the human race casually filming its impending doom

Yesterday I saw this video of tourists standing at the bottom of a massive rock slide, filming it despite certain death rolling down the hill towards them. I wondered how a human could possibly be this stupid.

Also yesterday, I saw that the last nine months have been some of the hottest months we have ever recorded on Earth. Of course, anyone with a brain would already have guessed that what with the deadly droughts, heat waves, wild fires, “zombie fires,” and whatnot that have been ravaging all areas of the planet more and more of in recent years.

But we aren’t going to change our ways. We aren’t going to do anything of the magnitude that is required to actually make a difference until the flames are literally engulfing our homes. Then we will be like, “oh shit, this is bad.”

We are all the tourists filming the rock slide tumbling down towards us. The human race is, generally speaking, that stupid. It’s pretty incredible. I wonder if I’ll survive long enough to witness the chaos unfold.

ghost towns 1

My flip phone has bitten the dust.

RIP, buddy.

It still works for the most part but it no longer vibrates at all, which makes it pretty much useless for me since I use that function a lot. Yeah yeah, cue the vibrator jokes. Boring. Anyway, I hoped that the thing was just being glitchy so I tried turning it off and back on, then tried taking the battery out for a while, then tried resetting the phone. The last thing wiped the phone clear of anything I had saved on it. There wasn’t much, maybe a dozen photos from over the years, but I hadn’t considered losing those when I reset it, and I was a bit bummed when I realized they were gone.

Now I’m back on another old phone, the one I’ve used as a backup for the last 10 years or so. When I fired up its dusty old steam engine heart and began clearing the cobwebs, what did I stumble across but a bunch of other old photos I had forgotten about from previous times I used it. A few of the pics were really special but most were not, yet I still found myself poring over them. It was funny timing because the other day Dana and I were talking about how I used to take tons of photos and keep detailed scrap books, until I suddenly just stopped. I’ve got probably 25 old photo albums, full of pics of all kinds of youthful debauchery, from the time we were teenagers up until I was about 30. I don’t flip through those albums often but I love them when I do, and will never get rid of them.

I stopped bothering with them because I eventually just got sick of the work that went into them. I got tired of always carrying a camera with me (this was before everyone used phones to take pics), getting the pics printed, arranging them in the photo album along with associated shit like receipts or ticket stubs or fingernails, and so on. Around the same time though, Jenn started taking pics occasionally with her phone, so she became the new de facto documenter of my life.

I’m happy with that, except for the fact that we are drawn to documenting different things. We also don’t spend every waking moment together so I do things that end up not being photographed. And Jenn doesn’t take a ton of pics, just of things that jump out to her. I feel like there are lots of small moments and events that don’t seem special but are worthy of documenting, that they are things we will look back fondly on and might not remember or think about without a reminder like a photo. So as much as I like that Jenn has taken over this role and the different approach to it she has from me, I feel like I should still be doing some kind of documenting, be it a real photo album or a digital one, whatever. I’ve felt this way for a long time so when I looked through the pics on the backup phone and was pleased despite most of them not being particularly special, and when I think about the pics on the flip phone that are now lost, it really hits home for me that I should get on this. Maybe now that I’m using a phone that can take decent pics, I can finally put my money where my mouth is. I’m excited about it.

This is a pic I took yesterday to test something with the backup phone. Let it be the first of many. It’s a throwaway pic but it actually sums up a good portion of my life: chillwave, vintage stove clocks, and de-wormer medication for cats. This is the kind of incidental, slyly important shit I’m talking about. Wowee.

the social value of the slideshow

lately i’ve been thinking about slideshow parties a lot. when i was a kid, my dad had a whole bunch of slides like the ones in the pic, and i found them fascinating. they were just tiny translucent versions of regular photographs my dad had taken but they were in hard little frames, and you had to put them in a slide projector to show them to people. it seemed like a really cumbersome system to me but i liked it a lot anyway. i don’t think my dad ever showed his slides to anyone, at least not that i can remember, but i looked through them sometimes, holding them up to the light and squinting to make out the tiny image.

i think that the idea behind slides was to have a bunch of people over and show them pics from your latest vacation or whatever, have a little slideshow party with your friends. just like how people used to show their 8mm film on projectors in the 50’s or 60’s, like a scene from the wonder years.

in that sense, i still think slideshow parties are a swell group activity. when i think about friends going on vacations, i want them to invite the gang over for a slideshow of their pics once they get home. i wouldn’t even mind the fact we would all be using computers and digital photos. there’s just something about getting together with friends and showing photos and chatting about our adventures that i think is really warm and old-fashioned.

i know with most people posting their shit on facebook and instagram now, it might seem pointless and inconvenient to bother with slideshow parties but i think the social aspect is invaluable, especially as we get older and find it harder to meet up with friends. i want to keep finding reasons to get together, hang out, and spend quality time with pals.

ben, i’m looking at you right now.