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Tonight's Culture This one goes to 11 It's a lot easier to follow in English. Quite the performance.

All this deferred resignation stuff has meant the departure of a few key staff members, one in particular I've worked with for nearly 15 years and deserved something more than an Irish goodbye. So I made him a little something for his retirement yesterday. That's the blank walnut, engraved/machined with the cnc machine. Finish applied, awaiting infill bits. Finished project. The middle bit is an original survey boundary marker for the island that I rescued from a demo project. It's likely way more than 100 years old. I thought he deserved to take a little piece of the place with him even if it's a little tarnished and scarred. I prefer things that way actually, probably because I resemble the description.

In the summer of 2007 I hiked up Mount Sugarloaf in Sunderland. I went up there many times in the '00s, both with and without a camera. The view from it is spectacular and really shows off a pastoral and idyllic perspective of the Happy Valley. The weather was fantastic and there were some hot ail balloons floating around merrily. Unfortunately for me, on this date I took the always terrible Canon 75-300mm lens and I did NOT know what I was doing. The photos came out terribly. I sat on them for nearly 18 years until last month when I sat down and processed them with some modern apps. I had to make deft use of Luminar 4, Topaz Sharpen AI and Photoshop to extract remotely decent results. The sharpening was key, and a faustian bargain. The 75-300mm is never sharp. I wasn't smart enough to up my 30D's ISO to improve shutter speed so a bunch of the shots have lens motion blur. The 30D isn't the most sharp thing to begin with in the best of circumstances. Too much AI sharpening makes for weird and very obvious artifacts. There is no perfect solution. With all of this said, the end results here aren't half bad. I rate this set a solid "Crank up that ISO you dumbass" out of 10. I did take a few shots with the 17-85mm, which is is a Leica rangefinder lens in comparison to the 75-300mm.

AROK, the future we were promised

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/八十八ヶ所巡礼/八＋九/ New (?) 88kasyo junrei double album -- I recognize several of the tracks, probably because they were released as singles and I ate them up, but I'm still not sure (because language barrier, and they're weird anyway) if this is a compilation or entirely new music, but whatever, I'm loving it.

Nice design!

In the summer of 2006, I got my first DSLR: an EOS 30D and its "better" kit lens, the EF-S 17-85mm F/4-5.6 IS USM (which shit the bed on me like 3 years later.) I went on a road trip with a friend from scenic western MA to southern Vermont. VT is a beautiful state, and I have many happy (if, ahem, somewhat hazy) memories of attending college there. I took along my shiny new camera and snapped a bunch of shots. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. The photos were terrible, largely because me having not understanding exposure. I uploaded a few at the time, but ignored the rest for 18+ years. I revisiting them this past January and applied some modern editing tools and 20 years of photo editing experience. The view I had every day at Landmark College in the mid 90s. I had no idea how good I had it. Same view in 1996, taken by my then-girlfriend. Did I ever mention I had a red haired girlfriend from Maine? I still have at least one from her... We then went on and saw a logging operation that was on the VT/NH border. It was quite a spectacle of machinery, dust, smoke, sprinklers and of course huge piles of logs. I took a bunch of shots and they more or less all came out terribly. I particularly like the puff of smoke on this one. For all of these shots, I loaded them into Luminar 4 and spent quite a bit of time working them over. Luminar 4 applies pseudo-HDR math, but with careful tuning, it's possible to keep it out of the cartoonish territory most smartphone cameras reside in. For just about all of them I also applied a lookup table. I did some final edits in Photoshop and in a number of cases cropped them to 16:9. I am an absolute goose stepping Nazi about aspect ratios and 16:9 is not one I normally use. With that said, I didn't like all the empty space above in many of these shots. I did much of this work while still recovering from covid, which might have had some effects on my decision making process. In the end, I'm quite pleased with these edits. The old "F/8 and be there" adage looms large here. As long as a shot is even halfway framed and exposed correctly, it can probably be salvaged in editing. Tune in next time for more of the same, but with hot air balloons!

I loved the Beasties and MCA turned into such a great human that is was extra tragic to lose him so young. Seems weird that was 13 years ago. I saw them twice, 20 years apart. In 1987, I saw them at small club on a the Licensed To Ill tour, their first headlining tour, with Fishbone or Murphys Law opening, which was fucking nuts. In 2007, they were at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, which isn't the biggest joint but still a very different experience.

Adam "MCA" Yauch died 13 years ago today. August 8, 1964 - May 4, 2012. His is one of the few celebrity deaths I mark every year. Kurt Cobain might be the most iconic Gen X musician, but I maintain that the Beasties were the true voice of the entire generation.