Writer, musician, wizardly guide to platform independence
2025: NETWORKING WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA
2024: BYE, INSTAGRAM
2023: OVEREXTENDING FOR WHO?
2021: PUT YOUR HEALTH ON YOUR CALENDAR
2020: NEW YEARS DAY ADVENTURES
2019: DEFINE YOUR OWN SUCCESS IN 2019
I forgot all about that very adventurous New Yeas Day in 2020! Wild to think how that year turned out.
On the first of the month I’m reminded to download my photos from my iPhone. I do this so I don’t have to keep paying Apple a monthly fee that just keeps going up, and I just like having my photos right where I can see them, in folders.
For December I have 215 photos, 54 screen shots, and 18 videos. I’ll keep that saved locally on my MacBook Pro (just 3.5GB), and start a new folder for January where I’ll dump the photos from my Nikon throughout the month.
Then, in February, I’ll move this January folder to my external hard drive.
My folders goes all the way back to 2002, but it’s not nearly as organized. The total is about 57,000 photos, which takes up 207GB on my 2TB drive, backed up regularly to BackBlaze.
Yeah, I miss the search functionality (finding all the photos of bikes, or cats would be great), but I love only paying .99 cents per month for iCloud instead of $120 a year.
Sometimes you just wake up at 4am and can’t get back to sleep so you start planing out a podcast series that you’d announce and launch on the day you host a big online event. What if?
We’ve all seen it – people waiting for their drinks at Starbucks. Arms crossed, sighing loudly while scrolling on their phones. Waiting, waiting, waiting for their drinks.
Then someone walks in, no wait, and walks out with their drink.
I get it; get people to order on the app. Less interaction, no friction, no need for someone to take the order.
In and out, money in the bank.
But I just looked and there’s like a dozen people here in this space, none of them having a pleasant experience.
How does that bode well for a business? A brand?
People in and out, and on their way.
And a business place filled with people rolling their eyes and getting the wrong order (like me) and just walking away.
Got this old rotary phone at a local antique market for $10.
50 years old.
25 years since I started Buzzgrinder (music blog).
20 years since I had a full time job.
18 years since I started Noisecreep (for AOL Music).
15 years since I started Skull Toaster (metal trivia).
10 years of Metal Bandcamp Gift Club (buying albums for strangers).
10 years since I started running.
8 years since I started working with MNRK Music Group.
5 years of Social Media Escape Club.
Tom Williams from the band Stray From The Path:
No-one gives a fuck about first-week numbers anymore, anyway. People care more about finding the record at your merch desk for the first time and buying it right then. I clearly remember asking (our label, SharpTone Records), ‘Why do people pre-order records?’ and being met with a minute of silence.
Love this from Jen Mayer of Makeist.
I’m not looking for a job. I’m not waiting to be hired. I’m not leaving it to luck.
I’m making the connections. I’m connecting the dots.
I am actively and intentionally creating my calling: a career I never want to retire from, and a life I don’t need a vacation from.
This is the work: building Makeist into something that’s not just a business, but a life.
Here’s to not looking for a job in 2026.
My friend and her dad hiked here earlier in the day. Hours later, he called and said he lost his glasses, so we went looking for them before it got too dark. We didn’t find them, but we got in a good walk at least.
Love this from Henrik Karlsson’s “Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog:”
Your contradictions are an asset. You’re a lover of classical English architecture and you’re also a dirty little punk—expressing both at the same time is more interesting than sharing just cute pictures of English gardens or just wild trashy stuff. The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.
