Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

Room Lighting

My little Casio point and shoot camera doesn’t handle room level lighting all that well. Miss Lilly Pad the Kitty/Gremlin helps me demonstrate.

No flash, room lighting. The three pics I didn’t post were all too blurry to use.

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The flash clears things up but it doesn’t look very good.

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I looked at the Best Buy website for point and shoot cameras. They are too expensive and Nikon doesn’t make anything that I would be interested in. What about Ricoh? They own Pentax, and one of the film cameras is a Pentax. That could work in the keeping-it-in-the-family respect. Do they make any pocket sized point and shoots?

Office Day

My work schedule these days includes one day working in the office and four working from home. This week is an exception to the rule. This week has two days in the office and three at home. Today is the bonus day. I am in Foxborough, which is about 70 miles from home. It’s not my favorite place to be, to say the least. It’s okay though.

When I went outside this morning I saw something unusual. The sky had blue in it. It wasn’t an awful grey color the way it has been almost every day this summer. It actually looked kinda nice. I took a picture for today’s photo a day challenge entry:

356/365
356/365

The little Casio point and shoot from 2008 is nice and all, but it’s nowhere near as good as the now-broken Nikon point and shoot from 2015. I need to replace the Nikon, I think. Unfortunately, Nikon doesn’t sell any pocket sized point and shoots anymore. I may have to consider going with another brand. That feels like being unfaithful. Bummer.

I am in a meeting at work right now. It’s a training, actually. We’re on a 10 minute break which is going to end in a couple of minute. I can tell by the look on your face how fascinated you are.

Favorite Movies

Daily writing prompt
What are your top ten favorite movies?
View all responses

My top 10 favorite movies? Nope, this question is impossible to answer. There’s no way I could narrow it down to 10 and there’s no way I could rank them appropriately. This is one of those lists that changes daily with the weather, or my mood, or my health, or whatever.

I’ll try though. They will be in no particular order (besides number one), and the list will be more like film franchises than individual movies. Okay… here goes.

  1. Star Wars. Empire Strikes Back is the best of the bunch but all of the Star Wars movies are grouped in here. The original trilogy is the best, but I am including the prequels and sequels and stories too. I love them all. They are my favorite movies ever. A bad Star Wars movie is better than any other movie ever made, though to me there are no bad Star Wars movies. I adore them all.
  2. The Godfather. Godfather 2 is probably the best of the three. Godfather 3 is by far the worst of the three, but I include them all because they are all brilliant.
  3. The Highlander. This one does not include the sequels. It’s just the original. All of the others are garbage. The original is pretty terrible too, but in a really good way, you know?
  4. Good Marvel movies. Not all of them, just the best of them. Infinity War/Endgame, Winter Soldier, Ragnarok, the first Avengers movie, Civil War. There are probably a few others that deserve to be listed, but those are the big ones.
  5. The Dark Knight.
  6. The Cornetto Trilogy. Sean of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End. Sean is the best by light years, but they are all pretty much perfect.
  7. Star Trek: The Even Numbered movies. Wrath of Kahn, Voyage Home, Undiscovered Country, First Contact. The greats. We can also include the Kelvin timeline movies here. I seriously dig those as well.
  8. Goodfellas
  9. The Naked Gun. Let’s include the bigger of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movies. Naked Gun and it’s sequels, Airplane, Top Secret. Also, BASEketball which is a terrible, terrible movie but I love every stupid, idiotic second of it.
  10. Harry Potter. I love them all, despite Rowling turning into an fucknuckle. My favorites are Azkaban, Goblet, and the two Deathly Hallows. Phoenix is especially important to me because my wife and I saw it multiple times together when we were first dating. It will always hold a special place in my heart for that.

Like I said at the start, if you were to ask me this question tomorrow the list would be very different. This works for today though.

2023 50/90 Challenge Day 49 of 90

What do you say we try to guilt me into working on the 50/90 challenge by trying to post daily updates again? Think that will work?

Neither do I.

Here goes anyway.

I put rhythm guitars onto two songs, lead guitars onto one song, and added one new song idea. That makes 32 songs in the pipeline.

  • 32 songs underway
  • 1 song is just a few bass riffs without any structure
  • 11 songs have rhythm guitars but no lyrics or melodies
  • 2 songs have lyrics and melodies but no vocals
  • 2 songs have vocals but no lead guitars
  • 4 songs have lead guitars but need to be mixed down
  • 12 songs have been mixed and are finished

And that, dear readers, is where we stand right now. 41 days left. That’s probably not enough to get me to 50 songs with mixed demoes. We’ll see how close I can get though.

Productive Morning

Talk about a case of the Mondays gone wrong, right?

I got up early, did my exercise, watched a Doctor Who (priorities, yeah?), ate breakfast, wrote a blog post, showered, went to the grocery store and got a few things that we forgot to put on the shopping list yesterday, took a photo for today’s photo a day challenge entry…

355/365
355/365

…Came home and put away the groceries, went down cellar and put rhythm guitars onto two songs that I started fiddling out last night, put lead guitars onto one song from last month, took a couple of obligatory I-played-guitar-today photos, and punched into work with about 10 minutes to spare.

Here’s hoping the work day is that productive too. Let’s keep the motivation rolling! Happy Monday, gentle readers!

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Writing

Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy most about writing?
View all responses

There seem to be two themes to these daily writing prompts. One is vague questions that don’t make sense and read as though they were written by ChatGPT. The other is simple questions that I probably should have thought about over the years but never really have… that read as though they were written by ChatGPT.

What do I enjoy most about writing? I have no idea. I just do. Maybe it’s that it allows me to pretend I am a functioning human being who is capable of communicating with other human beings despite 52 years worth of introversion and being mostly unable to speak directly to those other humans.

Put more simply, it’s a work around for near crippling shyness. I can communicate with people I know well and care about. I can communicate with other people when I need to for work or to get through daily activities. When it comes to just being social or nice or whatever? Nope. I don’t wanna. I just clam up and shut down and that’s all she wrote.

Here? I can act like someone who has social skills and can function and that’s kinda fun. If other folks read it and respond to it? That’s a happy bonus. If not? That’s okay too. I still know it works. It still gets the job done mentally and emotionally and all that fun stuff.

So, yeah… communication is cool, right?