Late-September freewrite!

It’s been a crummy day, guys. For some reason, as I battled through this cold, rainy afternoon with obstacles piling up through the evening, I felt compelled to end the night with a Hive post simply as a middle finger to the forces of nature that were trying to put me down. @guthrie is already getting into some academic and attendance trouble less than month into school and that meant I had to put the hammer down. I did make it to the gym which is about two months of consistency. It isn’t all bad. There are a lot of things I’m excited for so I thought I’d sweep them all up into freewrite for September as the month is coming to an end.

My friend Christine has become a really big part of my life and last week I had the honor of photographing her sister’s wedding. I’ve been shooting weddings for years. I could never do it as a career but on occasion with friends, I do have a good time. Weddings and funerals are the only time I’m ever in a suit, too. I had a great time and it was a beautiful union to be a part of. A few days later, Christine and I were invited by Mizna to participate in a panel at the 20th annual Arab Film Festival for our short film, “Rise”. I’d been shooting footage at protests for Palestine for two years at that point and it all came together with a beautiful, heartbreaking poem Christine wrote. She and I edited this video for months during the final stretch of her residency for her M.D. program. It was really humbling to be included in this event.

Immediately after the wedding, I had to run to meet @guthrie at the Shakopee Mystic Lake amphitheater for Megadeth and Iron Maiden. This was a birthday present for him all the way back in July. I found pretty good tickets on Facebook Marketplace for $300 for the pair. We saw Megadeth together two years ago and it was a life changing night for him as a young up and coming guitarist. Unfortunately, their performance at this show was abysmal. The laziest, saddest, oldest set list I’ve ever seen, and he knew it, too. Very disappointing. Iron Maiden saved the day, though. They were outstanding live. I’ve made fun of them my entire life but I admit, that show made me a fan.

Foraging has been really fun lately. I’ve been founding bounty after bounty now that we’re finally starting to get some rain at the end of the summer/beginning of fall. We had four straight days of rain so I went out to one of my usual spots and found a huge shelf of chicken of the woods, which to this day is still my favorite mushroom. I also found coral tooth, honey mushrooms and shrimp of the woods. I’m holding out that I’ll be able to find maitake since we’re in prime season for it right now. I’ve only ever found one! Here’s a video harvesting fresh sumac with some family friends.

The last two ADHD updates I can give is that I’ve found yet another working portable black and white TV for the TV wall I’m building. The wall is going to be used for the documentary I’ve been working on for the last three years. It’s one of the most ambitious projects I’ve undertaken. I snagged this little guy for $20 on Facebook Marketplace! Lastly, a deeply geek-centric endeavor, I’ve been building a local LLM AI survival laptop over the last month. The hardware took forever to get here because it was hung up in the Strait of Hormuz. The last few weeks has been patching the open source N.O.M.A.D. software to have access to a pre-indexed 200GB dataset; medical files, taxonomy, plant identification, engineering, the entire Wikipedia library. I’ve finally got it working. It feelings like ChatGPT from 2024 but it’s local, open source and could be a lifesaver if shit really goes tits up.