I’m 51 this year, and at the same time Tobyblog turns 11. Today there won’t be any celebrating to speak of, it being Good Friday. My birthday frequently seems to fall on the holy days around Easter (or Pascha as we now refer to it), so it’s often overshadowed but never entirely forgotten. Sunday Kassi will be baking me a special blackberry cake that I expect will rival anything she’s ever made for me in the past. In fact, I think I should make a photo gallery of all my previous year’s birthday cakes. There have been some outstanding ones. A old photo of the blueberry cake she made for me one year still stands as my most popular photo on Flickr for some reason.
AI has been a recurring topic of my conversations of the last few weeks, spurred on by the sudden popularity of ChatGPT’s image creation capabilities and its ability to mimic the style of popular artists, a feature that has sparked a fair amount of controversy both online and closer to home, with one of my close friends recently confiding to me that he took some heat over his frequent posts of family photos rendered in the fashionable Ghibli style. The whole subject is of some interest to me. I’ve known about Chat’s image rendering for a little while now and have played around with it some, but after discovering that they restored internet access for “deep research” queries I decided to turn it loose on this blog, asking Chat to do a deep dive on Tobyblog.com and generate an image of me that would tie together all the loose themes of my posts and capture the essence of what this site is all about. The result of that is the image posted above.
I won’t pretend that’s an accurate rendering of me personally, but as a kind of badge for the site I don’t think it’s all that bad.
Currently serving as my official on-the-go and anytime music playlist, the fourth entry in my Dad Wagon series serves up the usual chill sounds with an iconoclastic and occasionally discordant flare. Beware. This is not your ordinary boomer playlist. Expect to be surprised, delighted, and sometimes disappointed when my curated selections strain the limits of what can popularly be considered acceptable listening.
Once upon a time I was a little kid with kind of reddish, wavy hair. Shy and timid. I was a decent runner. I enjoyed collecting rocks when my Mom would take me on walks around the neighborhood. I liked playing outside. Holly Beach in South Louisiana was about as far as we ever made it back in those days, and only maybe twice that I remember. Even back then it had the reputation of being kind of trashy and muddy, but Louisiana didn’t have many options for beaches. Lots of beer tabs in the sand waiting to split your foot open, which I heard happened to my godfather once. Still, though, you could see the water and hear the waves crashing the shore. It was on one of those trips, maybe this one, that my grandfather and father caught a small sandshark with their bare hands, and hauled it up onto the beach. There’s a photo of them posing with it somewhere. I’m not sure whatever happened to the shark, but I assume they tried to eat it.
It’s been a little bit since I posted last. This already feels weird to me, but I suppose I can get used to it again. I don’t really feel the need to go into detail about why I dropped off. Very few people will ever see this anyway. But the blog was never completely off my mind. Over the years I’ve done quite a bit of work under the hood, so to speak, to modernize it and make it a lot friendlier for folks running on mobile devices and lower bandwidth connections. Not only because it interested me to do so — to stay current — but because I never intended to let this thing drop permanently. I always wanted to do it better, honestly. But I’m still searching for an idea of what that means.
As always, if you’re interested in viewing the entire set on Flickr, just click on the photo above. Or, if you’d rather continue reading, click the link below.
