This song kicks all kinds of ass. Alex first told me about it many years ago, when she first started hanging out with prog-metalheads in Kerkyra.
Category: English
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:
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
First minutes of 2016
First minutes of 2016
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
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.
EARWORM GARDEN // WOLFSHEIM — KEIN ZURÜCK
I tried to write something in German here; wasn’t sure if it was correct so I just ditched it. Schade.
Fact of the matter is I’m going through a kind of mini-“this is the first day of the rest of my life” feeling, as if the loose ends that had been hanging low were unexpectedly and simultaneously tied up—or rather, cut off.
Not “as if”, actually. One nagging little piece of emotional baggage in particular had been bothering me for absolutely yeeears (or did it just feel long?), and I never expected internal resolution to come that easy, so suddenly, that it would smack me up the head so hard and definitively and completely in its obviousness when it did so just a couple of days ago, so… yeah. I’m proud and happy about it. Take that, Skalomann (like Skallamann only for skalomata).
Kein Weg Zurück now then, but in a good way, perfect for what’s coming up next, i.e. having to wake up super early, follow questionable orders, enjoy rations of even more questionable quality and so on and so forth.
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
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Haunted By DataStrata+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. |
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What Happens Next Will Amaze YouFREMTIDENS 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. |
EARWORM GARDEN // ORPHANED LAND — ALL IS ONE
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).
“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.”
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.
REVIEW: WHAT’S THE NAME OF THIS BOOK?
What Is The Name Of This Book?: The Riddle Of Dracula And Other Logical Puzzles by Raymond M. Smullyan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In this popular puzzle, a man has committed a crime punishable by death. He is to make a statement. If the statement is true, he is to be drowned; if the statement is false, he is to be hanged. What statement should he make to confound his executioner?
I got this book after reading The Tao Is Silent and deciding that Mr. Raymond Smullyan must be one of my favourite people out there. A logician, a magician, a pianist, a Taoist and a mathematician? (it rhymes!)
What Is The Name Of This Book? (link leads to full text online, in case you’re curious—CTRL+F “Was I Fooled” to get a small taste) is a small journey through all kinds of logic puzzles, paradoxes, stories etc, most of them in the style of knights & knaves, that is puzzles in which the solver has to figure out from a series of statements which can be either always true or always false, depending on if they are made by a knight or a knave, who the knight and/or knave is.
Most puzzles in the book were based on similar themes and got a bit repetitive after a while, but really, how creative can you get with just logic, 0s and 1s that is? At this point it has to be said that lately I’ve been more interested in “irrational” puzzles, ones that have to be solved by acuteness of observation or thinking outside the box rather than clear-cut logic, i.e. those that try to trick you into blindly and thoughtlessly following logic, when using logic alone for solving the puzzle ends up being a hindrance, not a tool. I’m talking about games such as the ones Alberto from Spain taught me and I now play with groups of people whenever I get the chance.
Still, there’s plenty in What Is The Name of This Book? to make one think, and as a collection of quips, stories, anecdotes as well as logic puzzles, it does have a certain value. I would say that it’d make a great companion to Logicomix.
I’m making it my gift to dad this New Year’s; let’s see if he’s going to like it at all, him being more of a rational thinker than me and all. Maybe he can use these stories in his English classes in some way as well.
Solution to puzzle at top of review: (view spoiler)
JUST A COUPLE MORE THINGS ABOUT CHRISTMAS
I wrote “Is it really Christmas?” more than 6 years ago.
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.
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.
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
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.