internet road trip

today, scrolling tumblr i happened across a post directing me to internet roadtrip. if you haven't heard about it, it's a website where people are collectively "driving" via google street view and trying to get to canada. you drive the car by voting on what direction to go.

the website has a couple cute little oddities which i'll let you explore yourself. i booted it up, fiddled around with a few things, and was about ready to leave. then i turned on the radio.

when i opened the site, the car was in maine and the radio was playing WBOR, the bowdoin student radio station. people can collectively choose to change the radio station, and the available stations are based on the car's location. the DJ, named Talia, knew that road trippers were tuned in. she was talking to us, and suggested we take a detour to the town of blue hill, where her grandmother is from and she spent summers. blue hill, interestingly, blue hill is where one of my friends is from, and i've driven there to visit them a few times.

the chat immediately decided to make the detour, although some elements (branding themselves route purists) wanted to continue to canada. however, due to some internal miscommunication about what turn to take we ended up taking a wrong turn and having to do a whole loop of an area we'd already driven.

 

(i think there are more factions in the chat, but i didn't join the discord server to find out. that is left as an exercise for the reader)

i requested some courtney barnett, and the dj played sunday roast which was very lovely. the dj was generally playing good music i enjoyed, and that was fun. i left when her set finished. i trust they made it to blue hill, though i didn't stick around to see it.

i think it's neat that this exists, and that i shared a small thing with all these strangers. typical sentiment. you can find a deeper philosophy yourself, i'm just here to tell you about a nice thing that happened to me.

on the very day i'm gone

another song research rabbit hole! if you missed the last one, it's here, although they're not really related. except that they're both about nora brown kind of, unclear how this happened, i swear i listen to other music. anyway, definitely check out the songs i link. enjoy!

i watch a lot of music on youtube. this includes following individual artists; watching tiny desk concerts, live on kexp, audiotree live, and similar; following channels that feature artists such as gemsonvhs; and assorted videos that just pop up in my recommended.

the other day, i was recommended a video of nora brown performing a song called "the very day i'm gone".

she also performs it on her tiny desk home concert, as well as on an album that i haven't really listened to. 

i like this song, and i've also heard it before, particularly as the last track of the norfolk broads' album "yonder green grove" i found the norfolk broads through the longest johns (a former [and my favorite] johns' member, anna, was a part of the broads), and i will write more about shanties one of these days, but for now here we are and i have a song entitled "rambling woman" that i first heard through an english folk group now performed by a new yorker who plays appalachian traditionals. what gives, and where did this song come from? i also have a suspicion that i had heard this song before the broads, but i have no evidence to back this up.

my suspicion of hearing this song previously may be related to how familiar the song sounds. it shares many lyrics with "railroader's lament" which you might also know by the name "500 miles". my dad sang this song to me as a kid, we sang it at my summer camp, and while writing this i'm learning that it's actually not a traditional. wikipedia claims it was written by hedy west in the 1960s, and was very much part of the folk revival being performed by cash as well as peter, paul, & mary alongside others.

however, it's likely an adaption of an older song "900 miles" originating in the aughts of that century. here's a recording of "900 miles" from 1924 by fiddling john carson.

 

according to baladindex.org, it's also very related to the songs "reuben's train" (meredith moon performance)  and "train 45" (guthrie performance)

anyway, bringing us back around to "the very day i'm gone," the video description for nora brown's tiny desk cites it as being written by addie graham. i missed the information initially and found it through some other sources after watching a lot of cover videos on youtube. addie graham's wikipedia tells us she was born 1890 in kentucky. there's a tribute album to her i found on bandcamp, but an actual recording of her singing "on the very day i'm gone" eludes me. various sources tell me she has an album entitled "been a long time travelling" but the tracklist provided on discogs doesn't include the song i want. wikipedia links to the digital library of appalatchia but their website is broken and it also doesn't claim to have this song so i haven't bothered to dig in the archives. 

the full album is actually on youtube so you can listen to that if you like. it's got a charm to it. i also found some video of her singing "the old churchyard"

it's fascinating to me that very possibly no one will ever hear the woman who wrote this song sing it again.

how i make an instagram post

maybe this is a really self-centered post for me to make but i have a very particular process to it. maybe it's not even particular, maybe everyone does it this way. i think too much about these things. how do you make instagram posts? tell me in the comments. regardless, here we go.

i try to make an instagram post every month. if i have something particularly eventful or that has a lot of photos (e.g. my montreal trip over thanksgiving break) i’ll make extra posts. months segment things nicely, and also tend to be a good timeframe where i can cover all the things that happened.

i started making posts this summer, when, after some prodding, i realized that i actually liked the way i looked in photos and could post them. i made 8 posts catching up my life since the start of college, although i'm fairly sure i didn't post any photos of me from the fall semester.

to start, i go through all the photos from the month and put everything i think might be good in an album. often this involves a couple duplicates, as well as versions of shots that i think will crop differently and want to check which one i want.

once i have all the raw photos (this month i had 24), i start narrowing. some photos just aren’t that good comparatively on a second pass, sometimes i don’t need quite that many photos of one person, it very much depends on the month. i try to get down to 10 photos, even though instagram raised the limit. i could be pretentious and claim it’s an exercise in craft, but it’s also just habit and feels like the right number. narrowing can be tricky, and often i'll sit on it for a day or two and come back.

this month was interesting because i had a lot of photos from shows and low-light dorm rooms which were all kind of terrible quality, and a bunch of pictures from frisbee that i was considering making into their own post. i think the final post suffers from too much frisbee syndrome (tm) but i didn't feel like changing it.

once i've narrowed, i crop everything down to square. instagram changed the profile grid ratio recently and i'm going to be angry about it for a while. i put a lot of care into cropping. my time doing digital and film photography in an academic setting taught me the importance of careful cropping. sometimes, i can't get a photo to crop well and i'll swap it out for another. a few times, i've made a post in a different aspect ratio to allow for different crops. sometimes i'll touch up the editing on a photo, but usually that's not needed.

the photos are gradually placed in an order. this is never at a consistent time in the process. i'll consider order as part of narrowing, or do it before cropping, or partially crop and then order, or just do it last. i try to vary types of photos and give a sense of flow to the post. this could be narrative or aesthetic.

lastly, i pick a caption. common caption sources include in-jokes from the month, a phrase that wormed its way into my head, or an event.

then i post it! that's all.