Decided to try my hand at both baking and food photography tonight.
The electricity went out at my house just as this cake was coming out of the oven. I melted the butter in the warm oven while zesting and juicing a lemon before mixing the whole thing with an unholy amount of powdered sugar by cell phone flashlight. The power came back in time to decorate, garnish, and take the photos.
It tastes as delicious as it appears.
I felt antsy earlier tonight so I grabbed the camera and drove around for a few minutes. More Tallahassee at night.
Captures from a too-warm winter afternoon and evening drive around the Big Bend.
A late night stop on US-27 just outside of Tallahassee.
Inspired by Florida Springs and based on a photo by artist and master photographer John Moran.
Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper. 9″x12″.
Spotted on the drive home.
As Jay Maisel writes in Light, Gesture, and Color: “Carry the damn camera.”
Gutiérrez, Miren and Stefania Milan. “Playing with Data and its Consequences.” First Monday 24:1 (2019). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i1.9554
Scholars, advocates, and social critics frequently describe data as a structure of power used against citizens and the powerless online. In their article in the most recent First Monday, Miren Gutiérrez and Stefania Milan invert big data, arguing that “Citizens, activists and professionals alike embrace innovative data-related practices at the intersection of the digital and the informational, embedding data and ways of playing with data in their activities.”
Data is undoubtedly used to oppress and exploit, but Gutiérrez and Milan show how it can be used to advocate for the rights of the less powerful, as well. Recent work in critical studies of neoliberalism–I’m thinking about Byung-Chul Han’s ideas, in particular, which are very nicely summarized in the Verso essay collection, Psychopolitics–paints a nearly hopeless picture of privacy in the radically transparent world that social media has wrought. While it does not occupy the same intellectual field, this research introduces a necessary critical counterpoint.
Started off the day with a work visit to the C.H. Corn Hydroelectric Station in western Leon County. This dam is the source of Lake Talquin. An enormous volume of water was passing through the dam as a result of the heavy rainfall lately.
Later in the afternoon I had a visit from a friend in the tree outside of my window at the office.
We passed the time in shade unaware until
Russet skin descending in winter
to carbon upon the pavement, it
Caught the corner of my eye
Red passing to brown, falling
gray black dust in my lungs
Passing again I could not point to the fallen leaf
but it is part of me
Chlorophyll in the oxygen viscera
C.B. Crenshaw 