path: root/theanalogreview.com.txt

We need to change from consumption to production.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. -- from Sometimes, poem by Mary Oliver

# The Analog Review
    - The intersection of spirit, craft, and tools.
        - live well by making
        - Illich on making things
    - BIFL
    - Repair self-reliance, education, creating
    - Living well is the best revenge
    - Technology is a choice
    - The world is EVERYTHING, man made and not man made. the reason we think of then is seperate is because we stopped making beautiful things
        - cathedrals
        - antwerp rail station
    - Digital is not bad (I write on a laptop, you read on a device of some sort, this isn't bad) the digital at its best can replicate the same sense of accomplishment that analog can
        - I chose to focus this site on analog because it was under served and it seemed to me that a lot of people are looking for permission to embrace the analog. I am hear to give it to them.
    - How to junk and thrift
        - repair articles
            - clean cast iron
            - what to look for in vintage lenses and camera
            - etc
    - Against data -- do you really need someone else to test everything for you? Do you really trust that their "expert" conclusions are right for you? Why not try things for yourself and see if they work?
    - Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Tesla, etc
        - creators, makers, workers, inspiration etc
    - Promotion: blogs, links, podcasts
    - Fist clutching hammer with M A K E on the fingers
    - Simplify, Thoreau.
    - Plan and record your life
        - note card system
        - tactics with strategic goals
    - stoicism and simplification
        - be okay with course food
            - pioneer night, simple food
    - cooking and fuel
    - History: looking back not at simpler times, but harder times, hard is good struggle is good that's why we see those times as appealing.


# Tools 
## The Note Card System

If you want to accomplish things in life you need to make plans. Not a plan, those are useless. But you should have many plans so that you go through the process of planning. That's what's valuable, the planning. Plan at all levels -- strategic, tactical, and in between. This requires lists, lots of lists. Lists of goals, lists of outcomes you're aiming for, lists of things you need to do to get from here to there, what you did to get from where you were to where you are, and so on.

The way I see it there are three key parts to any information management system, which is what we're really talking about here. You need a way to track your strategic, long term goals. You need to way to track ideas as they come to you. You need a way to track your day to day tactical goals: what you need to do this month, this week, so you can decide what you're going to do right now.

The note card system I use handles only one part of this triumvirate, keeping track of ideas as they come to me.

The note cards started when I was in my early 20s and was pretty much spinning my wheels. Working in the restaurant and coffee shops, drinking, and um, using other things too much. Not sleeping enough. Never working out. Living without direction. It's good for you sometimes. I think everyone has to pass through this stage. I think I maybe enjoyed it a little too much and maybe spent a little too much time there, but I digress.

I noticed something during this period of time though. One of my good friends, who lived more or less the same way, nevertheless managed to run a successful coffee shop (three in fact), play in a band, and otherwise be a much more successful person than me at the time. While doing all the same bad things I was doing. I asked him one day how he managed to function through the haze of the life we were living and he said, oh, it's simple, I make these little lists of things to do every day on index cards and then I go do them. If I don't do them, I move them to the next day's card. Anything I think of during the day that I need to remember, I write down on the back of the card and then I save that.

Not real revolutionary, but also not something I did at the time. He gave me some more details about his system, which had simple priority rankings for tasks. And by "file" he meant toss it in a shoebox. Not perfect, but I started to do both things. Amazingly, I too started to accomplish more.

I started to use note cards for me too. When I read a book I kept a stack of note cards nearby, writing down things that caught my attention[^1]. I started doing the same for things I read online, conversations I had. Ideas that came to me though out the day. Things I needed to get done. Things I needed at the store.

The last two became a problem. There was no way to know at a glance which index cards were valuable insights gleaned from a book or meditation and which were just reminding me to get paper towels at the store. This is when I stumbled on extra-sticky post-it notes. They're like regular post-it notes. But they actually stick to stuff. Pretty much forever from what I can tell. They also come in this very attention-getting yellow. So I started writing todos and grocery type lists on these little yellow post its. I know that 

Years later I encountered David Allen's Getting Things Done, which inspired me to expand my daily system into longer term thinking and planning. This also had something to do with getting older I think, or at least it coincided with me wanting to accomplish longer term goals. I found note cards to be less ideal for this sort of planning. It's hard to fit much about a multi-year project on a single note card. For a while I used multiple cards when necessary and kept them all together with little binder clips like these. That worked, but it was difficult to carry around. 

I bought a notebook and started keeping my projects (to use David Allen's terms) in that, then making my daily lists of things to do on note cards. When I moved from freelancing to full-time at Wired, I started evolving this system because most of what I do at Wired is very long term and needs to be broken down into more manageable bits. Most of my planning for work starts at the seasonal level, then moves to monthly, then weekly. If find it easiest to track this flow in a notebook. So a project like updating the Wired guide to the best tents is something I do in Spring, Summer, and Fall. It's on the list for Spring, and then at the beginning of March or so, I'll review that list, note that Best Tents is on there, and move it to my list of things to do in March. Both lists are in the same notebook, I just keep the longer term lists and project-specific lists to the back and the weekly/daily lists to the front. I review my monthly list at the start of every week, and move whichever things I want to work on that week to a weekly list. Then I break that down by day. That's where the note cards come out.

There's no such thing as managing time. There's only so much you can do in day. There is what there is, use it wisely. I have a full time job, three kids, live on the road, and run two websites. I also manage to not work all the time. In fact I rarely work past 3. It's not that I'm so great at anything, it's that I can focus, and I can focus because I block out time in my day to work intensely rather than haphazardly throughout the day.

[^1]: I rarely buy books. I rely on libraries so just writing in the book isn't an option. Also, writing in the book means to find anything I'd have to do get the book, open it, thumb through it looking for the quote. All I have to do is flip through my note cards, which are archived (VERY loosely) by subject.


## Traveler's Notebook Review
## Mechanical Pencil Review
## What to look for in vintage lenses
## Tools for basic carpentry
## Bags
## EDC
# Craft
## Return to Film

I grew up shooting film. I first picked up my dad's Pentax in the 1980s and was hooked from day one. I set off to college with the vague idea that I would major in photography, though I dropped out before that ever came to fruition.

Like most people I made the jump to digital some time ago. I sold my last film camera just before we left on this trip. It was a sad moment, but I hadn't shot with the camera (a Nikon F3) in years. I knew there were people out there still shooting film, and I wanted the camera to be used, not sit around gathering dust, so I sold it. 

I didn't really give film much thought after that. From a technical standpoint 35mm film is massively more expensive, has less resolving power, and it's more difficult to work with, print, etc. 

About six months ago an editor at WIRED reached out and asked if I would put together a guide to film photography. This caught me a little off guard. Film? Did you really just say film photography? I said I would so long as Wired bought me a new film camera because I didn't think they would do that. Surprisingly, my editor agreed. I went on eBay and bought an old Nikon FE2, which was sort of the less pro version of the F3. I didn't need the TTL and interchangeable viewfinders of the F3, so I went with the lighter weight FE2. It came with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4. Good to go. 

I bought some Tri-X and some Velvia and went wandering around the Outer Banks trying to remember how to shoot film. Film photography is not like riding a bike. Everything I once knew... I forgot. But the technical hurdles didn't really bother me much after the first (embarrassingly bad) roll I developed. 

I realized I was trying to shoot film as if it were digital. It is most emphatically not digital. It has a very different process. Film has to be shot calmly, carefully and consciously. 

I've come to think that this is cornerstone of craft. What elevates anything to a craft is that you do it carefully and consciously.

Whether it's laying stone, stitching leather, carving toys, drawing fish, or making coffee, there is a calmness to the process of craft that comes from the care and consciousness. Even in the midst of stressful deadlines, the process itself remains a thing of calm, even calming.

What the Nikon FE2 gives me is the need to work slower. I can't make good images on film at the same speed I can with digital. Having to slow down gives you more mental space to reflect, remember -- sometimes technical details of process come to mind (expose for the highlights, careful with that tk Tri-X is unforgiving with tk, Velvia is going to render this sand dune more magenta than it is, and so on), other times I end thinking in tangents, just wandering through memory, almost like reading a book, but with the sense there's no need to hurry, you just let the world unfold at the pace you're reading. 

Why would a 40-year-old camera do all that? I'm not entirely sure, and willing to admit that it might just be me. And don't misunderstand, this isn't a nostalgia, the process is actually difficult and sometimes annoying. If you just want results, definitely stick with digital photography. What keeps me shooting film isn't really the results, it's because the process leads me to interesting places, both mentally and physically.

I think it has something to do with the simplicity of the machine and complexity of the task. There must be a balance here, but I think on the whole what humans really need are simple machines that enable complex tasks.

The FE2 gives me a light reading of the scene in front of me, but it's an average, and doesn't take into account the characteristics of the film I'm shooting, the range of light and dark in the scene, where the subject is, or any other of a dozen things I must take into account. I am the computer. The machine is very simple, the task is very complex.

Digital cameras are the opposite. They are very complex machines that can do 95 percent of what I have to do myself with the FE2, all I really have to do is press the shutter button. The machine is very complex, the task is very simple. While the result may be equal, even better in many instances, the satisfaction in the task is less because the task is too simple.

Photographer Galen Rowell has written at length. 




A craft is a process over which we have total self-determination. There is no "rushing", even when producing something for a client on a deadline.

of the process and outcome.





Something about this process dovetails 

everything is done
calmly, carefully and consciously. This is not about training but about attitude and total self-
determination

wander a bit, reflect on things, travel through memories. like reading a book – you create a pleasant space for yourself. -- Doolaard

I try to focus on the moment all the time. Planning traps you. Arriving at a goal is only exciting in the short term. At some point my home will be finished,
but that won’t last. That’s why I enjoy the journey so much.


## Instax Printing 
## Postcard Project
## Carving
## Nature Journaling
## Drawing
## Basic carpentry
## Building Shelves
## Knife sharpening
## repair a bike
## basic car maintenance
## Restore cast iron
# Philosophy
## Don't Plan Your Life, But Do Make Plans

I've always resisted the idea of checklists. Ticking boxes feels like an empty gesture. It is empty. It's no way to life a life certainly. Similarly, that old cliche, *if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail* (not by Ben Franklin) sounds like a poster in high school guidance counselor's office. That's no way to live your life.

When it comes to plans I'm with Mike Tyson: "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."[^1]

It's all good a well to have a detailed plan of how you want your life to go, but life is going to punch you in the face over and over again, shattering even the best plans. Sometimes this will be good, sometimes bad, but either way you'll rarely see it coming.

What's the answer then? Drift along aimlessly with no plan? Why not? This option is too easily dismissed. There's a whole self-help industry out there trying to get you to change your life by buying their books. Saying, *meh, maybe muck about for bit* doesn't sell books, but there's nothing wrong with it. It's a plan. And it's better than some.

I spent my teenage years immersed in the late 1980s world of punk rock where the worst thing in the world you could be was a Gordon Gekko-style yuppie full of hard driving plans. You needed to succeed on your own terms, not chase someone else's plans. This imprinted deeply on me, but I also had a perhaps more biblical take: "to dust you shall return" after all, and, if that's the case, what does it matter if you accomplish your plans or not?

I think this philosophy, while overly dramatic and two-dimensional, isn't a bad approach, especially when combining with Mike Tyson's observation. In other words, why all the fuss over plans if all you're going to do is get punched in the face by life?

The answer comes from Dwight Eisenhower, who famously observed, "plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

I don't have any studies to offer you on the wisdom of this idea, just my experience, for what it's worth. All my life I had the vague idea that I wanted to write. I also hated reading things where I could tell the author hadn't lived it. I liked writers who did stuff. Thoreau, Conrad, Henry Miller, Isabella Bird, Jack London, William Burroughs, Audrey Sutherland. People who lived first, wrote second. I didn't want to be some cloistered academic turning out meticulously crafted bullshit. 

This idea wasn't a plan in the traditional sense, but it was a plan, however vaguely defined, and I pursued it. I dropped out of school and went looking for adventure. That's more or less how I spent my twenties. I slept late. I stayed up too late. I drank too much. I had a ton of fun. I learned to cook, ran a restaurant, traveled around the world, met interesting people, did interesting things, failed in interesting ways. I don't regret it. Take that motivated list makers. 

The whole time I did it I had no concrete plan beyond the next couple of weeks, just that vague, nebulous idea that one day I would write all this down. Any specific plan beyond that would have blinded me to the opportunities and spontaneity that governed those days.

As with anything though, after enough time I found myself stuck in a loop, doing the same things in my early thirties, still looking for novelty, which wasn't there any more. I realized it was time to write it down. I did that and then life punched me in the face. What I wrote wasn't very good. I lacked the discipline necessary to improve it. Half the time I lacked the discipline to even finish it.

This was around the time I met my friend Keith. Although he had done a lot of the "wasteful" things I'd done with my life, he nevertheless managed to start and succeed in a business. Although I never thought of it this way back then, he became a kind of mentor for me. I picked his brain, figured out some systems he used to succeed (detailed here), and copied them. 

In short I started making checklists and ticking boxes. Not for things I wanted to accomplish in life, but for things I wanted to accomplish today, tomorrow, by the end of the week. At this very tactical level of thinking I found lists weren't so bad. In fact they helped me develop the discipline I needed to finish some things. I succeeded in landing some pitches. I got my assignments in on time. Turns out, that's about all you need to succeed as a writer, other than having good stories, which I did, and writing well, which I could. I started getting paid to write. 

Was it all the lists? No, not at all. The plans were worthless mostly, it was the planning that helped me. The act of planning helped me build a habit of doing the work. Once that habit was there, the lists became less important. 

Twenty years on the habits I need to make sure I get done what I want to get done are pretty well instilled at this point, all the lists do is keep track of the various projects I'm involved in, and whatever actions are necessary to move them forward. 





[^1]: This always struck me as a good modern rephrasing of Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, who famously said, "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces," which has been [shortened over the years](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/05/04/no-plan/) to "no plan survives first contact with the enemy." In other words, until you get punched in the face.



There are probably people who enjoy this sort of thing, making lists and then working their way down them.  

I'm a terrible birder because I rarely remember to record the birds I see.  

If you want to accomplish things in life you need to make plans. Not a plan, but many plans. At many levels -- strategic, tactical, and in between. This requires lists, lots of lists. Lists of things to do, lists of goals, lists of outcomes you're aiming for and so on.

I know I named this site the Analog Review, but planning a life requires enough lists, brainstorms, and other processes that you should consider both analog and digital tools. I do a lot of planning in text files. There's nothing wrong with digital.

That said. Ahem. 

When it comes to day-to-day todo lists, notes, and brainstorming I rely entirely on paper and I always have. I also rely on paper for long term strategic planning. There's a little blurb in a Wired guide I contribute too that mentions I do almost all my planning on note cards, which has prompted quite a few readers to write asking for details. Once I get a couple of emails, I almost always put something on the web. It's easier to link to an answer that's available for everyone than to keep re-writing the same email.

To understand why I use note cards though, I have to detail my whole system, not just the notecards bit, because notecards are only one part of a system that also involves sticky notes, regular notebooks, a custom built bookmarking app, a calendar, and a couple other bits and bobs. I also think of it as always evolving, and am always on the lookout for new tools, though I haven't changed much in the last ten years.

It all started when I was in my early 20s and was pretty much spinning my wheels. Working in the restaurant and coffee shops, drinking, and um, using other things too much, not sleeping enough, never working out. Living without direction. It's good for you sometimes. I think everyone has to pass through this stage. I think I maybe enjoyed it a little too much and maybe spent a little too much time there, but I digress.

I noticed something during this period of time though. One of my good friends, who lived more or less the same way, nevertheless managed to run a successful coffee shop (three in fact), play in a band, and otherwise be a much more successful person than me at the time. While doing all the same bad things I was doing. I asked him one day how he managed to function through the haze of the life we were living and he said, oh, it's simple, I make these little lists of things to do every day on index cards and then I do them. If I don't do them, I move them to the next day's card. Anything I think of during the day that I need to remember, I write down on the back of the card and then I file that.

Not real revolutionary, but also not something I did at the time. He gave me some more details about his system, which had simple priority rankings for tasks. And by "file" he meant toss it in a shoebox. Not perfect, but I started to do both things. Amazingly, I too started to accomplish more.  




You've probably heard that saying, . I am not a fan because this implies you're at least planning and you're not, you're doing noting, a leave in the breeze, a bubble in the current, pick your cheesy metaphor. 

Also, Benjamin Franklin didn't say it. People did not talk like that in the late 18th century. What Franklin wrote was, "by failing to plan, you are preparing to fail." I get that the modern version is catchier, but it misses something in its word play. Franklin's version acknowledges something important, 

You don't need me to tell you you need a plan. It should be blindingly obvious that without a plan you're 

## Why shoot film


Photography is one of the first things in my life that I took seriously. That's not to say I didn't find it fun, I did, but it was also the first time I recall being really driven to do something (like get up before sunrise) that I didn't otherwise need to do.

I first picked up my dad's Pentax SLR in the mid 1980s and was hooked from day one. I loved documenting the world, the things I saw. I was already into backpacking, rock climbing, and adventuring in whatever form I could find, photography became a way to document all that and share it with others. Sort of. There was no real way to share your images with anyone but friends and family back then, save getting published in a magazine.

I started reading magazines and books, trying to work out how one got published. Somewhere in there I ran across Galen Rowell and it all clicked for me. That's what I want to do. If he could do it, so could I. I bought more Kodachrome 25 and Fuji Velvia 100 than anyone should and went traipsing around the Sierra Nevada shooting alpineglow like no one had ever seen it before.

My main problem was that it turned out people had seen alpineglow before, and my images weren't adding anything to the story. In hindsight I can see that my images didn't really have a story at all. They were just pretty things. People like photos of pretty things (witness Instagram), but professional publications need more than that and I didn't know how to deliver it.

I turned to music instead, telling stories with sound and words. This worked out better. I kept taking pictures, but it took a back seat to the music and writing. Eventually the music began to take a backseat to the writing. Writing didn't require anyone else. It was just me. Maybe it came more naturally too. Whatever the case I produced a lot more of it and people started to buy it. Writing then. Onward. Upward.

This continued through the early days of this site. Then two things happened. The first was the digital camera surpassed 10 megapixels. This was where the quality of a 5 x 7 print looked the same whether you shot it with film or digital. Without giving it much thought I bought the best camera I could afford and starting shooting digital so that I could make images for both the real world and the digital.

The other things that happened is that I read W.G. Sebald's *Austerlitz*, which is one of the best books I've ever read. The description of Antwerp railway station is one of the most stunning things I've ever read. As I recall there's a nearly five page sentence somewhere in there as well that I didn't even notice the first two times I read the book. But that's not the lasting impact of the book on me, the last impact was that the book, which a strange blend of fiction and non, used images, but in a way I had never seen anyone do before. Sebald illustrated tiny details of his story with these images -- a knapsack hanging on a wall, a photo of a rugby team, butterflies mounted in a case, a partly disassembled pocket watch, the horsehead nebula. The list of strange images goes on. 

Sebald drops these images in with no captions or any other insight. They act as a kind of documentary evidence that make you feel that the fiction characters really did the things the narrator describes. The images are always things mentioned in the story, but they aren't necessarily major things in the story, until the image puts the emphasis on them.

If you go back and look at the early journal entries on this site, you'll see the influence of Sebald loud and clear in the images I used. The thing about these images, these little details that augmented the text I was publishing, is they didn't stand on their own at all. I didn't print them, I didn't want to print them. They were there to fit with the text, without the text they were nothing. At the time (2005) self-publishing a book was financially inaccessible so all my writing for this site exists only on this site and my digital backups.

Digital photography got me out of the habit of printing because it let me take so many images. Currating them became overwhelming.



which bothers me even more today, when self-publishing is not financially inaccessible anymore and is in fact really easy thanks to places like Blurb.





I sold my last film camera almost 10 years ago and until a few months ago my main impression of film images I see online is that the photographers are more enthralled with shooting film than making good images. There are exceptions, but by and large, in the online world, film is the province of attention seeking hipsters.



## Why print artifacts
## History as a harder time
## How Repair Skills Foster Self-Reliance and Independence

"In modern times when everything a person needs may be bought in a store, there are very few hand-made things left. So we are robbed of that rare and wonderful satisfaction that comes with personal accomplishment. In Noah's time nearly every single thing a person touched was the result of his own efforts. The cloth of his clothing, the meal on the table, the chair he sai, and the floor he waked upon, all were made by the user. This is why those people had an extraordinary awareness of life. They knew wood intimately, the knew the ingredients of food and medicines and inks and paints because they grew it and ground it and mixed it themselves. It was this awareness of everything about them that made the early American people so full of inner satisfaction, to grateful for life and all that went with it. Nowadays modern conveniences allow us to be forgetful, and we easily become less aware of the wonders of life."
                                                         --diary of an early american boy, p40
## Simple is Better than Complex. Complex is Better than Complicated
## There is no nature, because there is nothing unnatural, only ugly things
## Against data -- do you really need someone else to test everything for you? Do you really trust that their "expert" conclusions are right for you? Why not try things for yourself and see if they work?
## Pioneer night
simple food, stoicism, and avoiding hedonic adaptation
## Sometimes Digital Tools Help

In 2018 I sold my film camera on eBay. There's really no reason to shoot film at this point, save the fun of it. It's more expensive, has less resolving power, and it's more difficult to print even. 

And yet. I love shooting black and white film. I missed it. So not long ago I bought an old film camera for next to nothing off eBay, and picked up a few rolls of TMax 3200 and Tri-X 400. They were not cheap. This is what I grew up using to take pictures and it still feels completely natural to me even after a five year break.  

My original intent was to not digitize my film images. I planned to develop the film myself and then make contact sheets and file those with the negatives in archival folders. This is what we all did back in the day. Then I'd print select images in the darkroom using an enlarger. 

As with most plans, this one fell apart when it hit the real world. The first part was easy enough for black and white film (which is what I shoot 95 percent of the time). You don't need a darkroom to develop black and white film. I have a tutorial on how to develop black and white film without a darkroom. It's not that hard and the upfront costs are under $100. Consider that it's about $15-$20 *per roll* to have black and white film professionally developed and the DIY option is a no-brainer.

It was in the enlarging and printing of select images that problems came out. The biggest being that I live in an RV. Finding a darkroom to use was difficult. And I forgot how awful it is to breath and be around the chemicals involved in printing. I ended up not printing much. But the worst part was that what I did print wasn't good. The negatives were fine, but the prints weren't good enough. 

My darkroom skills had atrophied. This should not have been surprising, but it caught me off guard. We like to think everything is like learning to ride a bike, but it's not. Or maybe it is, but we discount too much the varying level of skill involved in riding a bike. If you haven't ridden a bike in 20 years your brain will probably remember how to balance and work the pedals, but it will take quite a bit more practice before you're tearing down mountain trails at 20 miles per hour with confidence. 

It wasn't until I looked at my prints that I remember the piles of notebooks lying somewhere at my parents house, full of notes on developing chemistries, development times, places I dodged, all kinds of details about each print. Printing in a darkroom is labor-intensive, and it takes skill. I quickly realized there was no way I was going to get the regular practice in a darkroom I needed to make the kinds of prints I used to make. 

After thinking it over, I reversed course and started "scanning" my film. I use quotes there because I "scan" by taking a photograph of the film negative. I minimally process it by sharpening and spot correcting, sometimes adjusting exposure a little, and then I have it printed professionally. Images printed on modern photo printers at your local professional shop are of far higher quality than what you'll likely get with an enlarger and photo paper. Well, "higher quality" is subjective, so let's just say I like the results better. The cost versus DIY is a wash. 

Throw in the added bonus of not having to seek out a darkroom (hard to do when you live on the road), having fewer chemicals to breath[^1], and the double-archive aspect (a digital copy should something happen to the negative, a negative for when the grid is gone), and I think this would be a somewhat rare example of a place that a recent technological developments have improved the [craft](/how-to/).

Darkroom enthusiasts might disagree. I am will to concede that there is something enchanting about sliding the paper into the chemical bath and watching it come to life. There is also something fun about hanging out in the weird red light of a darkroom. I love both those things, and if you have a place in your life for them (e.g., you have room for a darkroom) then you should stick with printing yourself. Building skills through practice always trumps convenience. But living in a bus means some trade offs. I don't get a darkroom. I have to compromise and that's okay. 

This process of moving from "I am going to do it all myself in a darkroom" to "I will do what I can and hand off the rest" reminded 

Not long after this I happened to pass through Amish country on our way to Wisconsin. We spent a night behind a high school in a small town in Illinois. We ate dinner watching the Amish play softball against a non-Amish team. 

We often think of the Amish as opposed to technology, but they aren't. They are in fact deeply engaged with technology, far more engaged than mainstream culture. The Amish put serious thought into technologies, deciding as a community which they use, and which they avoid. 

They have a complex system of determining whether a technology is acceptable or not, and the decision often varies from community to community, which is a key point. The use of a technology in Amish communities is a community decision. It's not a top-down imposed decision, nor is it an everyone-for-themselves decision. It's a community decision that has to balance whatever the technology is, against tradition.

The chief difference, at least in my cursor observations of Amish culture over the years we've spent traveling in and out of Amish areas, is that the Amish value tradition over innovation, mainstream U.S culture values innovation over tradition. 

To be clear, valuing tradition over innovation as the Amish do doesn't mean they try to never change. The Amish has managed to keep their unique way of life in tact through the most tumultuous stretch of history I am aware of, clearly they are pretty good at survival and understanding how and when to adapt.




[^1]: I do develop my own film. Since I can work with film developing chemicals outside in plenty of fresh air, they don't bother me. 



# Podcast
## Books covered ala Jocko
    - Illich
    - Thoreau
## Talking to other analog people about what they do