So Twine’s a game building hypertext tool that freed people from mass quantities of coding. Games but also interactive stories and other species of e-narrative, which includes potential image narratives. And possibly dreaming the semantic web into place, since its based in part on RDF resource description framework tools.
Irresistible and accessible, although it would be great if WordPress would give us a plug-in option to host Twine builds instead of having to cross link to another site.
Anywho, I used Twine to contain some raw ideas for a project I’m building. Here’s the roughout: http://www.philome.la/DriftlessWorld/301-roadtrip
Thoughts and reactions invited, it’s one of those: “this is an interesting tool, now what?” moments.
Posts Tagged ‘nostalgia’
Twine story project: testing trajectories
Posted in Art, collage, gaming, influences, photography, roadtrip, Topography, Travel, tagged documentary, gaming, history, landscape, nostalgia, photography, tools on November 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »
After a Busy Summer
Posted in landscape, photography, photomod, roadhouses, roadside, Topography, Travel, tagged driftlessworld, highways, landscape, nostalgia, photography, photomods, rural, topography, travel, Wisconsin on August 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Taking the time to sit down and edit again after a long and busy summer away from blogging. Rainy days like the one we’re having at the moment don’t induce the kind of “carpe diem” guilt that parking in front of a laptop, editing does on a brilliant blue sky summer afternoon.
Here’s a tumble-down tin roof roadhouse sagging toward earth near Muscoda, WI. Old wood and tin, irresistible!
Teaseled
Posted in ecology, landscape, photography, roadhouses, roadside, Topography, Travel, tagged abandoned, landscape, nature, nostalgia, photography, photography landscape nature Wisconsin, rural, scenic, topography on June 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I admired the architecture of these dried tall weeds and discovered their name & history later:
Historical: Common teasel is a native of Europe where it has historically had many uses. The heads of a cultivated variety of teasel are used for wool “fleecing”, or raising the nap on woolen cloth. (Grieve 1995). These heads are fixed on the rim of a wheel, or on a cylinder, which is made to revolve against the surface of the cloth (Grieve 1995). No machine has yet been invented which can compete with teasel in its combined rigidity and elasticity (Grieve 1995). The roots of common teasel are also reported to have various medicinal values ranging from a remedy for jaundice to a cleansing agent (Grieve 1995). http://www.cwma.org/Teasel.html
What struck me was the remark that “no machine has yet been invented which can compete with teasel”. A case of ‘first design, best design’. The prickly cone shaped heads atop the tall stalks are amazingly tough and durable. More durable that the receding farmstead that the teasel, trees and other encroaching brush and weeds have overtaken. As natural forces will always overtake what people abandon.
Therein a reminder to stay humble. Our tenancy and current dominance over the landscapes of this earth is entirely fleeting. Grasses, sky and trees around the house appear to have enjoyed a good bit of teaseling on this windy day. CanonT2i DSLR, 18-135mm f5.6 @1/200, no post-editing except the c. notice.
Memorial Day
Posted in Art, influences, landscape, photography, photomod, roadside, tagged automobiles, classic, documentary, highways, history, night photography, nostalgia, photomods, scenic, veterans, war on May 26, 2014| Leave a Comment »
One of the shots made in Muscoda yesterday,filtered through all that this day of remembering the ultimate cost of conflict represents in America.
My “photomod” post-processing actualizes the implicit tangle of emotion, layering visual moods directly over the image, rather than make any attempt at an objective presentation. The image becomes as freighted with interpretation as is our culture of ideals bruised by the realities of our actions and history. And our determination to get back up and move forward, unbroken.
Muscoda WI, Memorial Day weekend
Posted in influences, landscape, Legacy, photography, roadside, Topography, Travel, Wisconsin, tagged automobiles, documentary, driftlessworld, highways, history, landscape, nostalgia, rural, travel, Wisconsin, witness on May 26, 2014| Leave a Comment »
We drove over to Muscoda on Hgwy 133 Saturday to go to St Vincent’s Thrift Shop. I knew there were several sites / sights in this small river town that I wanted to frame and to think over. Memorial Day weekend always gets my attention anyway. Makes me mindful of what gets taken for granted in the backgrounds of our daily routines. There are the buildings, commerce, highway, past and present colliding. The road signs to tell us where we’re at. And then there’s the flag(s) speaking louder than anything else this weekend.
Here’s a couple of shots taken downtown at the intersection of Hgwy 133 & SR 80; I was testing smaller f-stops, using a remote release with the camera tripod-mounted and longer exposures, ISO 100. One’s “as shot”, the other’s post processed to adjust contrast and saturation. I need a better monitor for editing; this laptop’s color profile was balanced with a Spyder Pro, but I’m still not convinced that I’m seeing what I need to. Would appreciate knowing what they look like to you. Cheers.
Salted Black and White
Posted in Art, Florida, landscape, Legacy, mixed media, photography, tagged art, driftlessworld, farming, Florida, history, landscape, nature, nostalgia, OldRoads, people, rural, travel on March 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Back in the late 80’s after spending time in a graphic arts wet darkroom shooting artwork color separations for screenprinting, I became interested in black and white 35mm photography. A class with Lawson Little at Fla. Keys Community College and hundreds of shots later I had my own darkroom and binders full of negatives, contact prints and enlarged prints.
Fast forward to the digital age, past Hurricane Wilma and Key West’s inundation that went little noticed in the wake of the more horrendous landfall Katrina made in New Orleans. I’d already left Cayo Hueso to make a landfall of my own in Chicago, but not my heavier possessions: record albums, books, notebooks and negatives.

After a fire, the water tower, steps and a gourd vine’s all that’s left of this abandoned hilltop citrus emporium. And of course a realtor’s for sale sign.
Salt water does a lot of damage. But silver negatives in protective sleeves turn out to be much tougher than anyone who hasn’t salvaged them might guess. Wiped and dried out, the binders hibernated for years in my office while I considered what sense there might be in a digital age, to again invest in an redlight darkroom. Then at the local library where I work, like being hit between the eyes by a fast flying Junebug, i realized the workhorse public scanner had a 35mm negative reader tucked into the lid. Presto Chango.

Can’t Step Back Clermont Florida, 1989. From the 20s through the late 60s it was common to see hilltop, roadside citrus fruit stands dotting highways throughout Florida. Typically they were surrounded by acres of orange trees rolling toward the horizon. Fruit, cold drinks, maybe real estate or a viewing tower and a multitude of souvenir tchotkes greeting travelers who stopped. These steps are what’s left of an abandoned fruit depot that burned down; citrus cropping in Central Florida has all but ceased due to disease and unpredictable winter weather.
A bit of a learning curve ascent plus trial and error mostly overcame a long gone manual and for the first time in 25 years those old negative can step back into the light; of a different wavelength, but illumination nevertheless. The differences between ink and silver stand out in the new prints, but mashing up the two mediums has released multitudes of opportunities. And a little dance of ecstasy.

Nature indifferently reclaims what human enterprise abandons. This fruitstand’s ashes and all the work and memories shared within its walls erased except as held within memory, words, images. The hills beyond are crowned with rolling rows of orange trees that, in years to come will be frozen out. And if the pattern running up and down Highway 27 in Central Florida has held true to the course it was following at the turn of the 21st century, these rolling croplands will be sold off to developers, scraped clean and covered by planned communities featuring chic construction themes like Southwestern Adobe complete with concrete cactuses. Artificial Paradise.
And what I remembered about taking these photos, especially the series taken upstate, in the Central and North Central Florida citrus belts, which had undergone vast change even then, is the sense of a requiem. The Old Florida shown in these photos was vanishing when they were taken. It’s slipped away now almost entirely.
Photography is a medium where everything shown is in the past tense, and so the yearning for places, people and for a “sense of place” long extinguished comes built-in. Sally Mann, Stephen Shore and Frank Gohlke, among others have written about the inherent sense of loss, yearning or exclusion that comes with landscape photography; the places or homes we can never go back to, that resist our attempts to re/connect with their history and meaning. With their witnesses.

Evinston Florida, Sunlight Styling Salon 1989. Florida’s time warps are almost always unexpected and defy cultural expectations. many attempts have been made to sell the states enchantment and mystery, few ever succeed.
Time shifted contexts are by nature disconcerting: same physical location, but everything known about it and assumed to be permanent fractures and dislocates. Frequently deteriorates. Certainly becomes denaturalized. This is one of the first poignant lessons of mature adulthood: change is the only constant.
Before Subzero
Posted in Art, landscape, photography, winter, Wisconsin, tagged landscape, nature, nostalgia, rural, scenic, snow, winter, Wisconsin on January 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Quicksnap with G4 phone during my evening walk yesterday when our air temperatures climbed briefly into the high 20s, before beginning their arctic descent. -25 overnight with windchills to -50 through Tuesday. Upside is that the photogenic blanket of snow will be sustained and hoarfrost ice crystal formations are imminent, especially when fogs roll in as temperatures climb 40 degrees into mid 30s by this weekend. Patiently waiting & editing now while Mama Nature sets her stage
Old Key West Bottling Plant
Posted in photography, tagged design, Florida, history, key west, lomoMod, nostalgia, photography, photomods, timetravel, travel on May 18, 2013| 4 Comments »
I recently found an amazing archive of old Key West Photos at the Monroe Co. Library’s Flickr page. These shots of KWest from the 40’s – 70’s to me represent the “real” KW, before tourism took off and redevelopment took over and transmogrified the island into a simulacrum of itself; a place dusty, mellow, local and genuinely alive, populated by Bahamanian and Cuban Conchs, sailors, hippies, artists, refugees and scalawags of all stripe, who lived and let live. There was peace and more freedom there than any time or place I’ve lived since. And so I can’t resist taking these old photos and modding them to reflect the feelings they incite, deep within memory, dragged up from the depths of my heart.
Old Coke bottling factory on lower Simonton(?) Street, alley view, @ 1960. Credit for the original
to Florida Key’s Public Libraries http://www.flickr.com/photos/keyslibraries/