I can think of few less important things to do in 2026 than reviving a 20 year old blog, but I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging lately and here we are. Keeping a public journal made me actively think about the shape of days. I liked that. I miss that.

For years after I stopped blogging, I would check in on my vintage Moveable Type 3 CMS software that powered the blog installing shims to keep going , but eventually it gave up and I gave up, and slowly the blog started falling apart like a rusty car left in the woods. 

Maybe because my kids are in college now, I felt the pull of having an easy way to throw thoughts into the ether on a platform that wasn’t controlled by companies I no longer trust. I wondered, “Could I vibe code a Mac native CMS into existance?" After a few false starts it took me about a week to build a shambolic, but totally workable CMS that does a bunch of things I’ve always wanted.

1. I have a a local version properly versioned site that lives in a folder on my computer.

2. I can edit in WYSIWYG / HTML / Markdown.

3. I can drag in or paste in pictures.

4. I can sync (or not) to the web whever I want. 

5. I can easily choose from various style templates of my own design. 

6. I can generate the whole thing as static files. 

7. I can automatically use a local model to analyze images, add alt text, and to handle grammar (Dsylexia is a curse). I’m so far resisting the urge to correct old posts, but I might. 

8. I’ve made a phone client that will allow me to post on the go.

9. I can manage a text blog and a photoblog in the same place.

10. etc.

What do I want to do next? I still have a lot of cleanup on the old blog content, and lots of unpublished stories that I want to get up. I also have multiple photoblogs to bring into this century. 

My hope is this will go quickly and I can just start to get into the rhythm of posting again. I’m enjoying it. Here’s to lost causes.

We closed out 2020 still uneasy about the state of the world and what lay ahead.

This year, over and over, I’ve heard friends say ‘I just want to get through’ 2020.They talk about a ‘lost year’, a ‘lonely year’, a 'terrible year.’ The pandemic and our unsettled politics seem to have an amplifying effect on other troubles large and small, so a broken plate or a broken bone can become yet another proof that this is a uniquely awful time. For many of us adults this is indeed a year of extraordinary uncertainly and sadness. There is no denying this. Our children feel all this too. They are our emotional mirrors absorbing our frustrations and fears and reflecting them back to us. 
A year is a quarter of 4-year-old’s life. Younger children might not even be able to remember a “before”. And for the children who can remember, many are experiencing deep sadness especially around the separation from friends, teachers and family. We worry about the consequences of so much isolation. While my business at Tinybop to make content for screens, we worry about the effect of so much time in front of them.. None of us designed for this.
From the early days of the pandemic when schools began shutting down, children reached out to us for answers. A few even managed to find our company phone number and dial in. Many had a simple question: “What’s going on?” I always tried to start with the facts and talk about how we were feeling, then I would talk about empathy: “We’re staying home because we care about our neighbors.” I say, "There’s a lot we don’t know and we don’t know if this is the right way to solve this problem, but everyone is working on it. We’ll figure it out. Eventually everything will open up again." Kids always seem to get this.
While it is often our instinct to hide our worries from children. I think we do best by them by bringing them into the conversation and talking about the things that matter. I suspect these next couple of months will be especially difficult. Limbo is amorphous. The vaccine seems so close and yet for most of us it will be out of reach for some time. Again, the way through is honest dialog. 

Swan's Island, population 350, listed in one vintage guidebook as "a place where people vanish from the world" seemed pandemic friendly.  

The comet was easy to spot. 

It was my first visible-to-the-naked-eye comet, so I was pretty excited. Maybe moreso than the kids. 

Camping was a welcome escape.

George Floyd’s brutal murder shocked the conscious. For a nation stuck at home and glued to their screens it was a wake up call. 

Here in our corner of Brooklyn the helicoptors came before the marches. 

They would hover menacingly, sometimes in twos. Soon there incessant fireworks at night and patrols of cops seemingly looking for trouble. 

Eventually they found their trouble. People started coming out slowly at first: But before long, people were everywhere. As there was nothing else to do. Every day, the streets were full. 

Covid made me think about time. I started making my own pinhole cameras and taking long timelapses and solargraphs. If you ever want to make these yourself, I recommend the Sun Seeker app to help you track the location of the sun. It’s quite good! Pro tip if you need precisely milled perfectly round pinholes, you can find them on eBay.

I never stopped going to the office. I could walk. The building was empty. The office was empty. I could do projects. 

It felt intensely empty, but we continued to do good work. The folks at Tinybop scattered by the pandemic made amazing software throughout 2020 despite everything. 

By April we had settled into an uneasy routine. 

But everything felt like a struggle.

We walked a lot.

But mainly we waited. 

At first, those of us who didn’t work in hospitals treated Covid like a weather disaster—let’s spend a few days inside, hang out with friends on zoom, and start some projects. 

But the numbers of people dying kept exploding.

The emptiness started to weigh on us all. We wandered through the vacant city not really knowing what to do feeling helpless.

When the morgue at the local hospital overflowed, they put a makeshift trailer morgue on 7th Avenue in Brooklyn. All over, memorials to the dead started to pop up. 

I was not blogging in public in 2020, but as the year went on I started to collect images and put them in draft folders. My first folder collected a few images from the weeks before New York City closed.

Feb 28

Had just pitched an animated TV show in LA, which got picked up and were celebrating with friends. Nobody was talking about Covid yet, but there were people from China at the airport wearing masks. I remember sitting with them on an airpot shuttle and worrying. The virus was in the ether, but we weren’t really thinking about it yet. 

March 1 the first case of Covid was found in NY. We were hanging out with family.

March 7 A state of emergency was declared in NY. We were still out and about doing things. Someone in the office lost his sense of smell and started feeling sick. At that point that symptom was unknown. One of my kids was in a darkroom photography class. On the 9th it was abruptly cancelled.

By March 12 the office was empty and New York was shutting down. Signs urging distancing started to appear around the city.

I was still in denial, but within a few days everyone had retreated.

It had started. 

The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has cloned five ancient redwood stumps to create 75 saplings. After 2 years of propagation, the saplings were planted in the Presidio in SF in the hopes of creating a supergrove. I'm intrigued by the science behind this project . The short film Moving the Giants tells the story of Archangel scientist David Milarch an arborist on a quest to archive the genetics of the world’s largest trees before they’re gone.   

Watching Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, I couldn't help thinking about the woman who worked for my abuelito's family. We affectionately called her Cucita and loved her dearly. In northern Mexico, at least in our family the lines of class and race were not as clearly defined as they are in Mexico City as families in the north are a bit more mixed and close to the earth. This said the shape of relationships depicted were all deeply familiar.

Jamel Shabazz has been photographing Brooklyn since he was 15. His Instagram feed full of images of 1980's NY is a love letter to that time, the city and its people. He's working on a new book titled, "The Book of Life." I can't wait to see check it out.

Related: New York's Summer of '78