COLOUR FILM 4 + 5

First things first: Colour films 1-3 are sitting in my hard disk and are not online, with few exceptions. Let’s add to these exceptions. December 2009, Mytilini.

From JUST A COUPLE MORE THINGS ABOUT CHRISTMAS:

I was also thinking of getting myself a new (used) large sensor compact digital camera, as I’ve finally missed taking pictures. But then I figured that spending so much on something which I wouldn’t get to enjoy almost at all because I’ll be in the army, is indulging on some fetish compulsive spending for no good reason, which ironically is the very definition of the festive spirit… Instead, I got a couple of rolls of colour film for my OM2n and got ready for action. Results soon to come.

It took some time (can you believe that individual photo shops do not develop film internally anymore? They actually have to send it out to be developed centrally somewhere and the whole process takes days) but here are said results. I spent most day scanning, messing around with histograms, scratching films, trying to figure out why artifacts appear on specific spots on all strips. Sarcastic or serious buckets of fun were had.

Film is awesome. Read this (it is available online). Be smart about buying film (like I wasn’t). Always use a tripod (I never do); that said, don’t be afraid to underexpose, if you can get a workable picture at 1/60 (most of mine are @ 1/30 and are a mess). Embrace mistakes and the physicality of the medium (or your shitty scanner). Like so:

film_physical_medium — Done with scratches and fluo green and black markers

Or so:

You should only remember one thing: there will be dust. And scratches. And at least 1/2 the film will come out shite. But the rest will be worth it. Hopefully.

Enjoy.

Something’s a-baking

Are you hungry?

Choose your destiny

Men’s corner

Christmas lunch aftermath

Tried to do multiple exposure with previous pic

Oh hi Denny

Hand-made (kinda) sepia effect

Give me that WINE!

Nejib & Eva

Meditation station

You can shoot, but you cannot touch.

Eva, Bratislava Spotter

Forever curious

Messing around with the histogram when scanning

Eva, Bratislava Spotter

Neni with scanner artifacts that look like mixa and flower

Normal histogram Monastiraki

Light source for previous pics

This one came out better than I expected

Reduce, reuse, recycle

AthenStyle views multiple exposure

50mm selfie after first 40m consecutive run. Don’t use 50mm lenses for selfies.

Piquilía

Aegina

First minutes of 2016

The vrisp softness takes my breath away in this one in particular

First minutes of 2016

Any Germans out there?

Duck. Πάπια.

Multiple exposure sunset

Taliro for Flouri

Vegan vasilopita

Again, better use wide lenses for things like this

Vasilopita ’16

Heisenberg and Heisenberg’s mum

Media workspace aka my room

The damn roll just wouldn’t finish

If you liked what came out the other end, I’ve posted more of my experiments with film here and here (both mostly B&W). For the tiled gallery, try the Tiled Galleries Carousel Without Jetpack plugin.

FATE OF THE INTERNET

Two vids and two talks, all broadly on cryptography, freedom of information and mass surveillance, all excellent—and I don’t usually even like rap.

Especially the talks though, they’re on a different level completely, truly ground-breaking stuff. Haunted By Data you can either read or watch on Youtube, What Happens Next Will Amaze You is only in transcript form.

Juice Media vids

Talks by Maciej Cegłowski

Haunted By Data

Strata+Hadoop World, New York City, October 2015. [video] (20 mins)

Re-imagining data as radioactive waste we don’t know how to safely store. Nixon in your data center. Eroom’s Law as an example of how data-driven thinking can make things worse for an entire industry. A plea to stop gratuitously collecting data and start treating it as the trade-off it is.

What Happens Next Will Amaze You

FREMTIDENS INTERNET, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2015.

A talk about the corporate side of our culture of total surveillance. The odd story of how advertisers destoyed our online privacy and then found themselves swindled by robots. Six fixes that I think could restore Internet privacy. Capitalists who act like central planners, and an industry that insists on changing the world without even being able to change San Francisco.

ENJOY THE NEW YEAR LIKE LIVING UNDERWATER

Happy new year! I wish this is your year’s soundtrack. May you swim with the seals all the way.

Found this awesome little song from Ran Prieur who had this to say:
Doctopus – Wobbegong is a garage rock masterpiece, and an example of the elusive raw and intense happy song that I mentioned a few weeks ago. This is their only great song.

REVIEW: THE ATLAS OF THE REAL WORLD : MAPPING THE WAY WE LIVE

The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live by Daniel Dorling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book originally lent to me by Orestis from uni. In fact, if I recall correctly, he’d borrowed it from someone else first. In a weird twist of fate, I have become that shadowy person responsible for lent books gone AWOL. The person everybody loves to hate.

It’s not hard to get what this book is all about: it’s 366 maps that are much more infographics about human life on Earth than they are maps.

Greece doesn’t rank high in almost any of these expected or unexpected lists and their respective cartographic representations, apart from the follwing two, which stuck out for me—links are to the book’s source website, Worldmapper, which contains all 366 maps included in the publication for your viewing pleasure).

Mopeds and Motorcycles

“The Asian regions (Southern Asia, Eastern Asia, Asia Pacific and Japan) are where 65% of mopeds and motorbikes are driven. Mopeds are less powerful than motorbikes, having slower maximum speeds because of their smaller engines. Some mopeds can also be pedalled. This form of transport has an advantage over cars in that motorised bikes can be taken on narrow roads and paths. On the other hand the rider is more vulnerable to injury.

Malaysia and Greece have more than one motorbike / moped for every five people. Considering that some people will be too young to drive, this could be one bike per three people in the relevant age group.”

Total Elderly

Greece’s percentage of people over 65 (wow, that includes my dad!) is ranked fourth in the world, after Japan, Germany and Italy. Doesn’t this suddenly make the whole pension crisis seem way hopeless? Also see: why Europe’s aging population means that the EU need to welcome 20 million immigrants by 2030 to replenish diminishing workforce.

If this book could have always up-to-date info, and not stuck in 2008 at best, it would earn its 5 stars. But I’m sorry review, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

View all my reviews

JUST A COUPLE MORE THINGS ABOUT CHRISTMAS

I wrote “Is it really Christmas?” more than 6 years ago.

fuck christmas

That post sums up my negative feelings about the holiday period well, so read up if you’re itching for some Xmas-bashing clichés. But it doesn’t correctly represent the way I feel about it now, or maybe ever. It’s bad, sure, but there’s some good left in it. Christmas is Darth Vader.

This time of years is a great opportunity to make and bake stuff. This time around I thought I should try making melomakarona for the first time. I followed a vegan recipe that substitutes honey with grape syrup plus another batch without syrup. I must say the results were quite satisfactory.

Then of course you have Christmas or solstice parties and family gatherings. It can get annoying explaining for a millionth time to extended family your plans, or worse, the lack thereof, but hey, free food, good food, praise for my melomakarona.

Food as gifts is a great idea actually. It doesn’t have to be expensive, you can take the time to personalize it, prepare an experience as well as a real physical thing, and it can work for both people that like having stuff around as well as not.

I just realised that I have hardly received any presents this year. I was thinking that I truly, really wouldn’t mind if I received nothing at all. Less of said stuff to worry about.

No, I’m not being honest here: If I had to say, I’d like it if somebody got me a new jacket or some smaller jeans, or a shiny new, yet unassuming, journal/notebook/sketchbook to take with me to the army as a tool for rerouting my vital energy. They say that serving in the Greek army can get very boring, but I say “how can anything get boring, when you have something to write or draw on at hand?” In fact, I expect the lack of distractions and the army environment to give me some interesting ideas and the time to carry them through.

A couple of final notes about Christmas:

A lot of people are noticing that the weather is acting freaky, with temperatures much closer to those we’d have at Easter rather than Christmas, and perfect sunny days to boot (and it’s not just in Europe). All this plastic snowy decorations and allusions to the cold north, home to Santa Claus, which just isn’t so cold any more, make Christmas feel even more like a simulacrum: a veneer of stuff, rituals and cultural behaviours over something that has been so far-removed from the physical world it has ended up symbolising nothing at all apart from its own mere existence. Just like Halloween.

And, talking about Christmas decorations:

Santa’s Real Workshop: The Town in China That Makes the World’s Christmas Decorations

Santa’s workshop … 19-year-old Wei works in a factory in Yiwu, China, coating polystyrene snowflakes with red powder. Inside the ‘Christmas village’ of Yiwu, there’s no snow and no elves, just 600 factories that produce 60% of all the decorations in the world. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex — Santa’s workshop … 19-year-old Wei works in a factory in Yiwu, China, coating polystyrene snowflakes with red powder. Inside the ‘Christmas village’ of Yiwu, there’s no snow and no elves, **just 600 factories that produce 60% of all the decorations in the world**. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex

REVIEW: ΚΛΕΨΕ ΣΑΝ ΚΑΛΛΙΤΕΧΝΗΣ

Κλέψε σαν καλλιτέχνης: 10 αλήθειες που δεν σου έχουν πει για τη δημιουργικότητα by Austin Kleon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ακριβώς ο τύπος βιβλιαρακίου που διαβάζεις και θα ξαναδιαβάσεις μια φορά στο τόσο για να πάρεις έμπνευση και να θυμηθείς αυτά που όταν το διάβασες πρώτη φορά ορκιζόσουν ότι ήταν καλή ιδέα αλλά ποτέ δεν δεσμεύτηκες με το να κάνεις τίποτα απ’ αυτά και έτσι αποτελέσματα δεν ήρθαν, και γι’ αυτό αναρωτιέσαι τελικά αν φταις εσύ, και τι γίνεται με τη δημιουργικότητα σου, και αντί να παίρνεις τον χρόνο να δημιουργήσεις όντως κάτι διαβάζεις βιβλία που σου λένε 10 αλήθειες που δεν σου είχαν πει για τη δημιουργικότητα, τώρα όμως που σ’ τις είπανε νιώθεις πιο δημιουργικός ή λιγότερο;

Δεν νιώθω πιο δημιουργικός, αλλά το Κλέψε σαν καλλιτέχνης με έφερε πιο κοντά σε ένα σημείο στο οποίο νιώθω να κινούμαι από μόνος μου τελευταία: την πίστη στο δικό μου είδος δημιουργικότητας, αυτό το παρόμοιο συναίσθημα με το να γράφεις αυτό που θα ήθελες να διαβάζεις.

View all my reviews

THE FORCE AWAKENS

Got out of my local The Force Awakens premiere and I can’t stop thinking about it and how Star Wars has grown, changed, or not. I’m not sure if TFA was a “good film”, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. All this talk about good films, fun films, blockbusters and the rest… What is the connection, the overlap, between a film being “good”, well-made and without plot holes, and being enjoyable and fun? What’s the perfect balance between nostalgia, fan service and introducing actual novelties that made the original movies so special in the first place?

I don’t know what it is, but TFA pulled off what three years ago we thought was ridiculous to even think of: a respectable sequel to the original trilogy that changed the world of cinema forever. It could have gone wrong in a million different ways, but then again… was that so difficult? If anything, I’d say that the we, the Star Wars crowd, have certain buttons that at the end of the day should not be so hard to find and push!

Then again, in retrospect, when Episode III came out I was pretty hyped as well. Only later did I realise that it was a mediocre movie at best and that it could have been so much more. Funny how this all works. Probably has a lot to do with growing up.

EDIT: I made another realisation: Star Wars is like a fairy tale, right? Fairy tales don’t go by the same rules other stories go by, e.g. novels. Plot holes don’t have the same gravity, if they have any at all. There is no reason to suspend disbelief, because disbelief is suspended to begin with.

The Prequel Trilogy as well as The Force Awakens wouldn’t stand critical scrutiny as novels or ordinary sci-fi flicks, but if you just follow them through as you would a fairy tale, then yes, they work well no matter what. If you left it to fans on the other hand, it seems they would turn it into something more complicated than it’s meant to be.

Would a truly properly plot-thick Star Wars work? Maybe the spin-offs will give us an idea.

LINK: THE PSYCHONAUT FIELD MANUAL

psychonaut-field-manual-bluefluke-chaos-magick-1

psychonaut-field-manual-bluefluke-chaos-magick-2

AKA an introduction to chaos magick. This illustrated digital booklet holds some great guidelines and info and it is exquisitely presented. It’s s easily one of the best things I’ve ever laid eyes on, especially since we don’t get to read about esoteric stuff like that in such a form very often. That said, I can’t say anything about whether it works or not or how—that might have to wait a while still! Check it out here or download a .pdf of the latest version here.

Bluefluke’s Tumblr.

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