nicole @nicole@myna.social

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.

The front door of the Finca Ferdabella coffee farm, Boquete, Panama. #photography #4x5

My parents used to own a small coffee farm in rural Panama. I took this photo on my very last visit, as we were cleaning it up to be sold.

Awww. 💖 the sentiment. 💖 the design. But I literally _never_ wear black. 🙅‍♀️

Still, much love to all the folks at #Mozilla for making #Pridezilla swag happen.

Good morning, everybody.

Been feeling the urge to dip back into 4x5 #photography lately.

I haven’t done any LF work since I was flattened by Covid in Berlin in early 2020. Kind of intimidated by how heavy all the equipment feels right now (#hrt). Also, I generally only use LF when I’m travelling, and I don’t expect to be doing any of that for the next six months. 😌

Still, … there’s that tickle.

Really feeling the wanderlust today.

I was supposed to have FFS last week. It didn’t happen (#LateToEveryParty), so work sent these sympathy flowers instead 🥰.

I get really (really) run down sometimes (jobs are hard); little gestures like this mean a lot.

I'm endlessly impressed by whoever does merchandising for #A24. The Hereditary Gingerbread Tree House might top the Green Knight #TTRPG.

I was in #berkeley today, getting some art framed and I stopped in at Muracci’s for some Japanese curry. Notes follow.

1. Yum

2. Wow, I eat so much less after having dropped 10 pounds of muscle mass in the last year (#hrt). 😳

3. Some of my strongest memories of Japan are of eating curry out of gas station restaurants (pictured).

4. I know everyone’s done to death with people snapping photos of their food, but I think there should be a special allowance for those of us who choose to use an 8x10 camera to do it. #photography

One of my absolute favorites from a recent trip to Oahu. It was a tourist hellscape—hotels clustered around the ocean like eyes of Sauron around a bath—but I still had an amazing time.

People are everything to me.

Okay, so the two sheets that were stuck together were unrecoverable, as feared. Of the other four: two were blank, and two were photos of an antique store that came up in conversation just yesterday. (😳)