Believing that making a jacket that’s marginally less bad for the environment is a mechanism to stop global warming is akin to believing that the solution to alcoholism is drinking light beer.
I wrote about my time lurking in Ventura and working Patagonia and how and why I reached this conclusion on my substack, link in bio.
Over three years in the making, the short film that @moviemountain made for @rivianofficial is finally out. Out of all the commercial work I’ve worked on, this is my favorite one, by far. The sets were massive, the truck was over 3 feet long. I’ll post later this week about the process but here’s the film in its entirety. Thanks to @3rd_larry for thinking that Gear Guard could come to life via miniatures and stop motion.
Some talking point ideas for family dinners, down time and post meal walks this holiday season, courtesy of the PROFESSOR @moviemountain . In order of appearance, Terrence McKenna, “Hot” Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson.
The @highwizardry x @bedrocksandals STONE WIZARD clog releases Monday at 10 AM mountain time. Unfortunately, they sent me the wrong size. Jk, @moviemountain made these. There’s three colors, blue, black and one just for super sleuths with magnifying glasses in the mailer, a red. @philliptannand and I and the peeps at bedrock have been working on them for two years and I’m super proud of how they turned out.
After my Confessions of a Marketplace Addict write up, I did an a painful thing, and I followed my own advice. How much driving do I actually do off-road when I’m on a road trip? My F350 with the Bison excels on BLM land, forest service roads, in the snow, and in Baja, but most of my miles this last year and a half have been blasts down to Northern California on hunting trips. With diesel at $7.00 a gallon, a BMW e36 M3 that I’d driven 5 times in the last year languishing in my studio, I started doing shower math and daydreaming.
If I sold the BMW for a little less than I had in it, I could get a van that I could use for hauling stuff around and for road trips where I never leave gravel roads. Make a simple platform for sleeping and storage that I can remove and stack in the studio, throw some solar on top, run a standalone battery system that I can pull out and use elsewhere, tap into the fuel tank for a heater, and call it a day. With the logic of a marketplace addict on a runaway loop, I was sold on the idea and committed to the path. I sent a few texts to friends and associates about the E36 M3 and had it sold in two days. With cash in hand, I dove into searching for a van to use before a series of April trips to northern California. I ended up buying a 2016 Ford Transit with 3.7 v6, a short wheelbase. a low top and 190k miles for 9k. So far I’m into the whole thing for less than 12k and cant be more pumped on how the first trip went. I’ve been documenting the project on my substack. I break down why I went with Transit, the inspiration for a simple van and some of my philosophy of van use, and have posts on dec about the build, and plans for the buildout I went with. The link is in my bio. It feels good to be back in a van.
I just put up a substack admitting to being a marketplace camping vehicle daydreamer. My addiction dates back over 15 years to when I found my 1987 Vanagon on the Samba, and flew to Reno Nevada to pick it up. Since then, I’ve owned a half dozen different camper setups and have continued my near-constant daydreaming about what’s the best solution for a road trip. I tend to ping-pong between very capable off-road vehicles and more sized and fuel-efficient vans. The reality is that there is no perfect vehicle, just a balance of priorities, and thus, I am constantly looking on Marketplace.
The write up is more or less a breakdown of vehicles and camping setups that intrigue me and some basics of what I look for when buying a used car, sometimes sight unseen. The saying goes that “Some stuff catches fish, and some stuff catches fishermen.” Lots of vehicles out there catch fishermen. This breakdown is a list of setups that I would personally buy that are a balance of mobility, living space, fuel efficiency, reliability, and price. By and large, the price is really correlated to size. The smaller and more simple the setup, the less expensive it will be to buy and maintain. Transversely, the larger and more capable the setup, the more expensive it’s going to be. I break the discussion into three basic price categories: 10-25k setups, including vehicle and setup to camp with; 20k-45k for a vehicle and camper; and lastly, 40-60k for the most capable and largest setups. Sure you can get a set up for cheaper, and I have owned multiple in the 1-2k range but none of them, without a serious amount of wrench time, were reliable enough to take on a 10k mile road trip. Head to the link in my profile to read it.
We will all look back at this period of Reels and TikToks as a collective low point in self-expression. I don’t know who’s worse, the people that write the algorithms that guide all content to use the same songs and have the same look and feel, or the people that blindly go along with it in a shameless attempt to garnish eyeballs. Hopefully, everyone will look back at partaking in making edits of their life to a Drake song or talking into a Rode mic about their day with the same level of embarrassment as rat tails or an ill be gotten tattoo that’s been long since lasered off.
I spent 60 days this late summer and fall hiking around the mountains with my bow and rifle looking for game. Largely away from cell service, engaging in activity that humans have for hundreds of thousands of years, and life just seemed to make more sense. I wrote about my complex relationship with hunting and observations of an adult-onset hunter on my Substack, a place where I still feel people are making stuff in a spirit they will be proud of in 10 years.
I grew up skating in Portland in the early 2000’s. @brentatchley was a mythical creature. In the pre-internet world of skating, a video part would come out every few years and a photo in a mag here or there would show up in the magazines. Rumors flowed through Exit Real World, the Portland skate shop, about his trips and tricks. He skated Burnside like no one has since or before, and influenced the resurgence in park and bowl skating that’s so popular today. These days, Brent spends his time working on his non-profit, @pushmovement , helping kids and adults with substance recovery. He skates professionally for @asics_skateboarding and keeps up with the next generation of Burnside rippers, like Emile Laurent. Brent is one of my closest friends and an inspiration. We worked on this project over two years, filming a half dozen sessions in different seasons. Brent Atchley and Emile Laurent bomb hills and skate my backyard bowl. What’s the full edit in the link in my profile.
I grew up reading books like the American Boy’s Handy Book cover to cover. The images and illustrations inspired my imagination, and I did my best to replicate the creations, like traps, forts, and slingshots, I saw in them. Days spent in the woods behind my house working on these creations and forts set me down my path to build my own treehouses in 2014. I knew that I wanted to keep that childhood sense of joy and wonder that I felt when I woke up in a fort I built or floated in a pond on a raft I built with friends. I went into the building of the Cinder Cone tree houses with the intention of making a book that combined the spirit of the American Boy’s Handy Book with @lloyd.kahn shelter books. More so than an art book, I wanted to create something that would inspire others to build their own projects with friends or their families.
This year marks 10 years since the release of The Cinder Cone Book and 11 years since building the tree houses. I still sleep in them every night and still wake up with a sense of childhood joy. A few years ago I shut down my webstore to focus on stop motion and kept the few remaining boxes of books I had left for gifts. On the secondhand market, these books sell for amounts that make me shake my head in disbelief. A few weeks ago, my mom was cleaning out a storage unit in preparation for a move and found some piles of books that got lost in the sauce during the building of the studio at @moviemountain . I just listed 100 of them on the link in my profile. When they are gone, they will be gone for good. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
In 2021 I bought the car of my teenage dreams at an auction in Japan and then sent it to @tommyfyeah for a mechanical makeover. He went through it, replaced and upgraded everything with either Nismo or HKS parts, and created a 400-wheel-horsepower OEM+ monster. The sounds, power, and driving experience surpass my pimple-faced, Gran Turismo 3-playing dreams, but it turns out I live on a gravel road, don’t have a garage, and am more into camping and hunting than track days, so I decided this week to get rid of it. I listed it on Marketplace and wrote about the painful realization on my Substack. I love me a road trip, and more so than just selling it, I’d love to trade it for something else, deliver it, and do a road trip back home. Hell, maybe I’ll make a short film about it or do a write-up for my Substack about it. May is the perfect time for a road trip... Off the top of my head, I’m interested in a combination of an old BMW (E30, E36, E46) and cash or a a 4x4 van of sorts that I could drive up my mile-long gravel road. For a full parts list, check out the link in my profile or DM me.
For years, social media has felt like watching TV at a restaurant, with the sound off. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch it. Changes in backgrounds and colors draw my attention. The occasional beautiful woman on a beach pulls me away from the conversation I’m having with a friend or family member, and I watch for a few seconds. I, like so many others in the busy room, can’t help but watch. It’s a distraction from the conversation happening around us and makes the time go faster until my food arrives, but it means nothing. We retain none of it, and it doesn’t impact us in a lingering way. As someone that makes images and writes for a living, Instagram felt like a dead end when the suits at Facebook started severing content based on what they think our subconscious brains react to more than what our conscious brains chose to see. This led to Instagram becoming a platform for memes and cut-rate TikTok videos, not something where people share stuff they are proud of. The algorithm rewards quantity, not quality, and tends to focus on the reptilian brain. Death, Sex, and Outrage.
About a year ago, I fired up my old blog, A Restless Transplant, as a substack and started taking photos, making little videos and writing. I get way more out of writing longer pieces than I do whittling shit down to instagram. With a new muse, hunting, I’m traveling more and have more time by myself to think and come up with ideas to write about. Here are some photos from the last few months, and things I’ve been up to. Head over to my substack to see more, the links in my profile.
