Smart Enough
On This Day for Photos, Identity, and Reframing Read-it-Later Apps
Hi there! About a week ago I was emailed by Skillshare and they told me they promoted my previous Journaling Class in their weekly marketing email! That was great news. I am relatively new on Skillshare and most of my traffic comes from their own community. Last June I thought I’d give this platform a try and it’s already been about half a year that is paying my monthly rent. You got something to teach? Give it a shot. Want to hear more specifics about the platform and are interested in some statistics or what I make from my classes? Let me know and I’ll be glad to share. Oh, and if you want to support me feel free to sign up using this link :)
Now let me share with you a few more things that stood out from last week.
On Photo Archiving
A while back I went through the trouble of renaming and organizing all my archive of personal photos, and settled on Lightroom for storage and accessibility. I actually wanted to have the ability to search “this day” over the years and figured out that the best way to do this was to rename the files themselves. If all my files are named ‘Year-Day-Month 001.jpg’ then all I have to do is search ‘-Day-Month ’ including the hyphen and space… then I’ll get that same date over the years. This prompted me to go through more than 20 thousand photos and organize/rename them all. After that I got in the routine of culling personal photos taken from my phone or cameras once every week, backing them up and later uploading them to Lightroom Classic (which, by the way, doesn’t take any storage as it’s all smart previews). I would keep my phone’s photo gallery empty since I always had those well-sized previews on the Lightroom app. I thought this was the best system until this past week, when I decided to adapt my workflow to Apple’s Photo Gallery.
This past week I gave Apple’s Photo gallery a try and I was shocked. Really. Maybe in the past I never researched well about it or the features have improved over the years, but now that I tested the search function with advanced recognition of people, animals, objects, and natural language I was blown away. So… I spent some time moving and setting up everything back to my phone instead of Lightroom. The challenge that many people have with their phone’s photo gallery is the lack of space, either locally or on the cloud. This problem becomes more apparent as they upgrade phones and the new camera files are of higher quality taking more space. This all becomes worst by the fact that few people cull the photos they take. I resized everything, kept my originals on a couple of hard drives and dropbox, and plan to cull/resize everything on a weekly basis, just as I was doing before. No need to have originals with me always.
Do you want to have the “On This Day” feature I was telling you for your iPhone Photo Gallery? I found two Shortcuts that help out with this, and you don’t have to rename everything like I did. THIS ONE will find the photos and make a grid for you, and THIS ONE will just display them. This is one of my favorite features in Day One, my journaling application of choice and I’m happy to have it for photos.
On Learning
I took Judy Blume’s Masterclass. I have not yet read any book by this author but the way she speaks of her characters and the source of her ideas was wonderful. Can’t wait to read some novels by Judy. I am very excited to start exploring more of this genre she calls ‘realistic fiction,’ and I was also very inspired to listen her talk about following her curiosity, being honest, and being personal at the time of writing. Truly an inspiring masterclass and I was moved more than once as I watched.
I also took R. L. Stine Masterclass. I had no idea this author had a masterclass! I remember being totally hooked to the Goosebumps book series when I was in primary school. Many mornings I’d borrow one book from the library and I’d read it throughout the day, in secret, during classes. I think this got me in trouble more than once but it was thanks to authors like R. L. Stine that I loved reading novels since a very young age. The class itself was a bit too basic, maybe more than the others I’ve taken so far. He talked about knowing your audience, about creating likable characters, and coming up with ideas. I’d say that for me the value of the class was more personal. If you are not familiar with the books of R. L. Stine or they don’t mean anything to you I’d pass on this one.
On Articles
I read THIS article that talks about the right way to think about “read-it-later” apps. A short, quick article that I found very practical, especially now that I’m loving Readwise’s Reader.
This morning I was reading THIS ARTICLE that talks about what makes us who we are, or where is the essence of our humanity. I am not so much into metaphysics but I appreciate it a lot when complicated information is presented to the reader in such an interesting & engaging way. I’ve been thinking about this article all day and I see that as a good sign.
I read THIS ARTICLE about Ken Wilber. Wilber is the one who said that “No one is smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time.”
On Cinema
Haru (1996). It has been a while since a film surprised me as much as this one. I thought it would just be a classic Japanese romantic film, but wow, it was so much more. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie incorporate so much written text in its narrative, to the point that sometimes I didn’t know if I was watching a film or if I was reading a bunch of… emails. Truly a wonderful film.
Women Talking (2022). I remember watching The Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley some years ago. Documentaries that have to do with personal stories usually resonate a lot with me, so The Stories We Tell was just right up my alley. With Women Talking, however, I was able to appreciate more of Sarah Polley as a director and I appreciated even more some elements I had already noticed in her previous film. This latest one is a bit of a heavy topic, I am sure the synopsis will scare some viewers right away: A group of women in an isolated religious colony struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony’s men.
Heart of Glass (1976). I am most familiar with Werner Herzog’s documentary work, but haven’t seen much other than that. A couple of weeks back I read that most actors on this film had performed under hypnosis, so I got curious and knew I wanted to check this one out. There’s two things that made this film worth my time. The first one is its amazing imagery. It has a gorgeous use of light. A lot of the images reminded me of classic, beautiful, and dramatic paintings using chiaroscuro. The second one was tone. This film is about tone, mood, and feeling more than anything else. I am not even sure I understood what the story was about. It’s definitely not a film for everyone. Roger Ebert said it best in his in his—favorable—review, this film hasn’t been much seen, perhaps because it isn’t to the taste of most people, seeming too slow, dark and despairing. There’s no proper story, no conclusion, and the final scene is a parable seemingly not connected to anything that has gone before. I think it should be approached like a piece of music, in which we comprehend everything in terms of mood and aura, and know how it makes us feel even if we can’t say what it makes us think.
Knock at the Cabin 2023. The last film that I truly enjoyed start-to-finish from M. Night Shyamalan was The Village. I still watch his work but he lets my hopes down again and again. I can’t recommend Knock at the Cabin, sorry, but the idea or theme is an interesting one and it reminded me of another film that—in my opinion—had a better execution. Watch this instead: Funny Games (1997) by Michael Haneke.
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