nicole @nicole@myna.social

I really dig a good jacket.

Plucking #photography from the archives.

Sigh. Someone has high expectations for me today.

Hi!! Happy #TransAppreciationFriday!!

I’m Nicole (she/her). I manage mobile engineering for the Pocket products at Mozilla. My previous incarnations were as an iOS developer, an attorney, a CGI enthusiast, and an aspiring horror makeup artist (I never wanted to be an astronaut).

I originally hail from #Tucson, #Arizona, but reside in the #BayArea these days.

I think it’s really interesting that my oldest, dearest childhood friend is also #trans. Coming out to each other was super special.

This is my idea of #beachwear.

Okay, 2023. Let’s see what Outside looks like. 😎

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.