While Seated [016]

Michael David Murphy
While Seated
Published in
4 min readAug 15, 2016

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20160812_IMG_8265.jpg — Just a photo of an incredibly small frying pan.
20160812_IMG_8256.jpg — What something looks like as a photo vs. video of the same thing.
20160814 — There’s no bigger photographic grab-bag than the pictures you screenshot or save to your device, and then, thanks to a sparkling workflow, you separate them from your real, actual pictures, so as not to cloud your stream, but strange to go back and see what they look like in a grid: a bunch of quick-hits and scattered dumbness — shared in-jokes and passing captures.

20160814 — Weird to see the sequence of emblazoned COREY logos last week; the first, of a rainbow theme, the second, bright purple letters, and the third, perhaps celebrating USA in the Olympics — red, white, and blue.

COREY tower, August 8th, 9th & 10th, Atlanta, GA — MDM

It’s odd because this is the same digital sign that endorsed Trump and gloated about the Don’s primary victory here in Georgia. Might it be possible to be a sign-owner on a smokestack in the South who simultaneously believes:

  • a big digital-sign on a (smokestack) tower will legitimize our brand
  • Donald J. Trump should be President of the United States
  • let’s use this sign thing to support the LGBTQ community, too!!
20160814 — Occasionally you’ll see two tweets back-to-back (or stacked, really) in your timeline that appear to be having a conversation about placement and chance. Tonight in Lightroom, a similar mashup: this photo on the left, of our television, from the Olympic golf competition of Bubba Watson bending over on the tee-box while a fan in the background holds a framed poster of a painting of Tiger Woods (!), followed-by some Trump/golf/polling meme.

That feeling when you co-found a brewery in 2002 but it gets big fast and by 2010 you need money for expansion, so you sell a 21% minority interest to Miller/Coors and try to be quiet about it lest you rankle the hordes (who’d surely be rankled if you sold 26% of your brewery which, at that point, could no longer be referred to as “craft”, having eclipsed the 25% ownership threshold) and you keep on rolling for a few more years and then run the numbers and realize that in order to compete at the next level, you might as well upsell Miller/Coors’ stake so that they own the small-town craft brewery you created, and by that ownership, the small-town craft brewery you created ceases being “craft”, and a day or two after the the sale is announced, it’s also announced that you, as a co-founder, have stepped down because that’s what co-founders do when they sell everything they worked hard to create to a behemoth that doesn’t care about your story, your community, the veil of your brand’s authenticity, or (gasp) your feelings, but you’re suddenly flush with millions and the horizon is wide, so what do you do a few weeks later — you buy someone else’s craft brewery in a neighboring state and change the name.

20160811 — I’ve often wondered if the sharpest, most marketing-savvy way to advertise photo printers (or photo printing services) is to highlight the emotionally-empty, deeply unsatisfying act of scrolling through years of JPGs (“sifting through endless JPEGs”, above).
20160811 — Maybe time for a cinemagraph of bubbles bursting out of my latest, a blended well-hopped sour brett beer made with plenty of oats, which leads to this everlasting head. Everlasting head.
20160811 — Because twitter pulled API access to the site that archived deleted tweets from politicians, I paste this typo here, even though that site is apparently back up and working, but wouldn’t necessarily collect Hillary’s tweets because she is currently not an elected politician. Ok!
20160811 — Easy to watch Olympic golf in iOS, which doesn’t support Flash, but impossible to view in a web browser without a Flash upgrade. Sad! [Screenshot]
https://vine.co/v/5b69invxnzM — MDM — You could pretty much do an entirely new music video for The Smiths’ “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” using highlights and outtakes from Trump rallies, but if you did, it’d mean you have A LOT OF TIME ON YOUR HANDS.

If I were a 74-year old United States Senator who’d just finished an unsuccessful campaign for President, battling against a system I knew and everyone else knew to be corrupt and intractable, I’d want to return to my home state, buy a $600k summer house on an island in the middle of my state’s biggest lake, leave the same political party to become an independent (again) and wave at the rest of ya’ll from my deck chair.

20160810 — Always love some Ain’t Bad subject lines. [Screenshot]
20160805_IMG_8118.PNG — I can’t find anything about this photo in google image search. It’s prolly a crop, but still, nothing.
20160804_IMG_8105.jpg — How many musicians look exactly like this musician? [Screenshot]
20160803_IMG_8079.jpg — How many photos do I need to include to make this look like a photoblog? What’s the photo-to-text ratio that makes you comfortably feel like you’ve done some (but not too much) reading? How many questions do I need to ask until it’s clear I have no idea what I’m doing?

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