I picked up this camera from eBay a bit ago. It’s the same camera I had in the mid 90s that I’d carry around with me to shows and diners late at night with friends.
CARS
BROKEN RAILING
BIRDIE
DOCK
SOME BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS
Author: Seth Werkheiser
CULTIVATE COMMUNITY
How do you make it as a musician in 2024? Have fans that you can reach.
On Spotify, I can’t reach the people who follow me—I have no idea who those people are, and I can’t communicate with them. I’m just on a playlist or an algorithm. But here on Substack, I’m cultivating a community.
Fog Chaser
Without fans, you don’t have a career.
HIT THE ROAD, WIKIPEDIA
Bet you didn’t know that a handful of people wrote 15,000 articles about roads in the US! Well, the editors behinds have left Wikipedia behind and started their own site.
Despite minor disagreements, the US Roads Project mostly worked in harmony, but recently, a long-simmering debate over the website’s rules drove this community to the brink. Efforts at compromise fell apart. There was a schism, and in the fall of 2023, the editors packed up their articles and moved over to a website dedicated to roads and roads alone. It’s called AARoads, a promised land where the editors hope, at last, that they can find peace.
See, this is what I fucking love about the internet.
If you don’t like something, you can build your own thing.
Sure, AARoads might not get the views and traffic that Wikepieda provides, but… life is more than views and traffic, right?
It’s about writing, stories, history, humanity.
Split up the cost of a domain name and website hosting and you’ve got something sustainable and organic that you can hold onto for many years.
(via Simon Owens)
MTV IS A GHOST
This is unreal:
“MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”
This from ‘They are TV’s ghosts – networks that somehow survive with little reason to watch them anymore,’ via Simon Owens.
Such a unique opportunity in front of us, if only we could all look up from our phones for fucking three minutes, shake out of our trance, and believe that we can make something great.
“Although I live in a huge house, I keep a hotel room and go there at about 6:30 in the morning. I have a Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, a yellow pad, and pens, and I go to work. I encourage housekeeping not to go in, since I leave at about one in the afternoon and never use the bed.”
Maya Angelou
Via ‘Apples, Baths, and Bestsellers: The Rituals of Creative Minds‘
THIS WEEK IN BURGER WORLD
I see a lot of bad marketing emails from Square, but the marketing emails I get from Bad Luck Burger Club are fucking great.
It’s bold. It’s bright. The logo screams in your face. Love that.
The copy-writing matches their brand so well, too:
✅ The Intergalactic Rolling Church of the Burg (aka our food truck)
✅ Also, when you park at the market, don’t park in the dang bike lane!
✅ Party on, Burger out.
Most marketing emails are just square blocks of things for sale, but Bad Luck gets away with it because the top half was written by people – you can’t get an intern or AI to write that well.
Like, there’s a difference between greeting your customer with a hearty “hello, how ya doing today?!” and “so how many burgers ya want?”
I’ve eaten several of their burgers, all in one week at Furnce Fest in 2023, and they’re fucking amazing.
“Social media distracted me, where I didn’t have the focus to be able to focus long enough on the work … social media was too distracting, where it constantly interrupted me and didn’t allow me to get to that place where I’m in the zone.”
Illustrator Samantha Cotterill from Can I Delete My Social Media?
NOT/BUT
These are amazing. See more here.
NICE MONDAY
By Miriam Muñoz, via Posts
“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”
Cory Doctorow