nicole @nicole@myna.social

My New Year’s Resolution: top that.

“That” being an 8x10 photograph I captured in Japan in 2019. The subject matter was a waterfall blessing of (or by?) a portable Shinto shrine.

It’s probably my best photograph (a moment of motion). But I was boymodding at the time, so I don’t feel authorship the way I want to. Maybe that’s an impossible goal to reach for—feeling authorship the way I want to—but that’s the goal just the same. 🥳

#photography #japan #shinto #teenwitch #film

I was starting to wonder where she’d wandered off to. 🤭

In my dreams, it’s a little more elaborate. But dream manifestations tend to be truthful, like that.

I watched A Touch of Zen (1971) last night. https://boxd.it/SFm 🥰

Oh, mad 💞 for the lordly women of this film, who fling knives and soup, arrange marriages and ambushes; for the loyal retainers who dramatize royally; for the humble bookworm whose learnings actualize gruesomely; and, of course, for the goon-flicking buddhists who stand taller than all the rest.

Originally, two films, here stitched together, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was three or more: it includes its own prequel, sequel and prologue within it. Lovely, lovely photography, with some delightful nature intercutting during later fight scenes that would be difficult or impossible to articulate with today’s hyper-realistic #cinema language.

Ah. Lovely #Mendocino. Sleepy coastal Californian town with gentle sloping wooden boardwalks, and, snuggled just behind, a 19th century Chinese temple dedicated to Kwan Tai, the God of War.

If my friends didn’t occasionally force me out, I’d have nothing but photos of my dog. But I’d be happy with that too. 🥰

Four of my favorite photos from 2022. Not too shabby for a homebody. #photography #leica #hasselblad

Oh my, a whole list of #bakeneko (demon/ghost cat) films.

https://letterboxd.com/threepenny/list/bakeneko-or-ghost-cat-viewing-list/

This is why I love #Letterboxd so much: every #film is a gateway to hand-curated lists of conceptually-related films—genealogies along every imaginable vector.

I’m surprised how calm I kept myself as the gentleman cut away the old frame and used a razor blade to scrape the masking tape off of a 45 year-old piece of tracing paper.

When I first showed it to him, he asked, “is that from #Alien!?” I was honestly caught off guard: I thought this was about as deep a cut as someone could make, but a stranger got it in one.

I ultimately went with a reddish gold shadow box with the artifact floating slightly over a light cream matte.

Exiting, the gentlemen who’d helped me told me, “one of the joys in this business is when something like this comes through—getting to see this up close makes my December.”

Nicely played. 😘

From the #Photography Archives: #Halloween Night, #Shinjuku, #Tokyo, 2017.

@TheSpaceshipper It has arrived. Credit to the craters: they were thorough. The framing is pretty amateur looking, so I’m going to take it over to a trusted framing shop today and task them with doing art preservation the right way.

I finished up the sixth, and final, Lone Wolf and Cub film last night. I am in awe of these films. They are somehow adjacent to both El Topo and Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetary Man), but also Sanjuro, Once Upon a Time in the West, and … Troma? 🤷‍♀️

Extremely difficult to describe without spoiling, they build on one another in ways both subtle and overt, such that I have to recommend the series as a whole as one art object. (Though, the structure of the fifth film should be called out as particularly interesting).

I watched one a week for six weeks, and that ended up feeling just right: close enough in time to one another to catch the visual and narrative rhymes, but not so close as to wear the repetitions bare .

Best Film Series ever?

Well, certainly my favorite yet!

Oh dear. That is quite some packaging.

When I was in #LosAngeles last weekend, we went to a gallery showing of original artwork inspired by the #LastUnicorn.

This was my favorite piece. Unfortunately, someone had already beat me to it!

Mystery Purchaser, wherever you are: well played.

I was in #Chinatown #LosAngeles a couple of nights ago when my friend Ra (she/her) bummed a cigarette off of a stranger. While they chatted, I wandered a little ways off with our party’s third.

After a few minutes, it was clear that the conversation between Ra and Mister Cigarette had become heated. I rushed over to provide Ra with support, only to find her staring down Mr. Cigarette as he unfurled an anti-trans screed—one that was disturbingly premised on prison rape analogies. 🥺

I stayed in the conversation just long enough to realize that neither rationality nor empathy had a place, and then gently guided Ra away and onto a better night.

Meanwhile, our party’s third, snapped a few photos of what being an ally can look like.

#photography #trans

I won’t lie, I feel some pride whenever I come in to the #mozilla office. 🥰

I’ve slowly been working my way through the Lone Wolf and Cub film series on the #Criterion Channel.

It’s a sequence of six low-budget samurai #movies produced between 1972 and 1974, based on the manga of the same name.

The conceit: wandering ronin assassin-for-hire pushing along a wooden baby carriage with his infant son.

I can’t believe I’ve never been made to see them before; I’ve barely even heard of them.

They’re _wonderful_.

They’re shoestring kinetic vignettes clocking in at around 80 minutes each, adhering to a simple narrative structure that feels like it was plucked straight from oral storytelling; it’s raw, gonzo, violent, lurid storytelling at its unapologetic best.

It’s been a minute since I’ve seen anything so comfortable with its own limitations, and so earnest in its telling.

https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1217-lone-wolf-and-cub

Teams need slack. If your plan relies on every contributor working at full capacity all of the time, your plan is extremely fragile.

People take vacations.

People get sick.

People burn out.

People leave.

If one of your contributors leaves, and all of your resources are previously committed, how do you recover from the loss?

You won’t have resources to hire, to train, to pick up the slack, without pulling other contributors off of their work streams.

If you have multiple projects staffed like this, you’ll also have to manage agency costs, knowledge sharing, and multiple technical debt dumping grounds.

Again, if all of your contributors are fully committed, how do you allocate for these?

I’ve learned this lesson over and over again, but never seem to be able to teach it. 😔

Me, as I tousle my hair after the shower.

You can’t make this stuff up.