My glorious return is nigh thanks to the extreme labour that has gone into building this site myself and now migrating and reformatting 10 years of atrociously self coded blogs from blogspot, so nigh it is that this foray into procrastination (writing this) is probably the actual return, so really its not nigh, its now. If you’ve followed any of this, especially since the hiatus commenced in ~2017, you’ll know that producing stuff for this purposeless blog was became increasingly challenging, but the desire to post was what got me through the editing phase, my least favourite bit, but it was enough to edit – these days I pretty much just shoot (except work stuff, that requires editing) and put them in a folder I forget about. Mb I need to reproach my current editing style in lieu of something more exciting, which’ll be tough to find cuz I kinda have issues with the very nature of editing.
Over the hiatus (which I may still be in, only time will tell) I searched for answers as to where my desire went and why, or I guess how, and while working through the blog migration process I noted a particular point in my timeline, and it was not when I stopped posting with any keen-ness, but was when I finally gave in and set up an instagram for my Photography – actually the worst thing I ever did for my photography – not only was the ‘work’ it provided the worst, and from typically horrible people, but the platform itself cares nothing for photos and works to quantify social proof through tools that don’t rank – the fact that photographers post selfies, let along get more likes is really all I need to say, but there’s more, mainly that to do well on IG you need to stick to a single subject, and to a lesser extent style, which is the absolute last thing I want to do with my photos. I’ve always had qualms with photo-viewing in the digital realm, combine that with tiny phone screens and the masses and photos became more of a social credit than they did art, or a medium of expression, or anything worth worrying about. Instagram destroyed purity and visual splendour, instead opting for a platform designed to assig caliber to one’s ability to garner likes and to shoot the same thing over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, the first few months were fun….
Camosun Bog, a 2000+ year old ecosystem that was almost entirely destroyed in 75 years of population, dumping and invasive species pressures – oh and they cut a powerline trail right through the middle of it… The Sphagnum Moss found in these types of bogs is quite the organism and was used in applications from insulation to stuffing wounds – it’s like the polyester of the pre-petroleum world.
What I really enjoy, and enjoyed, about this blog is that it isn’t socials, you have to come here (these days probably from socials……….), you made the choice to engage, you weren’t forced to engage by the act of scrolling or the mechanism predicting your behaviour. The amount of freedom of expression this enables me is immense and something I’m only wrangling with now. I was posting on my blogspot before FB was a thing, let alone IG, so back then it was easy to stay the course but as these social apparatus invaded our culture and my psyche I got even further away from the core of my passion.
Looking west towards the Granville St Bridge with downtown on the left – shot from the lil park that Mary and I were v. hard lurkers, rain rain or rain before moving away from the Fairview Slopes… what a name.
I think another mechanism in my retreat from the blog was that I started aiming for too much, for eg, I’d go over seas for a month and then sit down and be like okay here’s 10000 photos to go through for work, and by the time I was done with editing, I was kinda done with the photos themselves – let alone sitting at my computer editing shit. And on top of that, writing about a month tour is a gargantuan task and really the project of getting it onto blogspot was too gargantuan, and not really what I wanted this blog for. I fell in love with this for the misc and for the micro adventures but now that I’ve got this website and the means to control it all I can now do both. CHEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Pitt Meadow Marsh Dyke Trail – bird watching was through the roof, as were the gravel trails. This kind of view is pretty standard in & around Vancouver but the wild thing is there’s pretty much nothing behind those mountains and this is pretty much the case all the way to the North Pole.
This rant is serving a few purposes: procrastinating grinding through and reformatting old blogs, a marker for the blog’s transition from google’s platform to my own and to help rationalise what it is about this that is important – which is the journal nature of it. I think my next post will be vast in time but brief in that it’ll overview my timeline over the last 2 years for my future self, before diving into journalling the lil adventures and times that make life great.
Really it all boils down to me wanting to spend time in photoshop that i’m not getting paid for – I say this because in migration I found about 35 blogs, all with thousands of words, that are drafted. Most of them are from the dark times, and I kinda wanna train a NLP bot on it – and another on the happy times, and see what they have to say to each other.
