The AI Obsession
The AI Obsession
Yesterday, I watched Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die and it was... unsettling.
Not horror-movie unsettling. Not jump-scare unsettling. More the kind of unsettling that sits quietly in the passenger seat of your brain afterward, occasionally clearing its throat while you're trying to think about something else.
If you haven't seen it, let me summarize the premise in a way that somehow manages not to spoil anything.
Summary: A man travels back from the future to recruit a team of misfits in order to prevent the creation of a sentient AI that will eventually wipe out humanity as we know it.
And yet, somehow, that summary tells you almost nothing about the movie.
Seriously. Go watch it. Then come back and tell me I'm wrong.
The film itself isn't really what disturbed me, though. What got under my skin was the way AI, and humanity's relationship with it, is discussed throughout the story. It felt less like science fiction and more like someone had wandered into a boardroom meeting, a technology conference, and a social media marketing seminar, then blended them together into a screenplay.
At this point, I assume there are still a handful of people somewhere on Earth who haven't heard the term AI. Maybe they're living happily in a cabin in the woods. Maybe they're on a fishing boat somewhere. Maybe they've simply achieved enlightenment and stopped reading headlines.
But if you're reading this blog, you've almost certainly heard of AI.
You couldn't avoid it if you tried.
AI is everywhere.
Every product has AI.
Every company has AI.
Every app has AI.
Every toaster is apparently one firmware update away from becoming self-aware and demanding voting rights.
We've reached a strange moment in history where companies are attaching the letters "A" and "I" to absolutely everything, whether artificial intelligence is involved or not. There seems to be a growing belief that if a product doesn't have AI, then it must somehow be outdated, incomplete, or inferior.
As though humanity collectively woke up one morning and decided that software wasn't enough anymore. It needed to sound like it had read three philosophy books and was planning a hostile takeover.
Let me give you a few examples.
A few weeks ago, I noticed several websites listing my camera, the Sony a7III, as having AI features.
Now, for those unfamiliar with camera history, the Sony a7III was released in early 2018. Back then, AI wasn't being sprinkled onto marketing materials like parmesan cheese at an Italian restaurant. It was just a remarkably good camera.
Yet somehow, sites like B&H, Amazon, and others had begun describing certain features as AI-powered.
They aren't.
The camera didn't magically become smarter while sitting on my shelf.
No secret update transformed it into a silicon philosopher.
The features were the same features it has always had. They had simply been renamed.
Why?
Because AI sells.
That's it.
That's the whole explanation.
People want AI, whether they understand it or not. Whether it provides value or not. Whether it actually exists or not.
It's the modern equivalent of putting "all-natural" on a bottle of water.
I see the same thing in my day job.
As some of you know, I work in software sales.
Not long ago, I was speaking with a prospective customer about a software platform.
At one point he asked me, "Does it have AI?"
The answer was no.
So I asked him a simple question:
"What would you want the AI to do?"
He paused.
Then admitted he wasn't sure.
He just wanted it to have AI.
So I asked again.
"What problem are you trying to solve? What would you want AI to accomplish for you?"
Again, no answer.
Not because he was uninformed or unintelligent. Quite the opposite. He was a smart guy.
But somewhere along the way, AI had become the goal rather than the tool.
It's a bit like walking into a hardware store and demanding a hammer without knowing whether you're building a deck, hanging a picture, or attempting to fight a bear.
The hammer isn't the objective.
The outcome is.
This morning brought another example.
I logged into WordPress and noticed a shiny new button proudly labeled "AI Link Genius."
Naturally, I clicked it.
I had to know.
Was this some revolutionary new technology?
Would it analyze my content and create intelligent pathways through my writing?
Would it achieve digital enlightenment?
No.
It checked links.
That's it.
It was the exact same feature that periodically scans my site looking for broken links and optimization opportunities.
A feature WordPress and related plugins have had for years.
The interface was the same.
The functionality was the same.
Everything was the same.
Someone had simply stapled the letters "AI" onto the front of it and sent it back into the world wearing a fake mustache.
Apparently that's innovation now.
To be fair, some of this madness appears to be fading.
The AI descriptions attached to the Sony a7III seem to have disappeared from many major retailers, and some original product descriptions have returned.
That's encouraging.
But the broader trend remains.
Every week another product emerges from the marketing laboratory wearing an AI sticker like a participation trophy.
It's exhausting.
Some days it makes me feel like the guy standing on a street corner wearing a tinfoil hat and muttering about the end times.
The difference is that the tinfoil hat guy is usually worried about aliens.
I'm worried about marketing departments.
Thankfully, I have photography.
Photography remains one of the few things that consistently pulls me back to reality.
A camera doesn't care about quarterly earnings reports.
Film doesn't care about investor presentations.
Light doesn't care about buzzwords.
The photons have no interest whatsoever in your product roadmap.
Recently, I've found myself spending less time scrolling through social media and more time looking at sculpture, classical art, and Renaissance paintings.
Many of them feature nudity, of course, but what fascinates me isn't the nudity itself.
It's the drapery.
The fabric.
The way cloth seems to float, twist, conceal, reveal, and guide the eye through an image.
The way marble somehow looks softer than skin.
The way painters managed to create movement from stillness.
I wanted to see if I could capture some of that feeling through photography.
Not recreate it exactly.
Just borrow a little of the language.
Translate it into a modern photograph.
Thankfully, Natalie was available and willing to help me indulge this particular artistic rabbit hole.
Armed with nothing more sophisticated than my decidedly non-AI Sony a7III, an Olympus mju-II, a Canon AE-1, and a collection of fabric that probably looked suspicious to anyone passing by, we set out to create something.
No prompts.
No generators.
No algorithms.
No machine learning.
Just two humans making art.
One of us standing behind the camera.
One of us standing in front of it.
I've only edited a small fraction of the images so far, and more can be found over on Patreon, but I'm genuinely proud of what we created.
They're beautiful.
Not because technology made them beautiful.
Not because software decided what beauty should look like.
They're beautiful because two people collaborated, experimented, failed a few times, laughed a few times, adjusted the fabric, adjusted the light, and kept creating until something clicked.
Maybe that makes me old-fashioned.
Maybe someday I'll be the guy yelling at clouds while wearing a tinfoil hat and clutching a film camera.
But at least I'll be making art.
And for now, that's enough.
Because despite all the marketing campaigns, all the buzzwords, all the promises that AI will inevitably transform every aspect of human existence, I still believe there is tremendous value in creating something with your own hands.
A photograph.
A painting.
A sculpture.
A story.
A conversation.
Things made by people remain meaningful precisely because people made them.
And until someone invents an AI capable of wandering through a field at sunset, getting distracted by the way light hits a piece of fabric, and then spending three hours chasing an idea that may or may not work simply because it feels interesting...
I think we'll be okay.
Ink, Wax, and the Lost Art of Letter Writing
Ink, Wax, and the Lost Art of Letter Writing
Let me tell you something true about myself, a thing I don't say lightly because the truth has a way of sitting in your chest like a stone you've been carrying so long you forgot it was ever heavy.
I was never cool.
Not in the effortless, magnetic, people-just-gravitate-toward-you way. Not even in the weird, ironic, so-uncool-it-loops-back-around way that becomes its own currency in certain coffee shops. No. I mean I was the kid at recess inventing elaborate solo games because the alternative was standing near other children and hoping, desperately, that proximity would be mistaken for belonging. It was not. Elementary school is a brutal ecosystem, honestly closer to a nature documentary about pack behavior than anything resembling civilization, and I was reliably at the bottom of the food chain.
Middle school didn't improve my standing. High school gave me the gift of anger as a coping mechanism, which is the kind of gift that arrives without a receipt and ruins several holidays. On my best days I was chaotic, a live wire someone had coiled into a desk chair and told to pay attention to algebra. On my worst days I was something darker, something I'm not proud of, something that lives in the past where it belongs. I grew up convinced, bone-deep, that I was less than. That the default human experience included a dignity and ease I had somehow been issued without, like arriving at a camping trip to discover everyone else got a tent.
I am forty-five years old. I am, by most reasonable metrics, a functional and occasionally delightful adult. And I am still surprised when someone looks at something I've done and says, that's cool.
Still. Every time. Like a man who keeps touching the stove to confirm it's hot.
A couple years ago, I started writing letters.
Not emails. Not texts. Not voice memos or DMs or any of the thousand frictionless ways we've invented to lob words at each other without actually touching anything. Letters. By hand. On paper. With a fountain pen, which is, and I say this with complete affection, an absolutely cool instrument to choose in the twenty-first century, a tool that requires patience, practice, and acceptance that sometimes the ink will do whatever it wants and you will simply live with that.
It started because my brother lost one of his children. There's no elegant way to write that sentence and I'm not going to try. Grief at that scale is a country with no roads in, you can't drive to it, you can't GPS your way through someone else's devastation. But I could write. So I did. Every week. A letter, sealed and stamped and dropped into the mail, because in all that unbearable silence I hoped, not knew, not guaranteed, just hoped, that something tangible arriving in a mailbox might carry a few grams of you are not alone with it.
I kept writing after that. I write friends and family every Sunday now, two or three letters. I joined a site called Postcrossing, which connects strangers across the planet for the express purpose of mailing each other postcards. I have sent postcards to people in Germany, Japan, Brazil, places I may never see, from a person they will never meet, carrying nothing but the small strange proof that someone in Atlanta sat down on a Sunday and thought I will send a piece of myself to a stranger and trust the postal service with it.
I have not received letters back. This is fine. This is not the point.
The point is the deliberateness of it. The point is that in a world engineered to move fast, to scroll, swipe, consume, refresh, repeat, there is something almost radical about sitting down and saying, I am going to spend the next hour entirely in service of another person's joy. No algorithm. No engagement metric. No reply button. Just ink and intention and the peculiar faith that the mail will figure out the rest.
And I have, I'll admit, gotten into it in the way a certain type of person gets into things, which is to say: completely, joyfully, with no obvious exit strategy.
I designed my own stationery. I print it on paper that has actual weight to it, paper that says I took this seriously. I write with fountain pens and inks in colors with names like Midnight Blue and Autumn Oak, which is either romantic or ridiculous and I have decided it is both simultaneously. I seal the letters with wax, real wax, melted with a little brass stamp, because if you're going to do something, do the thing. I have four wax seals in my collection. A fifth is incoming. I go to the post office and I ask for interesting stamps, the ones with birds or national parks or dead jazz musicians, because the envelope is part of the letter, the whole thing is the message from the moment it lands in someone's hands.
It is, as hobbies go, quiet. Deliberate. Stubbornly analog. I did it alone in my office every Sunday without ceremony, without announcement, the way I have always done the things that mattered most to me, quietly, in case someone noticed and decided it was weird.
And then my wife noticed.
She noticed, and she didn't say it was weird. She said she was thinking about starting her own letters. She said she'd been watching me disappear into my office on Sunday mornings with my pens and my wax and my careful rituals, and she thought, maybe she wanted that too. She was going to write to a friend in California. She might join me on Sundays.
I waited for the punchline. I am a man who spent a significant portion of his developmental years being set up for punchlines, and I know the shape of them, the little pause before the gotcha drops. I waited.
It didn't come.
She meant it. She genuinely, actually meant it.
Now listen. I have accumulated a small and fiercely loved circle of people who think I'm alright. My wife is at the center of that circle. She is, objectively, a person with excellent judgment. But forty-five years of bone-deep less than doesn't just dissolve because logic demands it, and so when the woman who knows me best, every chaotic, ink-stained, wax-dripping, stamp-obsessed corner of me, looks at something I do quietly, alone, without expectation, and says I want to do that too —
That lands somewhere different. That lands somewhere that's hard to name but easy to feel.
I'm not used to being cool. Probably never will be. But if someone has to look at me over a Sunday morning cup of coffee and think yeah, that guy's onto something — I'm glad, more than I know how to say, that it's her.
Self-Doubt and Creativity: He Wouldn't Believe It
Self-Doubt and Creativity: He Wouldn't Believe It
I've said it before. I'll probably say it again, the way you keep returning to a scar just to confirm it still belongs to you.
But God, I wish I could go back.
Not to fix anything. I want to materialize out of nowhere, slide into the booth across from my younger self, who is probably nursing chips and salsa in a Mexican restaurant scribbling in his journal, convinced the world had already decided its opinion of him — and just show him.
Not tell him. Telling never worked on me. Show him.
Spread it all out on the table. The photographs. The art. The projects that haven't even happened yet, built in collaboration with people he hasn't met, in rooms he hasn't stood in, for reasons he couldn't have invented on his best day. Let him turn it over in his hands. Let him squint at it under the lights.
He wouldn't believe it. That's the whole point. He'd look at me like I was running a con, because that's what his life had taught him to expect, the bait, then the switch. He'd be waiting for the catch.
There is no catch, kid. That's the most disorienting part.
The work is real. It's strange and it's real and it came from somewhere inside you that you keep trying to board up like a condemned building. Stop that. Quit apologizing for the weird corners. The weird corners are load-bearing.
Someday, someone's going to hand you a project and trust you to do something extraordinary with it, and you're going to be so alarmed by that trust that you almost fumble it... but you won't. You'll find the thing that lives underneath the obvious answer, the image that says what words keep failing to say, and you'll make it real.
Back then, I was sure that I was devoid of artistic talent. That creative projects were for other people, and that any effort I made at art would be pointless.
He wouldn't believe it. But I'd make him look anyway.
Life at 45: Scars, Stories, and Everything in Between
Life at 45: Scars, Stories, and Everything in Between
Yesterday, I turned 45.
Forty-five doesn’t sound like much when you say it out loud. It’s not one of those milestone numbers people make a big dramatic fuss about. But when I look back at what’s packed into those years, it feels less like a number and more like a well-traveled road with a few wrong turns, a couple of bar fights, and at least one questionable map.
In that time, I’ve been a lifeguard. A medic. I was a Mormon missionary once, and later an ex-Mormon, which is less of a clean break and more of a long conversation that never quite ends. I’ve worked in safety, trying to keep people from doing dumb things, and in sales, learning that people will absolutely do dumb things.
I’ve been married twice. Loved hard, learned a lot, picked myself up, and kept moving. Not always gracefully, but forward counts.
I’ve lived in nine states and moved 26 times. I know how to leave, and I know how to start over. Both come with their own kind of weight.
Somewhere along the way, I got dubbed a Knight by The Knightly Order of the Fiat Lux. Which still sounds like something out of a late-night campaign session, but I’ve got the title, so I guess that makes it real. Still waiting on the dragon, though.
I opened a gym, Geek and Gamer Fitness, because clearly I thought mixing barbells and nerd culture was a good idea. Honestly, it still is.
I’ve played hundreds of TTRPG sessions, built worlds, told stories, rolled dice that betrayed me at the worst possible moments. I’ve hit the shutter on my camera thousands of times, chasing those perfect little slices of time that don’t last nearly long enough.
I love conventions, DragonCon, ECCC, PAX, places where everyone shows up exactly as they are, turned up to eleven, and somehow that becomes normal.
I’m a son, a brother, an uncle, and a friend. Roles that don’t come with clear rules, just a lot of showing up and doing your best.
And yeah, there’s been anxiety. Depression. Some darker stretches where things got heavy and stayed that way longer than I would’ve liked. That’s part of the story too. Not the whole thing, but it’s in there.
My life hasn’t been smooth. It’s been chaotic, unpredictable, occasionally ridiculous, but never boring. I’ve lived a lot of different versions of life in these 45 years. Enough to know there isn’t just one way to do this.
It’s a little strange realizing there’s probably less road ahead than behind. Not scary, just… real. Makes you pay attention a bit more.
But however much time is left, one thing’s clear: I lived. I tried. I didn’t sit it out.
And honestly? That feels like something worth being grateful for.
From Survival to Stability: The Day I Bought a Photo Printer
From Survival to Stability: The Day I Bought a Photo Printer
I bought a dedicated photo printer this week.
Not the flimsy kind that sounds like it is fighting for its life every time you hit print. A real machine. An Epson SureColor P800 now sits in my office, quietly doing its thing, ready to turn pixels into something you can actually hold.
Of course, I had to break it in properly. So I printed a photo taken during Artemis II.
A photo taken in space. Printed in my office.
That still feels ridiculous in the best way.
But this is not really about the printer.
It is about where I used to be.
Not that long ago, I could not afford food. Not in the “cutting back” kind of way. I mean every dollar had a job, and none of those jobs included feeding me. Bills came first. Whatever was left went to my dog, Cordelia. She ate. I figured the rest out.
Sometimes figuring it out meant going without. Sometimes it meant stealing.
Usually hot pockets. Packs of four. Four meals if you stretch it. Grocery stores turned into quiet missions where the goal was simple and very clear. Get food. Do not get caught. Leave.
At the time, it did not feel dramatic. It was just part of the routine. Another thing on the list. Survive today. Worry about tomorrow later.
I remember being asked once how that made me feel. Having to steal food just to get by. And I did not have an answer. I had to actually stop and think about it, because I had spent so long just getting through things that I never stopped to process any of it.
When I finally did, it hit harder than I expected.
Now fast forward a few years, and I am standing in my office buying a printer that exists purely for my photography. Not because I need it. Not because it solves a problem. Just because I want it.
And my brain still does not quite believe that timeline.
How do you go from counting coins and skipping meals to investing in something like this
I have said a lot of harsh things about my past self over the years. Blamed him for mistakes. Second guessed decisions. All of that. And some of it is fair. He got things wrong. Sometimes really wrong.
But he also dealt with things that were not easy. Not even close.
He kept going anyway. He figured it out, piece by piece, even when it was messy and imperfect. He did the work to get out of that place, even if he did not always do it the right way.
And now I am here because of that.
Not in spite of him. Because of him.
So yeah, this printer matters.
Not because it makes beautiful prints.
But because it reminds me just how far things can actually change.
Vintage Camera Advertisements: The Beautiful Art of Selling Cameras in the 1980s
This morning started the way a lot of mornings start now: coffee in hand, thumb scrolling through Instagram Reels. Once upon a time people sat at the breakfast table with a newspaper and caught up on the world while the toast cooled. Now we sit there half-awake, letting the algorithm decide what we’re going to look at before the caffeine fully kicks in.
Somewhere in that endless stream of videos, a creator started talking about the Internet Archive. I’ll admit something that might sound a little strange for someone who spends plenty of time online, I had never actually explored it before. I knew it existed, of course, but I’d never gone wandering through it myself.
In the video, the creator mentioned that the Archive contains scans of old print advertisements from magazines. That alone was enough to grab my attention. I’ve always had a soft spot for vintage design and photography. Something about the look and feel of older ads just hits a certain aesthetic nerve for me.
So naturally I opened up a browser and decided to see what all the fuss was about.
It didn’t take long before I landed on a page filled with old magazine ads. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. It felt a little like rummaging through a dusty attic full of old magazines someone forgot to throw away, except everything was neatly scanned and waiting for you to stumble across it.
Two ads jumped out almost immediately. Both came from an April 1986 issue of Playboy.
Now this might surprise some people, but growing up Mormon meant I didn’t exactly have access to many Playboy magazines. So even now, as an adult, my experience with the magazine is pretty limited. Like most people, I grew up hearing the classic joke about people claiming they read Playboy “for the articles,” and I always assumed that was just a clever excuse.
What I didn’t realize until today is that back in the 80s and 90s a huge chunk of the magazine was actually articles and advertisements. From what I could see, something like eighty percent of the pages were writing or ads, leaving only a smaller portion for what most people immediately associate with the magazine.
And some of those articles were surprisingly serious.
While browsing, I stumbled across a long piece about the War on Drugs and the propaganda surrounding it. Not a throwaway article either, the writer had clearly done his homework. It was thoughtful, detailed, and the kind of thing that probably gave readers plenty to chew on.
It definitely wasn’t what I expected when I clicked into a random Playboy issue from the 80s.
But honestly, the real highlight for me was the advertising.
Inside that same issue were two camera ads, one for Canon and one for Olympus, and they immediately caught my eye. They were
beautifully done. Strong composition, interesting lighting, and just enough storytelling in the image to make you imagine the kind of life you might live with that camera in your hands.
They just don’t make ads like that anymore.
What struck me most is that these cameras are now decades old, yet those advertisements still have the power to make me want one. That’s impressive. Most modern ads barely stick in your memory long enough to survive the next scroll.
These older ads feel different. They’re stylish, thoughtful, and very clearly made by people who understood photography and human psychology. They weren’t just selling a product, they were selling a feeling.
And as someone who loves photography, that kind of thing is endlessly interesting. There’s a lot to study there. The lighting. The styling. The mood. All of it could easily inspire ideas for my own work.
So I’m genuinely grateful to that random creator on Instagram who mentioned the Internet Archive this morning. What started as casual scrolling over coffee turned into discovering an entire world of old magazines, articles, and beautifully crafted advertisements.
Something tells me I’ll be spending a lot more time wandering through the Archive in the months ahead. And honestly, there are worse ways to lose an afternoon than flipping through the visual history of the past.
Feeling Invisible Online
For most of my life, loneliness has been a quiet companion. Not the dramatic, movie-scene kind where someone stares out a rain-soaked window with a violin playing somewhere off camera. Mine is more subtle than that. It’s the sort that sits politely in the corner of the room, nursing a drink, occasionally clearing its throat to remind me it’s still there.
I’m not especially close with most of my family, and over the years I haven’t managed to hold on to many friendships in the traditional sense. The friends I do have are scattered across the map like misplaced books. I see them every few years if the stars align. Mostly it’s the occasional text message, the digital equivalent of a wave across a crowded room. We all have our own lives, our own chaos, our own responsibilities pulling us in different directions. I know they care about me, and most of the time that knowledge is enough. It has to be.
Usually my loneliness hums quietly in the background, like an old refrigerator in the kitchen. You know it’s there, but you stop noticing the sound after a while. Other times, though, it decides to grab a megaphone and start shouting.
Lately it has been shouting.
Maybe it’s because my anxiety has been running at a full boil lately. When that happens, loneliness tends to get louder too, like they’re collaborating on some sort of unpleasant jazz improvisation in the back of my mind.
Strangely enough, one of the things that amplifies it the most is posting online.
I know that sounds ridiculous. Social media is supposed to be the opposite of loneliness, right? Endless connection, endless conversation, endless engagement. That’s the sales pitch anyway. But sometimes posting on Instagram, here, or on Patreon feels less like a conversation and more like dropping a message in a bottle into the Pacific Ocean and watching it disappear beneath the waves.
I put a lot of work into what I make. The photography, the writing, the stories behind it all. And often it feels like it vanishes into the digital ether without so much as a ripple. I’ll see other artists share their work and the comments roll in by the dozens. Conversations, encouragement, jokes, reactions. Meanwhile I post something and hear… silence.
Sure, people like my photos. The little heart icons show up faithfully. My website analytics tell me people are visiting, reading my blog, exploring the work. I even have 30 patrons supporting me on Patreon, which is something I’m genuinely grateful for.
But when I actually share something, when I put a piece of myself out there, it often feels like speaking into a canyon and waiting for an echo that never quite comes back.
To be clear, I’m not writing this to make anyone feel guilty about not commenting. That’s not the point of this at all. No one owes me their time, their words, or their attention.
The reason I’m saying it is because I’m trying to be honest about what this whole experience feels like.
I’m trying, in my own slightly chaotic, occasionally philosophical way, to show up online as a real human being instead of a polished brand. The internet is already overflowing with perfectly curated grids, carefully engineered captions, and people performing versions of themselves that look great under flattering lighting. I don’t have the energy for that kind of theater.
What I’m trying to offer instead is the unedited version of myself. The real thing. The flawed thing. The guy who overthinks everything, wanders around with a camera, writes long rambling essays about life, and occasionally feels like he’s broadcasting his thoughts to a distant galaxy.
Because if someone does comment on my work, I want it to happen naturally. Not because my Instagram grid looks immaculate, or because some algorithm decided one of my posts deserved to go viral, or because someone randomly stumbled across my website while looking for something else entirely.
I want it to happen because something I said or photographed made another human being pause for a moment and think, yeah… I know that feeling.
Because at the end of the day, that’s what all of this really is for. Not the likes. Not the algorithms. Not the numbers on a dashboard somewhere.
Just that small, quiet moment of recognition between two people.
And if that happens, even once in a while, the room feels a little less empty.
Photography Gatekeeping: Why Some Photographers Feel the Need to Guard the Gate
There are a lot of things in this world that I simply don’t understand.
Some of them are big, complicated questions that political scientists, historians, and late night talk show hosts will probably argue about for the next hundred years. For example, I will never understand why anyone voted for Donald Trump. That one alone could keep a panel of experts busy for decades.
I will also never understand why people argue with complete strangers on Facebook like they’re defending their doctoral thesis in the comments section of a blurry meme.
But one thing that really puzzles me is this strange human urge to decide who counts as a “real” fan of something.
You see it everywhere.
Someone casually mentions they like Star Wars, and almost immediately someone shows up to administer the loyalty exam.
“Oh yeah? If you’re a real Star Wars fan, name all the lightsaber colors and what each one means.”
Why?
Why do we do this?
Why can’t someone just enjoy a thing without having to pass some kind of pop quiz designed by the self-appointed High Council of Nerd Credentials?
I saw a perfect example of this recently while scrolling through Instagram. A street photographer was walking through New York City filming an IG reel. As he passed a man on the sidewalk, the guy casually said, almost like a drive-by insult:
“Real photographers shoot with film.”
And I remember thinking… what a strange thing to say to someone.
Why do we feel the need to build these little fences around our hobbies? Why do we put up gates and then stand there deciding who’s allowed in and who isn’t? What exactly do we gain from that?
I’ve never understood it.
Maybe that’s partly because of how I got started in photography about ten years ago.
Back then I knew two things for certain. First, I didn’t know very much about photography. Second, I really wanted to learn how to take great photos.
The problem was that I didn’t personally know any great photographers. I didn’t have a mentor or a teacher showing me the ropes. So I did what a lot of people did at the time. I joined a few photography groups on Facebook.
For a while I just watched the conversations. People sharing photos, talking about cameras, arguing about technique. It seemed like a place where someone like me might actually learn something.
Eventually I got brave enough to post a few of my own photos.
Now, to be clear, I wasn’t under any illusion that they were great. They weren’t. They were amateur at best. But I wanted to get better, and the only way to do that was to ask people who knew more than I did.
So I posted the photos and asked if anyone had advice on how I could improve.
I didn’t get advice.
What I got instead were hundreds of comments telling me how terrible my photos were. People telling me I should sell my camera gear and quit photography altogether. That I wasn’t an artist. That I would never amount to anything.
It got so bad that eventually the owner of the Facebook group stepped in and told people to back off. But by that point the damage had already been done.
So I left the group.
But here’s the thing. Instead of quitting photography like those commenters suggested, I did the exact opposite. I decided I was going to prove them wrong.
For the last ten years I’ve practiced constantly. I’ve studied photography, experimented with different styles, made mistakes, learned from them, and kept going.
And today, if I’m being completely honest, I would say I’m equal to, if not better that, many of the photographers who gave me grief back then.
Not because I’m some kind of prodigy.
Just because I didn’t stop.
What’s strange, though, is that ten years later I still see the same behavior in photography communities. Gatekeeping knowledge. Mocking beginners. Acting like jerks toward anyone who hasn’t been doing it as long as they have.
And I still don’t understand it.
Why do we deliberately create this us versus them mentality? Why do we separate ourselves into little tribes just so we can feel superior to someone else?
It’s toxic. And honestly, it needs to stop.
So if you’re reading this, I want to offer a small challenge.
This week, find someone who is just starting out at something. Photography, writing, music, anything. And instead of testing them or criticizing them just for being new, try lifting them up.
Encourage them. Share something you’ve learned. Help them improve.
Because every single one of us started out not knowing what we were doing.
And the world would probably be a much better place if we spent less time guarding the gate… and more time holding it open for the next person.
Leaving the Mormon Church Taught Me to Laugh at 666
All of us carry pieces of our childhood around like loose change in a pocket. It doesn’t matter where you grew up or what flavor of chaos you were handed early on. Something sticks. It sneaks into your humor, your preferences, the way you interpret the world at 11:47 p.m. while half-watching television and pretending you’re not doom-scrolling.
Those early influences tend to show up in strange little ways. Mine usually surface as small, harmless acts of rebellion. Nothing dramatic. No tattoos in ancient languages I can’t translate. Just tiny, private jokes with my former life.
Last night I was watching a rerun of The Golden Girls, because sometimes Blanche and Dorothy are the only theologians I trust, and scrolling Threads. I came across someone proudly explaining that they never let the number of accounts they follow dip above or below 666. It must remain perfectly balanced. The aesthetic of damnation, curated.
I laughed.
See, I grew up Mormon. And if you didn’t know, Mormons have a very… active relationship with The Devil. Not in a vague, medieval painting kind of way. More like a regular cast member. Lucifer is the main character in the Mormon temple film. He’s the explanation for bad choices. He’s the whisper behind every questionable decision. Leave the church? Satan. Drink coffee? Satan. Feel skeptical? Definitely Satan.
It’s impressive, honestly. The man never takes a day off.
I left the church years ago, and with distance comes clarity, and a decent sense of humor about it all. But when you grow up hearing about “the adversary” as often as other kids hear about Santa, you end up with a weird relationship to things like the number 666.
So naturally, I opened Instagram to check how many accounts I follow.
1,274.
A perfectly boring number. Spiritually neutral. Not even mildly ominous.
For a split second I thought, There’s no way I can trim that down to 666. That would require focus. Discipline. A spreadsheet and maybe a minor existential crisis.
But I started scrolling anyway.
And here’s the surprising part: it was ridiculously easy.
Accounts that hadn’t posted in a year. Brands I don’t care about anymore. Aesthetic phases I’ve outgrown. People I don’t remember meeting. Influencers who once felt essential and now feel like background noise in a crowded airport.
Unfollow. Unfollow. Unfollow.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being a joke and started feeling… clean. Like clearing out a closet and realizing half of what you owned was just habit. My feed started to feel more like me and less like an accidental museum of former interests.
And then, somehow, I hit 666.
Exactly.
I stared at it for a second, waiting for my phone to overheat or a thunderclap to roll in from nowhere. Nothing happened. No sulfur. No dramatic music. Just my profile quietly displaying the most feared number of my childhood.
Will it stay that way? Of course not. I’ll discover a new photographer. I’ll follow a bakery I’ll never visit. It’ll drift. But for now, I’m enjoying it.
Not because I worship chaos. Not because I’m trying to be edgy. But because there’s something deeply satisfying about taking a symbol that once carried so much weight and treating it like what it is, a number on a screen.
And if somewhere, someone from my old ward happens to see it and feels a brief, dramatic gasp forming in their chest?
Well.
Consider it my tiny, harmless love letter to the kid I used to be, terrified of devils, now amused by algorithms.
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Our Bedtime Audiobook Ritual
Our Bedtime Audiobook Ritual
When Leslie and I first got together almost ten years ago, we started a simple bedtime ritual. We’d climb into bed, she’d get comfortable, look over at me, and say, “Tell me a story.”
Not a fairy tale. Not something made up. Just… a story from my life.
She said it helped her fall asleep, and for a while, I had plenty to work with. Stories from my childhood. Hiking through the mountains. Weird, surreal moments from my time as a Mormon missionary. Random adventures from Geek and Gamer Fitness. Little memories I hadn’t thought about in years suddenly found new life in the dark. For a couple of years, I was a one-man audiobook, and honestly, I loved it.
Eventually, though, I started running out of material. Or at least, I ran out of stories that didn’t require charts, footnotes, or emotional disclaimers. So I suggested audiobooks. And just like that, we fell into a new ritual that’s lasted the better part of eight years.
We’ve listened to The Dresden Files, The Iron Druid Chronicles, Lockwood & Co., The Hobbit, and so many others—some of them so many times they feel like old friends quietly telling us goodnight.
But choosing the next audiobook is serious business in our house. There are rules.
First, it has to be something we’ve already read or heard. New stories are dangerous. They keep us awake, listening intently, suddenly caring far too much about fictional people when we should be unconscious.
Second, the narrator’s voice matters. A lot. Some voices are soothing. Some are… aggressively motivational. We need calm, steady, and gentle. Not “rise and grind,” but “it’s okay, you can sleep now.”
Third, absolutely no dramatic sound effects. Nothing ruins sleep faster than being jolted awake by sudden music, explosions, or gunshots. That’s not ambiance, that’s betrayal.
So we cycle through long, familiar series and usually drift off pretty quickly.
Last night, though, we needed something fresh. I picked Ready Player One, read by
Wil Wheaton. It’s always been a favorite of mine, probably because I grew up in the 80s and still carry a deep love for arcades, mixtapes, and questionable fashion choices.
Every time I revisit this book, one idea sticks with me: the way each character has their own digital space. A personal site where they keep their favorite music, movies, thoughts, art, all of it. One centralized place that’s fully, completely theirs.
And every time, I think… why didn’t we build that?
I remember when Facebook was new, and I honestly believed that’s what it would become, a digital home. A place for your photos, your thoughts, your favorite things. Instead, we ended up scattered across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and a dozen other platforms, all owned by companies that profit from our attention, harvest our data, and decide what we see and when we see it.
It’s kind of bleak, when you step back and look at it.
But I still have hope. More people are building personal websites again. More folks are stepping back from social media, being thoughtful about where they share their photos and art, and reclaiming a sense of ownership over their work.
Maybe, slowly, we’re finding our way back. Back to having one small place on the internet that feels like home. A little digital corner that belongs to us, no algorithms attached.
And honestly? That sounds like a pretty good bedtime story.