Cutting Back on the Social

6FPS V2#11 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
December 14, 2020

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Election update 2021: in a few weeks, Biden will be our new president and we can start fixing and healing. As of when I write this, Trump is still fighting back and losing at every turn, which would almost be sad to watch -- his legal team is so pitiful and incompetent it would be funny if there wasn't so much at stake. Today, December 11th, I'm watching them attempt -- something -- at the Supreme Court that seems completely ludicrous, but until the court slaps it down, there's always that small sense of dread.

If there's a common thread among the legal attempts by the Trump campaign and the GOP, it's that much of it is ludicrously bad, of the "this will flunk you out of first semester paralegal" bad. As I've said more than once, anything trump touches dies, and the GOP continues to run right up and say "touch me again". I just hope they don't take the rest of us out as a side effect of this cult behavior they've bought into.

But for me, while I'm continuing to watch and worry about the future impacts of the clown show, I'm now able to back off and start looking forward again with a much better mental frame of mind. With a vaccine for Covid also on the horizon, we might just get out of 2020 alive and maybe start to find what a new normal life will be starting in 2021.

In terms of 2021, I currently have two more e-Books planned. The first will be another chapbook, 2020(1) with images from the year 2020 that I want to put onto paper for my shelves. The second is another birding topic that I'm doing writing and research for now. Expect to see 2020(1) released probably in February.

So while many problems remain, one thing has returned: hope that things will start getting better.

Easing out of 2020

Last issue I mentioned Laurie and I were both taking weeks of vacation in December. Laurie's plan to go to Yosemite was cancelled by Covid; we had decided it wasn't unsafe and cancelled the reservation but today, Yosemite announced that they were reducing use to day-use only, so she's going to spend her week doing things near home. I had similarly decided not to travel, but I've had to drop some of my day trip plans that take me too far away from the county, so I'll be staying local and spending most of the week birding. Or sitting and staring at walls. Either's fine right now... In fact, about the time this issue hits your inbox, I'll be at the doctor getting a cortisone shot in my left knee, which will slow me down a lot on Monday but hopefully improve things for the rest of the week.

Christmas is obviously going to be quiet and hopefully safe as we stay home and enjoy each other's company. While I miss my mom and dad every day, I do have to admit that I'm happy they weren't around to have to deal with this virus -- and the inevitable discussion about why we wouldn't be coming to visit for Christmas with my mom, a discussion that would have likely carried on into, oh, February. I must admit, I do not miss the circus of having to travel to SoCal every year for the family gathering, as much as I miss the family I gathered with.

As 2021 rolls in, I think the focus will be more on making sure the move to Washington happens in 2021, and I'll be bringing in the first Pods box to fill up with a lot of things we won't need until after the move and get them in storage and out of the way for the duration. I do think that's still on track, but it's far from guaranteed we'll get it done when we hope it'll be done...

Ben Bova -- RIP

We lost another good person, and a part of my past, at the end of November. Ben Bova passed away at age 88. When I was a baby writer and a member of SFWA, I took on administration of the Nebula awards in 1989 under President Greg Bear. Ben Bova became President of SFWA in 1990 and one of his goals was to revise the Nebula rules, and so he and I collaborated on rewriting the award bylaws. I got to work with him fairly closely on this, and for the rest of his time as President of SFWA. He was a relatively quiet but quite intelligent man and I learned a lot from watching how he tried to wrangle SFWA out of the messes it had made for itself at the time.

It was a surprise, but then again, not really, to hear that he passed away due to complications from a stroke. Like so many of the people I was involved in during my writing and SFWA years, I hadn't talked to Ben in a long time, and now, I'll never have that chance. He was a good mentor to a rather brash and sometimes annoying youngster with all the answers, and quietly knocked a few of those sharp edges off me along the way. He was a strong supporter of my writing and he was a good person to lead SFWA at a time when it needed strong leadership with an ability to build consensus.

He was a good mentor, a good author and a good mentor, and I just wanted to say a few things about him so wherever he is, he knows he's not forgotten. I made somewhat of a clean break when I decided to leave SFWA for reasons, and while I've never regretted that decision -- Ben is one of many people I met during my time in fandom and the organization that I regret losing contact with.

Rest in Peace, Ben.

My new Galleries Site

I spent much of the last month grinding away at a project I didn't know I was going to do until it happened: I've built a new site for my big images galleries: galleries.chuq.me.

That blog piece will go into more of the details, but the TL/DR is this is for my large collection that I share with others and make available for license; it is effectively my non-curated photo collection, as opposed to my heavily curated portfolios.

The site is actually quite straightforward: generic Wordpress with a standard, basic Wordpress theme and the only custom add-on being Envira Galleries to drive all of the image display and management. I'm quite happy with the result so far, and it solves a few needs I've been chasing for a while, such as a way to manage my licensing and distributing images easily without the need for many round trips of emails between me and organizations that use my images. The goal was a low maintenance setup with a clean and crisp and simple design, and I think it succeeds on all counts.

And a reminder: If you are involved with an environmental non-profit organization with 501(c)(3) status, I will usually license images to you at no cost for a specific use. I do reserve the right to decline a license if I don't feel the usage is appropriate, but please send me an email and we can chat about it and get you set up. And now, you can search for and download images to use without needing to email me and ask about my inventory, speeding things up for both of us.

My new E-book is out!

I'm happy to announce my new E-book is out and available as a free download.

Birds of Santa Clara County is my look at some of the birds I've seen and photographed here in Silicon Valley over the years. It contains photos of over 80 species, with images taken between 2007 and 2020. You can read more details about this book and how it came about here.

Where my previous books were only released as PDFs, I've set up this one so you can get it in PDF, but also in Mobi for the Kindle or ePub to load onto a tablet like an iPad. Grab the format that works for you.

This is absolutely free. To better support it, my previous book and future projects, I've set up a new system using Squarespace's online store system. You can get to all of the books on my Download page. The store is going to ask you for some information during checkout -- the only piece that matters is the email address so it can email you a download link. The rest -- if you don't want to include your real info, I won't tell anyone. And I promise that information will not be used for any purpose; I would disable that collection if I could.

There are now four titles available for download. This new one, as well as my previous ... And the Geese Exploded, as well as two of my chapbooks 2019(1) and 2019(2). You can get more information about those on the download page.

I'd love to know what you think about this new book. As I produce each title, I find myself improving and learning about how to write and produce a better book and I keep looking for ways to make them better (but I'm quite happy with this one as is).

And with that, on with the show!

What's New from Chuq?

Cutting back on The Social

There is a change to the Where to Find Me links at the bottom of this email since last issue. The link to Flickr is gone. In it's place is a new link, Image Galleries. I've brought my collection of most of my images back under my own domain, and I've canceled my Flickr account.

The decision to do this is quite similar to the one I made when I decided to cancel my SmugMug account for my portfolio: I am trying to simplify my online universe and I really prefer having content I create living on a site I own and manage. These changes reduce the number of systems I have to figure out how to work with each other and maintain, but it also puts my content back under my direct control and not existing at the whim of a corporate entity. A minor added benefit is that any SEO value this content creates flows back to me -- not the site I'm hosting stuff on.

I want to emphasize there is no criticism of either Flickr or Smugmug here: I really like both services and how they're being run. I just have different goals at this stage in my life. I will note that at its core Flickr is a social network and to take the most advantage of it you need to buy into engaging in and interacting within that network. Posting images and doing nothing within the social context -- is fine if that's what you want. But the real value in a place like Flickr is discovering other talent and engaging in ways that helps grow your network within the system.

I am headed in the other direction -- I'm continuing to work to reduce how much time I spend on social networks. I've thought about this on and off for months, and ultimately, I decided Flickr's social network wasn't worth the effort needed to engage in it in an honest and constructive way. Without my committment to that -- there's no added value to hosting images on Flickr for me. Bringing them home to my own domain simplifies things and doesn't "cost" me anything, since my images idling on Flickr wasn't really adding any value to me -- or to Flickr.

Why am I cutting back on The Social? I'm going to recommend you listen to the podcast episode The Monkey Trap on David duChemin's podcast A Beautiful Anarchy -- and if you aren't listening to every episode, I strongly suggest you subscribe. David's talking less about the how of being a creative, instead focusing on the creator by talking about self-care and how to be a healthy and productive creator. In The Monkey Trap, he talks about his decision to walk away from social media on his work and not the endless promotion of it, and on his own well-being and not on whether others are defining him successful (or not).

I am not, like David, walking away from social media completely; I still find value in twitter, and so I still spend time there and contribute there. I'm still on Facebook but I don't advertise my presence there -- because I am only there because of outside commitments and I'm working on cleaning those up in 2021 so I can step away from that toxic cesspool completely. but I can't just walk away from those commitments, not yet. I have, more or less, stripped my Facebook presence of anything that isn't directly tied to those commitments, and if we used to be Facebook friends and you notice we aren't any more -- that's why; it's not you, it's me. And please, connect in with me somewhere else instead. Because in 2021 my Facebook account is going away, too.

This may seem a strange thing for someone like me to do, given I used to make my living on Social Media as the spokesmouth for both Palm and Cisco's developer programs. But I've watched as social networks got hijacked by the trolls while their management reacted slowly (at best), allowing them to prosper. Or even, as at Facebook, have repeatedly been found to be publicly condemning them while privately making decisions that support and benefit those trolls. This is not the social networking systems I tried to build or want to be on.

A big aspect of many social networks today -- and Facebook and YouTube are the two doing this the most and who are most skilled at it -- are primarily about convincing you to stick around and spending more time on the network. They want to own your eyeballs and feed advertising into them. And both of them have gotten quite good and figuring out how to push our buttons to make us scroll to the next post or click in to the next video. It is very much an addiction response, and I don't want to play that game any more. I do still get good value out of YouTube but I'm careful how I use it. Facebook, frankly, is just an energy suck.

It makes me glad I made a choice to pivot out of doing social stuff professionally, because I don't want to be part of that universe the way it treats its users these days. And it makes me careful where and how I spend my time when I'm attached to any of the networks, because if you aren't conscious about what you're doing and what value you extract doing it, you'll suddenly step back and realize you've lost huge chunks of time and have no idea how or why. I am opting out of that game as much as I can now.

Which means that I'm not going to build a following, I'm not going to go viral, and I'm not going to magically get big and make my living by feeding content into the monster -- not that those things were going to happen whether or not I tried. If I was 25 and just starting my career I might take a different path, but today, every time I have the where do I want to be in five years? discussion with myself, the answer is never I want to be a YouTube influencer!

And yet, there are times when I still find myself pondering a project plan or business plan that involves launching a YouTube presence. That is how seductive they make it: I know exactly what they're doing, and I still end up in a You know, if I did.... moment...

And then I slap myself and get back to work doing the things I enjoy doing...

The bottom line for everyone, of course, is pretty simple (in theory): understand your goals, interests and priorities, and align where you put your time and energy into those things. The goal of social networks is to circumvent that and funnel your time and energy into things that benefit the networks, not you.

It's the Monkey Trap. Don't be a monkey.


Photo: Cattle Egret

Okay, some days you get lucky. That was what happenen when I was out birding and ran into a Cattle Egret, a bird not seen in Santa Clara County for a few years. I talk about that in Some days you get lucky (Cattle Egret!), and that's why this issue's photograph is a picture of that wonderful little white bird.

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds, Birding, and the Outdoors

Health and Fitness

Technology Nerdery

Fun Stuff

Download one of my books!

Download Now!

All my eBooks are now available and easy for you to get.
My newest, just released, is Birds of Santa Clara County which is my look at some of the birds I've seen and photographed here in Silicon Valley over the years. It contains photos of over 80 species, with images taken between 2007 and 2020.

You might also enjoy ... And the Geese Exploded, a combination of a series of short essays about my birding life, how I feel so deeply for birdwatching, and some of the aspects of being a birdwatcher that mean so much to me. It also includes over 100 of my favorite photos that I've taken over the last decade here in the greater Bay Area, out in the central valley wildlife refuges, and here in the western coastal states in the U.S.

There are now also two chapbooks, collections of images I've taken that I compiled into a printed collection I could keep on my shelves. 2019(1)contains images ranging from 2007-2019, while 2019(2) focuses on the images I created during 2019.

All of these books are absolutely free. You can get to all of the books on my Download page. The store is going to ask you for some information during checkout -- the only piece that matters is the email address so it can email you a download link. The rest -- if you don't want to include your real info, I won't tell anyone. And I promise that information will not be used for any purpose; I would disable that collection if I could.

There are now four titles available for download. This new one, as well as my previous ... And the Geese Exploded, as well as two of my chapbooks 2019(1) and 2019(2). You can get more information about those on the download page.

See you Soon!

And with that, I'll see you in 2021 with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@mac.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

Know someone who might want to subscribe? Send them here. You'll also find the archives there if you want to look at previous issues.

Copyright © 2020 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.