Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40

This month both my personal blog, Ascent Stage, and my Flickr account turn 20 years old. 

I’ve gone back through all of it — 862 posts, 30,558 photos. Other than endemic linkrot, an unfortunate smattering of Flash-based content, and services whose embed functions have crapped out (looking at you Flickr video, YouTube, and Google Maps), it has been a very pleasant journey through two decades of me. What follows are some thoughts on the evolution of the site, interspersed with my twelve most viewed (publicly-accessible) Flickr photos from the past two decades. (Here’s the 10,000th photo posted and, very recently, the 30,000th.)

Since 1996 I had maintained a personal website called, pretentiously, hypertext ::  renaissance. This site had no content management system — definitely not what would come to be called a blog — all hand-coded with table-based layouts, frames, and   hacks. It was a beautiful mess, all mine, and visited by precisely no one. I loved it. Many rough years passed with browser-specific HTML atrocities, cgi-bin Perl scripts, and transparent single pixel GIFs. But help was on the way: personal blogging software. As a former grad student studying the English Renaissance how could I not jump onto a platform called Movable Type?

But we’re starting in 2004. Google had just introduced Gmail. Flickr was launched as a social photo service built on the corpse of an MMO gaming platform called Game Neverending. The social bookmarking site del.icio.us was in its pre-acquisition heyday. Feedburner brought the first bit of Web 2.0 cred to the Chicago tech scene. Javascript was having its moment with the Ajax framework. Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 browser was attempting to cut into Microsoft’s then-95% share of the browser market with IE. MySpace had just passed 1 million users. Facebook had only just been created in a Harvard dorm room. Twitter was two years in the future. The iPhone, three years. My wife and I had two kids under the age of three. I decided to start blogging.

I have always loved writing and tinkering with software. And with a debilitatingly broad curiosity that has led me into countless hobbies, projects, and side quests blogging was a perfect outlet. But more than that, blogging itself seemed like fulfillment of the promise of the still relatively new web — the democratization of publication. So much more than the hobbyist/nerd niche websites of the late 90s, weblogs were full platforms to let anyone anywhere communicate in a relatively non-amateur way. Even better, as this was before the coming of fully hosted blogs, spinning up your own meant doing it outside any big corporation’s monetization imperative or walled gardens. This was the second coming of Gutenberg, at least to young me who liked writing about such things. 

I got the platform up and running but the site needed a name. I wanted something hopeful, forward-looking, and ever-so-slightly nerdy. As a spaceflight dork I chose Ascent Stage, the piece of the rocket that goes up. (Eventually I had to explain this. And yes I do also own descentstage.com. I’ve often considered crafting an anti-hero version of me there.) First post: Oct. 1, 2004 about my best buddy Matt’s art show. (And he’s still making beautiful things, 20 years on.)

Reading back through everything some patterns come through almost immediately. Many posts were very short, 2-3 sentence observations or comments on links. It was a need for something like Twitter several years before that service was launched. I even experimented with something I called microposts, basically manual snippets in the blog margin. What doomed these is that they were never integrated chronologically with main site posts or in the main RSS feed. Twitter solved this particular problem, but it created quite another. My blog posting rate dropped off a cliff in the early years of Twitter, but, given the service’s 140 character limit (which was delightful), the length of individual blog posts expanded greatly.

Microposts failed but the marginalia survived and continues to this day. It’s a persistent collection of featured site sections, latest public photos from Flickr, interesting links (powered today by Pocket, but formerly pulled from del.icio.us), and books I have recently read (pulled from LibraryThing). In some ways the margin is the oldest section of the site, at least in concept. It’s a throwback to a time when open, interoperable, embeddable web functionality was everywhere. A web made of many pieces loosely joined. Being distributed these pieces have broken many times through the years, but that’s the thing about a garden without walls: there are always new plants to find further afield.

Many posts in the early years were lists of favorite things like links, gadgets and software — most of which no longer exist, given the pace of technological change and startup frailty. And yet the reminders of what caught my fancy — such as what my backpack carried on international trips — have some historical and emotional value.

And speaking of the latter, one early topic category called The Darnedest Things (and a broader one called Kids) was a running diary of observations on parenting two and then three small children. My kids are only just now discovering these snapshots with equal parts fascination and horror. Like finding a lost diary.

Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophe for many, including my extended family. In an era before widespread social media Ascent Stage was a collection point for information as my wife’s grandparents fled coastal Mississippi. Eventually it was where our family could see that their house was destroyed.

Oh the music nerdery! These were the early years of MP3 files and online music stores, mostly pre-streaming. Having already ripped my entire CD collection to digital I was prepared for the onslaught of music organization, visualization and analysis tools that came about in the early years of the millennium. Hoo boy, I had some fun:

• The Mashability Index — an attempt at visualizing the most mashed-together artists from thousands of songs.
• Evolving my music genome — an attempt at using Apple’s Genius music recommendation algorithm to cross-reference its output recursively, highlighting duplicate tracks. This, I posited, would ultimately generate a playlist where my musical interests overlapped, each track of which being a root node for all the music that I have come to love moving forward from that point. It sorta worked.
• Culinary turntablism — using a traditional Chinese rotating food serving platter and the dishes placed upon it like a player piano roll. You should have seen the incredulity of my colleagues in Beijing over the course of a multi-hour meal as I assiduously noted when dishes were added and removed to the rotation and how many revolutions they made.

I dabbled in short album reviews on the blog, but mostly used it to distribute novelty remixes (like this one, danger!) and what I called giftmixes (like this one from 2011), lightly-mixed continuous collections of tracks for friends. These were also the days of my participation in the DJ collective known as Beat Research Chicago with Jake Trusell and Jesse Kriss. Such fun as we lit it up at Villain’s in the South Loop for a few months. Music was also a huge part of a series of bonkers holiday parties thrown by my wife and I. With a custom-built DJ booth, handmade electroluminescent jackets, and a steady stream of Chicago police officers demanding we turn it down the three final parties called Out of This World, Around the World, and The End of the World became legendary. I sure do miss those electroluminescent jackets.

Like any good blogger I wrote a lot about food, but very specifically about recipes and experiments in Southern Italian cuisine, relatively unloved in the USA. It was cooking as ancestor worship, basically. These were also the years of winemaking and brewing as well. Of course I had to do it the hard way, ginning up everything from colonial-era Applejack and wine from wild-picked raspberries to an Irish red ale in memoriam.

And then there was work blogging. The lion’s share of posts on Ascent Stage to date were written while I worked for IBM. Most of my time there was spent working on cultural heritage and related projects in Russia, Egypt, China, Ghana and dozens of other far-flung locales for shorter durations. These were the most formative years of my early career and the fact that I wrote about them at such length, naively in some cases but always with extreme curiosity and wonderment, brings me immeasurable joy. We got not one but two History Channel documentaries out of this work, not a single pixel of which seems to remain available anywhere on the Internet. I do know that Omar Sharif said my name in one of these, but you’ll have to take my word on that.

Then there was the brief but intense dalliance my colleagues and I took in virtual worlds, like Second Life, as we were researching technologies for our work in China. This roller coaster seemed to stop abruptly … and yet given the current fascination with AR and VR headsets and open world gaming these days it seems pretty clear that we were way out in front of the technology back then. What’s old is new. No more so than with AI. The blog documents one of my favorite memories at IBM at the very end of my time there in 2011: serving as a human test contestant while training the AI supercomputer called Watson as it prepared to compete on the game show Jeopardy. I beat the AI on one question. A single question.

I left IBM in 2011 which corresponds pretty precisely with the end of frequent posting on Ascent Stage — but the writing that did happen got longer and in some ways more serious. The reduction in posting is likely not that I had more time to write while working for IBM but because I had so many more outlets in my new role as Chief Technology Officer for the City of Chicago. Also, my travel during this time fell to nearly zero. And then of course there were the continuing effects of microblogging via Twitter.

My professional and intellectual focus at this point was primarily on urban design and technology. Even before I joined the mayor’s team, Ascent Stage had become an outlet for exploring the intersection of data, especially open data, and the experience of life in cities using Chicago as a platform. Here are some highlights:

• Our second city — an essay I was asked to write by WBEZ in Chicago and which, in retrospect, seems like the beginning of my deep thinking on cities and technology. A favorite.
• Lessons from unmaking urban mistakes — wherein I extract six examples from the past to guide us as we explore a future of networked urbanism. Holds up.
• What the public way means in the networked age — an ode to the sidewalk as the original social network.
• When tech culture and urbanism collide — still not sure we’ve learned to be skeptical about urban solutions coming out of Silicon Valley, a giant suburb literally built around the cult of the garage.
• City of Big Data — another career highlight participating in the curation of an exhibit at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (now Chicago Architecture Center), weaving my prior museum work into current interests.
• What we talk about when we talk about smart cities — one of the last in-depth treatments I gave to this subject before it moved to the saner side of the hype curve.

But really Ascent Stage has been the most fun when it was just cataloging the odd and the interesting, even when I didn’t realize it at the time. Here’s a selection:

Turns out not 20 days into even having a blog in 2004 I made an aside about my dislike for Donald J. Trump. (This hasn’t changed.) He tore down the Sun-Times building which, admittedly, was an unlovable eyesore on the Chicago River, right outside my window next door at IBM Plaza. We documented the whole thing and created a timelapse video, which I believe is my most watched video on YouTube. The refrain “there’s beauty in the breakdown” of the track we set the video to, “Let Go” by Frou Frou, hits differently these many years later living with the other things Trump has wrecked.

My friend Len introduced me to sensory deprivation tanks, something I enjoy to this day as a vehicle for relaxation and meditation. That in itself wouldn’t be very interesting except that the local ABC news affiliate did a story on it. Their spin? Harried working dad uses sensory deprivation to deal with stress. My wife was having none of it. But I was not done with the tanks. Through a series of experiments I brought a waterproofed iPad nano and heart rate monitor into the chambers to document taking all the senses away but one. Altered States it wasn’t. Scientific it wasn’t. But, hey, I was dealing with stress.

It’s tough to choose a favorite moment on the blog over twenty years, but the back-and-forth it prompted with my favorite novelist, Richard Powers, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has got to be close to the top. I had mentioned Powers early on in a post which prompted a reply in a now-defunct electronic literature forum. But it was in 2007 that I directly called him out for a claim that his then-latest novel, The Echo Maker, was written completely by dictation using text-to-speech software. He replied, convincingly and humorously. This was the essence of the early web, nailing a note to tree in a dense forest of websites and having it be found (by someone famous, no less). I’m sure this still happens via social media, but the direct access it seemed one had to experts of all kinds in the early days of the web still seems magical to me.

Lego bricks occupy a lot of space on this blog. And in my house. And in my life. Building crazy things got me through the pandemic lockdown (and an audition on Lego Masters, twice), but well before then it was the launchpad for a small business with my two young sons. When our first child was born I used some paternity leave time to convert his photo into a grayscale mosaic and then posted a how-to. This got picked up somewhat widely around the web and eventually led to our establishing a service to do it for others, called The Brick Brothers. We received a letter from the Lego Corporation, which I thought would be the boys’ introduction to the concept of cease-and-desist, but which was in reality a congratulations. I couldn’t love those Danes more.

Pretty sure this blog earned me honorary citizenship in Italy. I had been writing about my Italian heritage for a few years, having studied there in 1993 and learning about the spectacular and relatively-undiscovered province of Basilicata, the region from which my family hails. It began with the help of Ancestry.com as my kids and I traipsed all over Chicago locating graves and places from old photographs. Some folks in Basilicata noticed and eventually invited me to come to Barile, the town of my great-grandparents, as their guest. It was an odyssey I will never forget in no small part because of the rarity of serving as a tour guide for my aging parents. Bringing it back home I wrote 1903, a piece of speculative fiction and genealogical detective tale that is easily one of my favorite posts.

Going back through two decades of cultivating this weedy garden, I’m reminded of seeds planted way back when that flower today. As early as 2009 my interest in restoring ecosystems is evident which today manifests as a broad study of how complex systems (like dinosaurs and towns) fail. And it’s probably why you’ll find more recent posts about underwater exploration and coral reefs, including a fundraiser I launched for Marhaver Lab in 2022. The last two years of Ascent Stage have been dominated by long-form, multi-part adventures. Last year my daughter, niece, dog, and I embarked on an epic multi-state tour of the American West in a jalopy camper trailer hauled by an electric vehicle. This was an extraordinary trip in many ways, not the least of which was being able to document how to actually do it logistically. This year’s adventure has mostly been about horror — cancer, sure, but really horror movies. Starting with a Zombiefest in 2008 through lockdown binge-watching horror has long been a theme explored in these posts. This year most of the pixels spilled here have been devoted to deep dives into the places in these movies, specifically a segment called The Terror Tourist which I contribute to a podcast out of Salem, Massachusetts called the Heavy Leather Horror Show.

So that’s it. That’s 20 years of self-publishing. It’s possible that one day blogs will be seen as a period-specific format, much like silent films are to the early 20th century. I hope not, of course, as their personality and authenticity seem ever more important as the web fills with AI-generated slop curated by corporations inimical to the hyperlink.

Like anything online the picture this blog paints of me is incomplete at best, an artifice of persona at worst. But it is me. I’ve detailed many highs in the posts and photos linked here, but the blog also documents some low points — let’s call them bumpy landings before I ascended again. On this eve of a new life phase which will surely have its share of mission calamities, I’m glad for it all. Here’s to many more orbits.

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End transmission.