ghosts got left behind

Posted on October 9, 2026 by greg

What do you do on a bright sunny October day when you don’t want to do the stuff you really ought to be doing? You decide to drive 30 miles into the countryside to photograph an abandoned (and reportedly haunted) 1860s Italianate house for Wikipedia.

Well, that’s what I decided to do anyway. But some days just don’t turn out the way you expect them to.

The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has a Wikipedia page. Officially it’s called the J.G. and Regina Long house, but historically it was known as the Maple Grove Hill farm. Why? Because the house was set on a hill and Joseph Grayson (J.G.) Long planted a grove of maple trees which, in the mid 19th century, weren’t common in Iowa.

Three things on the Wikipedia page caught my attention. First:

According to local tradition, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad and features an underground tunnel connecting the house to a barn.

How cool is that? Very cool, is how cool. Who wouldn’t want to see a house with an underground tunnel (okay, ‘underground tunnel’ seems kind of redundant) to help escaped slaves? And then there was this:

a radio station in Iowa, has reported the house to be haunted by evil spirits due to its history.

Really, a house with a secret tunnel would have been enough. A house with a tunnel that was part of the Underground Railroad would have been enough. Dayenu, right? But on top of that we’ve got some evil spirits. It’s almost too much. According to the documentation to have the house listed on the National Registry,

A female wraith, projecting an image of haunting, albeit benign, sorrow, has appeared over the years to individuals in different rooms. The present owner, who has experienced the phenomenon, believes the figure to be Regina Hiskey Long, second wife of J. G. Long, because of its resemblance to a photograph of her.

So okay, maybe the spirits aren’t all that evil. Maybe Wikipedia got that part wrong. But even benign spirits are cool, right? And the third thing that caught my attention? There was no photograph of the house. We’re talking about a house that was part of an informal secret network to help slaves escape their bondage, a house haunted by a wraith (who may or may not have been evil, who knows?), and there was no photograph of it on the Wikipedia page? How was that possible? A house like that? It deserves a photo. The situation needed to be rectified. And I decided I was just the guy to do the rectifying.

So there’s me yesterday, camera in hand, ready to do right by Wikipedia…and what did I find? No maple trees. No underground tunnel leading to a barn. No barn, in fact. And absolutely no ghosts. Not even the slightest tingling feeling of ghostitude. I can’t say I felt cheated, because the house was still exceedingly cool (for an abandoned farmhouse), but it wasn’t quite what I expected.

There was a very good reason for that. It turns out the house has been moved. Back in 2012 the property was sold and the new owner apparently decided he didn’t want to own a historic haunted house. So another person bought it and had it shifted a couple of miles to this new location. The tunnel, the barn, the maple trees, and the ghost were left behind.

But here’s the thing: houses aren’t just buildings; rooms aren’t just areas enclosed by a ceiling, floor and walls. Inhabited spaces can be metaphors for the people who inhabit them. A lived-in room can inform you; it can answer questions. Who lived here? Who worked here? What were their lives like? How did their lives shape this structure, these rooms?

The J.G. and Regina Long house, even though it’s been moved and inhabited by many other people, can start to answer a lot of questions about who J.G. and Regina were. And the first question is this: how did they come to build a farmhouse in an Italianate style with Gothic arched windows in rural Iowa in the 1860s?

The U.S. Civil War had ended; ‘civilization’ was moving westward, driven by railroad expansion. The arrival of the Chicago & Rock Island railroad in Monroe, Iowa made it feasible for goods to be shipped from the east coast. Italianate style private homes had become popular on the east coast in the 1840s, largely because the development of cast-iron and press-metal technology made the production of decorative elements more affordable. Without the railroad, it’s highly unlikely an Italianate home could have been built in Iowa in the late 1860s.

An 1875 illustration of the Maple Grove Hill farm in its original location.

In the early 1860s, Joseph Grayson (J.G.) Long and his brother Jesse moved from to Iowa from Pennsylvania following the death of J.G.’s first wife. They’d been prosperous in Pennsylvania and farmland was cheap in Iowa. They both bought land, built similar Italianate houses, and became successful breeders of thorough-bred cattle. J.G. remarried (Regina Hiskey, a schoolteacher from Ohio) and had a family. Jesse became the president of a local bank. The future looked bright and promising for the Long brothers.

And yet, something was clearly wrong. In 1875, J.G.’s brother Jesse committed suicide by hanging. A few years later, J.G.’s son died from a self-inflicted gunshot. And according to the local newspaper, in 1899 J.G. himself “became insane, was adjudged a fit inmate for the asylum at Mt. Pleasant by the commissioners and has been taken thence.” He was institutionalized for a year; shortly after his release, he died in house he’d built. Jesse’s house was destroyed in a tornado.

Regina continued to live in the house her husband built; she died there in 1925. If ghosts actually exist, then I can see her as an “image of haunting, albeit benign, sorrow.”

The house and property passed through various hands until 2012, when it was relocated. It’s now completely abandoned. Sadly, but not very surprising, the house has been vandalized. Inevitably, at some point in the future, the house will be gone—either intentionally demolished or a victim of severe weather. It’s a shame for many reasons. There’s something poignant and tragic about any abandoned house, but especially one that held such promise when it was built.

As the documentation for its inclusion on the National Register of Historical Places says:

The Long house dramatically expresses the optimism and economic vitality, which [the region] experienced during its early years when its location on a major overland route from the southeast to Des Moines seemed to insure its future growth.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defined the future as a “period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.” Obviously, that sort of future is often an illusion. J.G. Long surely didn’t anticipate his future. And hey, my day yesterday didn’t turn out as I’d expected. But spending time in the J.G. Long house, learning about his life and the odd history of the house he built, has been worthwhile. I do find myself thinking about Regina, alone in that large house out in the countryside.

Any actual ghosts may not have moved with the house, but house itself is in the gradual process of becoming a ghost. I’m glad I was able to witness and explore a part of that process.

unexpected romance

Posted on September 28, 2026 by greg

I live in Iowa, a farm state, but I don’t know dick about farms. Or farming or farm life or farm culture or farm technology. Crops—I can distinguish corn from soybeans. Livestock? I’m sort of familiar with basic farm animals—I’m okay with generic pigs and cows, but I couldn’t tell you about different breeds. I can identify some farm equipment, like a combine, though I don’t really understand what it does. I’m basically ignorant about almost everything farm-related.

That said, I’m sort of intrigued by farming in a sociological way. Periodically, I’ll make my way out into the countryside or I’ll visit a small town to shoot some photographs and maybe try to get a sense of what life is like for rural folks. In keeping with that, last week I went on a brief tour sponsored by the Iowa Barn Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving old barns. I expected to learn something about the history of barn architecture.

I did not expect romance.

Two sheds, a wheelbarrow of bricks, and a very red truck.

I’ll come back to the romance in a bit. First, the reason I wanted to take that tour and visit the Mitchell farm was to see their barn. Not the barn you see in the photograph below. Their other barn. The barn they bought in 2019, the barn a neighbor was about to demolish, the barn (built in 1915) they decided to jack up and move to their property. That’s right, the young couple you see in the photo bought a used barn for US$2000. Then they found some folks who’d put it on a massive trailer, and they had it hauled a couple of miles to their farm.

I was eager to see that barn. I figured any barn that could elicit that sort of response from folks must be one hell of a barn. But when we arrived at the Mitchell farm, I didn’t even notice the barn. In fact, I spent the entire morning on the farm and failed to shoot a single photograph of the exterior of that vagabond barn, that vaga-barn. Why? Because I was immediately distracted by…well, by everything else on the farm. Beginning with Matt and Libby Mitchell.

I noticed them even before I left the tour bus. They were sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, casually talking to each other. What struck me was how obviously comfortable they were with each other. Kicked back, patiently waiting for a bus to disgorge a small group of strangers who were there to nose around on their property. There was no sense of discomfort or unease or anxiety; there was, instead, a very palpable aura of quiet contentment. You could see that these two people liked and cared for each other, that they shared a casual, companionable intimacy. They were so obviously affectionate, so relaxed and comfortable, so contented. I wanted to photograph them…forget the barn.

Then, of course, there were all those tractors.

Some of the approximately 35 old tractors.

So many tractors. At one point I asked Matt how many he had. “Oh, about thirty-five or so.” Thirty-five or so. Like the actual number didn’t matter. What makes this even more weird is that the man doesn’t seem like a collector. At least not in the traditional sense. Not like people who collect coins or thimbles or comics. He doesn’t seem to be deliberately putting together a collection, he’s not out tractor-hunting. He just hears about old tractors nobody wants…and brings them home.

Those tractors? They’re all operational. They work. He hasn’t restored them; he apparently doesn’t care that they look like old tractors. He just wants them to work. To be working tractors. I don’t know, maybe he wants them to fulfill their tractor destiny or something, and tractors are supposed to work. That’s the purpose of their existence.

It was the same with almost everything on the farm. Matt Mitchell is something of an agri-tech otaku. He has a deep, obsessive passion for old farm equipment. He finds it, buys it, or barters for it, or just agrees to take it off somebody’s hands so they can get rid of it. Then he brings it home, gets it in working order, and…and that’s it. Then he’s happy.

Scattered throughout the farm are projects—some finished, some in progress, some only a vague promise in the future. It’s a working farm, of course, so there’s a haymow in the vaga-barn’s hayloft (a brief tangent; I learned that a haymow is a pile of hay, loose or baled, stored in a hayloft). The vaga-barn is also a place to store future projects. An old Suzuki motorcycle, a pair of ceramic farm sinks, a rocking chair, an old desk—all of it dusty and distressed but potentially functional.

Potentially functional, that seems to be the key. Functional and practical. Not necessarily practical in the present day, but practical for its time. For example, the vaga-barn has an operational Louden Hay Carrier. “What in the hell is a Louden Hay Carrier?” you ask. It was a revolutionary pulley and track system developed by William Louden in 1867. It allowed farmers to easily transfer hay (either loose or in bales) into a hayloft, which made it possible to build bigger barns with larger lofts to store more hay. Here’s a video showing how it worked:

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn about the Louden Hay Carrier until after I’d spent time in the loft, so my photographs don’t show the tracking system. But in the photo below you can see the loft’s drop door and the ropes that accompany the system.

The loft of the vaga-barn, with the ropes of the Louden Hay Carrier

Following Matt and Libby Mitchell around their farm, listening to them talk about the things they’ve acquired, the projects they’ve completed (or started), I came to understand their interest isn’t grounded in nostalgia. Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for a golden past that’s very likely imaginary. This isn’t about a desire to capture the past.

This is romance. Not the sort of soppy, sentimental romance we see in movies (and, okay, I confess to enjoying rom-coms, but this isn’t that). This is romance in an older sense. I’m talking about an active, emotional connection with, and affection for, old technology. It’s passionate, to be sure, but not the burning, all-consuming sort of passion that torches everything and eventually extinguishes itself. This is a quiet, relaxed, enduring sort of passion. It escapes the boundaries of logic and convention, yes, but it never strays very far from reality. This is romance grounded in the appreciation of the beauty, purity, and out-dated practicality of agri-tech that can still work.

Matt Mitchell praising mortise and tenon joinery.

The Mitchells don’t need a thing to be shiny or pretty; it just has to have a history, it has to have had a life, it has to have mattered once to somebody, and it needs to have the potential to perform its function. If that potential is there, the Mitchells would like to see it fulfilled.

That’s romance, right there.

storms and bicycles

Posted on August 10, 2026 by greg

Six years ago today I had two ‘first ever’ experiences at the same time. I’d bought my first ebike—a massive 70 pound fat tire Rad Rover—a month or so earlier. As I’ve said many times, at that point I’d never even seen an ebike. I bought it online, purely out of hope that I might be able to ride again with minimal knee pain. It was a life-changing purchase. I rode that burly bastard everywhere for that month and I’d never taken it out of the lowest level of pedal assist. I’d never needed to.

Until that day six years ago.

That day started out beautifully. Bright, sunny, a bit humid but with a light breeze, a few fluffy decorative clouds. Classic Midwest August weather. I was still enamored with my new bike, so I stopped periodically and photographed it. After I’d ridden about ten miles, the weather began to change. The sky got a wee bit darker; it looked like we might get a rain shower. I don’t mind riding in a light rain, but I wasn’t sure how an ebike would fare in a shower. So I headed home.

Ebikes were still really uncommon in 2020. Almost every time I went out for a ride, somebody would stop me and quiz me about it. How far could it go, how fast was it, was it expensive, where did I get it, was it different from a regular bike, why were the tires so fat, was it cheating? On this day six years ago, as I was riding down a street that would some day become a new housing development, a city worker flagged me down to ask questions.

We chatted about the bike and about the housing development, and as we talked a tornado siren began to blare. That’s not an unusual occurrence in August, but it’s normally in conjunction with a thunderstorm. It still looked like we might get a bit of rain, but clearly there was no thunderstorm. So we ignored the siren. After a couple of minutes, it went silent.

Before the second tornado siren sounded.

A few minutes later, it sounded again. It still didn’t look like we were facing any sort of seriously bad weather, but a second tornado siren suggests we should pay more attention. The city worker and I both checked our phones. As we did, the wind began to pick up. This is what I saw on my phone.

The city worker climbed back into his truck; I got back on the bike. I was only about four miles from home, so I wasn’t particularly concerned. Then a third tornado siren went off. And the sky got really dark and the wind became pretty insistent. There was still no rain, but there was a radical drop in temperature. I could see bad weather behind me, so for the first time ever, I put the bike in a higher level of pedal assist. There were five levels of pedal assist; I went to level four. With the wind behind me, I was easily cruising just over 20 mph on a 70 pound bicycle.

Let me say this. There’s a weird sort of joy in riding a bike as a bad storm chases after you. Part of it is the drama, of course. The sky getting dark, the wind picking up, the sirens blaring. I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, but there’s something perversely thrilling about being in a situation that’s out of your control, and dealing with it, and getting away with it. That was one of the things I liked most about being a PI. This situation was definitely out of my control and I was dealing with it, but I had yet to get away with it.

Ginger, my partner, had obviously heard the sirens; she had the garage door open for me. I rode directly into the garage, got off the bike, and closed the door just as the rain began. I was laughing at having escaped the storm, still unaware of what had actually been chasing me. I went to a window and looked out. This is what I saw.

This was the second ‘first ever’ event. I’d never heard the term derecho before. A derecho is a widespread weather system of straight wind reaching at least 60 mph along a front of at least 240 miles lasting at least six hours. This derecho had winds of 120-140 mph (in Iowa); it lasted about eight hours, causing astonishing amount of damage across several states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

There was no prior warning of this storm in Iowa. Weather forecasts didn’t show the possibility of a derecho occurring until it was already happening. The system developed rapidly and arrived unexpectedly. As the storm traveled east, of course, more communities were warned, but locally it was an absolute surprise.

I got back on my bike the next day to survey the damage. It was easier to travel by bike than by car; fallen trees, downed power lines, and debris blocked several city streets and the city’s network of multi-use paths, as well as most of the bike trails.

The storm caused over $11 billion in damages. It’s taken years to rebuild. Although most of the communities have recovered physically from that derecho, trees are slower to replace. You can still see the damage along some of the more rural bike trails. This section of the Heart of Iowa trail is still littered with fallen and partially denuded trees.

The Heart of Iowa trail hasn’t fully recovered.

It was a hell of a storm. Six years ago today. I’m still cycling, although I’ve bought a newer, lighter, more maneuverable ebike. But as I ride along the more rural bike trails, I still see evidence of the derecho. And every time I do, I remember that thrilling, harrowing, frenzied race to get home, and I’m grateful for the invention of pedal assist.

You can read more about that derecho at this site by the National Weather Service.

deadpan — not really dead at all

Posted on August 2, 2026 by greg

About a month ago I happened to use the phrase ‘Deadpan aesthetic’ in conversation with a photographer friend. He was unfamiliar with the term—with the entire concept, really—and asked what it meant. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it was essentially this:

It’s what Buster Keaton would shoot if he had a digital camera.

Which didn’t help him at all because, let’s face it, it’s a bullshit answer. I was trying to be clever, but ended up just being a smart-ass. However, I’ve been sporadically thinking about the concept ever since. So I did what people normally do when they’re sporadically thinking about anything. I turned to the internet, which kindly gave me this definition:.

[A] deadpan photograph is devoid of emotion. It simply exists as a subject and photograph, yet it seems to be empty. There is no joy or sorrow.

This is from the New York Film Academy. Far be it from me to claim the NYFA is full of shit, but folks, the NYFA is pretty much full of shit. There IS an approach to photography that’s devoid of emotion, but it ain’t Deadpan. It’s called New Topographics. Very few photographers follow a pure New Topo approach. I can only think of one. Well, okay, two—but they’re a team. Bernd and Hilla Becher. In the 1950s and 60s they photographed German industrial architecture. Which is about as exciting as you’d think it is.

Reserved Parking, Iowa Department for the Blind

There’s most definitely emotion in Deadpan photography. It’s just understated, soft-pedaled (see note) emotion. It may be dry humor, it may be wistful, maybe a tad melancholy, or nostalgic, or any quiet emotion, but it’s there. There’s something ineffably sad about a bare Christmas tree in an alley behind the Department for the Blind.

Let me give you a better, more accurate definition (with less bullshit than my earlier definition). Here we go:

Deadpan photography examines the living world as it is; simple, without pretense, without any attempt at artfulness, without staging, straightforward, but with an eye for understated absurdity.

Think Deadpan humor with a camera. You know what? My original definition was accidentally pretty accurate. Buster Keaton was the model for Deadpan humor. He put himself in absurd positions, but never cracked a smile. It’s an acknowledgement that the world is absurd, that absurdity is everywhere, but mostly unseen or ignored. There’s something quietly absurd about a nearly religious symbol in an alleyway near a metal container for used cooking oil.

Yea, though I walk through the alley of the shadow of cooking oil…

A Deadpan photograph makes you go “what?“. Not “WHAT??!!“. It doesn’t hit you over the head. It’s not farce. It probably won’t make you laugh, although it might make you shake your head a bit. Deadpan photography occupies an odd interstitial space between the very human tendency to seek meaning in life and the failure to find it. It doesn’t necessarily nudge you to ask questions, but it may make you blink and try to make sense of what you’re seeing. There’s a certain ‘What the hell?’ quality to Deadpan.

There are no rules to Deadpan photography, but there are some general similarities. The photos tend to be shot head on, straightforward, avoiding artsy angles. The lighting is generally flat and devoid of dramatic shadows. Colors are often soft, muted. Compositions are mostly somewhat formal and balanced. But those are just generalities. You can ignore all that and, if you happen across a wee church surrounded by dandelions in a decaying, semi-industrial section of a small town on a bright sunny day, you can still shoot a Deadpan photograph. I mean, what the hell is a tiny wooden one-room church with a steeple doing among those warehouses?

That’s te thing about Deadpan photography; photographically, it’s really simple. It doesn’t matter where you are, or what time you’re there, or whether the sun is right, or what sort of camera (or lens) you have, or whether anything ‘interesting’ is taking place. You just have to BE there and pay attention. The entire world is filled with ‘What the hell?’ scenes just waiting for a Deadpan photographer to wander by. The world you live in is going to give you stuff to photograph. All you have to do is look and see stuff that normal people are ignoring, to recognize there’s something—not wrong exactly, but not quite right—about what you’re seeing.

Then point your camera at it and take the photo.

If you shoot photos regularly, you’ve probably shot some Deadpan photos without realizing it. The trick is to do it with intention. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

NOTE: Yes, that’s right, soft-pedaled. Not soft-peddled and certainly not soft-petaled. The lefthand pedal on a piano is the soft pedal, which is used to create a quieter, softer, more delicate tone.

return of the red menace

Posted on July 25, 2026 by greg

Really? Communists…again? It’s 2026 and we’re fretting about Commies? The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thirty-five years ago, and yet here’s Comrade President Donald Trump, Putin’s puppy, speaking at Mount Rushmore a couple of weeks ago:

[C]ommunism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.

Why? I mean, sure, Republicans are locked into a revolving Monster-of-the-Month cycle. But why communism, and why now? We’re still at sorta-war with Iran, so if it’s just basic fear-mongering there are plenty of Muslim extremists to point at. As far as that goes, ICE is still rounding up (and/or killing) every brown immigrant (or immigrant-looking person) that comes within arm’s reach. There are a lot of classic MAGA targets handy.

But no. They’re doing Communists again. Why, in the year 2026, are Republicans propping up ancient bones from the freaky 1950s? Nobody is scared of Communists anymore. There doesn’t seem to be any rational (yeah, I know, rationality has nothing to do with it) reason to resurrect the Red Menace.

Unless…

Ask yourself this: what does Trump really want? What does he need? He wants more money, sure, and more power. But I’d argue that what Trump needs is to have his ego fluffed. He needs to be admired, to be respected. He needs to be seen as an historically important figure, to have his name remembered. That’s why he’s pasting his name and face on just about anything that’s stationary—buildings, currency, documents.

I think that desperate need is what’s behind his consistent emphasis on creating a 51st state. Nobody has expanded the US since 1959, when Eisenhower added Alaska and Hawaii to the map. Trump has openly fantasized about making Greenland or Canada as 51st states, but nobody really takes that seriously. Puerto Rico, of course, is right there, but Trump doesn’t like Puerto Rico. Or Puerto Ricans, for that matter.

But Cuba? Cubans are almost…white. At least the ones in Florida are. And Cuban Americans have been reliable Republicans for decades now.

So maybe Cuba…the 51st state?

Let’s face it, you couldn’t ask for a more invadeable sovereign nation than Cuba. First off, it’s convenient. It’s right there, just a few miles off the coast of Florida. Easily reachable by boat or aircraft. And hell, we’ve already got a military base on Cuba. Guantanamo, forty-five square miles of US territory perched on the eastern edge of the island. Perfect for a bit of invasion staging.

A scene from The Godfather Part II in which members of the Mafia meet in Cuba.

And Cuba is weak. Sure, they have a standing army of about 50,000 troops, but c’mon. They’re armed with out-dated military hardware leftover from the Soviet era. Cuba is weak in just about every possible way. They’ve been under an embargo of goods and services since the 1960s. But after his Venezuela romp in February, Trump implemented a more stringent naval blockade of fuel and oil going to Cuba. The island has been without a reliable fuel source for half a year.

The result? The fuel shortage has hampered the harvesting of crops, so we’re talking food shortages. There’s no fuel for public transportation, so it’s more difficult for people to get around. Schools and colleges have closed. The fuel shortage means garbage trucks haven’t been able to collect garbage, creating a public health crisis. Hospitals are not only experiencing electrical blackouts, the embargo has made it difficult to restock their medical supplies. There’s been a dramatic increase in deaths, especially among seniors and infants. Fire trucks and other emergency transportation units have extremely limited abilities to respond.

Trump has created a massive humanitarian crisis in Cuba. It’s entirely on brand for Trump to now declare that ONLY HE can solve Cuba’s problems. It would be best if Cuba’s government invited the US in, but if not…well, the US cannot stand idly by and see the poor people of Cuba suffer. Order must be restored. By force, if necessary.

Oh, did I mention that Cuba is one of the few remaining Communist governments? And suddenly we’re seeing a MAGA resurgence of the horrors of communism. A Trump tells us, it’s a mortal threat to American liberty.

Also? Cuba is a tropical island. A real estate developer’s dream, an ideal location for resorts and casinos and hotels—which are all close to Trump’s heart (or whatever organ he has in place of a heart). Remember, this is a guy who saw the devastation of Gaza and the genocide of Palestinians as an opportunity to acquire beachfront property.

Let’s not forget that from the 1930s to 1959, when the Cuban revolution took place, Cuba was essentially a paradise for organized crime. Didn’t you watch The Godfather Part 2? Would anybody be surprised to learn that Trump’s retirement plan is to set himself up as the Godfather of Cuba?

against my better judgment

Posted on July 23, 2026 by greg

Sometimes the forces of popular culture ensnare you. Most of the time you can ignore them, but every so often some slippery bastard finds its way past your guard. Then one day, against your better judgment, you too put your baseball cap on backwards. One day, you too join Instagram. One day, you too watch KPop Demon Hunters or Severance. One day, you too drink kombucha. One day, against your better judgment, you too play pickleball. It’s not so much that you want to do these things; it’s just that you find yourself thinking, “I dunno, maybe I’m missing out on something? Maybe? What the hell, I’ll try it.”

One day, against my better judgment, I bought the book Dungeon Crawler Carl and turned to page one.

For the last year or so I’ve seen Dungeon Crawler Carl (let’s just agree to call it DCC) mentioned on various social media. I thought it was possibly the stupidest book title I’d ever encountered, but beyond that I gave DCC no real thought. Then, about a month ago, my niece mentioned it. We often discuss books and though she’s more sober-minded than I am, I’ve learned to trust her taste. The last time we spoke, she confessed she’d picked up DCC, started to skim it, and couldn’t put it down. She said she was reading the third book in the series. Her husband was on the sixth book.

A few days ago I finished reading a novel and began to cast around for something else to read. Here’s the problem with ebooks; they’re almost designed for impulse buying. I don’t recall what DCC cost, but it was fairly inexpensive. so against my better judgment, I bought it. And started reading it.

Folks, it really is as stupid as it sounds. Possibly even more stupid.

Also? My niece was right; it’s completely engaging. I just bought the second book in the series.

For those of you who are completely and happily unfamiliar with Dungeon Crawler Carl, here’s a brief summary. At 2:23 AM on January 3rd, every structure on Earth that had a roof completely pancaked. Totally flat, smooshing everybody inside (or partially inside).

If you had any sort of roof over you, you were dead. That included people in cars, airplanes, subways. Even tents and cardboard boxes.

What happens next is…okay, wait, a tangent. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, right? Poet, literary critic, philosopher, theologian in the late 18th and early 19th century. You know, In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree, that Coleridge. One of the things our boy Sam came up with was the concept of poetic faith, which he described as the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.” Basically, he was saying readers need to relax into a story and not get fussy about its ‘realism.’ This poetic faith is what allows readers (and movie-goers and television watchers) to set aside their logic and accept a world in which librarians solve murders and sword-wielding women in lingerie-armor fight dragons.

Sam Coleridge would applaud Matt Dinniman, the guy who wrote DCC. Right from page one, the reader has to willingly suspend disbelief like a motherfucker. By the end of Chapter One, you not only have to accept that every structure with a roof gets massively smooshed, you have to accept that what’s left of the Earth gets turned into a subterranean reality game show sponsored by some sort of galactic corporation. A game show that echoes every roleplaying video game ever made, in which the survivors of the Great Smooshing become characters fighting monsters (and sometimes each other) as they move through the various levels of the game, while an intergalactic audience watches.

There is absolutely no way this premise should work. I mean, the first five or six chapters are basically a game tutorial. Carl, of course, was NOT inside at 2:23 AM when the Great Smooshing took place. He was outside his Seattle apartment, wearing only a leather jacket, boxer shorts, and a pair of pink Crocs, trying to coax Donut, his ex-girfriend’s prize Persian cat, back inside. Carl and Donut become unwilling contestants in the game.

I am NOT making this up. That’s the story, these two (it’s not a spoiler to tell you Donut becomes sentient and able to speak) fight their way through various levels of the game dungeon. An inordinate amount of time is spent on Carl and Donut setting up their display menus, killing monsters, adding loot to their inventories, gaining game experience, leveling up, assigning skill points.

This should NOT WORK AS A NOVEL. But it does.

Why? For several reasons. First, obviously, is the developing relationship between Carl and Donut. Anybody who has ever shared space with a different species (cat, dog, ferret, snake, doesn’t matter) will identify with this. Like any relationship, it evolves as the characters experience the world and change. The relationship shifts through various stages from ‘Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s annoying cat’ to ‘Carl and Donut.’ And you sense the relationship will continue to evolve in future books.

Second, periodically we’re reminded that the Great Smooshing was an incredibly traumatic event. Not only that, but the injustice of forcing the few survivors to fight for their survival—sometimes against each other—as a form of entertainment is a recurring emotional trauma. And even though the reader knows Carl and Donut will survive their adventures (at least for now), other characters don’t. Carl often has to decide how far he’ll go to survive and/or keep Donut alive. There’s real emotion here.

Third, the story addresses issues involving the entertainment industry in general and game shows in specific, as well as aspects of corporate greed. To improve their slim odds of survival, Carl and Donut need to be popular, to attract fans of the show. That can mean killing in spectacularly gory ways. This is made more problematic when they discover the ‘monsters’ they fight are essentially replaceable slave labor, whose suffering is real.

I used to teach fiction writing. I always told my students that a writer has one overarching job: to get the reader to keep turning the page. Yes, there are hundreds of other things writers need to do, but if you want people to read your work, you have to find ways to make the reader want to turn the page—to need to turn the page, to find out what happens next.

Matt Dinniman does his job well. He’s got me turning pages. Is this art? Nope. Is it literature? Nope. But it’s solid, clever, thoughtful workmanship. I don’t know how many books are in this series. I don’t know if I’ll read them all.

But I know I’ll read the next one.

may in monochrome

Posted on June 14, 2026 by greg

A few days ago I posted some photographs I shot during a rainstorm, which disrupted a planned photowalk. I casually mentioned it was difficult to think in terms of color having just spent “a month of shooting mostly monochrome.” And I realized, I’d failed to write about my May in Monochrome project. So…here.

May is the month when Spring really takes hold. April gets credit for getting it started, but May is when everything seems to change overnight. That whole April-showers-May-flowers business is pretty accurate. May is a colorful month.

So what in the hell was I thinking when I decided to do a month-long monochrome project in May?

I suspect it had something to do with the release of the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome camera back in February. Even though I’m not considering buying one (at least not until they come out with a 40mm equivalent model), I checked out a lot of reviews of the camera. That means I saw a LOT of amazing black-and-white photographs. (Okay, I suppose we have to address the “Is there a difference between ‘monochome’ and ‘black-and-white’?” question. Technically, the answer is yes; monochrome means ‘one color’; we’re talking a single base color along with its different shades and tones. You could, for example, do a monochromatic photo in shade of red. But for most photographers, we use the terms interchangeably. Sometimes because ‘monochrome’ sounds more cool, sometimes (as in my case) it’s because we’re lazy and it takes fewer characters to type than ‘black-and-white. It takes even fewer characters to type ‘BW’ so guess what I’ll be doing for the rest of this post.)

I grew up shooting BW. That was mainly because BW film was less expensive than color film and much easier to process in the darkroom. But shooting BW taught me a lot about line and form and tonality. The release of the new Ricoh camera got me jonesing for BW again, so I decided to devote a month to shooting mostly monochrome. It was just my luck that the new Ricoh happened just before May.

Just to be clear, when I say I shoot BW, I mean exactly that. I never (well, almost never) shoot in color then shift to BW in post-processing. When I shoot BW, I set my camera to BW; everything I see in the viewfinder (or on the display, with the Ricoh) is in BW. I do that to remove the distraction of color. I want to see the world in shades of tone rather than hues of color. When you strip away color, then texture, contrast, light, shadow, and specularity become more critical.

There’s a better than even chance you’re not familiar with the term specularity. It refers to they way light reflects off various surfaces. When light hits a flat surface (like the side of the buildings in the first photo or the surface of the pond in the second) it reflects differently than when it reflects off the rough, bristly side of a longhorn steer. That specularity becomes significantly more important in BW. Specularity makes you decide whether you want hard, sharp, contrasty images or soft diffuse ones. I say ‘you’ have to decide, but in truth the subject matter is often the deciding factor.

If I’m shooting in the city, I tend to go more contrasty (I’m pretty sure that’s actually a word) than when I’m shooting in the countryside.

Removing color from a photograph removes any number of visual distractions. Oddly enough, that makes it more difficult to shoot good images. An ‘okay’ color photo can, to some extent, be rescued by the introduction of interesting colors. They draw the eye; color can be visually satisfying in itself. With BW obviously, there’s no ‘interesting color’ rescue. The image succeeds or fails entirely on its composition and tonality. BW photography is more unforgiving.

Earlier, I noted that when I shoot BW, I set the camera to BW. A lot of photographers choose to shoot in what’s called RAW format. This captures ALL of the physical information about the intensity and color of the light, which necessarily means it produces an image of unprocessed color. RAW files are meant to be processed later on the computer; they allow you the most control over the final image. In truth, RAW files will produce ‘better’ monochrome photographs.

So why don’t I do that? I’m not entirely sure. I tell myself it’s because when I shoot BW, I want to commit to the image. I don’t want to turn a color image into a BW image. But, again, it might be because I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the time fussing with a lot of post-processing.

The thing about BW photography is that it feels timeless. I admit, that sentence reads like the sort of bullshit photography purists say when they want you to take them seriously. But there’s some Truth to it. The photograph above, shot in May of 2026, could just as easily have been shot in May of 1986 (the apartment building in the center of the frame was built in 1985). The longhorn cow and calf could have been shot in the 1930s. That’s part of the appeal, isn’t it.

It was fun and challenging to spend a month shooting mostly monochrome. But I’m not likely to do this again, at least not in the foreseeable future. I’ll still shoot BW photos when I see something that feels like it should be shot in BW, just like I always do. But after a while I deeply missed color. Some images are just better in color. In the selfie above, that ceramic cat is orange; the roof of that building in the background is bright blue; the wallpaper was a soft sort of lavender; the sewing machine was hot pink. There’s nothing wrong with the selfie in monochrome; it’s just incomplete.

Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe that’s the challenge. Some images can feel complete (or more complete) in monochrome. And some just can’t. The photographer has to be able to know the difference.

rained out

Posted on June 11, 2026 by greg

I was supposed to meet a friend yesterday and do a sort of photo-walk. He’s got something planned that requires a specific sort of urban photography–street scenes without people. We agreed to meet at the top of a parking garage at 0930. That would give us the last of the morning light, and at that time of day most city workers would be at their desks instead of loitering around the street. The delivery drivers would have unloaded most of their goods by then, and the unemployed folks would probably still be in bed or having coffee.

We hadn’t counted on the storm, which arrived almost precisely at 0925. My friend had the good sense to turn around and go back home. Me? I’d arrived early (an old PI habit; you always get there early and check out exits). I was atop the parking garage watching the storm come. It was impressive. Lightning, thunder, wind, the complete package.

I do love a good storm. My camera, however, does not. My little Ricoh GR isn’t waterproof. It’s not even weather-resistant. I’ve had it out in a light sprinkle, but that’s it. This wasn’t the sort of storm that begins with a few tentative drops; this arrived as a goddamn deluge. I took shelter in a rooftop elevator lobby…at the opposite end of where my car was parked.

I was dry, but effectively trapped. That gold Prius in the photo below? That’s my car. Without a camera, I might have made a run for it. But nope.

I didn’t mind being trapped, really. I was dry, my camera was dry, and I figured the rain would let up eventually. I just had to be patient (which reminds me: a million years ago when I was in high school and got in trouble (again), the Boys Advisor told me that patience was my only redeeming quality). Besides, there were windows in the stairway beside the elevator, so I had stuff to look at. And, as I said earlier, I enjoy a good storm.

After about ten minutes, I remembered something obvious. The city of Des Moines has a skywalk system. And (I believe) it connects every public parking garage in the city center. So I wasn’t trapped at all. I just had to find the skywalk entrance and I was free to wander around.

I used to spend a lot of time in the skywalk system. It’s been somewhat diminished over time; a major urban fire cut off a large central chunk, as did some urban renewal. It’s not quite as extensive as it once was, but it still covers about four miles and connects over fifty buildings and parking ramps. The skywalk is climate-controlled–heated in the winter, air-conditioned in the summer. There are coffee shops, barbers, law offices, restaurants, small markets along parts of the skywalk. It used to be one of my favorite places for photography.

The thing about the skywalk is that it zigzags all through the downtown area. It not only connects building (hotels, banks, businesses, apartment buildings), it sometimes passes between them or behind them or through them. It crosses streets, rambles above alleyways, sidles up against structures, and reveals parts of the city you might otherwise never see. And reveals them from perspectives you wouldn’t otherwise get.

I roamed the skywalk for maybe half an hour, then the storm passed, the rain stopped, and the sun came out. I found the nearest exit to the street level, stepped outside and shot this photograph. The post-storm light was delicious…for about ten minutes, at which point the city became unbearably humid. I should have stayed in the skywalk. Instead, I hiked the streets back to the parking garage, got in my car, and went home.

I didn’t get to meet my friend (we’ll reschedule for next week) or shoot the sort of photographs he needs/wants. But I had a good time and stayed mostly dry. After a month of shooting mostly monochrome, it was difficult to think in terms of color again. I did shoot a lot of high contrast monochrome photos during my walk, but I decided to stick to color for this blog. It was refreshing to think about color again. Refreshing…I guess that’s what rain is for.

It worked.

gregfallis.com

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