Knuckledragger

I'm sensing a pattern here.

RIP Rick Derringer, best known for that one song we all can recall instantly. Credit to Bill Szymczyk, the producer, who turned that shit up to "11" in the studio, making it such an earworm. If you doubt me, check out the Edgar Winter version of the same song which is ...fine, but a pale imitation of the later Derringer only version. Also, while we're on the subject, Absolutely gratuitous 70s video of their hit from 10 years earlier. EDIT: I should add that Rick produced the first SIX albums by Weird Al, a fact which by itself should elevate him to legendary status.

Where was I? A different crop of this photo was the background for the website for my lighting company in the 00s. I turned off auto-renewal for that domain last week. Soon it will redirect a gambling site, I'm sure. 1 second with the camera placed on the sound booth. A breakbeat DJ and tattoo artist I knew in the 00s. I put a 300W moonflower light with a yellow gel behind him. A actual turntablist and not merely a DJ. Same 300W moonflower. Hannah under the lights. 1/30th, F/2.8, ISO400. I should add at this juncture that I cleaned up most of these shots with Topaz Denoise AI, which is a very 2020s anti-noise app. 00s noise reduction apps and plugins left a lot to be desired. I don't know who this long haired woman was, but she was quite photogenic. In this second shot, I originally cropped out everything and it looked terrible. Almost 20 years later, the rest of the frame serves as negative space. A very slow Sunday evening. Originally I cropped out everything except for the lissajous pattern. Now the photo is an available light study. As I mentioned previously, 2006 was an insane year. There are quite a few photo sets I haven't even looked at yet. A DJ I knew turned 30 in May of '06. He threw a party at the expensive yet shitty club where I worked sometimes. I couldn't use fog in there.. ...because it set off the fire alarm. Pic from 2005 very related. Early in the night. 0.4" with the camera placed on the bar. I elected not to use noise reduction on this one. I didn't like this shot in '06, but revisiting it, I cropped it square and now enjoy it's near abstraction. Wise DJs bring at least one opening act. The birthday boy picked the fella above, which was a wise choice. 1/6 handheld, which was quite reasonable with a tiny focal length P&S. As above with different lights on. I really liked this one in '06. I still do. The party got kind of wild. Birthday DJ reacting to a request to play ...not house music. This was a meter malfunction. Notice my photo tag. This is an image I did not re-edit. A case where motion blur actually improves the image. 1/15th handheld. 0.4" handheld. I have no idea. It looks neat. 1 second handheld. I braced my back against the wall of the club and held my breath. The answer is still "no" even if you play with your hair. Sneak peak for next time. This is a project that's going to take the last half of forever.

Feliz compleaños B. Kirk Lawson, Esquire! The Mexican with the fattest head most white sounding name ever.

Two things: We are in a palindromic period right now. This is some local havoc. Five Corners, or as it is often known, Flood Corners, is an infamous intersection on MV. This footage is from yesterday. Check out the start, then ~10, 20 and 25 minutes in. I made it a point to not leave the house yesterday.

I've been engaging in a bit of a photographic revisionist history/redemption arc. 2006 was a crazy year. I was working 3+ nights a week doing lights in nightclub (in addition to everything I did all day), and doing other sporadic events as well. It was mostly fun and I made enough money for it to be worthwhile. I cannot imagine doing it now. This was a time period right before LED luminaries became mainstream and most club lights were halogen or arc bulb based. This meant normal people could not operate or maintain them, so there was a niche I was able to carve out for a one man lighting business. All of that would change by the end of the decade. During this time period, I took a ton of photos. Many of them are really awful. To the point, the edits I posted were terrible. I operated under the misguided notion that cropping a tiny section out of a 5MP original (taken with a mid 00s point & shoot sensor) was a good idea. Also many of the photos were of the partygoers and in my opinion even the originals for most of those shots are just bad. In 2007, partially inspired by some scene drama, I privated ~1500 photos on Flickr and got on with my day. There's still a couple people from the mid 00s who have a grudge against me because of shots I took during that time. (There's a long story here about a garage house DJ I knew who had a very attractive and insanely jealous girlfriend. I had a photo of him ogling a go-go dancer, she saw it and got mad at him. He of course blamed me for his dysfunctional relationship.) Oh wait, I still have the relevant photos: ...but I digress. 2006 was also a significant year because it was when I bought my first DSLR (EOS 30D that I made heavy use of for entirely too long.) I bought the 30D because my PowerShot S60 died ...twice. Canon were real shitters about fixing it. I have been going through photos I took in the first half of '06, all taken with the S60. The process is slow and laborious, but it's therapeutic for me (and lord knows we all need some therapy these days.) I have been working from the original images (fortunately, I am a compulsive archivist and data hoarder), doing minimal edits and the then replacing them on Flickr. This is a process that no one besides myself will ever appreciate. Lucky for me I'm an only child and my primary audience. As I mentioned above, many of the shots are not salvageable. Using the built in flash on a ca. 2004 point & shoot while the club is full of fog is a benighted idea in the best of circumstances. I took a LOT of photos during this time period and it may well be years before I've finished this task. The following is a small sample: Spinning fire, Jan 2006. 0.4" handheld. I had no idea what I was doing. Re-cropped square but otherwise unedited. Same party as above. My friend Ed, who is a video artist and electronic musician. He has a tendency to hold still for long periods of time. 1.6 second exposure, with the camera sitting on ...some object (I no longer remember what.) I've got a long story about Ed I might tell some day. Re-cropped square, no other edits. A slow night at a Sunday event I worked in an expensive but ultimately shitty bar. 4 second exposure with the camera sitting on case. Cropped 2-3, but otherwise unedited. Same club a month later. Around that time Technics tried to compete with Pioneer in the CDJ market and made a really weird and poorly received product. They made for an interesting light source however. 4 second exposure again with the camera resting on an equipment case. Re-cropped 4:5 (my favorite aspect ratio) but otherwise unedited. Longtime reggae DJ. He's got a huge local following. I never saw eye to eye with him on a great many things (I could write a fucking book on that subject, but I won't.) 1/4 second handheld. I could hold the camera pretty steady for such a long focal length. The joys of a 5.8mm focal length... Part of the live kit belonging to Ed, the bald fella from a few shots above. Not a good photo at all, but the synth gear is too cool not to include. Sadly, in early 2012 Ed passed out drunk with a lit cigarette and burned his studio down. That was a very bad day. Alcoholism is the worst. Same show, available light. 1/6th, handheld. Re-cropped 4:5, but otherwise unedited. That blue LED Doepfer Schaltwerk was the stuff of legend. Same gig. Ed lit up by my 20mW 532nm green 3 mirror lissajous laser. 1 second exposure. No idea what I used as a tripod. Ricardo, the guy who helped me finish my Saturnine mix in 2009. Seen here in April of '06, using my CDJ and mixer combination. I could NOT find that flight case when I moved. That's somewhat concerning as it's kind of huge. Half a second handheld, cropped 4:5. All of this is the tip of the iceberg. I've probably re-edited ~100 photos at this point. More later.

This is hardly porn, but... I got a Velodyne CHT powered sub for the low price of "you're first in line, come pick it up" today. #MVLife

"Nice system, but does it have enough power?"

The Go-Gos played the Warfield Theater in San Francisco last night. Kathy Valentine posted these shots to her Bluesky account:

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.

No reason I should post this now.

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!

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.

A commenter on Imgur thought the trombonist was Tyree Glenn as well. Also the system was stereo and was set up to record. It was installed at the request of Lucille Wilson while Satch was in the hospital. https://virtualexhibits.louisarmstronghouse.org/2020/07/31/louis-armstrongs-1969-1971-tapes-reels-1-5/

Some trumpet player or other with his home hi-fi (I'm not sure it was stereo) in the late 1960s. Photo most likely taken by Jack Bradley. I'd love to know the identity of the trombone player. Google has, and I want to be clear about this, utterly fucking useless in this regard.

Jill Sobule died in a house fire(!) She made the good song called "I Kissed A Girl" I vividly remember it from 1995, which was about the last year I liked pop music. That was before the 1996 Telecommunications Act passed, allowing Clear Channel to own fucking everything and ruining radio (and therefore music) forever. UH I MEAN what a catchy folk pop tune.

When Pope Francis was visiting America, he told the limo driver that he had the sudden urge to drive. The driver was a good Catholic man and would never dream of questioning the Pope’s authority. So the Pope sat at the wheel, while his driver got in the back. The Pope pulled out safely onto the road, but quickly revealed himself to be quite the adrenaline junkie when it came to driving. He was soon whipping in and out of traffic and speeding down roadways, easily doubling the speed limit. He was a wild man behind the wheel. Eventually, a policeman spotted this limo flying down the road, flipped his lights on, and pulled the limo over. Before approaching, he called his chief to warn him about a limo he'd just pulled over with a VIP inside it. Chief: Who is it, the mayor? Cop: Nope, bigger. Chief: What, the governor? Cop: Even bigger. Chief: Wait, did you pull over the President??? Cop: Nope. Bigger than that. At this, the chief ran out of patience. "Okay, I give up. Who is it?" And the cop answered, "I think it's God." "What in the world makes you think that God is riding around in a limo?" the chief exploded. To which the cop lowered his voice and replied, "Well, who else would have the Pope as His chauffeur?"

I prefer to think of it as his Holiness's final act was giving JD Vance the gasface.

This is an absolutely wild one.

Let's go back to 2006 for a second (no, seriously, let's go back.) Then 1968 and 1969 for a second followed by 1962. Finally, back to 1994.

I keep my (now nearly 20 year old) Nikon D200 and 300mm F/4 on a lowboy chest in the kitchen, ready for whatever fauna shows up. Mr. Cardinal, being his usual show-off self. The pond froze for a preciously small period of time. Missing from these photos is the excited "roof roof roof!" noises that green sweater dog kept making. The sounds echoed off the ice and trees surrounding the pond. It was quite a scene to behold. Tune in next time for a 2006 logging camp!

So it turns out that this thing was a complete disaster. The entire thing is plastic, including the drive sleds, rails and all mounting hardware. The decidedly cheap MediaSonic ProBox enclosures I bought years ago are far more better built. With that said, I'd be willing ti ignore the plastic nature of the QNAP here if it actually worked. It (not so) randomly disconnected all 8 drives three times in less than day. Two were while I was doing an rsync. That could be catastrophic. A friend of mine suspected it was a power issue. I've got the two MediaSonic units back in action. They have loud and annoying cooling fans as well as their police car like strobes: Seriously look at this. Can you imagine having TWO of these in your bedroom? I covered the LED bars on both units with electrical tape. As much as I mock the MediaSonics, they have been extremely reliable, working 24/7 for years on end. Zero disconnects as well. I'm now looking at two other options. One model went up in price by 20% since yesterday (thanks, Donny!) and the other is ...the OWC Thunderbay 8 I probably should have gotten in the first place. (To be fair to me, OWC is now owned by some vulture capital firm and their reputation has tanked in the last however many years.)

A person I used to know in W.Mass is (very) active on Bluesky. They posted a bunch of parody variations of musician names like "Britney Halberd" and "Worse than Ezra." I was inspired: Silentpark (High) Pearl Fructose Syrup Alice Set Free Farvana Glass Mosque Drivers The Repairing Squashes Church of the Cat Father Hate Knuckle Sighted Cantaloupe Goldbench Visual Geriatrics Bar Peaceniks John's Rehab Mouth Skaters Enginefoot Minorlife Keen Eared Panther Uniform Gang Major Security

Got one of my two Thunderbolt docks, my DJ mixer, my MOTU M4 and all the appropriate wires out. I've got nearly everything set up and my Thunderbolt cable has gone missing. I cannot find it anywhere. I had it at the start of the evening and it's now touring outer Waziristan. No show tonight. Maybe one tomorrow.

*blows copious amounts of dust off this thread* Native Instruments is circling the drain. Due to some bad financial decisions by them in the previous decade + the vampire squid that is private capital, they may never release a new version of Traktor. I am now testing out DJay Pro. It's "free" on the app store, but requires a $50/year subscription I hate SaaS just let me buy the fucking thing I swear every MBA needs to die UH I MEAN the base version appears to be functional. The UI is alien to me, but that's what 16 years of Traktor does to a MFer. I'm not saying there's going to be a one-off test broadcast tonight, but there is now some possibility.