Tag Archives ⇒ trip

A comeback of personal blogging?

September 3, 2014
· Martin Kelley

There’s some pieces mak­ing the round to the effect that some of the old school NYC blog­gers are com­ing back to blog­ging. From Fred Wil­son, The Per­son­al Blog:

There is some­thing about the per­son­al blog, your​name​.com, where you con­trol every­thing and get to do what­ev­er the hell pleas­es you. There is some­thing about link­ing to one of those blogs and then say­ing some­thing. It’s like hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion in pub­lic with each oth­er. This is how blog­ging was in the ear­ly days. And this is how blog­ging is today, if you want it to be.

Wil­son cites Lockard Steele in Back to the Blog:

Back then, we’d had a ton of stu­pid fun link­ing to each other’s blog posts for no oth­er rea­son than that they exist­ed and that it amused us great­ly. Who wouldn’t want back in on that?

Anoth­er one of his cita­tions was Eliz­a­beth Spiers, who fol­lowed up with a post Any­thing I Care About:

I don’t have to write as nar­row­ly as I do when I pub­lish in a reg­u­lar media out­let. The upside of that for me is that I don’t feel com­pelled to stick to a par­tic­u­lar top­ic. I can write about, as Fred put it, “any­thing I care about.”

One of my first thoughts is how annoy­ing­ly insid­er these posts feel. One of the qual­i­ties about the cur­rent inter­net is that our fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms are so sophis­ti­cat­ed and trans­par­ent that we don’t always see how self-selected a sliv­er of social media we’re see­ing. Face­book and its mys­te­ri­ous algo­rithms are the exam­ple we all like to com­plain about. But Twit­ter is a dif­fer­ent beast depend­ing on who you fol­low and Google search­es use hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent sig­nals to tai­lor results. Just because your cohort all stopped per­son­al blog­ging in exchange for pro­fes­sion­al­ized blogs ten years ago doesn’t mean it’s a uni­ver­sal phenomenon.

When­ev­er some­one says they’re start­ing (or restart­ing) a blog I like to wait a few months before cel­e­brat­ing, as there’s a big dif­fer­ence between intent and actu­al writ­ing. But I like the idea that per­son­al blogs might be mak­ing a come­back among some of what we used to call the digerati.

But let’s not get too snob­by about domains: how are Face­book posts not a per­son­al blog? Is it just a mat­ter of URLs? I have Face­book friends who put care into their online per­sona. Peo­ple use Face­book and Tum­blr and Insta­gram part­ly because they come with built-in audi­ences — but also because their crack­er­jack engi­neers have tak­en away the fric­tion of blog­ging. When Wil­son decid­ed to exper­i­ment with this nouveau-blogging, he pho­to­blogged a trip to his Word­Press site. What hap­pened? The pho­tos were all over­sized. One of the com­menters asked Wil­son “isn’t this a bit sim­i­lar to what you’re already post­ing on Tum­blr and Foursquare?” Well, yeah.

Any­way, all this is to say that I’ve blogged a lot more since I decid­ed to make my Tum­blr my per­son­al blog. I’ve got the near-frictionless post­ing that keeps my pho­to­blog­ging look­ing good but I’ve main­tain the con­trolled URL of mar​tinkel​ley​.com to future proof against new tech­no­log­i­cal plat­forms. But is it just the URL that makes it a per­son­al blog?

Three-fort touring

September 1, 2014
· Martin Kelley
Here comes the fer­ry boat 
Get­ting closer. 
The fam­i­ly enjoys the windy ride. 
But first, some good food. 
Ice cream is nev­er a bad idea. 
It’s a long walk 
A long walk but there are flowers. 
Final­ly, we’re beat. Every­one lays out under a tree before embark­ing on the next mile hike. 
Some cool old­er buildings 
A pret­ty field 
Some crum­bling ruins. 
Stairs to gun mounts. 
Final­ly back out of the weeds. 
Gun at Fort Delaware. 
Hmmm…, this is all built on a sandbar. 
Dark-lit round­ed stairwells. 
Fam­i­ly shot atop one of the ramparts. 
Good view inside. 
Wait­ing for the boat, storm clouds appear. 
Get­ting closer. 
Lots of birds on the dock 
Stormy marshland. 
Hel­lo Delaware. 

The three-fort tour from Ft Mott near Salem, New Jer­sey, to Ft Delaware on Pea Patch Island (de fac­to Delaware), to Delaware City, Delaware and adja­cent Ft DuPont.

A few weeks ago Yum­my­gal at South​jer​sey​ex​plor​er​.com wrote up a trip report on The Three Forts Fer­ry Tour. It didn’t take more than two min­utes of texts before my wife and I decid­ed we would recre­ate this.

It’s wasn’t so easy at first. I spent way too long on the park system’s web­site try­ing to fig­ure out how to board the fer­ry at Ft Mott on the New Jer­sey side. Every option I tried had me board in near­by Salem, N.J. It wasn’t till I was home that I read that the Ft Mott stop had been out of com­mis­sion until ear­ly this sum­mer because of Sandy and that Salem had been the alter­nate board­ing loca­tion. The web­site hadn’t been updated.

Once we got to the dock we saw there was no tick­et kiosk. Once the fer­ry came in we found they couldn’t swipe a cred­it card onboard (real­ly? can’t any mod­ern smart­phone han­dle that?, but I digress…). The only place they could han­dle a cred­it card was the far end, in Delaware City. We’d have to dock on Fort Delaware/Pea Patch Island but stay in the boat and con­tin­ue to this city. We’d hadn’t even real­ly planned to nec­es­sar­i­ly go to Delaware City but we end­ed up spend­ing much of our day there.

Delaware City was a small port town whose claim to fame was its loca­tion as the east­ern ter­mi­nus of the orig­i­nal nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Chesa­peake and Delaware Canal. The mod­ern canal bypass­es it a few miles to the south, so Delaware City is a bit frozen in time.

First stop: Crab­by Dick’s, one of three eater­ies rec­om­mend­ed to us (the oth­ers being a pub and an Ital­ian restau­rant). Being a veg­e­tar­i­an I don’t get into this sort of a restau­rant very often but they had veg­gie burg­ers and cre­ative sweet fries (cinnamon-covered with an apple but­ter dip – yum!). Luck­i­ly it was near­ly emp­ty around noon in a Sun­day so our trou­ble­mak­ing kids didn’t cause too much commotion.

Next door was a small ice cream shop. The tem­per­a­tures were in the 90s so this was an obvi­ous stop.

What we should have done next is wan­der the town until the next fer­ry to Pea Patch Island and its fort. One of our par­ty was deter­mined to see all three forts so we set out for Ft DuPont. It’s adja­cent to Delaware City’s dock and down­town as the crow flies. But we aren’t crows, or fish. DuPont’s on the oth­er side of the old canal. You have to walk about a mile to the first bridge that cross­es it, a rick­ety one at that, then make a sharp left to trav­el in the same direc­tion you had just come from, only on the canal’s south side.

There’s no signs for the fort. Even Yum­my­girl had got­ten lost on her trip so I knew to rely on my phone’s maps. Most of Ft DuPon­t’s acreage is a large cam­pus dot­ted with an odd assort­ment of run-down ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry mil­i­tary build­ings sur­round­ing an old parade field. The camp had been a major deploy­ment cen­ter dur­ing WW II and had also served as a POW camp for Ger­mans. The state’s been try­ing to repur­pose it in recent years but it’s an odd assort­ment of halfway house ser­vices and nation­al guard asso­ci­a­tions, stuck in between crum­bling build­ings that will nev­er find a new role.

At the far end of all this a nature trail going through what remains of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Ft DuPont. Walk­ing it is a bit like tour­ing a jungle-covered Aztec city: every so often a ruin sticks out of the trees and tan­gled vines. It’s an interesting-enough trail but not worth a four mile round-trip hike with four kids in 90 degree heat. We were able to beg a ride back from a park ranger fin­ish­ing her shift thank good­ness but much of our day was sit­ting under trees drink­ing the last of our water.

Back at the Delaware City fer­ry office, we bought a small for­tune of water from the vend­ing machine till the next (and final) boat to Pea Patch Island. This is typ­i­cal­ly the des­ti­na­tion of the tourists but by this time we only had about 45 min­utes before the last boat from the island to Jer­sey. We had an extra half hour as the boat wait­ed in dock for a spec­tac­u­lar storm to pass over the river.

We’ll def­i­nite­ly return but prob­a­bly skip Delaware City except for pos­si­bly a meal.

Links:

The QuakerRanter Top-Five

December 28, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Outreach, Family, Pacifism, and Blog Culture

At year’s end it’s always inter­est­ing to look back and see which arti­cles got the most vis­its. Here are the top-five Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org blog posts of 2013.

1. Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning

This grew out of a inter­est­ing lit­tle tweet about search engine opti­miza­tion that got me think­ing about how Friends Meet­ings can retain the curi­ous one-time visitors.

2. Tom Heiland

My father-in-law died in Jan­u­ary. These are few pic­tures I put togeth­er while Julie was still at the fam­i­ly home with the close rel­a­tives. Thanks to our friends for shar­ing a bit of our life by read­ing this one. He’s missed.

3. Expanding Concepts of Pacifism

A look at Friends tes­ti­monies and the dif­fi­cul­ties of being a fair-trade paci­fist in our hyper-connected world today. I think George Fox and the ear­ly Friends were faced with sim­i­lar chal­lenges and that our guide can be the same as theirs.

4. Rethinking Blogs

A num­ber of new ser­vices are try­ing to update the cul­ture of blog­ging. This post looked at com­ments; a sub­se­quent one con­sid­ered how we might reor­ga­nize our blogs into more of a struc­tured Wiki.

5. Iraq Ten Years Later: Some of Us Weren’t Wrong

This year saw a lot of hang wring­ing by main­stream jour­nal­ists on the anniver­sary of the Iraq War. I didn’t have much patience and looked at how dis­sent­ing voic­es were reg­u­lar­ly locked out of debate ten years ago – and are still locked out with the talk that “all of us” were wrong then.

I should give the caveat that these are the top-five most-read arti­cles that were writ­ten this year. Many of the clas­sics still out­per­form these. The most read con­tin­ues to be my post on unpop­u­lar baby names (just today I over­heard an expec­tant moth­er approv­ing­ly going through a list of over-trendy names; I won­dered if I should send her the link). My post on how to order men’s plain cloth­ing from Gohn’s Broth­ers con­tin­ues to be pop­u­lar, as does a report about a trip to a leg­endary water hole deep in the South Jer­sey pines.

“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, 1902

July 8, 2012
· Martin Kelley

blankI began Con­rad’s clas­sic tale as a follow-up to last mon­th’s State of Won­der by Ann Patch­ett. Her hero­ine trav­eled to the most remote reach­es of the Ama­zon; all sto­ries that make the trip from the bland­ness of civ­i­liza­tion (Min­neso­ta in Patch­et­t’s case) owe a debt to Con­rad’s clas­sic tale of a steam­boat trip far up the Con­go River.

The book cer­tain­ly has its odd­i­ties, start­ing with the nar­ra­tive voice: we are lis­ten­ing to a sto­ry told aboard a ship on the Thames that is wait­ing for a change of tide to send it on its way out to sea. The narrator-within-the-story, Mar­lowe, tells the entire tale in flash­back, with Con­rad only occa­sion­al­ly com­ing up for air to the deck of the Thames boat (Heart of Dark­ness was writ­ten as a three-part ser­i­al; I assume these nar­ra­tive breaks are the stitch­ing between installments).

I had heard much about this book over the years so I was curi­ous to see the exact nature of the deprav­i­ties upon which the infa­mous Kurtz had indulged him­self. But two-thirds of the way through the book I real­ized we were nev­er to real­ly learn them. We know there’s a remote camp by a lake and an African tribe that regards him as some kind of demi-god, and we hear tell that he’s law­less toward oth­er Euro­peans and single-minded in his quest for ivory. But these are all bare­ly more than hint­ed glimpses.

blankThe sto­ry turns out to be not so much about Kurtz as it is about Mar­lows’ imag­in­ings as he gets deep­er into the con­ti­nent and gath­ers clues about the mys­tery man at the top of the riv­er. I found this to be a relief, as Con­rad seems almost as unin­ter­est­ed in flesh­ing out the Africans along the way. Kurtz is a bril­liant civ­i­lized man; in the jun­gle his sav­agery is unleashed and he becomes a force unto himself.

I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of any­thing high or low. I had, even like the n******, to invoke him – him­self his own exalt­ed and incred­i­ble degra­da­tion. There was noth­ing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked him­self loose of the earth. Con­found the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or float­ed in the air.

Yes, this is a work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of a psy­chopath. If this were a mod­ern Show­time or AMC tele­vi­sion show, this would be the start of the action: the pro­duc­ers, writ­ers, and actors would leave lit­tle gore or deprav­i­ty to the imag­i­na­tion. But for Con­rad this is the moral­i­ty tale at the heart of the book. Short­ly after being found, Kurtz con­ve­nient­ly dies and our nar­ra­tor sails back down­stream, going (we are help­ful­ly told) twice the speed as before, back out to the ocean and civilization.

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