🎵📸✍️

At this point I’ve assembled a collection of photos I’ve taken with cameras and phones, fractals I’ve made with various programs, and music I’ve made with two keyboards and apps, in addition to the poetry I’ve written over the course of my life and…

…and I’m looking for ways to combine them.

More on nostalgia

Nostalgia is avorite topic, perhaps, although not one I anticipated I would indulge in as frequently as I do now. Then again, I also hoped the future would be better and not this hellscape.

I liked the 90s, that’s for sure, but I feel like I’m one of the few GenXers who does not long for the 80s. I liked the music and the artistic styles back then but beyond that? Eh, I think that decade was one of the sources of our current situation.

In fact, I have more nostalgia for the 2010s. The stretch of time from the beginning of 2011 to the end of 2016 was among the happiest eras in my life. It was a candy-color psychedelic fever dream of creativity and productivity. I felt like I was learning something new every day and my spirits were buoyant. The millennials and their culture were peaking and I enjoyed the optimism and sparkly galaxy aesthetics. 

Then the rest of the decade began a decline which ended up being a plunge off a cliff with the pandemic.

As fun as the 2010s were for me, I still recognized signs of a potential dystopia to come and much of that centered on technology: would we handle social media, smartphones, constant information, constant stimulation, and constant content with maturity and discernment or nah?

Well, things kinda ended up in the “nah” category. And nostalgia has become a driving cultural factor in the mainstream with remakes while new stuff floats along either underground or dispersed on the virtual winds.

For the first time in my life I am not looking forward to the future. And that in itself is an odd, sad feeling.

Hope probably lies in the movements standing up for humanity. The thing is, will we, can we listen?