a bit), but they do capture a lot of what I enjoyed in Tennessee. They may not be my best photographs, but I think they're pretty good vacation shots. And I still want to share those as detail and/or context for the perambulating words I write each day of the trip.

So today we packed everything back in the car and headed home. I feel like I’ve been driving all day for 5 days, and I'm actually looking forward to staying home for a while. Travel is great, but travel often reminds us how much we love home (super original and profound, to be sure). And I love home.

Happy to be back in Richmond, Virginia for a while, and looking forward to my Maine trip next month.

Sunday morning brought another slow start, but today was by design. With my sis-in-law and her family gone, only my mother-in-law remained with my family. She’s in no shape for hiking, so we took it easy. We only really got started once we left for lunch at the Greenbrier Picnic Area in the national park. After dodging way too many yellow jackets at the picnic tables, I walked the kids through the trees to the bank of the Little Pigeon River. This is where we found all the magic and wonder. Fluorescent orange fungi, a wide variety (and abundance!) of butterflies and dragonflies, and plentiful skipping stones covered the ground in every direction.

We even managed to catch a huge cluster of puddling swallowtail butterflies before we left!

After a detour through the arts and crafts community (and a terrific demonstration of paint marbling), we decided to take a chance on the long and winding Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail. I say "take a chance" because, per the past couple entries, this whole region is BUSY, just chock-full-of-people. I’d heard it could take forever on this path because it’s one-way, and there's no way to turn back after you commit. But today was a Sunday, and with the exception of two particularly popular trailhead parking lots, the trail was terrific. Of course we stopped at a breathtaking view of the valley where Falls Branch runs (officially "Roaring Fork Interpretive Marker 3 Overlook" - really rolls off the tongue :-D ).

On our way out we stopped by the remains of the Ephraim Bales farm and explored the structures and surrounding land. The kids loved it, and I thought it was amazing to be able to walk around and inside this old Appalachian home.

It was a pretty chill day by the end of it, and the evening has been focused on unwinding and packing up most of our stuff for tomorrow's return trip. The primary motivation for this trip was getting together with family we haven't seen in over a year. The location was selected because my sis-in-law's family could camp and we could be close to "stuff to do". I don't think we’ll do Gatlinburg again any time soon, but we all got a lot out of this trip anyway. The family time was great, and while I felt like I spent the whole trip driving from one place to another, the views and natural splendor at the end of those drives were truly worth it.

Off to bed soon. LOADS more driving tomorrow, and right back to work on Tuesday...oof.

Today started off with rain. Thunderstorms moved in and around Gatlinburg until about lunch, so we took it easy at our rental house with the whole crew. My sister-and-law and her family hung out with us and we had sandwiches while the weather took its course. As everything tapered off to a trickle we decided to take a chance heading to some scenic views and gentle hikes. And wouldn't you know, the sun favored us when we needed it. The Chimney Tops picnic area and nearby Chimney Tops overlook were just gorgeous, with sun dappling the the northern slopes of the mountain itself.

We followed up the scenery with the shortest hike I’ve ever done, a mere 0.1 miles, to Cataract Falls. It was pretty nice, but nothing to write home about. I needed to fuel up the Honda after the waterfall, and Gatlinburg stood between me and every nearby gas station.

THE TRAFFIC in Gatlinburg is otherworldly slow. I don't understand how so many cars move through this otherwise rural, mountain tourist town. I think it took us 14 minutes to drive 1 mile? My sister-in-law suggested they just shut down the main drag to vehicle traffic and have folks drive on a bypass instead. Can't say I disagree.

With fresh fuel, we really just needed to head home and feed the kids. It was a simple day, but it was ultimately a pleasant one. And the back porch vista upon our return gave us layers of fog and clouds weaving between the distant trees and ridges.

My family arrived a little early in the Greater Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge Metropolitan Area yesterday afternoon. We made killer time driving from Virginia to Tennessee, but that meant we had time to kill before the rental office was open for our little mountain retreat. We drove to some covered bridge that sounded interesting, but it turns out it was built in 2000 and wasn't particularly special. We got our key, got lost on the way to the house, found the house, found out we had no mobile signal, but settled in nonetheless to a glorious view of the Smoky Mountains.

We picked this spot because this whole trip was planned around hanging out with my wife's sister and her family. They've been on a tear camping in National Parks this summer, and wanted to stay in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to make it six in a year. I love camping, but not in August in Tennessee, so we decided to stay somewhere between the park and Gatlinburg so we’d (theoretically) be close to some activities.

The problem (one of them, really) is that we're actually about 20+ minutes from anything useful in the area. My sister-in-law suggested we have pizza for dinner at our place to keep it simple on our first night here. Any restaurants with pizza that looked okay were so far away it would be cold by the time it got back to our rental house. And did we really want to tack on an extra hour of time in the car after a day full of driving? There was a restaurant close to the rental office and they had pizza, so it should be fine, right? I always talk about pizza as a "high floor" food. Even carelessly-made chain pizza can be enjoyable under the right circumstances.

Have you ever encountered a pizza that smelled like canned corn? I know some other countries intentionally put corn on their pizza, but it’s not common in the US, and we sure as hell didn't order any on our pies. BUT THEY SMELLED LIKE CANNED CORN. The crust was cursed, the tomato sauce was flavorless, and the cheese was oddly-textured. I make a big show out of not wanting to pay for Papa John's pizza, but I'll eat it at a party. This stuff? I didn't even want to save the leftovers. You could have made a better pizza dropping all the ingredients on the floor on the way to the kitchen.

But the food isn't why we're here, right? It’s family time! Last night we planned for today's activities since we had no phone signal and needed to meet up with multiple vehicles.

And what are we to do together? As a family? In Gatlinburg?

Gatlinburg, TN (and Pigeon Forge beside it) is what you would get if you took all the aggressively kitschy tourist mania of a beach locale like Myrtle Beach, removed the ocean, and somehow packed in twice as many mini golf and go kart facilities. If you want to do almost anything in nature without crowds (because COVID is still a problem right now even if TN doesn't seem to think so…) you need to drive and drive and drive. It is not my idea of a vacation to drive 6.5 hours and then have to drive everywhere all the time during the day, so we kept it simple today. Most of the gals went to some mountain roller coaster (a gravity-driven downhill car on track) while the rest of us took the littlest kids to a nearby playground.

We took it easy from there, getting another disappointing takeout meal from a local BBQ joint before parting ways so we could shop for supples and take a rest back at the house. Dinner was a safer bet this evening with some hot dogs cooked over the fire pit and corn on the cob, while Valerie and her sister made plans for a more scenic day tomorrow. It hasn't been a bad time so far because we love hanging out with family, but I think we maybe would have picked a different venue if we did it all over again :-P

Oh yeah, but we did see a black bear and her two cubs last night from our upstairs balcony!

Nota bene:

Folks, this is a long, rambling brain fart. It’s not advice. It’s not judgement. I’d say the Trump administration probably started the larger national discourse around ditching Twitter for personal sanity reasons, but anecdotally I’ve seen an uptick in essays, blog posts, and news articles over the past year about why we should leave Twitter (or why a particular writer did leave). That just got me thinking and, as is so often the case for me, I needed to get those thoughts out of my head so I could start thinking about other stuff.

How did I get here?

I joined Twitter in March of 2007. The service had been open to the public for the better part of a year, but after my friend Patrick told me about Twitter's usefulness during the South by Southwest conference, I finally had to give it a try. It was lonely on there for a while; most of my real life social network was still on MySpace or Facebook. In the years it took for people I knew to join Twitter I followed the handful of folks I knew personally along with internet personalities I knew about through other channels such as blogs and notable tech folks. I never followed too many people because I was, and remain, a "Twitter completionist" who prefers to read everything in my timeline.

I was on Twitter during its undeniable glory days. Despite the high probability of Fail Whale sightings, I was there for all the experimentation of 3rd party apps before Twitter ever had their own (I still love you Birdhouse!). I witnessed the emergence of hashtags and retweets. I rolled my eyes when traditional media leaned on the new-popular-web-thing trope that people were only posting about their food. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

I met people through Twitter that I now call friends, some of whom I have since met in real life. There was a lot of promise in the platform when it was young, and even while it was growing.

Twitter started changing.

Far smarter people than me have written about how Twitter mismanaged its own growth. Twitter just didn't seem to know what they wanted to be when they grew up. It was always broadcast platform-as-social-network, but at some point it started shifting in tone and usage more heavily toward broadcast and further from social. So-called power users started complaining about Twitter's disregard for its theoretically most ardent fans (kinda silly in hindsight to suggest a VC-backed user acquisition machine like Twitter paid any mind to "ardent fans").

On a personal level, I started to see a lot more duplicate posts and retweets from the people I followed. There was a Twitter-wide explosion in the use of retweets. Folks were posting threads that should have been blog posts. Many of my friends grew bored, gave up, or stuck with Facebook as the single attention sink for their social and parasocial needs. Most of the people I followed who stuck around gradually shifted their use into commiseration, news/culture/meme ingestion and sharing, and political/social complaint. This meant my timeline turned increasingly negative, occasionally interrupted by a funny meme or video.

Why the hell am I still here?

To be clear: I'm a straight, white guy. This means I have little risk of randos trying to stomp on my stamps whenever I express an opinion online. I can criticize Richmond For All, anti-vaxxers, Elon Musk, or Donald Trump without having to worry about a brigade of dude-bros jumping down my throat as if its their personal duty to shut me down. That's hella privilege. But that doesn't automatically make Twitter something I can use everyday without feeling the sort of emotional or psychological toll written about with increasing frequency in the press.

Here is how I make things work, for me. I totally get it if, for various reasons, it is healthier for you to dump Twitter if you're still here. It is, honestly, probably for the best.

1. I've maintained a low follow count.

As of this post, I only follow 107 accounts. I've periodically unfollowed accounts that appear abandoned. If we know each other and I don't follow you, it's not personal. I just strictly control how much of what kind of content makes it through on my Twitter timeline. I've disabled retweets for a number of accounts that I DO follow. There are people I know in real life who have followed me without my following back because I'm hesitant to add more to my timeline. I know people who appear to use Twitter as a form a solidarity and information sharing which is very cool, and helpful for some of my friends. For my timeline, however, that means following a few users in the same social/topical circle brings a lot of duplicate/similar posts about the same topic, news article, local event, etc. If you want to know what this is like, follow three or more of the local journalists in your area. Invaluable perspective and excellent news sources? Yes. Every single one of them posting all the same details about the same local story at the same time? Also yes (with all love and respect to Richmond, VA's excellent reporters at RTD, Virginia Mercury, VPM, and elsewhere).

2. I stay off the official website and apps.

I still use a 3rd-party app (Twitterrific has been my jam for many, many years) which lets me see a linear, reverse-chronological timeline with no ads (for now), Fleets (RIP to a stupid one), or trending BS. I don't get suggestions for who to follow or notifications about likes and new follows for the people that I follow. I have robust muting/filtering capabilities which let me fine tune my timeline whenever the need arises.

3. Who am I, anyway?

Finally, I'm nobody. Honestly, my best defense against the unrelenting poo-storm of Twitter is personal obscurity. I haven't pursued obscurity; I too crave the dopamine hit of likes/florps/hearts/upvotes/whatever Twitter is calling it these days, but I've just never been noteworthy enough locally or otherwise to draw a lot of followers and the attendant attention.

The long and short of it is that I'm scrupulous about what I allow in my timeline, and I'm invisible enough on the internet to avoid the ire of any real heat (I'm also terrified of becoming Twitter's main character, so I'm not one to make controversial statements in the first place). I'm not trying to convince you to stay on Twitter or offer a blueprint for surviving the avalanche of negativity, but as people continue to pontificate on what Twitter does to our brains and how to escape, I just felt like cataloging why and how I'm still a daily active user.

My family just returned from our vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I took the opportunity to get some new portraits of my kids, especially since I have a schmancy new portrait lens for my D800. Just look at this kid's hair! It’s spectacular! And why is he growing so much!? I demand answers!

July 20 was a Friday in 2001 and Valerie was in Richmond to move more of her stuff into VCU’s West Broad apartment complex. We had been hanging out and flirting since around April, when our mutual friend Kenny asked me to intervene in their friendly bickering about his long, luxurious eyelashes. Joking over AOL Instant Messenger led to group hang outs and awkward, nervous chats in real life. But I had a plan for that night. I was going to ask her out.

I think maybe nine of us met up to catch a screening of America’s Sweethearts, the sort of coordinated group effort you just don’t see after the days of campus ministry gatherings. Afterward the whole lot of us met up in Richmond’s Meadow Park to enjoy the summer weather and continued conversation. I kept looking for an opportunity to speak privately to Valerie so I could share my feelings but there was a hitch: her sister Elizabeth, 16 at the time, had travelled with her to Richmond. And she talked. A lot. Almost endlessly.

Eventually we walked back toward the block where many of our group lived and my friend Jake (one of the best men at our wedding) seized the moment on my behalf and pulled Elizabeth into conversation so Valerie and I could speak one-on-one. On North Morris, right beside the corral of apartment building trash cans, I glanced sideways at Valerie and muttered, “I like you.”

“I like you, too,” she said.

“Cool.”

I sheepishly asked if I could hold her hand and, after she assented, we walked on to sit and chatter in the shadow of Captain Q-tip (the now-removed Confederate artillery monument by VCU’s performing arts building) the way new lovebirds do.

The early days of our relationship were pretty corny, but they kept going. I learned to shut up and be okay with silence, and Valerie learned to open up and tell me what’s on her mind. She taught me most of what I know about art and I introduced her to some of New Jersey’s finer pleasures.

It’s remarkable enough that our marriage has lasted nearly 17 years (not bragging—marriage is hard!), but it’s also wild to me that Valerie stuck around for the 2.25 years that we dated. People change so much between the ages of 19 and 22 that it’s a wonder she still liked the person I was by the time we stood together at the altar.

And here we are twenty years later, aging together with our growing children. We weathered growth into adulthood together. I like to think that our time dating prepared us to face (and sometimes even welcome) the changes in each other for years after. I still like her. She still likes me. And I still think that’s cool.

Saw this short, excellent video interview with cinematographer Roger Deakins about how/why he chooses lenses for the films he shoots. I enjoy this as a movie enthusiast but also as a stills photographer. There's some conceptual overlap here when it comes to visual storytelling and the ways lenses affect framing, perspective, and so forth.

In a recent post of mine, I griped in a post script about the profusion of mediocre white American dudes on YouTube in nearly every topic. I added that you can find great stuff out there from non-white, non-American, non-dude channels, but you usually have to dig for it. One of the ways I do that on YouTube is to check the channels tab for any given channel if I like their videos, because they frequently include other channels to which they subscribe. This has been an important discovery vector for me and is how I’ve encountered a number of channels to which I have subscribed over the past year.

Case in point is YouTuber Ava Silvery, or Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah according to her website. She is a working visual artist (mostly photographer) whose videos have a beautiful and quiet documentary style. Her photography is varied and excellent, and she’s been on YouTube for about two years. But I was only subscriber #637! And the video at the top of this post has fewer than 200 views as of this publication. Perhaps Adu-Sanyah isn't looking to build a huge YouTube following, or doesn't want to deal with the maintenance, anxiety, and abuse (especially for women of color) that often comes hand-in-hand with more notoriety. But it’s criminal to me that we can get thousands of views for perhaps the 50th white guy "reviewing" a classic camera while something original never even bubbles up in my YouTube recommendations.

And why is that? Why did I have to proactively seek out channels like Ava Silvery? I show my kids one video about some pet otters and I get loads of recommendations for pet otter videos. But I follow quite a few photography channels, watch at least a dozen photography videos a week, and I have to search for great stuff like the video above?

I'm pretty bad about consistently posting on this website, but I do want to try highlighting some more great photography stuff that I find on YouTube from people who don't necessarily look like me or come from the US. If the art I consume is coming from a fairly homogenous group of people, I can only expand my understanding of photography and its impact but so far.

Oh, and while this post is mostly about YouTube and the Ava Silvery channel, don't sleep on Abu-Sanyah's website. She has loads of her work up there along with some thoughtful writing on her family and projects.