I’m 51 this year, and at the same time Tobyblog turns 11. Today there won’t be any celebrating to speak of, it being Good Friday. My birthday frequently seems to fall on the holy days around Easter (or Pascha as we now refer to it), so it’s often overshadowed but never entirely forgotten. Sunday Kassi will be baking me a special blackberry cake that I expect will rival anything she’s ever made for me in the past. In fact, I think I should make a photo gallery of all my previous year’s birthday cakes. There have been some outstanding ones. A old photo of the blueberry cake she made for me one year still stands as my most popular photo on Flickr for some reason.
AI has been a recurring topic of my conversations of the last few weeks, spurred on by the sudden popularity of ChatGPT’s image creation capabilities and its ability to mimic the style of popular artists, a feature that has sparked a fair amount of controversy both online and closer to home, with one of my close friends recently confiding to me that he took some heat over his frequent posts of family photos rendered in the fashionable Ghibli style. The whole subject is of some interest to me. I’ve known about Chat’s image rendering for a little while now and have played around with it some, but after discovering that they restored internet access for “deep research” queries I decided to turn it loose on this blog, asking Chat to do a deep dive on Tobyblog.com and generate an image of me that would tie together all the loose themes of my posts and capture the essence of what this site is all about. The result of that is the image posted above.
I won’t pretend that’s an accurate rendering of me personally, but as a kind of badge for the site I don’t think it’s all that bad.
Once upon a time I was a little kid with kind of reddish, wavy hair. Shy and timid. I was a decent runner. I enjoyed collecting rocks when my Mom would take me on walks around the neighborhood. I liked playing outside. Holly Beach in South Louisiana was about as far as we ever made it back in those days, and only maybe twice that I remember. Even back then it had the reputation of being kind of trashy and muddy, but Louisiana didn’t have many options for beaches. Lots of beer tabs in the sand waiting to split your foot open, which I heard happened to my godfather once. Still, though, you could see the water and hear the waves crashing the shore. It was on one of those trips, maybe this one, that my grandfather and father caught a small sandshark with their bare hands, and hauled it up onto the beach. There’s a photo of them posing with it somewhere. I’m not sure whatever happened to the shark, but I assume they tried to eat it.
It’s been a little bit since I posted last. This already feels weird to me, but I suppose I can get used to it again. I don’t really feel the need to go into detail about why I dropped off. Very few people will ever see this anyway. But the blog was never completely off my mind. Over the years I’ve done quite a bit of work under the hood, so to speak, to modernize it and make it a lot friendlier for folks running on mobile devices and lower bandwidth connections. Not only because it interested me to do so — to stay current — but because I never intended to let this thing drop permanently. I always wanted to do it better, honestly. But I’m still searching for an idea of what that means.
As always, if you’re interested in viewing the entire set on Flickr, just click on the photo above. Or, if you’d rather continue reading, click the link below.
The general consensus is that all time, day, and season since the announcement of the pandemic and the beginning of “these unprecedented times” has flowed together, coagulating into a formless lump of frustrated expectation. The expectation is that life will at any point now return to normal, or at least how we thought of that word prior to March 2020, when it seems that the powers of the world at last conspired to draw their net around the mass of us privileged, who up until that point had managed to eke out our lives in this place without more than the ordinary lot of troubles, looking on more or less helplessly as the “others” of the world suffered for our comfort, and perhaps, in our place.
But normal is one of those words whose meaning seems to fall apart upon close examination. It’s certainly not a universal condition. It can be understood only in a vague sense when conveyed to others. It is transitory. And how much of what we tell ourselves anyway is clouded by our own needful illusions or willful blindness? Did we ever understand what normal was? To anyone who has been paying attention the current situation, though highly abnormal, surely can be explained, even expected. Is it normal to think that we can go about living as we do, from day to day, forever without encountering any challenges to that life? To our assumptions? To our convictions?
It is in these times that we find out who we are. How to live. What to value. We look at things afresh. The normal takes on new meaning. Amid all these constant changes we continue to look for the light, to change our perspective, and wait for the perfect moment to… act, to snap that photo.
Do you see what I did there? I brought it all back to photography. I’m a good writer.
Anyways, it’s that time again, so enjoy this collection of my favorite photos from the year just past. We took a really lovely and memorable trip to Sedona in the spring, and I believe I added several to my collection of personal best photos from our local area.
