Creative: For What It’s Worth Episode 002

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Just what you wanted for the holiday. Another podcast. Back by insatiable public demand, episode two. I cover The Homeless Backpack Project, enlightenment, politics, immigration, my life in cameras and the odd demise of modern Apple. Yep, I’m gonna keep doing these, so you might as well get used to it. Or abandon this site forever. It’s a toss-up.

Comments 18

  1. For fear of following the hordes, I’ll have to say I am enjoying these. Truly hope you continue. I guess I’m just part of the insatiable public demand era now. Hey, we could start a club of sorts, the IPD, or something…

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      Rodney,
      I have a ton more on the way. I love this thing. I have ten new topics on my list.

  2. Hey Daniel! Listening to this new episode did excellent job of cheering me up in… hospital. I just put a ‘serious’ book aside and dived into your podcast. For some strange reason I now feel much better and full of positive energy. May be you don’t have millions of followers but you do influence people in a very good way. Thank you! Alex

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  3. Thanks for this post Daniel and good luck with fixing the politics of your country; when you are done there, can you pop over here to the UK to sort out our Brexit nightmare? Thanks.

    Re: screen time and trying to cut down on it – I hear you. Every morning, before one of my jobs (which involves a lot of screen time), I take an hour out and sit in a cafe with coffee, a fountain pen and a pad and write whatever is in my head – it’s a way of letting the mud settle in the water and the day becomes clearer as a consequence. Loosely based on Morning Pages from the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (pretty sure you’ll have heard of it, you may even have been through the process?), I might stick in some pictures I’ve printed out (rough from a laser-jet – couldn’t stand futzing with an inkjet any more – the pictures look, well, not great, but good enough for my purposes), or I might copy out a quote or two, a poem, or cut pictures from a magazine. I call these books Zibaldone after Leopardi (worth a google, even if it means more screen time) – Peter Beard is another influence… They aren’t for public consumption and are instead a form of therapy – they make me look forward to getting up in the morning.

    Anyway, I could go on and I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned some of this stuff in a previous post so apologies but anyway, the above is my fightback against the ubiquity of the screen and its detrimental impact on all our lives. If you do nothing else, try getting a fountain pen – yeah, it’s inconvenient and messy and blah, but oh my goodness is it therapeutic.

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      Patrick,
      Brexit…sweet Jesus. Start over? Hit reset? Your cafe/journaling idea is awesome. I do the same only here at home. I read, then write, then work, then read again. A bit of bike, a bit of yoga, a bit of other bits. But still FAR too much screen time.

  4. “Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”
    Hope I was not the only one who made it to the end of the podcast? Haha…!

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  5. Kidney stones, Daniel. No big deal but I needed some good distractions. So books and your podcast did the job. Thanks again! I’m back to family now. Hope your new podcast is in the pipe.

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      AM,
      All those old Nikons were just money. Even the ones with plastic gears lasted for decades.

  6. Yes I started with n.2, now I’ll go and listen to episodes 1 and 3. I think you can continue, they’re fun your podcasts (but I also enjoyed the 8 minutes vlogs). You’ve got balls to talk politics because as you said, this is tricky business and people do get over excited about this. I’m not american but I do read with interest your stories (in fact the only newspaper I’m subscribed to is the NYT, that I use to read news on Italy with the detachment that is needed… difficutl to get an objective view of things if you read italian newspapers). In fact I just read yesterday an excellent op-ed on the NYT about the need to send Donald away, and then I’ve clicked through and ended up on another brilliant piece on the Atlantic about the president who couldn’t read. It’s brilliant comedy stuff (only it’s real).

    About Apple’s demise? Well I think the same as you do. The new line they’re following it’s unstainable. In fact I’ve decided a few months ago to stop using apple products. I think I’ve already mentioned in one comment somewhere here about switching from Lightroom to Darktable, an awesome (but obviously a bit more involved and complicated to use) open-source alternative to LR. I have finally completed the switch and am now enjoying my life on Linux. I have cleaned up my old mid-2014 macbook pro 13″ which is ready to go. Man, those stickers were sticky! I need to peel away the three I’ve slapped on my new Dell XPS right away otherwise in 3-4 yrs time I will have to spend another full day for the cleanup.

    Darktable is pretty slick now, it has some incredible features adn the difficult part has been just to focus on the appropriate tools to do the minimal retouching and corrections I usually do on my photos. I’ve now also understood the library management which is the most prominent part for me. The next few months I will have to arrange my 365 project (a personal one on the 6th year of my daughter, all Fuji and 50mm-eq and black-white) and publish it on Blurb using Scribus, another open-source package to do magazine/books layout.

    You should push Blurb to give Linux guys some support, by the way… maybe releasing templates for the various magazines like they do for the Adobe products. Or making sure that Bookwright also runs under Linux (I think I’ve seen somewhere that being a Java app there are some tricks to make it work under Linux but haven’t tried).

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      Alessandro,
      Yes, the not able to read thing is pretty interesting. From all accounts it’s quite possible that is true. The deposition tapes are damning to say the least. I’m guessing he can read but only at an elementary school level, which for American’s is not that uncommon. One of the reasons newspapers are written at a middle school level. Apple sure seems to be up and down. I guess maybe that’s everyone. They do certain things so well, but others not so much. And at top dollar. Good luck with your projects. Scribus and all.

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