Me, Myself, and this blog

Art + Activism at Esalen

Last week I attended a Track II conference at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. If you aren’t familiar with Esalen it’s worth reading up on, because it’s kind of legendary for many reasons none of which I’m going to talk about here. Like other Track II events, international relations played a big part as well as pressing global issues such as nuclear threats, climate change and cyber security. For this event there was a new addition to the normal diplomacy talks with a focus on art ant activism, which is how I ended up with an invite. I went in kind of blind but then realized I would be presenting some of my work to help with context so I threw something together one night and thought it would be useful to post here for reference as well. This was written as a talk and includes a lot of ad-libbing but I think it’s fairly readable as well. Please to enjoy.

Hi everyone. I’m Sean Bonner and I’m going to ramble a little bit here so it’s going to either be terribly confusing or make perfect sense, but probably nothing in between. In the early 2000’s the art critic Jerry Saltz once said of my Los Angeles art gallery that he looked forward to seeing us either succeed or fail fantastically, so I always try to do one of those two things. So I’m just going to tell you some stories and let some of my photos play here in the background while I do. These things are probably unrelated. 

The other night during our one sentence introductions I struggled to succinctly explain what I do because I do lots of vaguely connected things – I’m a writer, photographer, illustrator, entrepreneur, publisher, musician… Recurring themes in my work are solitude, loneliness and connections, relationships. Chasing passions, and chasing passion. Most of my work is connected to subcultures in one way or another. I call myself a misanthroplogist which is only half a joke. It’s been pointed out to me that all of my companies and projects and efforts are somehow in search of or in service to a community. I’m always hunting for my people, trying to find the weirdos I connect with.

Where I’m from is almost as hard to answer as what I do. I was born in Washington DC, but I’ve lived in Maryland, Texas, Florida, Chicago, Los Angeles, Vienna, Paris, Tokyo, and now Vancouver. There might be some things I’m pretty good at, but apparently sitting still isn’t one of them

My first job was a dishwasher at seafood restaurant Florida’s gulf coast, I was 14 and I got paid in cash under the table. Some of my friends were in bands and before long we decided they should have records but assumed there was no way any real record company would be interested so I saved up started my own. You could ask “why did you think as a high schooler you could just go start your own company?” and the only good answer I have is I didn’t know that I couldn’t. Over the next 5 or 6 years I put out about dozen albums by different bands, first releases for many and some of whom are still touring, playing live and writing new music today.

This experience had 3 long lasting impacts on my life:

  • I realized anything is possible.
  • I realized the seemingly small actions of one person can inspire someone else to do something amazing.
  • It made me basically unemployable.

That last point is important because knowing the power of the individual and that limits are imaginary is incompatible with most corporate and business structures. I’ve had a few office jobs since then, they were… well, complicated.

In the big picture I often find myself trying to identify problems to help solve, not that I’m terribly good at solving them, but I enjoy trying. One of my favorite ways to do that is to build a new thing that makes the thing causing the old problem obsolete. Don’t try to change it, just route around it. The people you leave behind will either ignore you and keep doing their thing oblivious to your improvements, or they will realize they’ve been overstepped and change their thing to try and catch up. Either one of those is a perfectly fine outcome. 

I wanted to spend some time talking about one of my projects that relates to a few of the themes we’ve been talking about over the last few days – namely open source, nuclear, art and activism.

By 2010 I had given up my half of an art gallery and walked away from global blog network that I’d started almost a decade earlier. I was pretty frustrated with both the art and tech worlds at the time and was mostly hanging out at hackerspaces and doing “black ops” for venture capitalists to help decide what companies (and teams) to invest in, but I was also trying to figure out what to do next with my weird art/tech/DIY skill set. I was privately hoping to stumble across a project I could throw myself into, though I couldn’t have anticipated how that would play out.

For a few years I’d been involved with an annual event in Tokyo called the New Context Conference. Put on each year by Digital Garage, we talked about what was happening online, and hypothesized about what might be next. Our 2011 event was planned for April but In March a serious earthquake hit Japan causing a Tsunami that crippled that Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear plant and generally made a really, really big mess. I was still living in LA at the time and so I called my friend and co-organizer Joi Ito to see if he was OK. He wasn’t in Japan either, and was also trying to get word about what was happening. For the most part, no one knew what was going on.

We started pulling people together to see if we could help. We’re hackers and internet people with diverse networks of smart people all around the world – if that would ever be useful for something this seemed like it would be it.

At first we thought we’d just go find the data. Turns out there was no data, as no functional sensor networks existed Then we thought we’d just collect the data ourselves. Turns out there was no equipment to be had, as essentially every geiger counter on the market had been sold in the last 24 hours to randos with survival bunkers in Ohio. So we began to realize that we needed to build a way to collect the data from scratch.

The previously scheduled April event changed from “what’s happening next online” to “what’s happening next in Fukushima” and we brought a bunch of the people we were talking to over to Tokyo and sat down in a room together for a few days to try and come up with a plan. Over the following days and weeks we’d put together the pieces and people for what would eventually become a non-profit called Safecast.

We built a hardware & software platform for people to measure radiation and share that information with each other. We didn’t know if what we were doing was legal, but we didn’t really care either and decided not to ask anyone. We’d just apologize later if we needed to.

This work revealed a new issue: Our data was very precise, existing data was averaged. Which led to the realization that all of the existing data was mostly useless and this suddenly became a much bigger project than we’d anticipated. Our data showed that evacuation zones were wrong, and they were corrected. The rest of the world had the same problem with data that was too vague, so the project quickly became global

Hundreds and then thousands of volunteers all over the world got involved and started collecting and publishing environmental data through our system – which was entirely open source and public domain.

Our dataset of radiation background levels is now almost 200 million data points – the largest ever available. Before Safecast governments had good data and the people had crappy data, if any at all. After Safecast the people had the best data available.

We purposefully pushed for the highest standard data and put it into the public domain, to ensure that the work will outlive all of us. 

UN, IAEA, NNSA, etc have endorsed or use our work and recommend our best practices. Many people at these orgs told us they dreamed of doing what we did but could never get the internal approval to do it at their agencies and couldn’t figure out how a small group of nobodies like us were actually able to do it. I tell them we didn’t ask anyone for approval, we just did it. We helped force the NNSA to release the tax payer funded data they had for the US because the data we released made their “national secrets” not so secret anymore. We met with DARPA who told us they loved what we were doing but didn’t like that it was public, so they put millions of tax payer dollars into copying our work but making it private. The president of Tepco who couldn’t believe we weren’t trying to sell him something.

Air quality has a lot of the same problems – there’s no standards and the data is closed and confusing. We’re trying to see if lessons from one can apply to the other, but they are entirely different animals so in many ways we’re starting from scratch. 

This week we’ve talked about how to pay for these solutions and if there needs to be a disaster in order to get anyone to pay attention? I’ll just say from my experience most people don’t care unless there’s a disaster, and more specifically it needs to be directly impacting them.

Luckily Safecast has shown that you don’t need everyone to care, a very few people working together can build something that benefits everyone.

The directly impacted, the curious, everyone else

With radiation, even 10 years on, people still think of this as “that thing in japan” with air quality we see the same – we have all these fires here on the west coast and no good way to know air quality around them. 

We spec’d out a distributed system more than 5 years ago and funders told us ‘sounds interesting, we’ll get back to you’ and then they didn’t get back to us until there was a fire blowing smoke right at them. By then it was too late. Once the fires were put out they weren’t interested agaibn. We said “what about next year” and they said “we’ll get back to you” Then next year when smoke was blowing into their kitchens they called asking us if we ever got that sensor network up and running. So paying for these solutions is a real problem in and of itself.

We have some air sensors deployed, but not as many as we’d like. We recently codesgned a device with Blues Wireless called the Airnote and that’s helped get some more into people’s hands. 

In 2020 the pandemic ended travel and cancelled events which basically cut us off from all of our funding and we had to lay off our entire team – we were about 90% volunteer anyway and most of the people we had to stop paying kept on working in their spare hours. This shows that people genuinely care about solving these problems, but just caring doesn’t pay rent or keep servers online.

So thats activism, but how is this related to art?

Our devices have been displayed in several museum exhibitions. Our visualizations have been published in art books. Our data has been used for all kinds of projects, including this one released earlier this year which is what we’ve been listening to in the background. 

You can go to Safecast.live and hit play in the top left, or change the sample pack in the bottom right. The audio is being driven by the live stream of the data coming in from radiation and air quality sensors all over the world. Each reading triggers a different sample. The samples are taken from vintage synthesizers, a toy piano, or from the band Nine Inch Nails who released some of their audio with an open license as well. Sensors compose the audio. We’re listening to the world, right now. It will never sound the same, as the environment changes moment to moment and more sensors come online, this audio stream will continue to evolve.

This is one of many examples of art and technology coming together to make something new and wonderful.

Data integrity is something we’ve thought a lot about, because an open data set isn’t going to be very useful if someone can mess with the data. We wanted to be able to ensure that the data we are providing is the absolutely positively the same data coming off our sensors. We currently use a distributed cross checking methodology for that, but for quite sometime we’ve also been looking at blockchains as position solutions to the question of provenance and verifiability. As part of that we cofounded the Blockchain Research Lab at Keio University in Tokyo and have worked closely with the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT.

This year, art and tech came crashing with the explosion of NFTs. As such for much of the year I’ve been playing tech translator to my art friends and art translator to my tech friends. Not one to stand on the sidelines, I’ve been making and selling NFTs of my own work and have jumped in to help build one of the largest artist communities around NFTs. I’m really excited about the potential, we’re already seeing it dramatically shift the power structures of the art world and allow artists and creators to become financially independent on their own terms, allowing them to really focus on their work. This is bleeding edge stuff but I think it won’t be long before everyone is using them, and most probably won’t even know it.

I’m working on several related projects and hope to tie Safecast in someway soon as well. I’m looking forward to talking with everyone about this stuff in the coming days and seeing where we might be able to collaborate!

Control

Control is an ever present topic as an artist. We’re taught the rules and then encouraged to discard them. We celebrate happy accidents, and endlessly tweak precision techniques. The craft vs the variables. As a photographer this is multiplied by the endless gear and negated by endless memory. Film is whispered to be more pure, but it’s really just adjusting when you make the important decisions, before or after. On camera or off. As a street photographer, observation is everything, and everything is anticipation. You can only control so much. All the planning in the world is pointless if nothing catches my eye. As a writer, I control the words but not what is inferred from them. At some point I have to let go. But even then, always holding onto something.

The struggle between controlling and controlled is only complicated when life gets all over it. 

Primarily, my work is directly eternally. I capture moments of things happening around me, not to me. I leave the interpretations up to others, and it doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong. It’s about the feeling, not the reality. Artistic license applied to real life. By intentionally giving up control, it can’t be taken from me. It’s defensive, and preemptive. I don’t know the story from my subject’s perspective, I only know how I perceive it. And in that way, I retain control.

It’s harder to let go when looking inward at my own life and experience, when that dynamic is turned on end. I know the story, but no matter how desperately I want to tell it I’ve moved from the place of observer to the observed. When looking at photos I’ve taken of my life or my family, I know what was happening, but also what was about to happen. And how I played into that. Willingly. Unwillingly. Inconsequentially. Despite the consequences. The viewer only has part of that story, and I wrestle with how important the other part is. Or isn’t.

At the same time, I’m deeply attracted to community powered projects, shared decision making and consensus within a group. Finding a way for these themes to connect is both exciting and scary.

Safecast: Live at 10

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the 3/11 triple disaster that struck the Tohoku region of Japan (and the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant) which abruptly changed the course of my life, not to mention millions of others. 10 years ago, over the following days and weeks we’d start pulling together the people for discussions that would eventually solidify into Safecast. If you are reading my personal website then I suspect I don’t need to tell you about how many ways that decision changed the direction. If nothing else, it’s unlikely I would have had the opportunity to live in Japan as long as I did. In early February 2020 I made this post about Safecast, detailing our future fundraising plans and discussing some of our next big steps. Obviously 2020 didn’t end up playing out as I, or anyone anticipated and a few months before year end we had to make the challenging decision to shift to 100% volunteer in favor of using the funding reserves we had left to keep the servers online. Over 90% of the Safecast team has been volunteer the entire time so at face value that’s a tiny change, but those 10% who weren’t (including myself) were more than full time, all day every day, positions. We’re all still involved, just unfortunately with less available time to put towards the project.

How that would play out was not clear. Would things keep going? Slow down? Come to a crashing halt? We didn’t know, but we kept our fingers crossed and forged ahead.

Later today, a 24 hour live stream celebration of Safecast’s 10 year anniversary begins and earlier this week we announced a new air quality device that we’re deploying in partnership with Blues Wireless. Things are still moving, perhaps differently than we would have guessed last year at this time, but moving none the less. And the steps feel natural and appropriate, and being able to focus more on the data and less on the hardware actually frees us up to explore many other things that we might not have been able to otherwise. One of those things also launches today, and is called Safecast.live.

If your first reaction is that this feels more like an art project, you aren’t wrong. Last year my friend Ray Ozzie came across Listen To Wikipedia and sent it my way. I fell in love with the this way to “visualize” data with sounds, and it reminded me a lot of the concept behind many of Brian Eno’s ambient works that have deep systems in place to create ever evolving soundscapes rather than simple repeating loops. We discussed how Safecast’s data stream might lend itself to a similar audio experience. But we were busy at the time and the idea, as ideas sometimes do, kinda faded away. A few months back Ray surprised me – in preparation of the new air sensors coming online he’d been playing with the data stream and had put together a feed that he pointed to some test samples and it kind of worked. He handed me the keys and wished me luck. My mind was racing and I immediately started working on new samples from my synthesizers and sample collections I had, and trying to think of what kind of visual front end would go with it?

My friend, designer Rob Sheridan, runs a pretty fantastic discord server filled with creative people from many disciplines. I posted there asking if any front end developers might have some spare time to help out with a little project. Almost immediately I was contacted by a developer in the Ukraine, Kether Cortex, and we started trading notes and ideas. Aesthetically we clicked right away, and when he reminded me that the Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV album was Creative Commons licensed, I knew this was going to shape up to be even better than I’d imagined. Since then Kether Cortex and I have spoken every day, refining and reimagining the idea every step of the way. The production version which launches today is the culmination of those many hours. I don’t want to give away too many secrets as it’s intended to provide a space for exploration. I will say there are several different audio options, all of which are being driven by the data feed which is random and constantly evolving. As new sensors come online daily it will continue to change. In addition to the NIN sample, and ones I recorded myself, we’re using some samples provided by Hainbach and Samples From Mars. Find one you like, and you can listen to it forever and the pattern will never repeat. There’s no real purpose for this other than as a reminder that you can sometimes find some beauty in the chaos. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

So here we are, 10 years into Safecast – not where we expected to be, a little more beaten up than planned, but still here, and still moving.

Proof of Life / Station Ident

Apparently I haven’t blogged since May, which might be the longest stretch of non-blogging since I started blogging before blogging was called blogging. In my defense, we’re in the middle of a pandemic and I moved around the world from Tokyo to Vancouver. That’s not to say I haven’t been active, I just haven’t been active here. Which I regret. So I thought I’d quickly drop an update for the few of you that still read blogs.

Just after moving to Canada from Japan we at Safecast had to face the cold reality that our funding efforts this year have failed miserably in no small part due to COVID and that was unlikely to change anytime soon. We made the hard decision to shift the entire paid staff to volunteer so that we have reserves to keep the servers online hopefully long enough to get through this. That includes me, and means that for the first time in 20 years or so I find myself without gainful employment. Did I mention that I just moved around the world and we’re in the middle of a pandemic? Right, so that’s fun. The interesting thing about being self employed for most of your adult life is that it makes you essentially unemployable.

To that end I’ve been staying up late working on various side hustles any number of which might, with just the right combination of time and place, grow to at least fill some of these new gaps.

I redid my photography portfolio site seanbonner.photos top to bottom to try and give a better view of what I do, what I’m trying to do, and where I think that might lead and why it’s useful. At shop.seanbonner.photos you can buy prints and books and merch. I’m especially excited about my new subscription offer where I send subscribers a limited edition mystery miniprint each month – a few spots are still remaining if you are interested.

Speaking of photos and merch, streetsheets.tokyo has been updated with some new pacific northwest influenced designs on housewares and clothing.

Tara and I have finished writing The Interest Driven Life book and are in the final production steps before it goes off to the publisher. If you’d like to get more info about that as the release date gets closer, please do sign up for our mailing list on the site.

Speaking of mailing lists, I’m still actively writing my newsletter The Crowd, though like this blog the updates are not as frequent as they once were. This is in part due to the fact that I’m taking a break from Twitter because it’s a garbage fire of depressive bullshit, and that’s where I used to get a lot of the news I’d write about. Perhaps ironically I’m spending more time on Instagram. I would like to explore how best to merge the blog and the mailing list, so that I could write something and it would go to both places.

Perhaps most exciting, I’ve revived my old record label Toybox Records and have begun announcing plans and releasing things. The roadmap at the moment includes a mix of older yet previously unreleased material, reissues of favorites, and new stuff by new bands. As before, genre-wise, expect it to be all over the place. For now music can be found here and brand spanking new merch is over here.

Writing that all out does make it feel like a lot, but I’d be lying if I told you that from the place I’m sitting at the moment it felt like a lot. I think because so much of that is in the “about to happen” or tentative stages it feels like none of them are actually real. But they are, and at this point I’m just trying to get them in front of people who may appreciate them. If you know someone who might be interested in something I’ve mentioned here, I’d be in your debt if you felt like passing the link on to them to check out.

Party Mode

Bradenton, Florida. A shit-hole ghetto town about an hour south of Tampa. I think it was the summer of 1990. I remember it being really, really hot. I was in high school and my friend Chris suggested starting a band. He played guitar already and told me I should get a bass. I took that week’s paycheck from the grocery store I worked at and went to a local used music equipment shop and asked what that could get me, I bought whatever it was they suggested. In my memory it was a sunburst Fender but I honestly can’t remember. I didn’t know I needed an amplifier for it to work, and had trouble figuring out how to play it at home. The following week we got together in another friends garage for “band practice” which was a serious lesson in humility. I showed up without an amp, but luckily (or unluckily) someone there had a guitar amp I could plug into. This was the first time I’d ever heard what the bass even sounded like.

Chris proposed that we start off playing “New Direction.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Chris pointed out that I was wearing a Gorilla Biscuits t-shirt at the time, New Direction of course was the first song on their recently released album Start Today. I didn’t actually have the album yet, I had a dubbed cassette copy that my neighbor Max had made for me which I listened to all the time – so once Chris started playing it I knew what he was talking about, but Max hadn’t written the names of any of the songs so didn’t know what any of them were called. Max would later sell me his blue and white swirled vinyl copy of that album, which has remained one of my prized possessions even to this day. Anyway, I knew the song but I had no idea how to play it, given that I had no idea how to play bass. I stood there in the garage all afternoon while my friends jammed one song after another that I knew but I had no idea how to play. That was the only band practice I ever went to, and I wasn’t ever invited to be any of their bands ever again, rightly so.

I kept that bass and every once and a while I’d pick it up and hope I’d magically learned how to play something. I never did. When I’d fantasize about being in a band I always pictured myself singing, so just never got motivated enough to try and learn it. Besides, my favorite band in town at the time, Tired From Now On, already had a bass player and a singer and I wasn’t going to even try to start a Tired From Now On copycat band. I think I sold it to my friend from Canada Kyle for $50 when one of his bands was passing through Gainesville a few years later. At least I’d spray painted it black so it looked much cooler than that crappy sunburst. I wonder if he still has it?

A few years later when I was working at Victory Records my co-worker Chuck told me he wanted to start a band and asked if I’d be interested in singing. Of course I said yes, instantly. He said he was getting the rest of the band together and we’d have a proper rehearsal in a few weeks. At that time I was often the last person to leave the office, which was in a 3 story condo in an industrial part of Chicago. My office was on the 3rd floor, and when everyone else would leave I’d often turn up my stereo as loud as it would go and jump around screaming along like an idiot to the loudest, angriest thing I had. It was excellent therapy. I highly recommend everyone try it sometime. My private karaoke included many bands, but vocalist Tim Singer’s bands – No Escape, Deadguy and the recently released (at the time) Kiss It Goodbye were in heavy rotation. I guess I always kind of related to his “I tried, but everything is fucked anyway” lyrical narrative. In my mind, that’s how I’d sing in a band.

Eventually Chuck would rope in the rest of a band and we’d all get together one evening after work in the basement of Bulldog Records, Victory’s record store in Wicker Park where bands like Blood For Blood and Murphy’s Law had recently played some already legendary shows. Drums set up, amps plugged in and blasting. I knew enough lyrics to enough songs that I figured there wouldn’t be a repeat of the New Direction situation and I was ready to go with whatever song they pulled out of the hardcore repertoire. Except the songs they’d written themselves and had already been practicing that I’d never heard before. Chuck handed me the mic and said “let’s go!” and I just stood there. I didn’t know what to sing, or what to say. I’d never written lyrics before, and certainly hadn’t anticipated doing it on the spot. I’d been daydreaming about doing this for years, and now when given the chance I froze. I convinced myself that anything I’d come up with would be so stupid the band would stop playing and I’d be laughed out of the basement. Of course, just standing there like an idiot had a similar effect. 

Decades later I of course recognize how letting my insecurity keep me from doing the thing I was dreaming of doing, when I directly had the opportunity to do it, was just about the stupidest thing I could have ever done. I’m not really big on regret, we all do things that if given another chance we might do differently or applying hindsight realize our errors, but pushing past that fear and doing actually band with my friends sometime in the 90’s when I had countless opportunities is something that I’d totally should have done. If life had do overs, that’s where I’d use mine.

I mention this because totally out of the blue this week there’s a new EP out by Tim’s new band Bitter Branches and it’s incredible. It’s the last thing I was expecting in 2020, and after listening to it on repeat essentially since buying it I can attest it’s exactly what I needed. If anything I’ve mentioned in this sounds familiar to you, maybe it’s what you need as well. If nothing else, it’s a good reminder to take the chances we have, when we have them. They won’t always be there and even trying and failing is way better than not trying at all.

Normal

During the 2016 US Presidential campaign the above ‘This is fine’ meme gained significant popularity as it perfectly captured how many people were feeling about the overall situation. It was not created for that however, and is actually part of a 2013 comic by KC Green, which you political buffs out there will recognize as a date not long into then President Obama’s 2nd term. There’s no question that 2020 is shaping up to be a disaster, and people are understandably asking how long until we get back to normal. But when exactly is this “normal” that everyone is talking about? It certainly wasn’t 2019, nor 2016. If you think back to the George W. Bush years following 9/11 and the resulting ‘war on terror’ there was a lot of hoping for a “return to normal” then too. The response to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign certainly made it clear that for a lot of people, Bill Clinton’s presidency was far from ideal. That takes us back to ’93. Was it normal before then? Under Bush Sr? How about Regan?

Fuck that.

The truth is it’s been a disaster for a long time, we simply forget how much we hated yesterday because of the overwhelming pain of today. So we trick ourselves into reaching for something slightly less terrible, rather than something better. “Normal” sucked. “Normal” was broken. “Normal” was dysfunctional and oppressive.

If “normal” was so great we wouldn’t have needed 4 waves of feminism. If “normal” was so great we wouldn’t have to explain to anyone why black lives matter. If “normal” was so great there would be no debate about who deserves health care, or an education. There would be no argument about what kind of basic lifestyle can or can’t be afforded with a full time minimum wage paycheck. There wouldn’t be countless examples of laws being enforced differently based on someone’s income or race. Teachers, the people we put in charge of educating future generations, wouldn’t be having to pay for school supplies out of their own pockets. Artists and musicians, people who make our world beautiful and enjoyable, wouldn’t be seen as disposable. The oceans wouldn’t be full of garbage. We wouldn’t be talking about how amazingly clear the skies and air are in cities that have imposed shelter in place rules, keeping people out of their cars. We wouldn’t be counting how many people died from the latest pandemic that jumped to humans in the unsanitary conditions from selling wild animal parts in wet markets.

And that’s the moment we are in right now.

It’s not hyperbole to say that everything is going to change. There’s the world we knew before the virus, and the world we make after it. No one will ever think of handshakes or face masks the same again. That’s a given. But what about everything else? I don’t want the world to go back to normal. I don’t want something just not quite as bad. I want us to take the opportunity that we have been presented with and strive for something better.

You can call me an idealist, but that would be a hard sell given how much time I spend talking about how everything sucks. But I’m trying to make tomorrow better, and I believe that’s possible. And I’m not the only one. Here is a very short and very incomplete list of a few people I consider friends. People I know who won’t settle for “not quite as bad” and are actively working for something better. Take a few moments and see what they are up to, and feel free to add more names, projects and links in the comments.

Astra • Christian • Esra’a • Gunner • Glen • Isha • Jesse • Keli • Peter • Ryan • Shaka • Shepard • Stephanie • Tarek • Tiffiniy • Ugo • Helen, Jason & Karien

(this post can be found at arethingsbacktonormalagain.com)