2016: 366 days
I’ve been into writing and blogs for most of my life and I often do some kind of yearly retrospective. I typically discuss the music I got into or a make a small summary of highlights, but this year was a bit different.
I’ve been in a creative deadspace for a while now; it has been nearly 5 years since my exit from the band. Part of me wants to get back into music but part of me also feels like that part of my life has run its course. I have ideas for a memoir-style writing project that I’m hoping to kick into higher gear in 2017.
Towards the end of 2015 I was looking for a project. The thing that I really miss about the band was constantly having something to be working on. I was always checking the various sites and social media accounts or working on some graphic design. I wanted to find something to always be doing, so I settled on a photo-a-day project.
I set very loose guidelines so that I would hopefully skip fewer posts for not catching something specific. The photo, or photos, just needed to be from that day. I knew I had to do it every single day or else I would fall behind and become frustrated with having to do a giant block of them at once. For the most part I succeeded with this and I think that’s a big reason in why I completed it. So, every day at 8:00 PM I got this reminder on my phone:
A majority of the photos in this project were shot with an LG Nexus 5 . It didn’t have the greatest camera but it got the job done. Some posts contain pictures shot with my T2i and everything after October 25 is with the new Google Pixel.
Once in a while the reminder would pop up and I would have nothing, so a picture of Lilly was usually an easy solution. After I had my photos picked out I would go through and edit them, usually beginning with a bit of cropping and straightening. With my Nexus 5 I did a lot of color tuning and sharpening; once I got my Pixel it was crop and rotation only.
There are a few ways to navigate this:
First, you can just start scrolling. The dates are in reverse chronological order so it begins with December 31 and ends on January 1. At the top of the page there’s a link to the archive, a visual listing of each post. There’s also a random link which is exactly what you think it is. Finally, you can search in the top right. You can search by a tag (try a random word, see what comes up!) or by date (i.e. March 12).
The tags are really the heart of the whole thing. Originally I had a page that listed all of the tags in order by frequency so you could see how many times each one was used. It allowed you to scroll through and find ones that piqued your interest or see that a lot of posts were under “work” and very few were under “#1 sports nutrition meat snack”. However, the scripts that loaded the tags in order stopped working, so we’ll have to get by without it. (see edit) In its absence, I have compiled the highlights page. This is a small collection of specific posts and a list of tags with a brief description of their significance.
Every post is loaded with tags. You can see every Wednesday. You can see my results of trying out the food service Blue Apron. At the bottom of every post, click any of the tags and see what you find. Most of the posts have more than one photo, so clicking the “Burien Press” tag will show every time I tagged it, along with the other photos from the same day.
I kind of backed off of Facebook and Instagram to make this project more substantial and not just a repeat of everything I had already posted. I also told very few friends about it to make something I’ve been doing literally every day for a year a complete surprise.
If you would like to leave feedback or want to ask me questions about anything, the ask me anything link will send messages to me here (with or without a Tumblr account - if you do use this, please include your name). Clicking the timestamp at the bottom right of a post (i.e. “4 months ago”) will take you to the individual page for that post where you can publicly comment. You can reach me on Twitter at @evanhuggies. I am aware of a few posts with distorted/blocky images and I’m not sure what the deal is. Tumblr has not been the best choice for this project for a variety of reasons. If you see any other errors, please let me know.
I had a lot of fun doing this, even though some days it definitely felt like a chore. I hope you spend some time clicking around and enjoy seeing my perspective for 366 days.
Edit: Good news! The script is working again and the tags page is up and running. Whether it was bandwidth resetting at the beginning of the month or my email to the developer was actually successful, I’m really glad to have it back!
I find the more frequent tags to be interesting from a quantized standpoint, but you’re probably more likely to find the truly interesting things when they were listed only once.
The highlights page will remain since I put a lot of work into it and it was fun to make.
One more thing - If you’re viewing this through the tumblr app, some posts may appear out of order. The app also does not show the navigation at the top of the page or the extra pages. I strongly recommend viewing this in a browser.