Ploafmaster General

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.

I don't remember exactly how long I’ve wanted a portrait lens for my Nikon, but it’s been a loooooong time. Maybe the obsession coincided with my intensified interest in photography in 2008 and the work of local awesome creative guy Ansel Olson with his own 85mm lens.

Last night, at long last, I took delivery of a near-mint copy of this lens. I don't really have anything to show for it right now, but you can bet your bippy I'll be taking some fresh portraits of my wife, kids, and anybody else who will let me over the coming months. This lens renders out-of-focus regions with a particularly dreamy aesthetic, so I'm sure to use it for plenty of non-portrait photos where a longer focal length works as well.

It’s always exciting to try a new lens with photography because it is quite actually a different perspective, and I'm thrilled to discover how I see things differently through this new (to me) glass.

Just a little post-rock instrumental sugar for your listening pleasure.

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Here I am, a geriatric millennial, and I’m about to write about daddy issues like I’m some kind Gen-x-er. But it’s Father’s Day, I have time on my hands, and the weather isn’t cooperating with my plans for a photo walk.

My biological father was mostly terrible. He ditched my mom for college money, physically abused my older brother when he was younger, and pretty much wasted every post-divorce weekend he had us by watching sports on TV while my brothers and I played with toys on the floor.

At some point in my late teens he seemed to make a noticeable effort to improve. Never to apologize, mind you, but all three of us boys recognized he was doing something different and we actually started to enjoy seeing him. Then he died when I was 26.

My stepdad, on the other hand, did a pretty good job of helping my mom raise a houseful of boys (including my half brother he had with her when I was 6). He treated us like his own kids, took care of us, and I still feel mostly positive about my childhood with him around. His style of discipline was regressive, but on balance we felt loved.

Then my mom left him when I was in grad school and he weaponized his resentment against her by withholding alimony as frequently and as long as he could get away with. When I confronted him, he dug in and felt like he deserved to behave this way because of her past misdeeds. We haven’t spoken since 2012.

Now I’m almost 40 with no father figure of my own and two kids who have to deal with me. I’m trying to be a very different sort of dad than either example I had, and I’m not great at it. We don’t do physical discipline in our house, but I still struggle with anger all the time. The number of episodes that have ended with shouting, then shame, then apologies are too many to count.

I’m also ideologically different than my dad and stepdad; they were both super socially conservative. I’m trying to help raise a daughter to be strong and independent, nurturing her nerdy and athletic sides. I'm trying to help raise a son that can resist toxic masculinity as much as possible (and struggling not to model it myself) while keeping his sweet nature intact. And I’m trying to help—that is, show these kids that it’s not just Mommy’s job to run the house and take care of them.

I spent a lot of my 30s minimizing the problems of my childhood because I know enough folks with worse and more numerous stories. But the reality is there are some real trouble spots from my youth, and a great many of them have to do with the father figures that were in my life.

Father’s Day, for me, has mostly become a day to be grateful for my own fatherhood. I don’t spend much time thinking about my own fatherly examples anymore. But I do earnestly love being a dad myself, and I’ll keep working on it. My kids don’t owe me anything, but I hope when they’re my age Father’s Day is less fraught. I hope they think of my parenting as a net positive, even if they don’t laugh at my jokes anymore.

There's a bit of British English slang that this Yank would like to see adopted in The States: faff. As in, "havin' a faff", "faffin' about", and so on. It’s a delightful way to talk about wasting time, messing around, or a pointless task.

It’s Wednesday. The world is garbage. But you can bless the rains down in Africa for 12 straight minutes if you want to take your mind off things for a while.

I remember, in the folly of my teenage years, trying to create my own catchphrase. I come from the Jersey Shore where, like many coastal towns, you wore surf wear even if you didn't really surf. Billabong, Quicksilver, Rusty, Ocean Pacific, etc. I was particularly fond of Quicksilver. So fond, in fact, that I would tell more than one person, on more than one occasion, that "Quicksilver is my sauce". You know, because I wanted to be covered in it? Complemented by it? I dunno. I was already a super nerdy outsider, so I don't know why I though this would do me any favors.

I’ve enjoyed the gentle, entertaining, informative videos from James Hoffmann about coffee over the past year, but his last couple of videos have been a bit of a departure that have been no less informative and entertaining than the norm. Just today, for example, a video about cultural appropriation, colonization, inclusivity, and some oft-overlooked ways to make coffee better for everybody, and not just white folks in Europe or North America:

Hoffmann doesn't even show up in this video except as mentioned by Ārām Se's Raghunath Rajaram to thank him for including the video on this channel. It’s an excellent video about what Westerners often take for granted, the hegemony of US/UK influence on the world of specialty coffee, and how colonization and exclusion need fixing in more than just the farming and production side of the industry.

Last week's video also kept Hoffmann out of the picture by sharing a production from Gilly Brewing Co. in Stone Mountain, GA about their mostly coffee-based mixed drinks (non-alcoholic, I believe). These drinks are meant to tell stories based on a combination of the writings of James Baldwin and the book of James from the Bible:

It’s been nice to see Hoffmann showcase people in the coffee world that represent non white and/or European populations, and to essentially sideline himself. I don't think he’s a hero, or anything, but I like seeing somebody use the platform they have to shine a light on folks with no platform or at least a smaller one. White male YouTube channels dominate in so many topics (photography, maker channels, etc.), and I’d like to see similar actions from other creators to redirect attention toward and showcase people that don't usually get equal representation.

I hope Hoffmann himself shares more videos like this, or at least continues to direct his considerable audience to other specialty coffee folks (or at least YouTubers) outside the dominant white male cohort.

P.S. There are YouTube channels out there in a number of topics run by women, Black folks, non-US/EU people, but you have to actually look for them (most of the time - Marques Brownlee is pretty easy to find because he is a FORCE). Sometimes that can be dispiriting given just how many mediocre white dudes think people want to hear/see their work in video form. Like, seriously, the number of white guys with half-researched tips-and-tricks-based photography channels makes me want to yell. But if you actively look to expand the makeup of the producers you follow, you can find great stuff (e.g. Jess Hobbs).

For whatever its really worth, I consistently score as an extrovert on Meyers-Briggs tests. I've taken the short and long forms many times since high school, as recently as my early 30s. It's pretty common for folks to conflate extroversion with an outgoing personality, and for most of my life I had both. I wasn't really the life of the party or the center of attention, but I loved meeting new people, introducing myself, and generally being in the thick of of group, talking and listening about whatever.

Of course extroversion doesn’t really denote an outgoing nature; I find, rather, that I’m far less likely to do anything without somebody else to share the experience. As my college years gave way to my 20s, and the friendly, open atmosphere of my friends gave way to the corporate world, the outgoing side of my personality mostly stayed behind at Virginia Commonwealth University.

I’m pretty sure this all started once I was in a professional environment. I didn’t know what vocational consequences I’d face for my eccentricity and, coupled with my almost pathological people-pleaser nature, I intentionally held back my full self in the work place for several years. It’s a bit harder to have relaxed, social interactions in the workplace if you (rightly or wrongly) worry about being too much of a goofball or a nerd. But my particular work environment did little to break me out of this state either. I worked in software, so it was mostly white men of widely varying ages and backgrounds talking about women and/or sports all the time. I didn’t want to talk about other women because I was happy in my marriage, and I while I liked NFL football back then, it wasn’t the dominant topic in my life.

It took years to understand what seems so collectively obvious now: men (talking mainly about cis-het white men here) mostly care about objectifying women, sports, and work. Or at least those seem to be the only things most men are willing to talk about. I’ve observed this with so many casual interactions over the years that my social reservations have become self-reinforcing. Meeting folks at my wife’s high school reunion? Sports and work. Co-workers at work functions (or my wife’s work functions)? Sports. Work. The various women at the event. Even these days where most new guys I meet are dad of my kids’ friends, it’s the same. “You following [insert sports topic]?” Or more frequently “What do you do?” Mercifully, I haven’t had yet been asked what I think about any hot moms on the playground.

Sure, I’ve been fortunate to meet new people over the years, make friends, have a healthy social life. I've even been fortunate enough to find some real friendship at my prior and current jobs. But my once youthful ease I had around anybody and everybody has all but disappeared. I wouldn’t consider it replaced by shyness, per se. I'm not anxious about meeting new people. I just tend to pessimistically assume that most new interactions with other men are going to be another round of that 3-square conversational bingo card.

I recognize how it may sound like I’m self-limiting my pool of potential interaction to folks like me—white dudes. For better or for worse, though, as a parent of two young kids in an IT job, most of the time I get to interact with other adults in a spontaneous way is at school functions, the playground or park, or at work events for myself or my wife—all before the pandemic of course. In a mostly heteronormative culture with plenty of toxic masculinity and many good reasons for women not to want to talk to men, most of these social settings tend to divide along gender lines like a middle school dance.

I’m willing to bet many of the folks I meet would really rather talk about something cool they read, or a weird hobby, or how much time they waste participating in some obscure fandom. Maybe they’re bursting to share about music they’re writing, or what bothers them about local politics, or where they hope to visit someday when the kids are older. Unfortunately, years of the wrong kinds of experience and my own bad habits of overthinking and projecting have put up such guardrails that I’ve started avoiding opportunities for these interactions. I occasionally wish I was still outgoing in the same way that I wish I’d kept up with playing the piano; I don’t really believe I can recapture that spark, but I miss the personal comfort and fulfillment that came along for the ride.

Well that's a lot of gloomy words to match the gray weather outside. At least I’m sure that’s how it comes across; I don’t really dwell on it. I have a generally happy, healthy life and I don’t feel like I’m wanting for much (other than perhaps more sleep every now and then). But this has been on my mind for a while and I've been chewing over how to write about it. If writing is thinking, than this is me thinking back on and processing perhaps one of the more significant shifts in my life over the years.

I was sitting on the toilet, playing sudoku to escape the kids, when I remembered the word "pilcrow". Most of us probably recognize it even if we don't know or remember the name. It’s the typographic symbol for a paragraph and has taken a number of fun forms over the centuries (where it originated as a marking to separate thoughts, before folks visually separated them into modern paragraphs).