Plateworks

Rowe Creek Fire - "Burn I"

Dom Alhambra — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:43:14 GMT

Another photo of M. Grey taking a few strips as we attempt to catch up with the head of the fire at night. Not far from Prineville, it was a more forgiving terrain for burn operations. Taken with a Blazar Remus 50mm, on an A7SIII.

Size	Paper	Image	Limited run	Price	Buy
Small	5 × 7 in	2.75 × 6.18 in	25	$30	Buy
Medium	11 × 17 in	7 × 15.74 in	10	$90	Buy
Large	17 × 22 in	9 × 20.24 in	10	$120	Buy
Diptych	Two panels, 17 × 22 in each	Two panels, 14.5 × 16.31 in each	3	$170	Buy
Triptych	Three panels, 17 × 22 in each	Three panels, 19.33 × 14.5 in each	2	$210	Buy

"The Poodles"

Dom Alhambra — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:41:30 GMT

Driving around Pyramid Lake, on the north side of Surprise Valley. I worked on a fire in the Poodles in 2025. The fire was about 600 acres but felt like 60,000 because of the lava rock you had to hike over. Luckily, the base of these mountains is much more forgiving. Taken with a Blazar Remus 50mm, on an A7SIII.

Size	Paper	Image	Limited run	Price	Buy
Small	5 × 7 in	2.75 × 6.18 in	25	$30	Buy
Medium	11 × 17 in	7 × 15.74 in	10	$90	Buy
Large	17 × 22 in	9 × 20.24 in	10	$120	Buy
Diptych	Two panels, 17 × 22 in each	Two panels, 14.5 × 16.31 in each	3	$170	Buy
Triptych	Three panels, 17 × 22 in each	Three panels, 19.33 × 14.5 in each	2	$210	Buy

Rowe Creek Fire - "The Ochoco Nat'l Forest"

Dom Alhambra — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:48:15 GMT

The most active day of the fire closer to Prineville, OR. Despite our burns to the southeast, we weren't able to corral the head of the fire that pushed toward the southwest. Just a couple miles down from this photo, we would have to pull out due to the increased fire activity, just an hour or so before sunset.

Size	Paper	Image	Limited run	Price	Buy
Small	5 × 7 in	2.75 × 6.18 in	25	$30	Buy
Medium	11 × 17 in	7 × 15.74 in	10	$90	Buy
Large	17 × 22 in	9 × 20.24 in	10	$120	Buy
Diptych	Two panels, 17 × 22 in each	Two panels, 14.5 × 16.31 in each	3	$170	Buy
Triptych	Three panels, 17 × 22 in each	Three panels, 19.33 × 14.5 in each	2	$210	Buy

Rowe Creek Fire - "Burn II"

Dom Alhambra — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:41:37 GMT

Another Blazar Remus, 50mm capture around 8 or 9pm at the Rowe Creek Complex, as Diamond Mountain IHC fires down a highway in the attempt to contain the most active part of the 300,000 acre fire. S. Barrett walks along the road, AKA the "road lighter". Taken with a Blazar Remus 50mm, on an A7SIII.

Size	Paper	Image	Limited run	Price	Buy
Small	5 × 7 in	2.75 × 6.18 in	25	$30	Buy
Medium	11 × 17 in	7 × 15.74 in	10	$90	Buy
Large	17 × 22 in	9 × 20.24 in	10	$120	Buy
Diptych	Two panels, 17 × 22 in each	Two panels, 14.5 × 16.31 in each	3	$170	Buy
Triptych	Three panels, 17 × 22 in each	Three panels, 19.33 × 14.5 in each	2	$210	Buy

On Authenticity

Dom Alhambra — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:56:24 GMT

An excerpt from Ted Gioia’s recent “Authenticity in Music”:

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.
So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

Authenticity is a wave, and practiced by individuals, not groups. You don’t go to the marketplace and pronounce “all of you should be authentic!” Even if everyone agreed, it would be immediately be performative, because the concept would be interpreted as a group. And a group of people only determines what the average of a concept is, so everyone can accessibly emulate it. What is creative to the group? Painting, music, writing, etc. What is leadership to a group? Heroic command of others. What is integrity? Transparent responsibility for one’s actions.

But these words mean very different things to the individual. Creativity can be the arrangement of rocks around a fire lookout tower in the middle of Montana. Leadership may come in the form of questions from an outsider, not commands from the insider. Integrity may mean someone’s responsibility to their own values, not others’.

Authenticity as a cultural foundation is an oxymoron. The person recognized as “authentic” by others just exhibits traits of authenticity agreed upon for the time being. It’s part of the zeitgeist. Authenticity is not described, it’s lived. And to its consumers, authentic works are only experienced, and recognized later as “authentic” if it fits in the culture’s definition.

Authenticity in its truest form is nurtured in small, one-to-one moments. Do you ever notice how you and your friends change voice, change mind, change demeanor when more than 2 people converge? The intimacy is gone, and now you are living in an averaged existence of the group.

The good thing for Gioia is that he’s focused on authenticity in music, which has a great history and future of few people truly making music authentically. The musician can be alone and just make music without pretense. Doing it for themselves.

Where teams are involved, there is little to no authenticity. Does this mean that the music is less-than? No, it’s just not authentic. The pop artist is part of a team attempting to figure out what pop music will sound like in the next few months when they finally release the song or album. The rock band is trying to figure out what sounds good for all 2, 3, 4 ,5+ of them (at least those that actually have a say in the direction of the piece). Teams are great at averaging out what a sound can be, which can make it even more likely to achieve success, commercially or culturally.

The authentic musician will likely not be tied to genre, or culture. They will likely not find success, though sometimes after they’re dead. This is because they’ll be making something that speaks to them, not others. They’ll even more likely never release it, because it’s not their goal. They made it for themselves. Some small percentage of authentic artists will release their stuff, likely because someone told them to do it after they showed it to others one-on-one.

My tone sounds as if I’m arguing against Gioia, but he’s come to similar conclusions. Mine’s just shorter. He thinks of a solution:

What does this mean in practical terms? First and foremost, we need to be willing to make that essential first step in any authentic artistic experience—namely, we must be willing to go to where the artist is, rather than force the artist to adapt to our expectations. We open ourselves up, rather than close ourselves down. We broaden our horizons, and perhaps even find that our comfort zones are larger than we previously realized. Instead of seeking the familiar formulas, we allow ourselves to be beguiled by the artist’s inner truth.

Similar to the counterculture piece from a bit ago. We do need to meet the artist where they are, so they can create and perform for themselves, where we can join them in that experience, if they’re willing to share.

The commercial method of “I pay so you come to me and perform for me” is not the recipe for success in one’s authenticity. That requires an eye for scaling, for averaging.

If we extend this out to general authenticity, it’s not where others are. Authenticity is a lived practice, and just like wu-wei in Daoism, it isn’t even thought about when it’s practiced. It just is, and the unfortunate over-thinkers like myself hopefully get to recognize it for what it is, and then lose sight of what another generation of authenticity will bring for us as we get our noses dug into the past searching for other instances for the average “authentic person”.

Fitness and Death

Dom Alhambra — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:50:35 GMT

I’ve never been particularly worried about my lifespan. I’ve watched the older people, and I’m not jealous, no matter how fit they are. I’d rather live my life and die when necessary.

I do care about fitness, but not for my lifespan, or my “healthspan”, as the new trend calls it. Fitness allows me to do very hard, physical work for longer, and with more competence than an unfit person.

Good fitness also protects my ego, who doesn’t want to be left in the dust when hanging out with other people my age. I’m now working with much younger and much fitter people than me, and it does feel like a bruise on my capabilities; even at 30, I didn’t really differentiate myself from the 22 year olds out there in terms of physical performance. But at 32, I’m starting to see the difference.

That’s digression about inevitability. But fitness has only been my identity in the sense that I actively practice in the genre so I can keep up, accomplish more outdoor goals that I couldn’t do when I was younger and more sedentary, and help others learn from my mistakes and my experience.

Fitness has always gone out the window when it comes against learning and doing something new, something that speaks to me. I don’t think that’s a great habit, but it happens because when I focus on something, I put my full weight behind it, and at times that is not physical performance but self-education and reflecting on new experiences.

I’m a student of many different activities, practices, and philosophies, because none of them are me. I pick and choose and meander between them, developing my own activities, practices, and worldviews. If I boiled it down, maybe the world doesn’t offer an end for me, but only beginnings. Why be married so much to someone else’s opinions as if they are our own?

Maybe it’s same experimentation-mindset: I see a hypothesis, an assertion, set by someone else, and I’d really like it to be true, so I try it out, and see where the truth actually lies for me, and what to get rid of. Maybe I get rid of the whole thing. It’s not a waste of time, just another experience. Others seem to want it to be true, and try to make it true. Not very scientific, but people are addicted to certainty. Don’t come to me for certainty, because I only have one thing I’m certain of: I don’t know anything.

I just have opinions and experiences to draw upon, and it’s fun to make a guess and it turning out right, but it doesn’t make my thought process a rule.

Someone long ago made it a goal to live as long as possible, so now we’ve had at least 5,000 years of people trying to live this person’s goal. In the modern era, we have all this technology to see whether our bodies are trending toward this goal. With new technology comes a new addiction, and here we are, having so-called “health neuroses”, giving up living for physical health.

People want to time their death, so lifespan and healthspan have become big for online, techno-fied people. I’m aware because I’m online and techno-fied. I’m just guilty of it because sometimes I forget why I like getting swept up with the times. Sometimes it feels like a waste of time, to think so much about fitness, and how one lives a well-lived life, etc.

I think it’s because it allows me to talk about things that are relatable to people. No one relates to spiritual self-awareness right now, so physical health is a bridge for me to relate. Some people, in the pursuit of fitness, realize that’s a good chunk of it comes from mental health, which requires a bit of self-awareness. So I talk about fitness in the pursuit of the spiritual.

One thing my spiritual, philosophical essays don’t cover: Death, and its timing. It’s not a thought for me, though I bet in a few decades it will be. But I tend to write what is relevant to my life right now, and as I continue the process of living, I consider death and its timing to be a quick period at the end of a long-winded sentence. Maybe death cuts that story off mid-sentence, leading to an unsatisfying.

A Counterculture

Dom Alhambra — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:45:32 GMT

The New Counterculture

Ted Gioia on the next indie wave

The Honest BrokerJared Henderson

Ted Gioia is a prolific writer on modern music culture, and has a lot of great insights on the negative effects of the modern music publishing oligopoly in pop music, as well as the ever-growing stranglehold of Spotify over music streaming and artist income. He is a great advocate for music artists, and a discerning lover of music and the arts.

In a recent interview, Gioia proposed something silly that caught my eye. I have a little bit to say on why it's silly, and I will attempt to provide a definition for the term he's throwing out there: Counterculture.

"There is a counterculture out there, but it’s struggling now because it is starved of cash." - Ted Gioia

Gioia commonly presents a pathos for the starved artist, which in a sense is wholly agreeable, but it throws out the logic of what it means to be an artist, and to be part of any kind of countercultural movement.

I'll go for the silliness first: A counterculture with abundant cash is simply the Culture. Money flows to what maintains prevailing culture. Money flowed to Michael Jackson because he solidified what pop music sounded like in the 1980s. Money flowed to John Coltrane (to a lesser extent, of course) because he maintained what jazz sounded like in the 50s and 60s. Money flows to the archetypal beings of their era, because they are iconoclastic and help create understanding of what it was to be there.

Huey Lewis and the News will continue to make their royalties because they defined a period of time in someone's life. Andy Warhol maintained his success because it defined a period of art in the 60s and 70s. These huge artists of past decades and periods defined the Culture, so long as the culture found them relevant.

Money only seeps into those who copied the Culture, imitated it. Your B Tier artists still made some money, because they provided some insight into the Culture. But they didn't help make it. They just rode the wave.

Money does not flow to those to reject the Culture. It is more likely that they have to pay out of pocket to be seen by others, because most people are not going out of their way to experience rejection.

Culture is a set of defined values and principles that are in constant transformation. Culture is like a constant conversation that changes from one topic to a next, getting persuaded into new things or dropping the old. To engage in the rejection of culture is like interrupting the conversation with a fart. And for what gain? To tell the Culture that its conversation is either boring or just plain sucks.

There is little to no money in Counterculture. If there was money—you can already see my first point above—you would immediately have B Tier Countercultural copycats, because money attracts copying. It's actually a foundation of capitalism: The copying of things so efficiently through large capital that it's affordable at scale. A Counterculture doesn't have room for copycats because it's not about the money, and it's not about the recognition, and it's not even about genre.

It's the anti-genre. The ultra-individualistic sound, image, design that speaks to no one, and through that lack of definition, it mistakenly does speak to the very few who want to listen.

If I go to Bandcamp and want to find some Countercultural music, should I have to click on a music tag like "folk" or "drum'n'bass" to find something completely original? Probably not. Tagging is the attempt to attach your art to recognizable Culture. Whether on Twitter or on Spotify, the tag is the Culture-fication of a piece content.

Continuing on. There is no single counterculture out there. There are countercultures that reject countercultures, let alone rejecting the prevailing culture of a locality, region, or nation. What is "The New Counterculture"? Sounds like another Culture to me. Another set of values and principles seeking money and recognition. Alternative pop, alternative rock. Indie. A mass organism absorbing others in the name of a broader movement, even when those others never considered themselves in this broader movement because they never categorized themselves as part of The New Counterculture.

I think what's interesting about Culture, especially in the modern era, is that it's so hyper-aware of itself that large propositions of Counterculture is simply another Cultural habit that comes and goes. I think about Hardcore Punk from the 70s and 80s. Super aware of what they're reacting against. Culture is as culture does.

On the other hand, Counterculture is completely unaware, and doesn't even put itself on the map in relation to the culture. Because once they actually announce themselves as Counterculture, it's dead.

If you're looking for Counterculture, you're going to have to go to local shows, not internet streaming sites. You're going to have to go through a lot of Culture-slop copycats to discover it, because it's not even like 1% of the art that is made in the world. And these people you see are going to be completely unaware of what you're talking about when you try to throw them into any New Counterculture movement. Because they're doing it for themselves.

These artists exist and they're closer to home than you think. And those $5, $10 tickets you might be purchasing to see their work is barely going to support them. Because that's not the point for them. Their point is expression by any means necessary, and they're willing to front the cash to make it happen, and work at Wendy's to keep getting that cash.

Support in whatever ways you can, but let them struggle. Because the struggle is what makes original expression worth it.

On creativity, the Creative, and Creation.

Dom Alhambra — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:25:36 GMT

I think I wrote about this before: It's hard to write when you're not a creative person, surrounded by creative people. But it's not because you're running into 'writer's block' over and over again; it's because you know the words you're putting into ink (or digital text) are a regurgitation of someone else's own thoughts and views.

I set myself up for failure with this kind of thinking. You haven't written a paragraph and you're trying to compare yourself to all of your mentors and idols. So you just think "well, if they already figured it out, why am I wasting people's time by re-writing it in my own words?"

I'm going to think out loud here so I can refute this thought for myself.

People start their intellectual and spiritual journeys from the oddest of places. It might not even be a book. It might have been a second-rate movie that you saw at midnight. It might have been from the time you smoked too much weed with a couple friends. It might have been when you were walking along a dirt bike path, and even as engines rattled in your head, you saw something beyond accessorized bikers and their new tires.
Each book out there is wasting the time of at least 80% of those that read it, and for those 20% of people that appreciated it, only 1% of those at best might take something from that book and apply it to the rest of their life. If you play this numbers game, you have to accept that, especially in our Information Age, you're going to disappoint some folks and very rarely find appreciation for your work.
The go-to method of refutation is that you should "just write for yourself". It's a value call. But there are limitations and a certain insincerity to it. Sure I get the should, but then why are we maintaining publicly-available blogs? You know why people usually don't just write for themselves? It's because they want to have a dialogue about what they wrote.
- A dialogue doesn't always mean an email exchange is required for what you wrote to be meaningful, but that you responded to something interesting from your corner of the internet. The standard blog is different from Twitter/micro-blog in this sense, because the work is both a dialogue and an isolation. The blog doesn't require checking on links and direct responses/comments to understand the stance of the writing and writer. Yet it is part of a larger conversation.

Working off these three bullet points, here's my conclusion: Contributing your voice to the world is the opportunity to express your side of the conversation, and to spark the unlikely event of an inspired reader. The unfortunate side-effect is wasting a few people's time, and maybe provoking them beyond what you intended.

Back to the original point, which requires explanation. In coaching, there's a fun twist that you can put on creativity. You ask the client times when they've been creative, and many people will say "Well, I'm not creative." Then you kindly tell them that being creative is engaging in any creation whatsoever, whether it be grocery lists, notes to friends and family, or organizing a party. This opens the client up to the possibility that they can indeed associate themselves with the concept of "creativity".

This is very much appreciated in a coaching context, but I batten down the hatches when I think about my own creative works. I've made music, written many essays, and play the flute. Yet I can very rarely count the times that I have made something without response. This is what I consider the difference of being an archetypal Creative, which you may recognize as a concept in Human Design.

The Creative can pull a work from thin air. It is a pure expression of themselves, without response to a stimulus. I think this exists, but it's very, very rare to see. It's rare to see because in the Information Age that we live in, the creative types that we run into on the internet and in media, while very innovative in their own right, have rose like cream to the top because it's more likely that they created a responsive work. That is, a work that is very much in a product of the culture that we live in. Even some avant-garde short film that won awards at TIFF is likely an innovation in response to something else.

This is the bread and butter of creativity. The weirdest shit you've seen in art is likely in response to the culture.

I'd like to provide an interesting example. David Lynch, the avant-garde director of Hollywood, was an ardent follower of Transcendental Meditation (TM). The underlying concept of TM is the existence of a collective consciousness that you meditate to gain access to. Lynch would say his ideas came from "fishing", sinking a line into this collective consciousness and pulling something out that he'd want to work on.

Of course, these are just words being said and perhaps he is a true Creative. Maybe he just thought he was responding to the collective culture. But we can see from his work that he has a legibility in creation that puts it beyond what Hollywood could achieve but still able to tug at something or another in the modern person. A lot of people like to point at his work in contrast to Hollywood movies: "This is real auteur filmmaking!" But this contrast only exists because he worked so closely to Hollywood.

The Creative is incomparable, and more likely illegible. It's those arty friends that shows you their work and all you see is a blob. There is not symbolic connection of it. You're not going to contrast them with Hollywood or Warhol, because there's nothing to see.

We see in symbologies produced by ideologies. You can refer to Slavoj Zizek or Human Design's founder Ra Uru Hu for better context on this idea. We are a practical species, even with art: What does it do for me? And for the most provocative of art: What does it do against me? You can refer to Ayn Rand and her conceptions of art to see what happens when someone is mad about creation.

But the Creative is very likely to create out of nothingness, which is the areas where symbologies don't exist. We can place anything into the work; it looks only like noise to us. So the Creative is most likely truly ignored, and only the .00001% of people out there, if they ever get the chance to see it, will find inspiration in the truly Creative. And during those rare events, an earthquake occurs, perhaps Nietzsche's concept-quake. Because that inspired person will create their own symbology to place onto this Creation and the culture may sooner or later come around to finding it finally useful to them.

"They were ahead of their time." The thing about this phrase is that it's usually about a work that was at first panned and then accepted as a great work afterwards, maybe decades down the line. I don't think decades is enough for a Creation to be accepted, and I don't usually think the Creation itself is ever going to be widely accepted. It's usually the symbologist-discoverer and their following innovators that will be accepted by the culture.

There is no better time than now to seek the unexplainable works of others as this symbologist-discoverer. There is no worse time than now, because you'll run so many millions of folks who want to push back on your efforts, telling you that it's all been discovered. These are people who are dragged along with the times, unable to understand why the world is changing around them. While the work to be done is not for everyone, it's certainly for those who are interested in life itself.

AI Guilt and the New Terminal

Dom Alhambra — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 17:24:56 GMT

Originally, I was making a self-conscious introduction to a few Claude Skills I had come up with to help me find unique interpretations of Human Design data. However, the opening is already way too large, and as a non-editor of my own writing, I've just turned this into its own essay.

Here I am, presenting a couple potentially useful tools for anyone who cares in an age that if someone did care enough, they could make it themselves. Perhaps AI stands for the Age of Irony.

I only say this because I'm naturally conditioned to feel guilty for using AI. For those living online a little too much, this technology has become the primary target for almost every problem, from jobs to climate change. For some cases, like energy use, there is nothing to argue: Until there are groundbreaking innovations in parallel processing and data bandwidth (both of which are currently supplied by GPUs and RAM), the ever-growing server farms crunching AI data will be a drain on resources throughout the world.

Yes, I feel guilty, because I always felt like my values were positioned toward a Luddite-lite wisdom of minimalism. Yet that has always been an aspiration: No matter how many countries I travel, forests and deserts I trek through, and wildfires I've helped suppress, I've always had an eye for technology and what works. I've always come back from the mountains and the rivers and thought, Okay laptop, what can you do for me now?

The past 30 years of technology, besides the laptop, the smartphone, and the server, have been a bust. Yes, billions are made on video games and virtual reality accessories and smart watches, but the real money and real change in society has always come from the Terminal: One's primary entry into the internet. Every other digital and electrical product has been secondary, supporting the Terminal in its many expressions.

Adobe makes artistic tools for Terminals. Apple Watch gives health data to the Terminals. Instagram connects Terminals together with ads and imagery.

The laptop and smartphone have had decades now to express itself through digital art and writings and music. The server is now speaking through what is known as "AI", but is better described as a Large Language Model, a software that uses statistics to figure out what to say, letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, until someone's made their own vibe-coded app or a Harry Potter fan fic story.

I just saw someone claiming they made a health-tracking app on their fancy smart sunglasses while walking around New York City. Yes, the sunglasses were a display for the real Terminal: The server. The server is soon becoming the sought-after consumer Terminal, and there will be a couple more decades' of value to be gotten from this paradigm shift.

While Apple's attempting to implement AI locally on iPhones, Android has nearly given up that fight and delegated all of its advanced generative technologies to servers. Whisper Flow, Gemini, Notion, Canva... All 90% server-based, so these services don't have to worry about how much of a potato your phone is.

My primary fascination with consumer technology is how far it will go to make a life easier. I can't say it can make my life, or your life easier, because it requires a very specific type of person to make life easier. I am very much grounded to my house, which requires plants to be watered, a front and back yard to be cleaned up, and food to be cooked. You might notice that AI can't do any of that for me, so I know that I can only look as a fascinated outside observer of this digital phenomenon.

Here's the lifestyle of those who AI will both empower—and possibly destroy, if used improperly: The digital native, living in a minimalist apartment, maybe they're even in one of those Japanese hostel pods and just have a table after they climb down from their bed. Food is DoorDashed to them. That succulent is not from a nursery but Ikea. Physically, they have so little to manage but their own body. Almost all aspects of their life can be successfully managed by a Large Language Model, because almost all aspects their life is based in knowledge.

Knowledge of their health stats, their clothes, the specs of their Terminals, the macronutrients of their food; "If it can be measured, it can be controlled," as someone didn't really say, and I'm even paraphrasing it now. Large Language Models are constrained to the knowledge environment, and most people unfortunately have to deal with a lot more than knowledge in their physical environment.

But this is what I'm fascinated with, even if I cannot live the lifestyle that AI is so geared toward. So I come back to my very humble use of AI models like Anthropic's Claude to clean up digital files I'm too lazy to organize myself, and to ask questions about Human Design that I can't find online. The best I've found for the use of AI is to have a third-party give suggestions that I hadn't thought of before, and those suggestions, with enough mulling over, may become insights that helps me interact with my physical environment better.

The messiness of relationships and people and groups and environments that are being set aflame by lightning and chains dragging on pavement in the most arid environments. I can still ask AI questions about new perspectives on the knowledge I've built on all of these very physical circumstances, and sometimes it provides something useful, or at least a formatted structure that I can find useful for myself.

I realize that the guilt I built for myself with regard to AI is conditioned by people who don't want a new perspective on the information that they've been given in life. They'd rather wrestle with the same problem over and over and over again and feel like the struggle itself is the means of transcendence. And maybe it is, but I've never been one to leave money on the table when it looks like there's so much opportunity in something so accessible. So I will learn to use AI models with care and precision that helps me accomplish tasks I couldn't do before.

Even more importantly, these tasks I can now accomplish actually have to do with self-education; that the newly developed Skill I created for Claude will actually allow me to stop using Claude after a few uses, because the Skill provides me the education to do it myself from now on.

In other words, I use AI to work it out of a job. And when the companies crash or become domain to only the richest people, and I am locked out from access to this technology, I'll only have gained a few more life skills for the rest of my life. Then, as it has been, I can walk away from the Terminal and enjoy a few more weeks of grass and people again.

Thoughts About "Caught Stealing"

Dom Alhambra — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:00:51 GMT

When I think about Darren Aronofsky's work, I think about "kinetic energy": The integration of movement and editing that keeps up a brisk pace, even when people are asking him to slow down. I think we've seen enough movies that feel like a shamble, starting and stopping with each new scene, but Aronofsky nearly mastered a flow to his direction that is the foundation of his style.

Between violent and 2 shot dialogue scenes, there is an inherent forward momentum to so much of his movies, where career-long collaborating cinematographer Matthew Libatique captures moments with great care and consideration. Movements, minor and major, are followed. A beginning scene with Russian mobsters is filmed and cut with great attention to detail, raising it above the usual stoic Fincher-inspired neo-noir styling.

A chase scene uses an obviously wide angle lens to invoke surreal movement towards the second act of the movie.

A wide angle chase scene that makes it both engaging and silly. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

The wide angle has been used by Aronofsky for many of his grimiest films, which has always given me the sense of irrationality in the face of someone trying to maintain control over their lives.

A secondary basis to his style is the respect he has for the physical environment surrounding the character. He doesn't lean on depth of field techniques that isolate characters from their typically grimy interiors and exteriors, except when needed for psychological isolation.

"Caught Stealing", Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

Cities and apartments provide context and characterization to the people who live in them. From "mother!" to "Requiem for a Dream" to "Caught Stealing" to "The Whale", we can understand the character's situation, because home is where so many of the characters work out their stories.

"The Whale", courtesy A24.

However, there's a polarizing catch to Aronofsky's style...

While I have many positive things to say about Aronofsky as a director and his stylistic glue, the most paradoxical strength and weakness of his voice is that a lot of his work is thematically kinda stupid. But beautifully stupid

With all the movies I listed above, to ones that I can't really remember, I just remember the beautiful obviousness to what should be subtext. Characters vocalize Aronofsky's proposed themes. You'll see it in "Caught Stealing". You'll see it in "mother!". You'll see it in "The Whale".

Subtext is usually thrown out the window for this director. And, as a very limited lover of great 20th century adapted plays like "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", I actually love the lack of subtext. These movies are made like punk rock (which not-so-coincidentally sets the musical tone of "Caught Stealing"), up front, in your face, nothing to hide.

Thematically, these are not clever movies. They are cleverly filmed and edited, but as I said before they are beautifully stupid in expression. Hey, Quentin Tarantino is only a few steps behind Aronofsky in this department. Yet Tarantino is, as stereotypical as it is, my favorite director.

Back to "Caught Stealing"

I don't think you need the plot details of the movie like a normal review. You can just go to Rotten Tomatoes for that.

Here are my thoughts: We have Aronofsky's least ambitious movie, except an ambition to do something different. While his subject matter has been generally eclectic, he is usually attracted to an overblown thematics of religion, alienation, decay, and tension between control and chaos.

The last one holds over to "Caught Stealing", with the character living through a "Big Lebowski" miscommunication-neo-noir plot that becomes a chaotic killing spree that is more tongue in cheek than grisly. This is a genre movie, a crime thriller, that needs to follow a specific formula to stick the landing, but the surprising twists in the first and second acts would make the audience, at least myself, think that something very different should have happened.

The structure of character deaths in this movie are sudden and unexpected, but don't have nearly the same impact as the same execution by the Coen Bros. It creates expectations that the movie should turn out much darker and contemplative than what it ended up being.

In other words, as other people on the internet has more succinctly said it, there is a "tonal whiplash" between somber deaths and the silliness of the premise.

The script is written by Charlie Huston, who also wrote the original 2004 book. I can't tell if Huston's script was modified by Aronofsky's own stylistic direction, but some of the choices feel as if they were.

The highlights of the movie are the antics of the mobster stereotypes, from the corrupt police, Russian mobsters, a Puerto Rican drug dealer, to the Hassidic Jews, the last of which provide a lot of heart to the movie during the last act.

As I've said before, the movie's use of New York City and the interior designs of bars and apartments are great, and bring to life a stylized vision of 1998. This movie was truly an ode to late-90s/early-00s grunginess, and I always enjoy the lived-in-ness of the more inspired period movies.

The texture of a 1998 NYC captured me. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Ultimately, the movie adds up to Aronofsky's lightest, least auteur-like work I've seen, but I am grateful that he made a fun movie. It's kinetic, physical, vibrant, and flows so well until the third act, which has moments of inspiration but gets drug down by the genre it lives in.

I just hope for two things: 1, he doesn't veer too far away from the wild swings of "mother!" and "The Whale" (maybe he can follow the Scorsese "one for them, one for me" approach); 2, that he finds a better footing in genre films like this if he chooses to continue making them, because it was so solid, but could be elevated even more by Aronofsky's unique voice.

Thanks for reading,

Dom

Long Valley Creek Trail

Dom Alhambra — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 23:38:00 GMT

January 31st, 2026

A highlight this winter has been discovering this trailhead, which is pretty much across the street from an overland trail that I had taken the dogs with Sosa several times, enjoying the sloping canyons and miles of open walking terrain that's hidden behind the small industrial "suburb" of Lockwood.

Unlike the overlanding area, this trail has easy access to water, following the Long Valley Creek what seems like 10+ miles. Sosa and I have only seen the first mile or so with each dog walk, but even that is already a great experience.

The dogs greatly appreciated easy access to drinking water and a place to cool down, given that even January was warm for Northern Nevada.

Tuesday and Princess enjoy bouncing in and out of Long Valley Creek.

Short of the mile mark, there's a choice to follow the creek to head up the ridge. From here, you can enjoy views of the rolling mountains of what I believe is called the Curnow range extends along the north end of I-80, though getting up and close with that area is just heading into what feels like an endless range of mining operations.

Similarly, across the Long Valley Creek from our ridge is a mining company that appears to have blown off the top Washington Hill to extract who knows what. Maybe I saw copper, or maybe I'm making that up in my head.

In the distance, the "Curnow Range", I believe.

At the end of this trail is supposed to be the Lagomasino Canyon Petroglyphs, which I haven't yet gotten to, but will enjoy exploring likely later this year.

Behind Tuesday, you can see bits and pieces of the nearby mining operation.

The highlight of this miniature canyon trail are the plateaus and outcroppings that give so much character to the trail

I find the trail systems behind Lockwood fascinating because it's only 5-10 miles south before you start encroaching on the northern ranch suburbs of Virginia City. Where this trail feels like it's going into a remote pocket of outer Reno, in reality, OHV trail systems effortlessly connect between Lockwood and Virginia City, turning the wilderness of the Virginia Range mountains into a playground of 2-stroke and 4-cylinder engines.

Luckily, Long Valley Creek trailhead appears exclusive to horse riders and hikers, providing a small haven from UTVs barreling down rocky trails.

Lil D enjoys ridge top views over the creek.

Our goal is always to find places for the dogs to run free. They're not particularly well-trained to come back immediately, so we know that if others are on the trail, we'll keep them on leash. We cut our walk a bit short when we saw a few other hikers with their dog in the distance, so we didn't have as much opportunity to look down the canyon into the creek.

I'll be posting another series of photos for when I took just Lil D down the lower path along the creek.

This open field seems popular for camping just a quarter mile away from the road.

Reno continues to grow, and I'll accept that little-used trails like this will become more and more popular as the city expands into the hills, as Tesla and Panasonic and mega-warehouse distributors pull people into small towns like Fernley and Lockwood to skip the bumper-to-bumper traffic caused by the incredulous small artery of the I-80 that connects Reno/Sparks to these huge corporations.

But during my weekday travels to the remote pockets surrounding a developing city, I have great appreciation for the amount of freedom one can have in the high desert. Where the troubles of city life so quickly transforms into the near-silence of a desolate and beautiful scenery.

Tuesday comes down from the mountain.

Red Rock Near Reno

Dom Alhambra — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 03:18:23 GMT

I was told the wildland firefighters based out of Doyle, California had a training hike around Red Rock. I'm not sure if I arrived at the right spot, just a half mile off the 395 exit. It seemed more like a 4-wheeler or boondock haven rather than a definitive hiking spot.

It's about 2000 feet from the parking area over to the rocks.

You can drive almost to the bottom of the rocks, though it's a bit bumpy, and I thought I needed the walk. I still couldn't find an established trail, but followed ruts carved out by years of water runoff.

The aptly named red rocks of the area have a chalk-like texture to them. It's a soft rock, and contrasts heavily with the brown and green mush of the surrounding high desert area.

The bottom of the outcropping is silvery-white, which pairs beautifully with the above rocks' southwestern reddish hues. These parts look more like molten rock, something you might see on the volcanic beaches of Hawaii, just much lighter in tone. Not much traction in this section as the rocks seem to be actively shedding dust as you walk on it.

I didn't try going higher to test out the feel of the red rocks themselves, the sun had already set and I was losing time for a few pictures of the area.

Across from me, a view of the 395 and the Sierra Nevadas. I'm not far from Hallelujah Junction, a gas station city important to Nevada lottery-goers and a reasonable bathroom stop when turning from Susanville to Portola.

I feel like this visit to Red Rock was a lesson in texture. I love rock-landscape photography when the rocks allow for beautiful angles and unique textures that make you just want to touch your screen to see what it's all about.

And there are some rock structures that make you feel like you're on a different planet. Stepping into the white outcropping area did it for me, and I very much appreciate this unique, tiny piece of land in the larger Great Basin.

Thank you for your support,

Dom w/ Badwater

Erza at Horizon Hills

Dom Alhambra — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:41:00 GMT

While dog-sitting a friend's dog, Erza, I thought it'd be great to show her around the northern Peavine hills, otherwise known as Horizon Hills. She doesn't get outside the city much, so I was curious to see how she did in this OHV area.

She was mostly scared. It doesn't seem like she's touched much dirt in her life. Any time I got off trail, she had a big hesitation before deciding that she might as well just follow.

This is one of my favorite places to take the dogs. Whether during the weekdays or the weekend, there's a limited amount of UTV or vehicle activity in this area, despite the intricate system of roads that follow canyons, saddles, and ridge tops, and the mountain bike trails that take advantage of the constant changes in elevation.

Last summer, I had driven some of these trails to take the dogs up the hills to the left. Now, they're a bit to muddy, which makes sense given the northern aspect of this area.

It's only about 20 minutes from my house, and the dirt roads are beaten up but fully accessible during dry and wet periods, so it's been a dependable piece of land for having a quiet outing.

In the back, Peavine Mountain.

The last couple years, I had committed to going up higher and higher Peavine Mountain, which you can access near the Amazon warehouses in Stead. But I kept on seeing that there were other trailheads several miles before that turn out. I assumed that they would be much more popular OHV systems, but each time I tried a new trailhead out, the only thing I really saw were boondockers.

A lone RV at Horizon Hills. in the back, you can see how northern Reno suburbs encroach up to the Forest Service borders that cover the Peavine area. It's likely only the expense of knocking out tons of rock that limit the development of those lower ridgetops.

I'd be lying to see Erza particularly enjoyed the experience; she's even scared of riding in the car, so I hope that she expanded her own horizons around here.

But maybe I could see a partial glimmer of curiosity in her eyes as she climbed a hill with me to a nearby mountain bike trail.

The Dogs at Hot Springs Mountains

Dom Alhambra — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 01:45:20 GMT

On the everlasting quest to find convenient places to take the dogs out for an open space run with few to no other people around, I was first intending to check out The Narrows, an off-roading trail that extends from Fernley up to Pyramid Lake. The whole trail wasn't the goal, but just some part I could get to and have the dogs run free.

Unfortunately, one old entrance to the trail system was cemented off at the end of a highway exit, and the other seemed to have a cop blocking the entrance, so I was not wanting to spend more time searching for the other paths to that trail. I proceeded up the I-80 another 15 miles and found a non-technical dirt road system that seems to serve an oil pipeline, solar farms, and some other industrial sites interspersed around 1000s of acres of open land.

Parked near a "do not enter" sign near a reclaimed mine.

I was thinking to myself when getting to this wide expanse of a valley, that it's so hard to really capture that essence of "freedom" that I see in the Northern Nevada deserts. I think it's not only the openness of the area, but the small dirt roads that move about; seeing those makes me know that people have just decided to go a certain direction, and pioneered their way into new parts of the desert.

I also understand that true freedom would simply mean this place would either be a landfill or another industrial plant extracting all it can from the natural landscape. It's a recreational freedom, I guess.

I do hope that someday my photos can bring about that feeling of "recreational freedom". It needs depth, texture, and clarity about the little opportunity one can have by being in a place that just lets you explore any which direction by foot.

The dogs had a lot of fun running around, and I enjoyed the relatively flatness so I could keep track of them a bit better today.

Lil D jumps to evade Princess' attack.

Lil D was jumping all around this area. She loves openness as much as I do, taking advantage by going full sprints in every direction, and soon enough at Princess or Tuesday, sometimes to their surprise.

Tuesday does his lone wolf routine and takes the edges of the group, always looking for something to hunt or chase. This time there wasn't anything.

I really enjoyed the area, but it's an enjoyment of quiet desolation that's hard to truly capture for others. It's only when I go to canyons and forests that people seem to engage more with the photos. But ah well, that still means I get to enjoy these tracts of land for myself—and for the dogs.

Sunset at Geiger Grade

Dom Alhambra — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 02:26:40 GMT

It was 4pm and I wanted to take my Belgian, Princess, on a drive. She seems more comfortable in the back of the car than at home, so the more she rides, the happier she seems to be. Unfortunately this was going to be a ride for her, and then a walk somewhere else.

It's still the middle of January so the sun is setting around 5pm, but that might be the horizon-time, getting cut short by the Sierra Nevadas that only seem to tower over the city in the evening hours.

A winding road heading up the foothills to Virginia City, Geiger Grade is a mini-destination road for performance cars and motorcycles; there is always someone waiting for you to take one of the pullouts so they can pass and feel the bends of the road. I'm not confident with pushing that stuff.

Geiger Grade. Past that mountain is Virginia City, another 15-20 minutes from Lookout Point.

OnX reminded me there was a Lookout spot that's frequented by anyone looking for a good sunset view over the Sierra Nevadas. It's a great hangout spot, but looks like it had ambitions to do more many years ago, with rock-built structures that have disintegrated into ruins. The only sign that they weren't historical was the concrete that kept stair steps and isolated spires together.

I kept wondering to myself, "What was it all supposed to be?" Maybe I should have kept the pictures of the rest of the ruins, but I don't want to blow this post up with too many pictures.

Several lookout spots were built on rock outcroppings. Almost all of them were covered in graffiti. Broken glass bottles of past parties littered the bottoms of the outcroppings, where I was attempting to find some good landscape angles before the sun disappeared. I didn't have much luck, and ended up taking a few more post-Golden Hour photos.

Looking down into Washoe Valley.

Honestly, due to mansions taking the tops of the mountains in this area, I didn't find many shots to take advantage of the red and green textures that make me enjoy Geiger Grade so much. A lot of the northern Nevada high desert are a mix of greys and greens, which are usually overpowered by the color of the sky. There are just some occasional patches of the desert that really "pops" for the camera.

After pondering the ruins of recreation around the Lookout, I decided there was not much more to take advantage of, especially since Princess was patiently waiting to go somewhere else.

Next time, if I come back, I'll take the steep trail down and see if there's anything else to see, but overall, it seems more like a "shoot your camera straight into the sun until it's gone" type of place.