Too Close
astrofish.net/travel
Pink Cake: The Quote Collection – Kramer Wetzel
Pink CakeWalk the Wire – David Baldacci
There’s a fun touch, right at the very beginning, before the main characters show up, just a little, probably nobody notices, but the hunter and prey, the strong man? Not always so strong. “Loses his lunch.” Just a wonderfully evocative opening. I picked this book up close on the heels of staying up late to finish reading another book.
I don’t recall which one, but one of the (Lee Child) Jack Reacher novels was set in a similar, North Dakota posting. Think it was similar in description, at the outset. While I have the books on the shelf, I can’t be bothered to try and figure out which one it was. But if the Arctic Circle is merely 50 miles north of the Canadian border then, well, why?
“It’s the wild, wild west.” Along with Minnesota, probably added to the list, now North Dakota as a place I might not want to visit again. High body count, in the novel, you know.
Does a good author leave obvious clues out in the open?
Some of it, updated variations on old, familiar themes. Some of it? Yeah, North Dakota got a less inviting.
Sentimental flourish at the end, and proof the author has a soft spot in his heart. Otherwise, an excellent addition to the Memory Man collection.
Think there are more, but I couldn’t pull them all together. Apparently, I’ve read a lot of this author.
Walk the Wire – David Baldacci
Walk the Wire (Memory Man Book 6)“What I don’t recommend is trusting social media to answer your questions. There are far too many people out there who think they know everything and type in a confident manner who are flat wrong and will only hinder, not help.”
No source or citation, see the fineprint.
Two-Meat Tuesday – Kramer Wetzel
Two-Meat Tuesday: Astrofish.Net/XenonSan Pedro Creek (temporarily free e-book)
#tuesday
#HashTagsSuck
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold.
Consider, that is flawed human memory from near thirty years distant. Still the notion, rebounded here, yet again, when I would think of it as an ‘art project.’
Not quite half a lap of Saturn. Not done, just withering, unattended. There are a few scattered images that carry great significance, like the early Car Crushing Bump, and one, it was a heron with a snake in its bill, the snake wrapped around the bird’s beak. Cartoon image, sort of, only, in real life, along San Antonio’s storied and fabled riverwalk.
13 years of a single image a day. I launched that site, the original side-project before there were many image-sharing sites. One other earlier site, though, was named something like ‘500 pixels,’ and for the first couple of years, I ran images that were just 500 pixels wide, as a matter of space and bandwidth, and even then, it was more about trying to learn about websites, photography, and digital images. Imagine that, an art project that was a teaching tool, too.
Like the intended image irony.
What I did learn is that I wasn’t a professional photographer. Nor would I be one. The original premise was cameras that cost less than $100, ubiquitous point-and-shoot, but those were replaced by phones. By 2010, it was all iPhone images, pretty much, and postproduction following Apple’s various iterations of consumer-grade digital photo tools. No extensive Photoshop, nor any high-end software.
Digging around in my archives, I found my own discussion about getting the upgraded, “pro” software, from Apple, which I did, eventually. Useful more for a growing catalog rather than image manipulation. There was one quote, near the bottom, perfectly summed up, “Results aren’t worth the expense in time.”
I did, with the advent of iPad tools, play around with more filters, but eventually, I surrendered to just point, click, post. Excellent experience.
When I lived downtown, I was in the midst of a city in transition, years behind Austin’s explosive exponential growth. Then, too, San Antonio always struck me as Austin’s older sibling, way weirder, where the weirdness quotient runs bone-deep, not just some affectation. Better breakfast tacos, too.
In San Antonio, I encountered an absolute reverence, an obeisance towards two institutions: church and Spurs. The San Antonio Spurs evoke a kind of local spirt that goes far behind any normal sports franchise, with a nod towards Mark Cuban. “Two favorite teams, The Spurs and whoever’s playing Dallas.”
Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.
Cressida in Shakespeare’s T & C (I.ii.154)
I post images infrequently, now, and when I do post, most pictures go up in some portion of the social media feeds. It’s worth noting that numerous sites have come — and subsequently disappeared, which is why I ran my own site for the repository of my images. Can’t trust anyone else to do the work.
The name is for sale.
Name: BexarCountyLine.com
ISSN: 2150-685X
(Includes an ISSN serial designation, like, how cool is that?)
New Media (old) | Post-Modern conceptualismLooked it up in my own source, Pink Cake…
“Things fall apart—“
W. B. Yeats “The Second Coming”
Two books that the website spawned?
San Pedro Creek (temporarily free e-book)
Bexar County Line Best of the Double-Aughts (temporarily free e-book)
Hard copy versions of the books are available at astrofish.net/books.
Looking ahead, looks like I’ll be live and in-person on June 7, back in San Antonio. Live Oak, really. With everything going on? I would prefer the contactless pay, wave your phone at my little credit card thing. Works better, you know, and less chance of infection. Probably won’t have change for hundreds, either.
Upside is that everything is getting better, right?
Venus is retrograde, Mercury will be retrograde err long, and error?
One vendor was offering — for a fee — plastic shields for the readers and other vendors, but I find that even more inconvenient. I’ll follow guidelines and wear a mask, I guess. Looking for hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes, too.
The sign kind sums it all up, am I right?
Online until then….