Knuckledragger

Tom Lehrer, song satirist and mathematician, dies at 97. Also, Tom Lehrer was still alive.

I'm voluntarily getting up at 8AM tomorrow (a Saturday) to take photos of Land Rovers. ^ I wrote that last night and forgot to hit enter. Also I think I managed like two hours of sleep last night. With that said, I made it to the Vineyard Series LR meetup and took a ton of photos. More when I'm less tired.

Related, Ozzy had a comeback in '88 with his hit song "Miracle Man" which is about Jimmy Swaggart.

Hulk Hogan croaked. I have very little good to say about him.

I used to have a friend from .ca who lived outside of the Toronto area. His parents owned a BMW dealership, so I called him "The Torontonian Trustafarian." TT for short. He endured a good decade of "TT" jokes. If we were still friends, he'd be extra annoyed with me today as all three TTArtisan lenses I bought during prime day arrived. I made it a point to use all three. I favored the 75mm F/1.5 the most, to the surprise of no one. The 100mm F/2.8 Bubble Bokeh is odd and I need to use it more. The 11mm F/2.8 Fisheye is neat, but I have no idea what I'm doing with a fisheye lens. 75mm, wide open. This wood pile is my new favorite subject. 100mm wide open, I think. The aperture ring is in an odd spot on all of the TTArtisan lenses and was not used to adjusting them. My neighbors across the street are and old Vineyard family. Mr. Norton died earlier this year at 93. His family do a top not keeping up the farm. They replaced half a dozen rails in their fence (which are expensive AF.) I think I mentioned I have no blinkered idea what I'm doing with a fisheye.

The Cardigans also did a cover of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" on their first album from '94. My college roommate loved that band and had all of their albums (which was ~3 at that point.)

Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne dies aged 76, his family announces. Fuckin' hell, mate.

This is absolutely crazy. Th Those are Legacy Whispers. I'm enough of a nerd to remember when they came out in the early 90s. They were Legacy's statement model. They're actually not as bassy as the Focus model (which I have coveted for 35 years now) but they excel in more or less every other aspect. Of course, the way to get around the lack of bass is:

Dear lord. Today's news is insane, and leaves me with more questions than answers. Sunny was a tough woman. Not superhuman, but definitely world wise and not easily intimidated. She grew up in a harsh environment and knew how to fend for and defend herself. There's some missing piece of this story we still don't know. Is this kid a physical giant? Did she know him? I suspect she did. Did he manage to sneak up on her? This would be an insane story in any location, but in a quiet town of ~2000, it boggles the mind.

Speaking of expensive... Anyone remember Kai Wong? In earlier days of YouTube, he hosted a bunch of photography related videos on DigitalRevTV, out of Hong Kong. DRTV doesn't really exist anymore, but Kai maintains some degree of celebrity in the online photography world. He's got his own YouTube channel. I'm not subscribed and have never watched any of his videos (before today) but YT's algorithm has taken note that I have been consuming a fair amount of photography related material recently. (I've been doing a deep dive on TTArtisan glass, the OG Canon EF 15mm F/2.8 Fisheye -- more on that later -- and of course specific M42 mount lenses like different iterations of the Asahi Takumar 50mm F/1.4. I learned that my non-multicoated 7 element version is probably radioactive.) I guess that explains the giant orange hexagon, but I digress... Well, ol' Kai managed to get his hands on a vintage French-made cinema lens, the Som Berthiot Flor 55mm F/1.5. I don't know a thing about the Flor 55mm or Som Berthiot in general. I do know that cinema lenses tend to be several orders of magnitude more rare and expensive than ones designed for still frame. They were made in comparatively infinitesimal numbers and only a small fraction were sold to the general public. Additionally because motion picture cameras feed the film through vertically, many cinema lenses don't make an image circle sufficiently large to cover the 35mm film plane on a still camera. The Flor is one such lens and it can be adapted to fit Leica rangefinder bodies. Consequently a clean example goes for upwards of 60,000 British Pounds in the rare event where one comes up for sale. I'm not necessarily suggesting anyone watch (most) of this video. In spite of Kai's best efforts with his little handheld wireless mic, the sound quality is lacking. Add to that the rather thick accents of most of the subjects and it can be a challenge to figure out what they're talking about. The example shots taken with the Flor are ...fine, but nothing dazzling. I own a (not so) small army of manual focus primes. While none of them match the Flor's specific unsharpness and color transmission, I can get to an equally interesting optical space with fair number of my vintage lenses. I can't mount any of them to Leica body, however. (Which is mostly fine with me, I have never coveted a Lecia digital body, but I would certainly give an M6 with a 35mm Summicron a go.) I'll go a step further and say that if there was lens that offered identical optical performance to the Flor, but was made in much larger quantity by a less storied maker (Yashica, for example) it would sell for maybe $100 on eBay.

The base model M4 Mini is basically the best deal in computing right now. It's so good that it has more or less killed the used Mac market. Except for a few exotics, it's difficult to sell Intel based Macs at all. I'm seeing them pile up on the MV Stuff 4 Sale group. No one is selling Apple Silicon models.

Things have been so chaotic recently that I'm not sure I mentioned this or not: My M1 lappy had a major problem. First one of the TB ports stopped working, then the keyboard began to fail. I lost use of left arrow key, which was a nightmare. I am constantly using arrow keys to highlight text. I began to get the "MacOS doesn't recognize this keyboard" messages ...on a laptop. I had the option to renew my AppleCare this past February and didn't. Big mistake. It cost me three times that to get this machine fixed. With that said, when one gives APPL nine hundred fucking dollars, they really deliver. They sent me a super neat box to ship it out and got the machine back to me within 5 business days. Here's the punchline. It's an entirely/mostly new machine with my SSD in it. I am on this laptop more or less constantly. The only objects I own where I know the nicks and scratches better are things like my Canon EF 50mm F/1.8 Mk I that I've had for 20 years. Apple is a weird as shit company and I could write a book about them. It'd be titled "Why Apple Sucks Balls, But I Swear On Steve Jobs' Smug Grin, Windows And Android Are Worse At Every Fucking Turn."

Still trying to make sense of Sunny's murder and failing to do so. I knew her for just under 30 years. I actually remember the day I met her. It was August 31st, 1997, my first day at Bradford College. Also the day Princess Diana died. I've been a photographer for two decades at this point, but I have precious few photos of Sunshine. I had been meaning to catch up with her for years, but as tragically is so often the case, I kept putting it off. The last conversation I had with her was two years ago when her father passed. I sent her this photo: I look it in 2012 with the never-not-shit EF-75-300mm. I ran it though the Silver FX Pro plugin, which I favored at the time. Mark (Sunny's dad) was ...a piece of work, but certainly a character. In this shot he's a man in his element. The only photos I have of Sunny herself are from 2007 and 2008. I took this one on my back porch in October of 2007. When I remember is she had to leave early. That fall was marked by two things: some of the best foliage colors I've ever witnessed in scenic western MA, and the absolute peak of dubstep. Not brostep fart noises, but the original very sparse minimal reggae tinged sound that started in say 2003 and was dead by 2009. There was a big dubstep party that happned about two days after Sunny left. I did the lights and if memory serves, I DJ'd at the after party. Initially Sunny wanted to attend, but business in Maine called her back. Sunny was possibly the biggest extrovery I ever knew. She had no shortage of self confience. Yet she did not like having her picture taken. This shot and the following one are from July of 2008, just shy of 17 years ago. She wasn't pleased that I was pointing my SLR at her. As I have said many times, I always prefer portraits where the subject is reacting to anything but the camera. I mentioned the Silfer FX Pro plugin earlier. Prior to that, I used to make heavy use to two Photoshop scripts I found in the mid 00s. One was "holgafy" and the other was "lomofy." Both were more than a bit heavy handed, but I taught myself to reverse engineer and wrangle them a bit. I did to passes with said scripts on a photo of Sunny in 2007, but never published the edits. I found them yesterday while looking for photos of her. I don't particularly like either edit, but he lo-fi effects of the scripts take on an entirely new meaning in light of Sunny's passing. At the risk of repeating myself, if you have someone you haven't spoken to in entirely too long, do it today. There may not be a tomorrow.

Holy shit. One of my closest friends from college was murdered not far from where she lived. Sunny was one of the toughest people I've ever met. I can scarcely process this.

Ukraine accuses Putin of humiliating Trump with devastating attack on Kyiv. Russia launches record number of drones and ballistic missiles in seven-hour assault shortly after its leader spoke to US president.

File under: Exceeding the attention span of nearly everyone. Five hours of Gamers Nexus explaining why chaotic tariffs are a dumb idea and how they ruin everything. I watched the first installment over a couple evenings while grinding loot in an RPG. I haven't watched the second one yet.

In the parlance of our times, RIP Bozo. Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whose ministry was toppled by prostitution scandals, dies at 90.

A guy I've known on Discogs since like 2002 picked up some dream speakers. Kid for scale.

That's an expensive cat warmer.

ABC of AFX.

Iran says it launched attack on US forces at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base.

More room porn than anything else. Via this real estate listing and /r/audiophile.

There's a web comic called beanytuesday. Way back in 2018 (almost 7 years ago to the day), he did a series of intentionally poorly drawn 2018 election candidates. One of them has had an enduring legacy. No, not ol' Hills. Gen Z loves to meme this one. It's newly relevant.