Knuckledragger

This is gonna be a long walk, as most such posts are. In early 2010, a now long closed second hand store on MV had two 1990s point and shoot film cameras. They gave them both to me because they didn't want to deal with the hassle of testing them. The first was an awkwardly titled Olympus Trip XB AF 44: Seen here in 2010, taken with my 30D and Orestor 135mm F/2.8 manual, stopped down to F/I-have-no-idea-that-was-13-years-ago. I got the Olympus working, but it died halfway through the first roll I put through it and and would not come back to life no matter what I did. The other camera was a lower end Fuji Smart Shot II: Seen here a few months ago, taken with my 5D IV and 135mm F/3.5 CZJ Sonnar. As I'm fond of saying, the Sonnar is the best actual lens among the ever growing army of manual focus 135mm primes I own. Unlike the Olympus, the Fuji kept running through an entire roll of film. Nothing says quality like "CVS Photostar." The Smart Shot II was made in 1994. I have no idea how old the above roll of film is, nor how long it was the camera. It might be utterly ruined. With that said, I shot the entire thing this summer. As with the other, uh, 4 exposed rolls I've amassed, I still have no idea where I'm going to get it processed. I've also been shooting a fair amount of digital. It's taken me quite some time to make friends with the 5D IV. It's quite a camera, and has a very dense set of controls. The AF system is very complex and I don't like it. I was much faster with my 2006 EOS 30D than I will ever be with the 5D IV. It's a good thing I don't shoot sports. With that said, I have had some successes. This time of year, last light is a fleeting and intense moment. The colors that appear for a few minutes at the end of the day are nuts. I live next to a pod, but across the street is a farm. I traipse through it with my 5D and lens du jour, trying to capture what I can. The above were taken with the 17-40L. The same phenomenon a few days later, taken with the '86 nifty 50 (a lens I much prefer.) These are all more or less "SOOC" with slight edits at most. I also visited the Edgartown waterfront with the 5D and 50, but those shots will have to wait for the moment.

Two things, actually a number of things: I haven't replied in however many hours because something I ate tried to kill me. Longtime listeners will know that I have chronic digestive issues on the best of days. When I ear the wrong (combination of) things, the results can be catastrophic. I spent much of today accomplishing such tasks as "staying in an upright position" and "keeping solid food down." After that I decided to get my Sonnar on in the afternoon light. The median age in the Gaza Strip is 18. 40% of its population is under 30. The last and only time Hamas got elected was 2006, over 17 years ago. The population of Gaza as it is now, did not vote for Hamas. To suggest otherwise is akin to blaming Gen Z for Trump or Millennials for GW Bush. I find accusations of bigotry are almost never productive to any discussion, especially as we now live in the age where such allegations are constantly being weaponized. In the last few months I had a post on Facebook that had the word "assholes" in it mass reported by a bunch of buttmad cretins and I ended up in the tentacles of FB's AI moderation. There are no humans who monitor content at FB anymore. I now have a strike against my FB account with an unknown number remaining before it gets deactivated. Normally, this would not be an issue, but half of MV life takes place on that accursed site and I need to be there. Similarly, I pluralized the word "autistic" and got an official strike on fucking reddit for hate speech. This is a site that still allows people to have the hard R N-word in their username. With all of this said, anti-semitism is on the rise globally. The richest man in the world gave his praise and approval to some fuckwit pushing the "great replacement" theory. The idea is that Jews are somehow magically using dark skinned people to worsen the lives of good God fearing whites. Also, and it pains me to say this, I have seen supposed leftists chanting "gas the Jews" and other horrible shit. I'm sure some of them are bad actors posing as protestors, but there's no way they ALL are. This behavior is inexcusable. The rise of the toxic left is a worrisome trend. A major and important distinction is that being anti-zionist, or even offering mild criticism of zionism is not the same thing as anti-semitism. Similarly, calling Bibi a corrupt and evil clownstick is not even the same thing as being anti-zionist. Bibi doesn't own zionism, zionism doesn't own Israel and more broadly the country of Israel doesn't own the global Jewish identity. Also, we live in the "No True Scotsman" age. The moment the member of a group does something horrid, that person is magically no longer in that group according to its members. An incel or alt-right loser goes on a mass shooting, and suddenly he's no longer one of them. Similarly, a trans man shot up a bunch of school children this year. There was a not insubstantial amount of denial as to his status as a trans person all over social media, extending as far as (once again) weaponized accusations of bigotry for merely acknowledging the fact that he was in fact trans. This line of non-thinking has certainly been visible in the discussion of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I think comedy has an important role in the discussion of war. The greatest comedian of the modern era had quite a routine on Gulf War I: George Carlin had a thing or two to say as well: I'm not saying that the above two men had a massive shaping of my worldview, but if the shoe fits.... Lastly, I cannot stress how important it is to ignore things like "likes" and other reactions. They're a fucking curse. I use scripts and browser plugins to block them on sites like FB. HC is sufficiently small that TBH they don't have much impact, but they are still best ignored. I say this as someone whose mental health is an a precious balance on the best of days. Ignore that shit.

Dammit, Valve!

As I'm sure all of you know, on October 7th of this year, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing over 1200 people. That makes it the deadliest day in history for Jewish people since the holocaust. The situation has only degraded more in the following month. Oct 7 has been Israel's 9/11. Bibi Netanyahu, an unpopular, corrupt, right wing leader has used the tragedy to dodge criminal investigations against him and further his agenda and position in power. [NB: As much as I loath the man, I'd be doing Dubya a dirty if I directly compared him to Bibi. Shrub ain't even in the same order of magnitude of "corrupt."] The Israeli response to Oct 7th has been immense by any standard. Israel dropped more on bombs in Gaza in a week than the US dropped on Afghanistan during the most intense year of that war. Afghanistan is over a quarter of million square miles. Gaza is 139. There have been a few batshit insane calls for Israel to nuke Gaza. It's been an open secret for decades that Israel has nuclear weapons. Even the most more bloodthirsty war hawk understand why Israel would not detonate a nuke right next to their own border. With that said, Israel has effectively nuked Gaza. The combined explosive force of the conventional bombs dropped by Israel (over 25,000 tons at this point) is the equivalent to a couple tactical nuclear weapons. (Strategic nukes are an order of magnitude bigger and usually originate from missile silos or submarines.) The western media coverage of the unending clusterfuck has been a nightmare of its own. As a longtime user of reddit (my account is older than most of the site's user base at this point), I have been absolutely gobsmacked at the state of /r/worldnews. It's essentially become /r/IDF_press_releases. I generally stay out of the fray on reddit, both for my own mental health and because I know it does no good. I made one post calling out an influx of obvious bot accounts in worldnews, and was rewarded with my comment being shadowbanned. It's more than a bit scary to see such blatant astroturfing occurring online, especially as someone who clearly remembers the post-9/11, early Iraq War II era. Its is my understanding that the polar opposite of what's happening on most of reddit is taking place on Tik Tok. I have not nor will I ever use that app. I see plenty of complaining about Tik Tok and complaining about complaining about Tik Tok and ...fuck it, I'm closing the goddamn web page and looking at cat videos. With all of this said, it's almost invariably true that the best coverage of a controversial issue is done via comedy. Everyone's favorite self-deprecating British expat dedicated half an hour to the Israel-Hamas war and did a better job than most of the corporate media combined:

The Vineyard is full of artists, and has been for ...centuries really. One of them is a painter, and he discovered my Flickr page a while ago. He liked this photo I took in September of '09: Reflecting on it (heh), the image has entirely too much foreground. In the past I was very guilty of such poor framing choices. In this case I had a 50mm on an APS-C sensor, so I didn't have much of a choice. 2010 infrared image of a rail bridge I photographed a great many times. Again with acres of unnecessary foreground. It's the "rule of thirds" not the "rule of corners." Anyway... Tim, the painter, wisely chose to focus on the top half of the photo I took in '09 and turned it into an interesting scene.

James Austin Johnson is so good it's downright spooky.

I toddled around downtown Edgartown with the 5D IV and nifty fifty Mk I. It was ball freezingly cold, especially with the wind off the ocean. With that said, the light was fleeting but perfect. Photos from that jaunt Real Soon Now(tm). At the moment, all I have time for is an OC shitpost: Zoomer meme if it needs explanation.

I don't use FB any more than I have to do so. I looked at my own profile for the first time in ages today. When Trugoy the Dove died this past February, I posted this video: I just noticed Facebook "fact checked" it. I rate that a solid Zucc/10.

These two thoughts are related:

This is longer than most people will want to watch. I found it to be hilarious. TL; DW:

I have another post identical to the one I just made, but first it's a detour into a nightmare. I've known two guys named Eddy and Jair for over 20 years now. Of all the photographers I know, Eddy is the one whose work is going to end up in a museum. He does one thing and does it well. He takes street portraits with medium and large format film. He's also bipolar AF, drinks and smokes heavily, and is morbidly obese. I like Eddy a lot, but I recognize he's not going to live forever. You should check out his work while he's still around. The January of 2007, Eddy and Jair were walking through the woods and stumbled upon some hunter's Bushnell remote game camera. Being they miscreant teenagers (they were actually 20 at the time) that they were, they ganked it. The trail camera produced really noisy, crappy 640x480 images. It also had some serious rolling shutter issues, which were not normally a problem on a camera that's not supposed to move. During that January, Eddy took, or more to the point, the CAMERA took a bunch of weird and very bad photos. There's no shutter control on trail cameras. Just a few settings, either motion activated or timed. I think one shot every 5 seconds was the fastest. I ran a select few of the images through Topaz GigaPixel AI and in a couple cases Topaz DeNoise AI as well, but did almost no other edits to them: This is the moment the pair stumbled on to the camera. It's like something out of a found footage horror film. That will be a recurring theme. Two self portraits Eddy took in the bathroom mirror after he got the camera home. There's a very strong rolling shutter effect on the second one. A triptych taken during one of their many visits to the remains of the infamous Belchertown State School. The grounds were very accessible in the mid 00s. These are demonstrably terrible photos, but there's something about the lo-fi horror movie aesthetic they have that I quite like. The testarossa in them is Eddy's younger sister Rosie, who is a bit of a nightmare herself.

This is an idea I've had for years. I have a lot of audio equipment and other gear (but still a tiny fraction compared to many HCers). Much of it is in less than 100% working order. Some of it is "door stop" or "paperweight" status. There are bits I'd like to get working again and things I'd do better to throw out. I am sure I am not the only one. In no particular order: HeadRoom Milllet(t) Hybrid serial #1. Pete's name misspelled on the front panel. Class A circuitry. I bought it from one HighLife 10 years ago. I strongly suspect it's got bad caps. This is among the top pieces of gear I wish to restore. It's got real history to it. Also it sounds amazing when it works. The logistics of repairing are complex. I have to find someone who is willing to work on it. I've looked at the HeadRoom site and I hardly recognize it these days. I get the strong impression that they do NOT service old HR gear (or even acknowledge that it exists.) After I find someone to fix the amp, I have to send it and the PSU to that person and wait however long. The problem is I only have one HeadRoom DPS, which is currently being used by my HR Balanced Desktop (now my most used headphone amp.) Tascam 122 Mk III. The greatest cassette deck ever made, full stop. Bests Revox and Nakamichi units. (Tapes recorded on a Nak and played back on another Nak might sound better, but that's a severely limited prospect.) Mine has at minimum bad belts and possibly a bad gear. A clever friend of mine bought one and restored it himself. He said it was nontrivial, but not impossible. A pair of Unisound AU265 speakers. Way back in 2010, a website with the silly name ThingFling listed these for $100 or $200 shipped They were like $1200 new in the 00s. One of mine rattles like a bastard when any amount of bass goes through it. I genuinely do not know if it's one of the drivers or an issue with the cabinet. I'd love to get this pair working again because the Unisounds look like proper pieces of furniture and are the big burly battered black boxes that my NS-1000s are: My (sainted, octogenarian) mother would much prefer the Unisounds to these things. The NS1Ks are so imposing that the contractor we had in the house to fix some electrical problems talked about the speakers almost as much as he did the actual work he had to do. I thought it was hilarious. My mother was less amused. Symetrix 528E voice processor. Not an audiophile thing at all. For a good 15 years it was THE preamp to mate with an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone for speech purposes. As someone who has spent entirely too long pontificating about ...all sorts of things on the mic, I love the combo. There's actually a company that refurbs and even improves 528Es as a cottage industry. I was going to pursue this route ...then covid hit and life got complicated. I still have plans to pick up that thread. Audio Research LS-9. Very solid preamp with mixed balanced and SE I/O. It's a totally solid state design, which is unusual for the manufacturer. I found it to be very neutral. Whatever I put into it came out of it the same. Mine has ...issues. One of the switches is missing a bat after a wire got caught on it. Also there's some internal problems. I suspect bad caps. TBH I should really restore this thing but I'm not sure I can be arsed any time quickly. It really is a great pre. California Audio Labs tube DAC. I bought it from an HCr years ago. It needed a new chip and a tube. This is trivially easy to do, but I felt like a big boy when I got it working. It was actually one of my favorite secondary DACs. It was great for lo-fi content like streaming audio. Unfortunately, I used some idiot Monster Cable interconnects on it and those things grip like their life defends on it. One the DAC's RCA jacks came out with the stupid cable and I have never attempted a fix. Canon EF-S 17-85mm F/4-5.6 IS USM. The "better" kit lens I got with my EOS 30D in the summer of 2006. I used it extensively until it stopped working after I took this shot in 2009: TBH I don't think I'd pay to fix it. It's crap at the wide end and I'm done with EF-S until further notice. Canon EF 35mm F/2. It's had a broken AF motor since 2009 when some idiot club goer knocked my lens on to the floor. I've used it as a manual focus lens for 14 years now. It's still a great lens. I'm probably going to buy the newish 35mm F/2 IS at some point. As I have said many times in the photo thread, 35mm F/2 is the best lens for APS-C or full frame in my estimation. That's all the broken kit I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more, both here and still on the mainland. So HC, what broken bits of kit are YOU avoiding dealing with today?

In no particular order: Finished another roll of film. The first one I put through my Rebel K2 in 15 years(!) Still have no idea where I'm going to get it (and the other three rolls I have) developed. The only photo from my ferry ride back from the mainland that I've bothered to edit. Departing from MV. Those are some very Vineyard weather conditions unfolding. Makes for ethereal imagery. Fussing around with a circular polarizer on my 17-40L. The combination is a PITA to use because I have to adjust the filter with the lens hood off, re-attach the hood and then frame the shot. Testing out my 5D IV the first day I got it. Taken with my 50mm F/1.4, which I hardly use because I prefer my OG 1986 "Nifty Fifty" 50mm F/1.8 in every regard. A young buck across the pond. It is with great restraint that I avoid shopping for Canon 400mm or 500mm L prime. Wildlife photography is where dreams and bank accounts go to die. The contractor working on our house is ...quite a character. He's either greatly over or under medicated for his ADD. He's got a really nice doggo however. Her name is Turkey and she's an English Bull/Boxer mix. She has a gorgeous brindle coat. Watching her dart around my yard put me dangerously close to wanting a dog. A study of the tool shed my grandfather build in the 50s. Futzing with the 85mm F/1.8. Absolute silliness with the 17-40 at the wide end. From my first test of the nutty Suntar 135mm F/2.8 M42 lens I bought for under $20. It has an amazingly long minimum focus distance and an aperture that only increments in full stops. This was taken at F/5.6 or F/8 IIRC. I ran this images through Luminar 4 and applied a LUT to it. Did I mention I bought a Holga HL-C 60mm F/8 in Canon EF mount? It's enormously silly. I got a Asahi Super-Takumar 50mm F/1.4 in the mid 00s, as part of a lot of M42 lenses I bought of eBay. It's quite expensive now. I find it to be reasonably sharp when stopped down, but never particularly contrasty. I post processed the above two photos extensively in Luminar 4 and Photoshop. This is Sweetened Water Pond, which is the one across the street from where I live. It's normally a Vernal pond, going dry in the summer. It stuck around for all of this year and the ducks were quite happy about it. You've heard of Turquoise Hexagon Sun? This is Orange Hexagon Lens Flare. The Takumar's element coatings are decidedly a product of the 1970s. The CZJ Sonnar 135mm F/3.5 once again proving it's the best actual lens amongst the army of 135mm primes I own. Early evening moon. 85mm F/1.8 again. It is a really good lens that I don't use nearly enough.

Neat.

R34 Nissan Skyline in Akihabara Japan. Kodak Porta 400 in a Mamiya 6. [OC] Solid Jeep Owner/10. There's a lot to unpack here. That's a photo of a cracked Acer (laptop?) monitor, presumably taken with a phone and then printed on a vinyl billboard. That's beyond boomer/10. 1965 Chevrolet El Camino.

I I want to be clear, I have always been in favor of hacking the heads of little girls and putting 'em on my wall. My opponent has only recently adopted this position.

The official Biosphere FB account shared this link recently. That eccentric looking fella standing on the rocks looks familiar.

I've got a bunch of photos of high end systems stashed in a folder, and instead I'm gonna post these: The mainland house is now my remote outpost. I still have two NS-1000s stashed there, for a number of reasons (I have 4, I need some speakers in the old house until I demolish it, NS-100s are heavy as all fuck, and I'm not relishing the idea of moving them.) Sadly, my old 1970s Martanz receiver might finally be on the way out. One of its two "Protect" LEDs won't go out when I power it on. It also plays a monophonic signal no matter what I feed it. I think something inside gave up the ghost. The Yamaha receiver I helped my father pick out in 1997 so he'd have a sound system to woo his then-girlfriend (it didn't work out) was nearby, so I swapped it in. I never really liked the sound the Yamaha, it's kind of thin an anemic. It definitely doesn't have the balls to drive the NS-1000s as they were meant to be. With that said, it still works. How many other bits of consumer electronics from over 25 years ago can you point to that work as well now as they did new? The rest of the signal chain is the HeadAmp Pico DAC I bought off some HCer or other an eternity ago and my M1 MBP. Barely visible but of great importance is the USB-C to Mini-USB (vs Micro) cable I bought of bozos.com. I may have mentioned this before, but cables with that particular arrangement of connectors do not grow on trees. Both the Pico DAC and my HeadRoom Balanced Desktop use Mini-USC, so I make it a point to have a few of those cables on hand always. The sound of the above was ...fine. It's not like I had time for critical listening. I watched a couple old movies with my (sainted, octogenarian) mother while we were there. The TV is my friend Dave's 2006 DLP model he dumped on my lap when he skipped town. It will not being following me to the Vineyard, but it still works for now. Speaking NS-1000s... The other set are on the Vineyard. I spent the last two days clearing crap out of the living room, including: 9 boxes of records, four Unisound tower speakers I bought back in 2010 from some wacky site called ThingFling.com (a few HCers might remember them), and innumerable other things including an Herman Miller office chair that I am convinced wants to kill me. My back is not happy with me. I cleaned off the NS-1000s (which are 30 or so years old at this point, the Technics 1200 (ditto) and Outlaw RR2150 (much newer). If one knows anything about NS-1000s, it's that (A) the midrange driver is at least as famous as the speakers themselves, and (B) they have awful spring loaded speaker terminals. Earlier this year I bought a set of terminals specifically for this job: be s Today I dug out some speaker wire from a box in the attic and had it. The first record I put on was a 7" 45 of Yam Yam's Bahama Mama, which is a weird little downtempo ditty that defies description. You'll just have to hear it for yourself. NB: The version of the 7" is a bit different than YouTube rip, but that's life in the world of obscure promo downtempo vinyl. Next I rummaged up "I Spy" by Death in Vegas, which lifts a beat from a Notorious B.I.G. track. Lastly I found one of the four vinyl copies I own of Oliver Lieb's 1994 one-off album The Ambush. Talk about a timeless classic. I actually played all four sides of it and really listened to the system. Some Captain Obvious observations: The R2150 blows the poor Yamaha out of the water. The spot I chose for the 1200 is lousy, and resonance prone. Twelves are big beefy MFing turntables and resistant to vibration, but I could hear some unwanted resonance in the midbass range. The NS-1000s midrange is really something spectacular. The RR2150's phono preamp is very good, but it's hardly audiophile grade. With that said, listening some 90s (and one case, 70s) mastered vinyl through was just compelling. Vinyl is engaging in a way that nothing digital will ever be. I'm sure that 90% of is looking at the turntable spin and handling the actual records. It might be a very psychosomatic effect, but it's still a real one. EDIT: I completely forgot to mention the record in the photo. That's a 70s pressing of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. I played it in the wrong order (part II first) but it still sounded amazing. It's funny how the part everyone knows (the Exorcist bit) is a tiny segment in the beginning. Next week I'm replacing the 1200 with a television set. More on that later.

Oof. Matt Perry dies at age 54, apparent drowning.

Richard Moll, who found fame as a bailiff on the original sitcom ‘Night Court,’ dies at 80. RIP Bull.

Cars and cats, mostly. Firewatch_IRL. Mural in Amsterdam. First generation Mazda RX-7. Scotland has a police tractor.. "Put it in 'H'!" 300ZX Twin Turbo. Least confused Masshole. "Trophy wife." Trump's lawyer is using an Asus gaming laptop. 1971 Jeep J3000 pick-up. Studebaker Golden Hawk.

Nothing will top the ear-rape of playing Killing Floor with Colin, a decade or so ago.

Very long term HCers (which most of y'all, TBH) might remember I own a misfit assortment of vintage McIntosh gear. How vintage? 1969. Older than me. For reasons not worth explaining, in 1999 I got two C-22 preamps and one MC-75 amplifier. Two stereo preamps, one monophonic amplifier. Not exactly useful. With that said, I've stubborn held on to them for 24 years and counting. Today I moved them, and the amp nearly killed me. Glamor photo of the boat anchor I took in 2009. One of the pair of C-22s after I had all of the above serviced, 2009. A bunch of the Mac kit and other crap, hanging out in a spare bedroom, 2013. I stuffed the Mac kit, plus a bunch of other electronics, into an upstairs closed before I exited the mainland this past January. It collected quite a bit of dust. The MC75, looking rather grubby. I had a very bad moment getting it down the stairs. I grabbed it from the closet floor, and attempted to stand up. I was not wearing my back brace (100% necessary when lifting things these days.) I could stand up while holding the Mac. My legs said "yeah, that's not happening." Getting old is a real MFer. Eventually I got myself and the amp upright, but at significant cost to my back. After the above photo was taken, I did locate my back brace (stable door and all.) I loaded two pieces of framed artwork into the Fit (not exactly a specious vehicle) and used the MC-75 as a, well, anchor to hold them in place. There it sits. Yes, I straightened the damn 12BH7 once I caught my breath. This is the Fit, mostly packed. In there (besides all the Mac kit) is a Dynaco monoblock (visible behind the lamp), 3 wood clamps, a Technics SL-1200 Mk II, a Symetrix 528E voice processor (direly in need of servicing), a California Labs tube DAC I got from ...one HCer or other (which also needs repair), a Parasound DAC (still running strong, 30 years later), a Tascam 122 Mk III (the greatest cassette deck in history, I will die on this hill) that ALSO needs repair, a shit ton of semi-valuable fabric items used as packing material, my tool chest, and a giant "Ricky Ricardo" style chandelier. My (sainted, octogenarian) mother thinks I'm nucking futs. She's not wrong. My back is killing me.

A friend of mine posted about that thrift find in Discord. Turd in the punchbowl opinion: The Canon 50mm/1.2 is ass. It has remarkably lousy bokeh. It's better than the old Canon 50mm F/1.0, but so is basically everything else. TBH I'd rather have a good 50/1.8 like the OG 1986 Mk I. In the age of modern DSLRs and their insane high ISO settings, super fast primes are really not necessary. The cost and weight penalty brought on by super fast lenses is almost never worth it. Also everything I said above is not true for the the Canon 85L, and as best I can tell the Nikon and Sony 85/1.4s. Maybe I'm biased (I am) but the designs used in lenses longer than 50mm render OOF highlights in a much more pleasing fashion. In the case of the 85L specifically, it has this brilliant property of transitioning from the in-focus area to OOF seamlessly. The 85L paints the background in a way that the 50/1.2L completely fails to do. I have a bunch of photos I took back in the fall of '09 with the 85L and my crappy-ever-for-its-time 30D. I re-edited a bunch in the last few years. I posted some here a while ago, and I'll dig up a few more example later. Right now my (sainted, octogenarian) mother is pestering me to pack the cars to drive back to MV tomorrow.