New Beginnings

New website, newsletter, and refocusing on photography

Hello fellow walkers and flâneurs,

It’s been a while since we last connected. I’m Toto and you are reading The Flâneur — a long-neglected newsletter of mine that has been on a stable annual schedule for a couple of years now.

If you are new, welcome—and thank you for remembering me (fingers crossed).

If not, you might notice the newsletter looks a bit different than usual. That’s because of the big changes I’ll share in this dispatch.

The Past Year: Travels and a New Darkroom

2024 and the beginning of 2025 have been hectic. I traveled on 24 long-haul flights across the globe, bouncing between Europe, Japan, and all points in between—including a now 100+ day-long protest in my hometown.

It was also a pivotal time in my approach to photography and the process. I’ve completed my shift to analog processes, started to formalize the ways of working, and am about to finish building out a proper darkroom in my new studio. It’s been a long journey, and I have documented most of it on my new website — ttvl.co.

A Public Notebook

I’ve soft-launched ttvl.co a few weeks ago. You, dear reader, are among the first I’m telling about it. ttvl.co is where I share all my current projects, big or small, mostly about technical photography, productivity in general, and being a generalist. Think of it as a public notebook of my findings, ideas, and curiosities. The website already hosts a few main topics:

The log is a distilled version of my daily journal (minus personal things). I’m quite proud of it as it incorporates one of my passions as a software engineer and writer. I’ll be writing about it more in upcoming dispatches.

The darkroom section is primarily about technical articles around analog processes and photography at large.

I’ve also been pursuing research in human-computer interaction (HCI), and I’m starting to share and formalize some of those findings—mostly around tangible user interfaces and spatial computing. The first chapter is about my notebook system, Unbound Notebook System, which merges the benefits of pen-and-paper with the search and retrieval powers of digital tools. It’s a work in progress, but I hope others might find it useful or want to contribute.

I’m quite proud of ttvl.co even at this work-in-progress stage, and I’m very excited about what it will become in the upcoming months and years. I hope many of you will find at least one thing you might be interested in.

Re-focusing on Photography

2025 is set to be quite pivotal in my photography. Alongside ttvl.co, I have also made a completely new, all-custom website for my photography too. I have completed programming it but need to tidy up some copy and images of books before officially launching it. It will be replacing totocaster.com entirely.

Alongside the launch of the photo website, I’ll be announcing a big new initiative which I have been working on for the past six to eight months and am really looking forward to sharing it with everyone. It has been an immense effort and I can’t wait to make it public—my favorite part is that it involves physical books—a true way to experience someone’s photography.

Moving Beyond Substack

One more thing: this newsletter has also migrated to the new site. I like that it gives me control over my own infrastructure. It costs me a bit, but I trust the platform more than a giant tech corporation. Your emails are still stored securely by Campaign Monitor, a hugely reputable email service that does not use your emails for anything.

I’m looking forward to 2025; it promises to be an exciting year full of new projects that I will be announcing here in the next couple of months. Stay tuned for more updates and ideas.

Feel free to explore ttvl.co and let me know what you think. I hope you’ll find something there that sparks your curiosity or helps your own work in some way.

Till next time,
—T