I don’t know why, but I recently remembered ASCIIquarium. It still exists! (You can also find it in an easy-to-install hombrew package) Thank me later.  

The original art was by Joan Stark and was grabbed from Geocities. 

Sam Bourne a Nottingham bank clerk with with a passion for phtography photographed the Indian Himalayas in the 1860s. Tony Davis of antiquephoto writes about his work here and Heritage Lab, dives into the untold stories of local labor and knowledge used to make them. 

More of his work from around India can be found on these sites: National Gallery of Scotland, the V&A, and DAG. 

I collect picture books from around the world. Japanese books are always among my favorites. Here are a few to seek out if you want to experience a different and delightful sensibility. Most are Japanese-only but are easy to translate with camera-based translators.

Ito Hiroshi - Kumokun [Mr. Cloud]

A cloud can turn into any shape he can imagine. Not availalbe in the US, but you should also check out I became captain’s strange octopus.

Takeda Miho - Tonari no seki no Masudakun [Sharing a desk with Masuda]

Miho-chan doesn’t want to go to school because she has to sit next to a bully

Miyanishi Tatsuya - Omae umasodana [You look yummy!]

A tyranosaurus wants to eat a lonely baby 

Komagata Katsumi - Little Tree

A beautifully simple popup book covering the change of seasons and enhanced by shadows in the book

Arai Ryoji - Boku wa boku no e o kakuyo [I will draw my own pictures]

A single line morphs into  the sea and the sky and then a whole world. 

Tamura Shigeru - Yoru no sanpo [A walk at night]. A boy can’t sleep. He takes a walk and keeps growing and growing. 

All of Shigeru’s work is amazing search his books out!

Tanaka Kiyo - Kuroino [The little one]

A little girl and her creature friend go on adventures around their house. 

Noritake Suzuki - Shigotoba [Workplaces]

A book featuring the places people work. Simple and effective. Suzuki is also the author of a deeply Japanese book that most Americans might find wildly inappropriate called “I Want to Know About Butts.” It’s weird and delightful.

When I was a kid one I would often fall asleep finding far away away stations through the static on a little Grundig shortwave radio. I loved tuning my way around the dial. 

Every few years I stumble upon sites that collect world radio streams. They're always worth exploring. Radio Garden is one of the better ones. My only quibble is that it doesn’t integrate w/ Apple Music/Spotify. 

Other radio sites worth checking out:  Globe Radio, RadioHear, BRAWN SK-555C

I’d love to wire one of these sites to a physical device with knob to hear the various stations resolve through the static. I miss the serendipty of that kind of radio. Come to think of it I miss serendity in general, but that’s a longer post.

One of the ironies of being someone who always has a camera close is that I have few photos of myself. Rarer still are candid, unposed photos in which I am unaware of the camera, and rarest of all are photos in which I am happy. So it felt like a minor miracle last night when I found this image from 1993. 

I had been taken in by a Tibetan family near a small village, and despite having zero language in common, we were having the conversations that made everyone laugh to the point where our faces hurt (they were trying to match me, but thought it was hysterical I had no yaks). I had taught one of the kids how to use my camera a few days earlier, and he must have picked it up my FM2 and snapped this picture. When people ask why I fell in love with this corner of the world, it was exactly this.   

This are a few of my photos from that same afternoon.

Want to look up your Japanese Birthday color ? Rows are months, columns are days. Mine was a bit of a bummer.

Jamie Hawkesworth is a British photographer with a nice range of professional and personal work. I especially like his informal work around the British Isles. I can tell he shoots on film and I’ve heard his prints are beautiful.  

Fun fact from his Wikipedia page: “He first used a camera in 2007 as part of his studies for a forensic science degree…" Find more work at his  gallery.  

Say what you will about missionaries, they made great maps in their quest to collect souls. Some of my favorites of this genre were made by the Reverend Oliver Beckwith Bidwell and printed by his brother at 120 Nassau Street in New York.

Back when I was in college, and back when Soho wasn’t the souless high end mall it is today, I somehow found a shop called E. Buk at 151 Spring Street. 

“Shop" is maybe a generous term, imagine a steam punk hoarder’s nest up a flight of rickety stairs. The E was for Elli. And Elli was a mad collector of vintage medical equipment, space ephemera, 18th century pornography, voodo dolls, early movie cameras and missionary maps (amongst other things… he kept a hand decorated Philippino electric chair in the bathroom and jars of Japanese glass eyes). Elli’s loft always smelled of oil and paint and leather with a roomtone of whirs and clicks from his many machines. I could have lived in there, and Elli always let me linger and even take things apart as long as I put them back together. 

I would visit on every trip to NY to hear his adventures about how he had saved each object. Always after poking around for a while, he would say, “Want to see something really cool? This one is too good to sell.”

As a poor college student I couldn’t afford anything, but I think he saw in me a fellow collector and when I moved to NYC he gave me a very good deal on a 12 foot wide mammoth missionary map of India as a moving in gift. It was published in 1841 by the Bidwell company. It’s still hanging on my living room wall today. My only regret is not grabbing the other Bidwell maps he offered (“I can’t give them to you, but I can sell them as long as you promise to sell them back. You’re never allowed to resell them.”) He probably didn't realize my studio only had one wall big enough for a single map, but I still regret not grabbing the rest. The one I still think about was a handcolored world map from the 1850s with large red “SAVED” labels over certain areas. 

Elli passed away some time ago ( these were some of his things ), but I still hear his voice in my head when I’m able to point someone to the many neat details of his mammoth map. 

Are you a Robert Johnson obsessive? Musicologist Nick Dellow remastered a clean test pressing of Crossroads Blues. This is one of the cleanest recordings of Johnson I’ve ever heard.

Mr. Dellow seems to specialize in finding amazing things. Here’s an photo he uncovered taken in 1931 of McKinney's Cotton Pickers at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Kansas City:

More Dellow goodness: An interview Brian Rust, with the creator of the Jazz Records 1897-1942. 

If you’ve ever been to Dhaka, you might know that capturing its colorful pulsing energy is difficult. There’s just too much going on. But this image by Noah Addis seems to get it. I keep coming back to it.

This image is part of his impressive Future Cities project where he documents “slums and informal settlements” where “one out of every seven people on the planet” live. He notes that they “may outwardly appear to be ruled by chaos and disorder, but they are in fact very organized places that grow almost organically to suit the needs of the people who live in them.” Addis is a photojournalist and artist who has long been focused on urbanization and climate change. 

Whenever I’m in a Egyptian gallery of a museum, I always look for pair statues. Starting in the around the Third Dynasty (2686 BC - 2613 BC) it became relatively common for Egyptian tombs to include statues of couples. What is so striking about these images is how intimate they feel. What other 4000-year-old art has these little nods to love?

It’s in the hands, mostly. I like how the an arm might drape protectively around a spouse’s shoulder. Or maybe they are sitting side-by-side, their hands resting just inches apart, almost touching. In a culture where art was governed by strict, formal rules and 'eternal' poses, these small gestures of proximity feel like a small nods to the everyday. I think about how statues were built for the afterlife to act as 'backup bodies' for souls. These Egyptians wanted to live forever together.

My abueltio and abuelita would sometimes joke about not being buried together (“Maybe I want to be with my sisters?” my abuelita would tell my abuelito, “Maybe you would be be happier at the ranch.” They were, of course, buried together. 

Some sources: Statues of sitting couples. 

I can think of few less important things to do in 2026 than reviving a 20 year old blog, but I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging lately and here we are. Keeping a public journal made me actively think about the shape of days. I liked that. I miss that.

For years after I stopped blogging, I would check in on my vintage Moveable Type 3 CMS software that powered the blog installing shims to keep going , but eventually it gave up and I gave up, and slowly the blog started falling apart like a rusty car left in the woods. 

Maybe because my kids are in college now, I felt the pull of having an easy way to throw thoughts into the ether on a platform that wasn’t controlled by companies I no longer trust. I wondered, “Could I vibe code a Mac native CMS into existance?" After a few false starts it took me about a week to build a shambolic, but totally workable CMS that does a bunch of things I’ve always wanted.

1. I have a a local version properly versioned site that lives in a folder on my computer.

2. I can edit in WYSIWYG / HTML / Markdown.

3. I can drag in or paste in pictures.

4. I can sync (or not) to the web whever I want. 

5. I can easily choose from various style templates of my own design. 

6. I can generate the whole thing as static files. 

7. I can automatically use a local model to analyze images, add alt text, and to handle grammar (Dsylexia is a curse). I’m so far resisting the urge to correct old posts, but I might. 

8. I’ve made a phone client that will allow me to post on the go.

9. I can manage a text blog and a photoblog in the same place.

10. etc.

What do I want to do next? I still have a lot of cleanup on the old blog content, and lots of unpublished stories that I want to get up. I also have multiple photoblogs to bring into this century. 

My hope is this will go quickly and I can just start to get into the rhythm of posting again. I’m enjoying it. Here’s to lost causes.

Over the last few years I’ve written a couple of children’s books. My younger son Gabriel is making some illustration tests. I love them.