Knuckledragger

(!) Look who's back: It's like 2007 all over again.

This sketch aired 30 years ago today.

This is an obscure one. Today I learned that Mario Rosa AKA Dr Mario died, before his 50th birthday. Dr. Mario gained some fame in the Los Angeles drum n bass scene in the late 90s and early 00s, as well as on mp3.com around the same time. I discovered him on that site, during an era when I'd make regular dives into their electronic music section. I actually contacted Dr. M once, asking him about a track that was only released in shitty, 128k mp3 format (a phenomenon regular listeners to my show will remember be talking about often.) He said he'd look for the originals of that track, but he never got back to me. I have one of his IRL friends on my FB friends list because many years ago, I went look for Dr. Mario and found his friend instead. I saw a post from said friend saying Mario had passed. At his best, Dr. Mario made frenetic DNB even by the standards of the genre. He crossed over into full on IDM territory, echoing the sounds of 90s Aphex Twin and Autechre, but with a deceptively deep sense of melody. Two of his best tracks are this one: This one was briefly popular on mp3.com around the year 2000. This one wasn't as well known, but I actually prefer it. It sums up everything that I like about his music. (Not even) 50 is entirely too young for anyone to pass, especially a talent like Mario's.

Adam Yauch died 11 years ago today.

From the sound of things, Topping ate Monopoly and has proceeded to shit out Connect Four.

Gordon was a complex one for me. I grew up during the age of angry punks and metalheads who were reacting against "boomer rock." His style of music was the least hip thing imaginable around the time I got my first Walkman. In spite of that environment, I always liked his songwriting and his incredibly distinctive singing voice. As is often the case, Gordon Lightfoot wasn't actually a boomer (1938, Silent Generation.) I remember hearing "Sundown" on the radio when I was quite young and finding it captivating. It was many years (which are big ones when one is so small) before I had an artist song title I could attach to it. It's apocryphal/not proven, but the lyrics to the song are often described as referring to the woman who indirectly killed John Belushi. That adds a whole additional weight to an already quite dark song. Also I've noticed that younger generations (later Millennials and Zoomers) seem to unironically (as they say) like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I remember a few years ago someone posted a graphic illustrating how lake Superior had its own weather systems to reddit and a bunch of users there wrote out the entire lyrics to the song, one comment at a time. That's some lasting impact right there.

Someone on the MV FB group I'm in got their account hacked and posted this obvious scam: So I posted my own version:

Well, I did it. I finally got a digital camera with some Leica glass. No, not like that. I went to the second hand store on MV and saw a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7. Some of you may remember when Panasonic licensed the Leica name for their point and shoots in the late 00s, to the sound of much snickering from the photography world. This thing is very silly. It has a tiny 10MP sensor, a "25-300mm equivalent" zoom with an F/3.3-F/4.9 max aperture. In a word, yick. A super range zoom is more or less the opposite of what I like (fast, short primes) Also, the exposure controls are lousy. Even my mid 00s PowerShot S60 had manual (push button) controls for shutter and aperture. I actually kind of like 00s digital cameras. I've shot with a bunch. My OG IR 5D is still in service (once I give the sensor a proper cleaning). As I have said before, I now have an active disdain for the pseudo HDR look that current SMRT phone cameras shit out. The somewhat goofy behavior of older digital cameras is vastly preferable to me. With that said, this Lumix isn't the kind of vintage I like. I cannot complain too much because I got the camera for $8. Strictly speaking, the charger and battery were $8. The young fella at the second hand shop who sold it to me (who appeared to be more stoned than I was at his age and, well... 1996 was the best year of my life that I don't remember) couldn't figure out the price of the camera. His solution was to consider the camera, charger, battery and case to be one item use the price tag he had at hand. Oh, the punchline: The TZ7 can address has a maximum SD card size of 32GB. The only SD card I had on hand was a 64GB. I went on a rummage and found a 256 megabyte card that is doubtlessly older than the sentient cloud of pot smoke that sold me the camera. Fortunately, it formatted just fine and the Lumix was happy with it.

This is amusing, but it's to ...spazzy. If they work out smoother transitions between the AI generated iterations, they'll really be on to something. As it stands now the idea is neat but the execution is seriously lacking.

FYI/FWIW: Imgur, the site to which I have uploaded images since 2009, is changing their ToS. All NSFW content as well as images uploaded not uploaded by a user with an account (that is to say, done anonymously) will be deleted after May 15. I've had an Imgur account since September 9, 2010 and in that time I've uploaded over 42,000 images (an alarmingly high percentage of which were posted in this very thread.) I didn't have an Imgur account for the first year or so that I used the site. I suspect any content I uploaded in that time period is on the chopping block. Also, while I don't upload anything I'd consider to be porn, I'm sure there's a bunch of photos I've posted that will not fit in with the site's new ToS. I have no idea how Imgur is going to go about pruning all the content they don't find acceptable. I remember what happened to Tumblr a few years ago and I'm a bit worried about the future of Imgur. With that said... Memes you can hear. This should make you feel old. "Knight to Bork 5." Least delusional RAM driver. me_irl Firefighters washing blood off the sidewalk following the mass shooting in Dadeville, Alabama. Apparently the "beads" USB hub design is not a new one. This a USB 1.1 hub from 20 years ago. There are two cats. Cape Cod, Nantucket and (part of) the Vineyard on April 14 from the ISS. What a bunch of no-good punks.

Okay, things one could not make up for $500, Alex. The beat from that AI MC Trump track I posted yesterday is lifted from this song: "The Great TK" is a female rapper from New York ...who is a double amputee. She has a YouTube channel. I take it back. AI will never be able to replicate the human experience.

Speaking of, Ignoring one's own opinion on AI generated art (or sentient bags of cheeto dust) for a second, this song is a banger. I'm pretty sure it's over for us as a species.

Desktop Dungeons is free right now on Steam. It's a cute roguelike that began development a really long time ago. The late, great TotalBiscuit covered it over a dozen years ago: Also TB died 5 years ago this spring.

Even though I tend to pontificate about cartoonishly large format cameras, I must say I find the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson and his "humble" Leica 35mm rangefinder (usually with a fairly slow 50mm attached) far more compelling than nearly everything that Ansel Adams did. HCB's nighttime Paris photos are directly or indirecty an inspiration for all the long exposures I did in the second half of the 00s. The same can be said for his candid portraits and street photography. Candid portraiture was the one area of photography where I excelled in spite of myself. I put the most effort into landscapes, but in spite of the planet, you know, in general holding still and not GAF if I was photographing it, I only ever had mixed results. Conversely, I was quite good at annoying people I barely knew with an oversized DSLR and large-ish lens and getting interesting results from them. Of course, as descendents of tree monkeys, we're programmed to study each other's facial expressions and consequently find faces far more interesting than some mountain range. Maybe I'm a hack after all. 🙃 Case(s) in point: I've never done much true street photography, but I've always lvoed this shot of a young couple on vacation on MV during the "shoulder season" of early September. As many/most HCers know, I ran a one man nightclub lighting business for over 15 years. I originally got into photography to take photos of my lighting gear in action to market it. Quickly I became more interested in photography than nightclub lighting. One thing I learned early on was how to take photos in low light conditions with mid 00s low ISO digital sensors: This photo has a bit of a story: I was taking some pictures from the stage and two inebriated idiots wandered up, wanting to talk to the DJ. They didn't know (or didn't care) that I was shooting, and stood right in my way. I set the AF point to the center, and used the two drunks to mask the sides of the image. I cropped the photo to 5x4, but otherwise did no edits. The subject is actually a fairly awful person, but in this moment she was a dancefloor diva. A good friend of mine with his then girlfriend. She was nothing but trouble for him, but I like this moment captured. Bonus: that Asioan woman out of focus above his arm is his *ex* girlfriend. I did not plan that. Hooray, beer.

There's a bit to unpack there. First off, the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody include "mama, oooh-OOOH, didn't mean to make you cry." The way Freddie sings the "oooh oooh" part is phonetically similar to "UWU" which was originally text base smiley but grew into something far more because Internet and because Anime. There's also "OWO" and "OVO" which are animal and bird emotes, respectively. From there things turn into "UWU voice" which is, well... both absolutely awful and with great rarity highly amusing. Essentially it means speaking in a stereotypical anime female character voice. There's a semi-regular on my TF2 server who does the most spot on uwu voice I've ever heard and it truly both horrible and amazing.

Apparently the current HC post editor, Chrome, MacOS and me are not going to get along. If you don't understand this, consider yourself lucky. Protests in Israel.

In that "Gen Z" article they utterly failed to the goddamn horizon line even remotely straight. The single most important part of any photo involving a body of water is keeping it level. One of the things I don't like about using an LCD screen for landscape photography is the lack of markings. For years when I used the AF point indicators on my 30D/5D to see if I had the ocean remotely level. Even with those, I'd often spend considerable time futzing around in Photoshop to get things as flat as I wanted. I salute the large format photographers who succeed at the task while looking at the world upside down and backwards. Now that I say that bit out loud, maybe I was meant to be an ULF photographer.

I have a friend who maintains a kWh sucking late 00s Mac Pro in spite of the fact that his iPad Pro has more CPU power at this point solely because of legacy FireWire hardware. He has an old high end FW audio interface (it's an RME FireFace 800 IIRC) and also an analogue video interface which he uses to digitize legacy media (a task I've taken on recently in the world of Windows Hell, more on that later.)

RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto. Member of YMO, producer, film composer, and so many other things. I've had Robin Brunson's remix of his "Anger" in my record bag in one form or another since 1998:

Every thing I said about ULF cameras in that rant earlier, summed up in one image. Palpably ancient. Cartoonishly oversized. In skilled hands, superior to more or less everything to this day. I both hope to get there some day and pray that I never do.