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Pretty Good Hat

A hand holds a small box titled ‘Inspiracles: photography inspiration cards’ and has fanned three large playing card sized cards. The top card is titled ‘Neon Portrait’ and suggests taking futuristic styled photos with neon lights.

My wife got me this fun and thoughtful photography gift: a deck of photo inspiration cards with prompts for things to look for or styles of photos to make. They’re really neat! I’m going out on a pre-winter-storm walk this morning to try out a few.

I have moved into that very particular Holiday Dad Mode where I check the Christmas tree in the morning and take great personal pride that the tree has drunk a healthy amount of water overnight.

A bright yellow background highlights bold text showing my favorite new-to-my artists this year: Big Thief, Low, Japanese Breakfast, Alvvays, and Courtney Marie Andrews. The hashtag at the bottom of the image reads #tuneR.

A heatmap showing calendar days through twelve months, with light yellow showing ‘light’ listening days shading to purple for the heavist days where I listened to the most music. I listened to a lot of music in Januar, July, October and November.

I dusted off the last.fm data visualizer that I started working on last year around this time. This year I built a couple of fun Spotify-wrapped-like visualizations; why should Spotify users have all the fun?

If you’re a last.fm user, you can try it, too! TuneR is a small Shiny app that you can provide your last.fm username and see your year in music, a comparison of this year to your all-time most-listened artists, and a fun heatmap of your listening activity.

A Lelit espresso machine photographed at an angle and showing a narrow depth of field with a blurred, small cup beside it.

I got an adapter and I’m excited to use my old Pentax lenses on my Fujifilm X-T30. (This is with the SMC FA 35mm)

A silver and black camera sits on a bright, narrow countertop, lens pointing away. The light is bright, making the shadow very stark and deep behind the camera.

I found that the battery on my Fuji X-T30 no longer holds a charge, so I’m making photos this Thanksgiving with my X100S while I order a replacement battery. Gosh this camera feels so good to hold and use. It’s just so elegant and solid and graceful. I should carry it everywhere.

A close-cropped photo of a green coffee cup sits beside an open Macbook in front of a glowing, electric fireplace.

My early morning routine this holiday week has been journaling and coffee by the fireplace. It’s a small, electric fire that doesn’t put out a lot of heat, but it warms my toes a bit when it’s cold.