Hwhup The Deans List? The Jason Dean here, bringing an end to the Weekend like it was the end of the Fiscal Year. That’s right, for those of you who celebrate, happy Fiscal New Year’s Eve Eve Eve! I hope the Easter Claus makes all your balance sheets come true.

Anyways. Let’s get into it.

Art

I’m going to wax a little philosophical here, mostly for my own edification (but would love to hear your thoughts!).

TL:DR- Bonus images 😎

Earlier this month, I had an interview published in Bold Journey Magazine. You may remember me mentioning it.

In the interview, I talked about “being self-critical in a non-judgmental way”, something I accomplish in my work by having “multiple checkpoints where I am constantly evaluating and re-evaluating my photos”. I do this because I want to “have the confidence that the work I’m putting out into the world is really my best work”. And every single word I said to Bold Journey is true. Nothing has happened since then to change my philosophy.

Except I recently self-diagnosed myself as suffering from acute Analysis Paralysis. Let me explain.

Part of my ‘multiple checkpoints’ system is simply allowing photos to ‘prove’, as it were. Now pay close attention, because this is where you learn that I know absolutely nothing about baking. By doing intermittent quality ‘sweeps’, I allow my photos to ‘prove’ which essentially lets me get distance from my initial reactions (which can be influenced by recency bias and residual exhilaration from the photo shoot itself), which in turn allows me to make more rational, less emotionally-driven decisions about what images I like and don’t like. I edit the photos that I like and put them into a queue. Once queued, the photo goes through additional intermittent sweeps to see if I still like it until eventually, I share it.

The problem is that sometimes, I see my photos so many times through this process that I can lose track of whether or not I feel a photo is good enough to share and so it can be paralyzing to just, you know, share my photos.

Consider the first three photos below. Originally, I was planning to share these photos in this edition of The Weekender. All were taken back in June and just finalized last week:

Then I started second guessing whether or not I should share them because I didn’t know if they were any good. Even now, after making the commitment to share them here, I have lost the ability to know for sure.

This is not the first time this has happened. When I am hit with this Analysis Paralysis, my conundrum becomes whether to discard my work to the cyber-sands of time, never to be seen by another person; or, to go against my current gut feeling and send them out into the unforgiving wilds. I decided to share these particular photos but I can’t say for sure how I will handle these situations in the future. 😕

That said, you should know I am not taking this uncertainty lying down! In order to shake things up and hopefully stave off more Analysis Paralysis in my near future, I am trying something different. The three (bonus) photos below are ones that I have taken recently- as in ‘Within the last week’-recently. These were all edited on Lightroom Mobile while chilling in the hammock after work on Friday. They have not gone through the ‘proving’ process; they are, quite literally, fresh out of that big hot thing where you put the one stuff into (I told you I know nothing about baking).

Thank you for coming to my mini-existential crisis. If you’re excited to see me continue to overcome my doubts, you can support the dream by hurling a metaphysical cup o’ Joe my way at the button below! And if you can’t, it’s all good friend- sharing my work on your socials is awesome too (although, as you’ll see in a bit, you might want to not share this particular edition of The Weekender on Meta’s platforms).

Field Trip

A couple of weeks ago, I’d shared that I was going to be a part of Humana Obscura’s Fall Issue. Well, that Fall Issue is live now! I’ve ordered mine and it’s supposed to be here next week. As always, I can’t wait to see my work in the wild in a collection of other wonderful art and words from some other amazing human beings.

And last week I preshared that I was going to be a part of an upcoming holiday art show. I’m postpleased to announce that show will be the Twenty-fifth Annual Holiday Art Sale at the Marquette History Center. More information to come, but you should just know I’m so freaking ecstatic, folks!

Philosophy

If you’ve followed me for any period of time, you’ve heard me talk about my involvement with Hintology.

Hintology has played a HUGE role in my development as an artist. They showed me that there is an entire community of people like me; people that enjoy photography but not in the ‘taking normal pictures’ kind of way that I enjoy photography. They were my first (and second) outlet for having my photography published in print media, and they’ve platformed me multiple times on their socials. I’m forever grateful for what they’ve given me.

Recently, their social media accounts (Instagram and Facebook) were suspended. Apparently an artist had their work featured in Hintology’s weekly curation without the expressed written consent of the artist (typically, using #hintology has been an informal sort of ‘Sure, you can share my photos in this social media space’ permission). This person reached out demanding financial compensation and threatened legal action before blocking Hintology and presumably reporting the accounts to Meta. As of this writing (editors note: 2:30 PM on Saturday, September 27), the accounts have not been restored and Meta has not given any reason for the suspension or a timeline for resolution. Apparently this suspension did not just hit the Hintology offical accounts, but even the person accounts for Hintology’s editor-in-chief, Vincent.

Yikes.

Let me first say that I actually have a degree of empathy for the artist whom I am assuming reported the incident to Meta. As someone who is moving into the world of art-as-income, I can understand the idea of being fiercely protective of your work. If this is your livelihood and people are out there just stealing it (note- I am NOT in any way suggesting that Hintology stole their work)- you do have to be vigilant and guard against your work being stolen. And while I parenthesized it, I’ll say it again- I do NOT believe Hintology stole their work. I can just understand why they may have responded in a certain way.

That said, this person can go pound sand. Hintology is a wonderful community that likely gave this person some latent career boosts along the path of their artistic journey. If you want them to take your work down, give them the chance to take your work down before playing games.

The actual reason I’m bringing all this up in The Weekender, however, is because this whole ordeal confirms my reasons for leaving Facebook earlier this year. In Vincent’s newsletter explaining the social media outage, he put into words exactly why I brought The Jason Dean to Beehiiv.com: “Regardless of what happens with Meta, this whole experience has shown me how vulnerable we are when we build community entirely on platforms we don't control. One complaint, one algorithmic decision, and everything can vanish overnight” (emphasis mine).

Here’s what I know: Mark Zuckerberg and his sycophantic billionaire ilk are cowards who have no idea what it means to have community with other people. They use our intrinsic desire for human connection against us in order to make rich people richer by sowing division and selling our data. As soon as your (virtual) existence threatens that cash cow they will cut you off with no warning and no recourse. They don’t care if you have a voice or not unless that voice does something that threatens their bottom line, in which case they hit a button and vaporize your (again, virtual) existence.

Friends, that is why The Deans List.

A lot of words today- I think I had a lot of pent-up things to say that just sort of spilled out. Thanks for hanging with me til the end! You…did stay till the end, right? If you did, please drop a ‘Hang Eighteen’ in the comments. Thanks for being awesome, friends!

See you around,

Jason