Knuckledragger

Gay rights and longtime Democratic Congressman Barney Frank dies at 86. I have mixed feelings about this one. Barney was a trailblazer in a much earlier era. He also had (and I steal this quote) a sense of humor he wielded like a wrecking ball. I have never seen anyone make Republicans so buttmad on the floor as he did. He's also one of the few politicians who ever directly took on Wall St. in my lifetimes. With that said, he spent his retirement years undoing more or less all the good that he did in office. He became a lobbyist for the very financial institutions he sought to regulate previously, he went after trans people directly and in his final act as a public figure, attacked Graham Platner. Way to shit on your own legacy, bud.

NSFW!

Counterpoint to my paean of primes: Modern zooms can be really good. Last fall I bought a stack of lenses from an MV photographer who had gone mirrorless. The least interesting but most useful of the bunch was the 24-70mm F/2.8L II. It's the perfect "walk around" focal range and a vast improvement of the original model (which was more than a bit of a dog.) Also pictured is the 100-400mm F/4.5-5.6L IS II which is an impressive and massive beast, but also a great way to blow copious amount of dust into one's camera body. I took all of the following with the 24-70. It's been so long since I've posted photos in this thread that we're going all the way back to last Christmas. I'll win no awards for framing on this one (especially on a stationary object) but in spite of my snapshotesque abilities with the viewfinder, I really like the the look of this shot. 30 seconds at F/22, ISO200. I really needed to do shots significantly longer than 30 seconds, and I was too stubborn to raise the ISO. At this point I had not been able to locate my remote cable. Blissfully, the remote I bought for my 30D in 2006 works with the 5D IV. This coming Christmas I can do multi-minute exposures. This is the house my father grew up in. It has a big Cyrano De Bergerac portico that juts out into an already narrow sidewalk. For something like 150 years it has served as an inconvenience to all passers-by. I love it. Cool Story Bro: My grandparents were the last private family to live in the house. After they moved out in 1940s, it became a law office and of course it's been a retail shop for decades at this point. Right next to the Vineyard Haven ferry slip. Not pictured: the December wind ripping across the harbor and through my jacket. I will cheerfully take the same picture over and over again, in different weather an lighting conditions. Happy sledders enjoying the first snow of the season. Later afternoon sun on Sweetened Water Farm. There's that patch of woods again. The calm before the blizzard. The aftermath. Ideal lighting conditions at the Oak Bluffs harbor. Still shooting that 1980s car commercial. All good things must come to an end.

Oh boy. Pulled a tick nymph off my leg. It was on there long enough to cause irritation, but not get engorged yet. TBH any length of time is too long for a tick. MV has a terrible alpha gal problem (no, that does not mean women who fancy themselves the leader of the pack.) If I develop those symptoms, I'm jumping in front of a train. Note from legal: MV has no trains. It did have one in the 19th century. The first locomotive to arrive on the Vineyard got dropped into the ocean as the workers attempted to unload it from a ferry. If Knuckles manages to jump in front of any of the above, he's more talented than previously believed.

Tom Kane, Iconic ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Powerpuff Girls’ Voice Actor, Has Died. RIP. 64 is crazy young.

Shooting with primes will make you a better photographer, but they won't make you take better photos. Modern (as in the last 20 years) zooms are so good that primes are vestigial beasts best left to eccentrics. There are exceptions to this rule of course, mostly super-teles that operate in a range outside of any zoom. Personally, I muck about with primes because I find them interesting. To me cameras are fiddly devices that get between me and the photo I want to take. Lenses are tools to make art. While I use modern (or "modern") autofocus lenses all the time, for me the real joy is ancient manual focus ones. Also, I haven't posted any of my own photos here in like six months. Two of my favorite bits of vintage glass are Asahi Super-Takumars: A 35mm F/3.5 and 50mm F/1.4. It's a tossup which one is more crackheaded. The 35mm, in spite of its woefully slow aperture for its focal length, has a really fat ass and will not fit properly in Nikon or Canon DSLR bodies. It will fit in a Canon cropped sensor body, and presumably most mirrorless ones. I've posted shots with it in this thread many times over the years. I liken the images it produces to a horror movie. The 50mm does the same thing, but much more so. My particular copy is a third iteration (IIRC) and it's notable for being radioactive. Glamour shot taken with my 100mm F/2.8 Macro. The 50 has a permanent warming filter (that gets more warm over time). It's useless for anything serious, but endless fun for goofing around. For me this is definitive example of "Takumar horror." The color temperature, weird rendering of OOF highlights and slight vignetting are all produced by the lens. I did only minor tweaks in Photoshop. The same view, taken with the 35mm mounted to a 7D Mk II. Not really horror at all. First and foremost, I stopped down and used infinity focus. Also the 35 is not radioactive. I have a long term goal of buying a full frame body so I can mount the 35 to it and see how bad the corners are. Yes, buying a $3K body to mount a $75 lens. Makes perfect sense. I mentioned in the snow thread that we got absolute decimated here in February. I promised to post photos and never did. The AF system on my 5D IV was not impressed with the condensation on the outside of our windows. One nice thing about old primes is that most of them have a hard infinity stop. Modern glass often lets the user focus beyond infinity (calm down, Buzz Lightyear) meaning they're a PITA to use in low light and other difficult circumstances. This shot is in focus, but still quite blurry because of the water on the window. Looking out my front door. No giants doing cartwheels or a statue wearing high heels. Quite the whiteout, however. Taken with the TTArtisan 100mm F/2.8 "Bubble Bokeh," which is a Trioplan copy, more or less. I have mostly used it as an actual 100mm and ignored its abilities with OOF highlights. Our poor, battered thermometer. Back to the OG Canon 50mm F/1.8. My ca. 1988 copy is one of my most prized lenses. Back to the 35mm Takumar and 7D II. Not exactly horror movie, but exhibiting how the 35 is not entirely sharp at any aperture. The images it produces have a slight uncanny quality in more or less all circumstances. One of the casualties of the nor'easter, which had some very powerful winds. As of this writing, the boat is still there. The mighty Canon 135mm F/2L. Designed as a portrait lens, it's good at photographing more or less anything, provided the photographer is up to making use of its FoV and DoF. Oh, hey. Actually using the TTArtisan 100mm for its intended purpose. The late afternoon sun reflecting on the pond and some early spring buds.

Feliks Audio also make a few dynamic amps. The Envy (7K EUR) and the Envy Susvara Edition (a paltry 13K EUR) have similar visual DNA to the Bliss. I suspect they share similar design decisions and component selection, if you take my meaning.

Clarence Carter, Soul Singer Behind ‘Patches’ & ‘Strokin’,’ Dies at 90. Also, Clarence Carter was still alive(!)

A redditor's father died and left him this: Also, I was born into the wrong family.

RIP legendary music producer Jack Douglas. Longtime listeners will know I have a fetish for the sound of 70s analogue productions. Aerosmith (a band that I find to be a curiosity at best) posted these photos on their official FB page: That console is a thing of beauty.

^ In that post, I just used the URL posted by the guy on the audiophile subreddit. The following will be more UK friendly. Fuck Nigel Farage. This Scandinavian fella is living his best life:

Sub SnoreWoofer.

Ted Turner died. Of the many things he did, my favorite by far is Turner Classic Movies. Also, the way he shook up professional wrestling in the 1990s.

Scott Lee of DIY music electronics company PAiA has died. The PAiA website currently has a memorial up for him: https://paia.com/ I never made an PAiA kits, but I was a ware of them for many decades. From Theremins to TB-303 clones to full-on modular synthesizers, PAiA had something for any would-be synthesist handy with a soldering iron.

David Allan Coe croaked. I have mixed feelings about this one. DAC was a jackass and utterly full of shit, for many decades. He annoyed other country legends like Waylon. He recorded an album in 1982 with some very questionable lyrics. On the other hand, he had quite a good voice and could write decent songs when he wanted to. Fittingly, he died on Willie Nelson's 93rd birthday. This song sums up his whole career for me. Kind of idiotic and cringe inducing lyrics and gratuitous name-dropping, yet it's also a goddamn earworm. I first heard it on a cassette I had in the 1980s. It had a bigger impact on me than I could imagine.

Fan made C&H remixes are brutal.

I have a (not so) secret soft spot for yacht rock. That one blonde backup singer looks familiar, it's almost like she has... TV appearances that aren't lip syncs are a treasure.

Goddamn size queens.

April 23, 1976, the Ramones released their debut album. Hey, ho, 50 years ago(!) As I snarked in 2016, "Sheee-it, some tiny insignificant punk rock album by a band you've never heard of dropped 40 years ago today. It sold poorly, probably because it didn't have any good songs on it." I know I don't have to explain the significance of the Ramones to the crowd of codgers that is head case. I will be lecturing some mostly uninterested zoomers on the subject.

This is going to be a long walk for fairly little payoff. Everyone knows the 1994 hit film Pulp Fiction, which made Samuel L Jackson a household name and revitalized the career of John Travolta. There's a scene where Quentin Tarantino has a cameo (as he likes to do) playing Jimmie Dimmick. Jimmy has three noteworthy traits: he's the person who the two main character seek out when they need to hide a corpse, his wife (never seen) is black, and he casually drops the N-word (something else Quentin likes to do.) That scene birth the phrase "Dead N-Word Storage" which has lived on on the internet since 1994. Certainly it's popular with people who were going to find a reason to say the N-word anyway, but even outside such circles, the phrase is a cultural touchstone. With that in mind, this meme came across my radar earlier: Even as far back as 1994, I thought Jimmy's kitchen looked very dated. That rage hood reeks of the 1970s. A few google searches later I learned that "Jimmie Dimmick's house in Pulp Fiction is located at 4145 Kraft Avenue, Studio City, California." The property is listed in Zillow and Redfin. It's far older than I'd have guessed, built in 1936. Also it's $2 million, but that's hardly batting an eye about these days. The place has been completely redone since 1994. Very deceptive photo that makes the kitchen look far larger than it actually is. Significantly more realistic shot. Note in both that the range hood (now an iconic screen-used prop) is there in all its glory. The hallway has a print of the Banksy work of the same name (which is so famous it has its own Wiki page.)

Just learned that Michael Kohlbecker died. In the 90s he made pounding hard trance on the then-mighty Harthouse label. I especially like the work did under the Eternal Basement name. I had a whole stack of Harthouse compilations in the mid 90s the EB tracks stuck out even amongst his legendary peers. Later, he'd go on to do ambient downtempo weirdness with a rotating crew of compatriots as the Saafi Brothers. While I outgrew the hard trance sound fairly quickly, the better Saafi tracks have stuck with me for decades. My favorite track by them is still this one: In classic SB fashion, it takes forever to get going and goes on far longer than it has any need to. With that said, I used to put it on whole I was cooking dinner in the 00s. I've mixed parts of it in to my radio show many times over the years. It's got the best shuffling bassline.

Boards of Canada Reveal New Album Inferno. First new BoC album in 13(!) years. Hol. Lee. Fuk. 🤯