Oh look, it’s a bit of English FAIL on the way to work this morning! This, near the Washington County Fairgrounds…
In other news, my new phone’s camera seems not to suck nearly as much as the xv6800’s… nice, eh?
Category: Media
This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.
-
Shiny Distraction
I’m feeling rather “blah” lately, especially today what with the phone bill showing up and stressors being piled on at work. I haven’t had much to say about much of anything this past couple of weeks, not even about the wedding I took pictures of eight days ago.
So, here, look at what the Spud gave me, bought with his ticket winnings at the nickel arcade:
Nice, isn’t it? It’s actually a piggy ducky bank, I just didn’t take the picture from an angle which shows off the coin slot.
-
As The Dust Settles
I started my day with some cleaning. I emptied the garbage cans in my bedroom and bathroom, then started in with clearing off the main desk. Why? Because it just might make a workable set for photographing rubber ducks, of course! (As if anything else would motivate me to wading through years’ worth of paperwork and other detritus. Seriously!)
Eager to show off the fruits of my labors, I reached for my camera.
Say, why don’t we get some ducks into that shot?
It took five minutes for me to locate one of the nine, however. Turns out that he’d been forgotten in my backpack for a few weeks, since the last time I took the ducks out-and-about (intending to do some outdoor shooting which never quite happened). Oops. Adding injury to insult, he’s a bit the worse for wear:
Some of the paint on his bill rubbed off from being jostled around in my bag all that time. You can imagine how delighted I am at the results of my own negligence.
The show, however, must go on. We’ll deal with it. Now I just have to convince him not to eat my brains while I sleep by way of retaliation…
-
Stranger In A Strange Land
Once again, the “classics” are leaving me cold.
I’m not done with what is arguably Heinlein’s best-known work, and I’m not sure I’ll finish. Oh, the first two parts are interesting enough. V. M. Smith and his interactions with the people of Earth hold one’s attention well enough, covering a lot of the ground that the C.J. Cherryh “Foreigner” series would later examine in excruciating detail: “Aliens and humans don’t think alike!” Yep. We established that, alright. And let’s be honest, there’s vast and fertile storytelling ground in that concept.
Too bad we’ve spent half the book so far centered on one word: Grok.
All of these clever humans Michael ends up surrounded by, and they can’t find the words in English (or presumably any other language) to approximate this Martian term… that Heinlein conveyed moderately well several times in that same stretch of the book. In, you know, English. Ahem. Well, we wouldn’t want the characters to be as clever as the author, would we? Hey, let’s hit the readers over the head with “grok” a few more times! Some of the conversations late in the second section are interesting, but most are absurd from overuse of grok this, grok that, grok you.
But that’s not where the book has lost me. I can roll my eyes and get past all of that, especially for the sake of the solid sociopolitical theater in the Jubal arc, but I’m perplexed at the Digby And Foster Show. I’m barely into the book’s third section and… all of a sudden, after all of Jubal’s ranting and railing about religion, now we’re peeking into the Heavenly Bureaucracy? For laughs? And the crazy love grokbirds have taken on a tattooed evangelist, and that’s going to be played seriously? Um.
It was the second appearance of Digby And Foster: Angels In Heaven that pulled me out of the book completely. I looked at the time (a bit later than I should’ve been awake, but not too late), firmly closed the book and turned out the light.
I don’t know if I’m going to finish this thing. So, dear readers, I ask you: Is it worth it?
-
Lunch Fixin’s: Photographic Proof
Do you see what happens when I’m so excited by my culinary success that I feel compelled to run upstairs and grab the camera? Do you?
That’s the chicken I cooked yesterday, awaiting insertion to a bed of noodles (mixture of shells and rotini, as yet uncooked in the above picture) and grated cheese (cheddar of various sharpness, plus some other mixed cheeses, not pictured).
I’m such a dork. But I can live with that.
I refuse to take responsbility for any hunger pangs you may be experiencing on account of reading this post.
-
Testing The New Lighting Gear
Following Dad’s suggestion, I picked up a couple of “sunlight” bulbs for scene lighting from Freddy’s. A quick trip to Office Depot netted me a pair of flexible desk lamps to put ’em in, and here are the results:
Lighting Test: Li 
Lighting Test: Rusty, LI, Score The colored towels are there for testing purposes. As you can see, these ducks look pretty good now. My next trick will be to come up with a “set” of some kind. Mind you, I don’t plan to restrict things to just the one location, and in fact with sunnier weather on tap this weekend I’m considering getting some usable shots out-of-doors if at all possible.
Another, albeit less critical, task that I’d like to accomplish involves some softening of the lighting. Both Dad and Uncle Pete have given some good suggestions on that, it’s just a matter of acquiring materials and performing more tests. (Oh, shucky darn, I’ll have to take more pictures. Boo hoo.)
Progress, it is being made. Once the physical requirements are met, though, I’ll have the really tough work: Cranking out enough scripts to get a few weeks’ worth of material into the queue… and there’s the whole “gotta do something about the website design” thing, too. Ack. What have I gotten myself into?
