FILM ADVENTURES CONTINUE

The camera on the top is the camera I used back when I was a teenager going to shows a few times a week. I’d then drop off the film for 1-hour processing while I worked next door at the grocery store. After my shift was up, I’d stop over at pick up my film.

Both are loaded with black and white film, and they’re ready to rock.

BACK TO THE NIGHTMARE

We endured a pandemic. Life shut down. Live music stopped. No more going to the movies. It was take-out only at food stops. I avoided aisles at the grocery stores when it was filled with too many people.

Through all that, and a million Americans dead, it’s like we just couldn’t wait to get back to being miserable.

I’ve talked to a handful of people recently, and no one’s fucking happy. Short fuses, bad tempers, and people being shitty everywhere.

Oh, we can get back to “normal” a bit? Great. Time to be miserable.

SCREEN RATIO NERDERY

I have absolutely zero skin in this game, as I haven’t owned a TV since… 2008? I don’t even watch much TV, but have fallen in love pretty hard with all the Star Wars material on Disney+, and of course sports on Sling.

What I love most is someone post a video about aspect ratios in the year 2023 and it can be seen 215K times.

(via Garbage Day)

BACK IN THE CAMERA GAME

I finally got around to buying a real camera (Nikon Z30), and I absolutely love it. I haven’t owned a digital camera since my Bike Nerd days back in like 2010 or so, and I’ve never owned a camera this nice, period.

Sure, the camera on the iPhone is nice, but using something that just does one thing is real nice. And when I pull out my iPhone to take a photo I could see a notification about an email, a message, or whatever else.

The camera is just a camera, and I love that.

IF I’M MISSING I’M WORKING

“If I’m missing I’m working,” as said by the mighty Chuck D.

Social media ain’t working, so in effect, you’re missing.

When I see big media outlets reaching just 3% of their audience, with full-fledged social media and marketing teams on staff? HAH.

As far as the 97% of your followers who haven’t seen that post?

You’re missing.

I know that’s not what Chuck D is talking about here, but he’s been off Twitter. Long enough for someone to say “you went missing.”

Nah.

He’s working.

Get working on things that work.

PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM

I couldn’t imagine being a laid off Microsoft worker then waking up to this news.

Everything is cruel and cold. Be a robot. No emotions. Don’t rock the boat. Eh, you’ll probably still get laid off because paying for extra server capacity for AI bots is cheaper than rising health care costs.

People are the problem, it seems.

SOCIAL MEDIA LAST GASPS

This post from Cory Doctorow has pretty much ended it for me:

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

My biggest project is Heavy Metal Email, and I usually hype my recent posts on Twitter with some fancy videos or the cool images I make. Then I’m careful not to include a link, since that’s frowned upon, and I just mention LINK IN BIO.

Well, in the past month, I’ve gotten less than 20 clicks from LinkTree.

And that’s from Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook combined.

So tonight I put out a new GOODNIGHT, METAL FRIEND mix (#32 right here) and I’m not going to promote it all via social media.

I’ve go a newsletter going out to 17 people at 8am tomorrow (subscribe here if you want). So they’ll get to see I have a new mix that I just released.

And I’ve now got 38 or so “followers” on Mixcloud, so those people will get notified of my new mix.

Eh, let’s see where it goes from there, because social media ain’t gonna help a bit!