@trenthead

Month: November 2016

  • November 23, 2016

    November 23, 2016

    So hilarious. Just had a guy in the press room tell me what we really should be doing with our photo galleries to make them look better, get more engagement, etc. He details the whole plan, and I am able to tell him – I’ve built that site, and no one is using it.

    I pulled up the current site (above) so he could look, and sure enough – it fits everything he is talking about. And again, no one is using it.

    And you know what is even worse, I’ve built that site five different times over the years, always with the same dead end result.

    And that’s when you realize that really, you are the fool in your own story.

    .:.

    It seemed crazy last year when I created over PDFs of more than 700 articles posted to Longform.org. But what I’ve adopted as a philosophy is that when you recognize an obsessive behavior in your life, double down on it.

    In this case it meant using the SiteSucker app to download the entire Longform website, grepping out every single link from the text of their site, and writing some scripts to have yet another site create epub files of every single article ever posted on Longform.

    Now I just need to read the 9,000+ longform articles I have thrown onto my iPad.

    .:.

  • November 9, 2016

    My assignment last night was the Utah Democrats Election Night Party.

    Not the happiest place.

    .:.

    The coverage of the campaign has been atrocious – always falling back to the horse race rather than issues.

    And how does the New York Times run the odds of Hilary winning (always over 85%) up until late last night when out of nowhere it reads Trump with 93% chance of victory?

    How does the media, get it so wrong? So out of touch.

    At our pre-election night photo dinner, a colleague couldn’t understand why anyone would vote for Trump, and why anyone didn’t like Hillary, that there was nothing to dislike.

    But I’ve known people who have hated Hillary for twenty years. That’s beside the point. I was surprised that he gave no validity to anyone on the conservative side, that anyone opposed was simply a racist or misogynist.

    They voted against Hillary because they don’t agree with a progressive agenda. I’ve kind of swerved here in my writing.

    Back to the media – and more importantly the fake media, the partisan media – those outlets. The media world is so splintered into tiny outlets with little credibility.

    But you know what? Readers don’t demand credibility any more. They just want to see what they agree with, or what outrages them.

    It’s true in my own life – for a while this year I was looking at the Daily Mail everyday. I knew that the stories were all exaggerations and falsehoods and the most ridiculous stories. It didn’t matter, because that’s what I was looking for…

    It was more fun to read the cartoon version of the news than the real news (which I read as well).

    And I’ve stopped, so don’t judge.

    .:.

    I’ve been saying this year that everyone always says Never Forget, and It Can Never Happen Again, and how we’ve learned so much from the Holocaust.

    But really, in the future it will happen again, with much more precision and devastation. Humans have gotten better at everything – the next rise of fascism (whether or not it is Trump) will be exponentially worse.

  • Surrounded

  • November 2, 2016

    Just back from a cold walk – with Ruby who was pinballing all around chasing sights sticks and smells.

    Had someone reach out asking about the Short Creek zine I put out a while back. This was the push I needed to set up https://store.trent.photo.

    .:.

    We had a great fovi8 meeting last night. I’ve pretty much finished with the back end and now the ideas are flowing from the team. It’s great to be involved with three brilliant people.

    .:.

    It’s funny how you want things

    Not going there.

    With all of the recent hacks going on, it’s gotten to where you don’t really want to write anything down, especially in an email or text.

    That’s definitely the direction I”m going. Why put anything down that reveals the a*shole that we all have inside of us? It’s not really who we are, but it comes out with quick expressions of opinion.

    After watching a couple episodes of Black Mirror season 3 yesterday, I taped over all of the cameras on my devices. I don’t use them anyway, so why have an exposed window that is out of my control? Seriously.

    .:.

    Eli told me that UNPA results are all finalized, but I”m still waiting on them arriving in my inbox. Yes, in November we still don’t have results from the contest. And we haven’t had a get-together to hand out the awards.

    Big credit to Eli, though. He’s been handling a lot of contest work for a dozen years. He’s finally done after this one. I just need that email and he’s done.

    I have moved the UNPA winners gallery site to https://unpa.trent.photo, which isn’t optimum. I don’t like having my name in the URL, but I’m no longer in the business of buying too many domains. At least, I hope those days are over.