Knuckledragger

We've got some uncharacteristically early fall weather here on MV, that means a man's thoughts turn to ...blues metal. I've been a fan of Glenn Danzig's music for 40 years now. The Misfits need no introduction nor explanation. Samhain was an amusing but short-lived diversion into goth rock. The first four Danzig albums (and the fun little Thrall-Demonsweatlive EP) are represent Glenn in his absolute prime. He had the ideal backing band for his possessed Elvis persona. Eerie Von is the perfect backbone for the whole thing, and already had experience dealing with Glenn in Samhain. John Christ's riffs are leadenly heavy but still cut sharply through the mix. Chuck Biscuits got his start in punk rock (DOA, Black Flag, Circle Jerks) but adapts seamlessly to the demonic blues sound of Danzig. He's not a showy drummer, but he always does exactly the right thing. The efforts of all of these men are captured by producer Rick Rubin, who was also at the absolute top of his game at the time. Rick has done an awful lot to tarnish his own legacy, but the truth is in the 80s and 90s he was a music god. The first Danzig album is lightning in a bottle, and really without peer. I'm biased, because I bought it new on cassette in 1988, at a very impressionable age. Similarly, I bought II and III on CD when they came out. Both albums seek to the one(s) before them, and succeed in some areas and fall short in others. Also, they straight up fucking ROCK. Even at his most goofy, Glenn was a savant at conjuring compelling cheese. I didn't pick up 4 until years later, some time post millennium. While it's vastly inferior to the first three, it still a solid listen. Glenn was veering into experimental territory and well out of his natural depth. This would be a harbinger of (bad) things to come. He was fortunate to still have the classic band lineup and Rick Rubin producing. 4 was recorded in legendary Sound City studio, and I'm sure that helped. Look up the albums recorded there sometime, it's a staggering list. The album with the greatest guitar tone ever was recorded there. (I will die on this hill.) All of the above was enough to counterweight Glenn's worst ideas. Mostly.

TBH Stretch, I suspect you are in fact the ideal target market for the iFold new iPhone Duo™. The strength of Apple products is the ecosystem. The individual pieces are only okay and invariably overpriced, but like 1980s Transformer toys, they make something really cool when combined. As I've mentioned, I'm friends with a silent generation couple here on MV. He turns 90 at the end of the month(!) and has no use for mobile phones, smart or otherwise. She's a comparatively youthful 86 and is in the market for a new iPhone. She has already got a recent iPad Pro (which is a very slick device) and a MacBook with 8GB of RAM (I swear, I turned my back on her for five minutes and she bought the exact worst model.) I've been encouraging her to at least consider the Duo. Their son, who lives in Spain, has an Apple Vision Pro. I am unsure if he uses it to translate on the fly. He also has a vegan girlfriend who has alienated the rest of the family. I swear, vegans are cultists. They take what starts out as a good idea and twist it into some fundamentalist extremism that... So uh anyway, the machine to buy for legacy Intel based apps is a 2018 i7 Mini, or if one is feeling insane, an Intel Mac Pro. I actually have a friend who has been taunting me with the idea of selling his.

So Jim Bakker croaked, which got me thinking about the 80s. He had a sex scandal with Jessica Hahn. She cashed in on her "fame" and appeared in a few music videos, most infamously with Sam Kinison. That one sucks. Sam was at times a great comedian, but his music career was pathetic. In a much more interesting example, she appeared in a video by the nuclear (and ecology) obsessed Nuclear Assault. Not my favorite example of 80s thrash, but it holds up pretty well.

In September of 2009, I drove to a local brick & mortar store and paid them $30 for a DVD of Snow Leopard. It felt like a genuine upgrade from 10.5. Some time I after that I doubled the RAM in my laptop (remember when we could do that?) from 2GB to 4. I also replaced the spinning rust HDD with an SSD. Good times.

A guy on reddit built a "1968 system." A 275 driving Cornwalls had got him like this:

HAH. Controversial televangelist Jim Bakker dies at 86. Know Your MemeRIPBOZO | Know Your MemeRIP Bozo, often written as RIPBOZO, is a phrase used online to celebrate a person's death, deeming them a "bozo," commonly defined as someone who is insign

Dozens quarantined after researcher at Russian plague laboratory dies of ‘unknown’ infection. Oopsie doop-ski. It's a (possibly/probably weaponized) variant of the bubonic plague.

Political cartoon from 2005.

R5 Mk II arrived yesterday, and by "arrived" I mean I drove to the post office and picked the damn thing up. The camera body is comparatively small and lightweight vs an equivalent DSLR. The 5D IV with its battery grip feels like a hulking behemoth in comparison. Even the 5D classic a chonker next to the R5. Funny how much bulk a pentaprism adds. The R5's UI is ...Canon. I had to figure out how to enable shutter activation when "no lens is attached" to use my manual focus glass. From the get go, the R5 pestered me relentlessly to set it up with my iPhone. That necessitated making a "MyCanon" account ...which I did on my laptop, with a real web browser and password manager. Then I had to sign into Canon on my iPhone and pair the two devices. The entire process made want to buy a view camera from 1920. I own zero R lenses and probably won't for quite some time. I am totally buying an R mount anamorphic. I started with the Canon EF to R adapter and it did what it said on the tin. The lens I had closest was the 135L, which says more about me than it. For reasons unclear to me, Canon ships their bodies set to fast burst mode. My 30D came that way 20 years ago. Some fussing later, and I had single shot and daylight white balance set (AWB is the devil.) Of course, the first actual keeper shot I took was with my beloved Super-Takumar 35mm F/3.5, a lens design that goes back to the 1950s. My copy is from the 70s and while it's far from perfect lens, I love how it renders things. This marks only the second time I've used the 35mm Takumar with a full frame sensor. Its ass is too fat for EOS bodies and on the 5D IV, it requires mirror lockup and live view to use. I find that workflow to be a miserable PITA, so I only ever used the 35 with my EF-S bodies (of which I have 3 ...for reasons.) While I loved the shots I got with the Tak on a cropped sensor, I knew I was losing out on much of the flavor of the lens by not having it on full frame. It's like own a Mac tube preamp and not using the phono input. The Fotasy M42 to R adapter is very well made. I had to enable the "shoot with no lens attached" setting or the shutter won't work with non-electronic lenses. Of course, the second lens I tested was the 35mm Takumar's 50mm, radioactive, F/1.4 sibling: There are a lot of variants of the F/1.4 Takumar, and mine is among the least desirable. The original 8 element version proved to be too expensive to produce and is a bit of a white whale amongst collectors. Besides being radioactive and yellowing, my version has a terrible coating and makes giant orange hexagon flares. Of all the lenses I own, it might be the one with the most "character." The 50's posterior isn't as bulbous as the 35's, so it's far less invasive inside the camera body and as a result I've shot with it on full frame for years. Before lunch today I had a go with the Nikon F to Canon R adapter (also made by Fotasy.) I have never been good friends with the Nikon lens mount. It's backwards. Also, I have owned precious little Nikon glass over the years. The only ones I shoot with are the mighty 300mm F/4, an excellent 50 F/1.8 I got from a certain 🐵 in 2010(!) and the decidedly mixed 18-200mm VR. Of those, the 300 was the obvious choice. I replicated a shot I took nearly 20 years ago of the house across the pond. Manual focusing a long lens with an EVF takes some getting used to. The R5 has a zoom peek function, but I as of yet haven't figured out how to use it. That's it for now. I'll out some modern electronic AF lenses tomorrow. What a silly idea.

Putin, 73, Gets Confused in Stuttering Speech to Reporters. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

The pain of living on MV. Four different "updates" on the delivery of my new camera. Two trips to the post office. No fuckin' camera. The clerk's advice was to try back tomorrow.

RIP Conrad "Chronos" Lant, frontman of legendary metal band Venom. I was never really into Venom, but their influence on bands and entire genres that followed is undeniable.

Apple is discontinuing support for Intel based applications sooner rather than later. This is bad as I have a shit-ton of old photo editing apps I use with varying degrees of regularity. The current market for used 2018 Intel based Macs (the last year for them) is exploding. i7 models with decent RAM are particularly expensive. I saw a 64GB model go for $500 on eBay and a 32GB model hit just below $400. 2018s do have replaceable RAM, but good luck finding the right SODIMMS at a non-insane price. Thanks, AI! I'm going to purchase a clean 2018 Mini in the next week or so. Also, I explained ^ to a friend of mine and referenced the neuron activation meme. He sent me this: So I guess I'm part of the problem.

Ha ha look at these crappy old wooden boxes. Who'd ever want them? They don't even have a finish.

Memorial Drive, Boston. Remember, it's not a Storrowing unless it happens on Storrow Drive, otherwise it's just a sparkling bridge strike.

I have successfully gotten my M4 Mac Mini to play nice (via SMB) with at least one of my Wintendos and a pair of Linux boxes. This was a nontrivial exercise. I ended up using Claude AI. Clod is actually pretty helpful with persnickety geek tasks. The process was more or less an involved "turn it off and turn it back on again." So far I kind of like Unbuntu. I'm actually considering installing it on my UM350 micro PC. Debian has proven to be more of a challenge. It's not precisely unfriendly, but it expect more of the user. I'm going to ask Claude about the NTP error that has been plaguing me for over a week now.

A while back I bought a little widget to make music listening on iPhone less painful. This was before I got my AirPods Pro Max II AKA My Idiot Neighbor's Life Insurance Policy. The unit is a Fiio KA15. It's a tiny thing with a USB-C gozinta and 3.5mm single ended and 4.4mm balanced gozoutas. When I wasn't looking, 4.4mm balanced became the New Hotness. I picked up a 4.4mm Senn cable a while back as part of a larger purchase. Every review says the Fiio works with iPhones. Me: [connects Fiio to iPhone via USB-C to Lightning cable] "See anything?" iPhone: Nuh-uh. Me: What I if I let you upgrade to the new version of iOS you've been after me about for like a fucking month now? iPhone: Dunno, we'll see. Me: [upgrades] iPhone: SUP, bro! You've got liquid glass now. Wanna take a tour? Sure ya do! Check out thi... Me: [tries widget] iPhone: Still nuh-uh. iPhone: Hey, now'd be a GREAT time to finish setting up your iPhone! Me: ... iPhone: ApplePay is right here, you should totally set it up! Me: I will literally throw you into Jernegan Pond. Meanwhile, Google: Hello! Yeah, we're tracking your every move. Did you know you scratch your nose with your left hand more often on odd numbered days? Anyway, yeah, foobar2000 for Android is a thing and since you're signed into Google here, you can remotely install it on your only Android device (don't worry, we know all about that, too!) with one click. Android tablet: This Fiio widget works just fine. We'll make foobar use it by default. Foobar2000: Yeah, I see all these mp3s on the SD card. Did you know you put the same Alcest album in there twice? Me: [exasperated Malcolm Reynolds dot gif

Sorry. Not sorry.

The new comment editing widget and I do not get a long, which makes sense as I didn't get along with the old one either. What I'm talking about with the EF 50mm F/1.4 and IR 5D:

One of my favorite photography YouTubers covered a lens whith which I've had a 20 year love/hate relationship. Comment I posted on it:

Phil Collins in his home studio, 1980s: I spy a TR-808, TR-909 and a LinnDrum.

Not all 60s consoles are created equally.

In early 1990, not that long before his tragic death, Stevie Ray Vaughan performed on MVT's Unplugged (y'all remember when ...nevermind.) Watching on a small CRT with a mono speaker, it was somewhere in in the middle of "Pride and Joy" where I became an SRV fan. Just Stevie, an acoustic 12 string (years later I'd learn it was 1969 Guild) and a stupid amount of talent. At the time I had no idea how difficult it is to play a twelve string, never mind how Stevie did it. In 1989, three musical genres were peaking: hip hop, death metal and rave. I was into all of them and decidedly not into blues rock (acoustic or otherwise). I bought my first CD player in the summer of 1990 (a Pioneer 6 disc magazine changer.) The first "CD" I bought was the legendary Led Zep 4 disc boxed set. The next two were some now famous Iron Maiden single re-releases. After that was SRV & Double Trouble's In Step. Stevie has my vote.