Apparently I haven’t blogged since May, which might be the longest stretch of non-blogging since I started blogging before blogging was called blogging. In my defense, we’re in the middle of a pandemic and I moved around the world from Tokyo to Vancouver. That’s not to say I haven’t been active, I just haven’t been active here. Which I regret. So I thought I’d quickly drop an update for the few of you that still read blogs.
Just after moving to Canada from Japan we at Safecast had to face the cold reality that our funding efforts this year have failed miserably in no small part due to COVID and that was unlikely to change anytime soon. We made the hard decision to shift the entire paid staff to volunteer so that we have reserves to keep the servers online hopefully long enough to get through this. That includes me, and means that for the first time in 20 years or so I find myself without gainful employment. Did I mention that I just moved around the world and we’re in the middle of a pandemic? Right, so that’s fun. The interesting thing about being self employed for most of your adult life is that it makes you essentially unemployable.
To that end I’ve been staying up late working on various side hustles any number of which might, with just the right combination of time and place, grow to at least fill some of these new gaps.
I redid my photography portfolio site seanbonner.photos top to bottom to try and give a better view of what I do, what I’m trying to do, and where I think that might lead and why it’s useful. At shop.seanbonner.photos you can buy prints and books and merch. I’m especially excited about my new subscription offer where I send subscribers a limited edition mystery miniprint each month – a few spots are still remaining if you are interested.
Speaking of photos and merch, streetsheets.tokyo has been updated with some new pacific northwest influenced designs on housewares and clothing.
Tara and I have finished writing The Interest Driven Life book and are in the final production steps before it goes off to the publisher. If you’d like to get more info about that as the release date gets closer, please do sign up for our mailing list on the site.
Speaking of mailing lists, I’m still actively writing my newsletter The Crowd, though like this blog the updates are not as frequent as they once were. This is in part due to the fact that I’m taking a break from Twitter because it’s a garbage fire of depressive bullshit, and that’s where I used to get a lot of the news I’d write about. Perhaps ironically I’m spending more time on Instagram. I would like to explore how best to merge the blog and the mailing list, so that I could write something and it would go to both places.
Perhaps most exciting, I’ve revived my old record label Toybox Records and have begun announcing plans and releasing things. The roadmap at the moment includes a mix of older yet previously unreleased material, reissues of favorites, and new stuff by new bands. As before, genre-wise, expect it to be all over the place. For now music can be found here and brand spanking new merch is over here.
Writing that all out does make it feel like a lot, but I’d be lying if I told you that from the place I’m sitting at the moment it felt like a lot. I think because so much of that is in the “about to happen” or tentative stages it feels like none of them are actually real. But they are, and at this point I’m just trying to get them in front of people who may appreciate them. If you know someone who might be interested in something I’ve mentioned here, I’d be in your debt if you felt like passing the link on to them to check out.
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