Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

Camera Plans

What camera gear should I bring to Vermont this weekend for Bellana’s graduation festivities? I’m thinking… all of ’em. My Nikon Z5 mirrorless, Dad’s Pentax K1000 35mm, and my Nikon FG-20 35mm. I’ll probably bring all of my lenses too. I just need to figure out how to pack it all up.

The two film cameras are both loaded. The K1000 has a half finished roll of Fuji Superia 400. The FG-20 has a fresh roll of Fuji Superia 400 as well, but I have the ISO set to 200 because King JVpes on youtube said it will look cool. I tried it once in Disney and he was right. Thanks! The K1000 has the Pentax 50mm prime lens on it. The FG-20 has the Gemini 80-200mm zoom with the KtoF adapter. I’ll probably take them as is, but bring my Nikon 35-70 lens too. I only have one full frame lens for the Z5, the 40mm prime lens, so that’s going too.

What additional film should I bring? I have a roll of Porta 800 that I bought for Disney but didn’t use. That’s coming. I will put that into the Pentax when the current roll runs out. I have a roll of Cinestill too but is that appropriate in this case? All of my other color film is Fuji Superia. I have a bunch of Kentmere black and white film too, but I don’t think I want to shoot black and white this weekend. Or do I? Maybe I’ll bring a roll or two.

I am really looking forward to this weekend. Seriously looking forward to it.

Courteous Bad Stomach Fun

I’m having another unhappy stomach day today. It’s not bad. I won’t have any problem working or anything like that. The stomach pain feels like bad gas so far so maybe I will try to take a Gas-X pill and see if it clears it up.

The pain is nothing but courteous this time as it waited until morning to start bothering me. I didn’t wake up with it at 1:30am or anything like that. I woke up with it at 5:30am, which was when my alarm went off. Nice of my stomach, eh?

Change of subject, I think I just did something I’ve never been able to pull off before. I think I just saved an external hard drive. Sort of, at least. The drive I had been using for my Time Machine backups corrupted itself somehow recently and went into read only mode. I tried fixing it with Mac Disk Utility but didn’t have any luck.

I replaced the drive with a new 2tb drive over the weekend and yesterday I had my first successful backups. This morning, in between powerful burps and even more powerful farts (sorry) I tried fixing the first drive again but it wasn’t happening. I reformatted the drive instead and remounted it and whatdayaknow, I can write to it again. It’s now my music files backup disc and maybe it might be my Flickr backup disc too if I ever get the energy to back up the zillion photos I have stored there. Yeah, I should do that soon. There’s so much to lose on that account. Now is the time.

My stomach has made me late to get started for work. It’s 8:21 now and I still need to take a shower and get dressed and all, so I will do that now. Happy burping, everyone.

Haircut Redux?

I posted something the other day about having a bad experience trying to get a haircut. Checking in early only to have to wait a ridiculous amount of time, and being in a large crowd in a confined space in the time of Covid… granted the state of emergency for Covid was lifted last week so I guess I can’t technically say it’s still the time of Covid. Whatever, I didn’t feel safe.

I am going to try again tonight after work. I booked a 6:00 appointment. Here’s hoping I get right in because they close at 7:00. My hair really needs to be cut. I look like bozo the idiotic clown right now. The mirror cried “uncle” this morning and I have to appease it.

Unrelated story, I bought a fly swatter the other day. I was at the grocery store and I saw it and that was literally the definition of an impulse buy. The idea behind it was to keep it at my work desk in the cellar and use it to eliminate bugs with extreme prejudice. Spiders mostly, but also little flying assholes that I don’t have a name for that often annoy me while I work. Earlier today, the swatter tasted insect blood for the first time and it liked the taste. It is thirsty for me.

There was a yellowjacket buzzing around. It was loud and obnoxious and clearly in a shitty mood. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t go anywhere that I could get a clear shot at it with the new fly swatter. It just wouldn’t stop flying around long enough, and when it did it stopped in a spot that I couldn’t swing my weapon with any accuracy.

If flew into one of the lamps and I thought a spider got it. It was quiet for a few minutes. Good riddance, I thought. But no. It flew out of the lamp with spider webs wrapped around it and trailing behind. It was clearly in distress and couldn’t fly very well. I saw my chance. It landed on the wall behind my desk for just a second and I struck. The sound of the fly swatter slapping against the wall was deafening (no it wasn’t, I am just being overly dramatic) and the bee fell to the desk. It was alive but severely injured. I struck again and the invader lived no more. Rest in peace, asshole.

I grabbed my little waste basket and swept the corpse off of the desk into it. It was then that I saw the little inch worm/caterpillar looking prick that had been hiding under the basket. The fly swatter tasted bug blood once again.

Something tells me my impulse buy will go down in history as money well spent. Money very well spent.

I Suck at Hockey

In my second round NHL Playoffs predictions post I wrote this:

Traditionally my picks are awesome in the first round (fuck you, Bruins) and awful awful awful in the second round so take this at your own risk, m’kay?

Me

If Seattle loses tonight’s game seven against Dallas then I will have picked all four second round series wrong. All of them. Zero out of four correct.

I suck.

Fear is Back… Unfortunately

Fear the Walking Dead’s eighth and final season kicked off last night. I’m watching the episode now as I close my exercise ring on this Monday morning.

Why, oh why do I keep doing this to myself?

Why is being a TV show completist even a thing? Why am I compelled to watch what is clearly the worst show on television, and quite possibly the worst show in the history of television? This show hasn’t been anything other than awful since the second half of season four. This is the start of season eight and I am still torturing myself.

Why?

Ten minutes into the season premier and it was clear that all of the things that made seasons five, six, and seven unbearably terrible are still in play. After three seasons of shit, we’re still introducing new characters in the opening segments, they are still somehow… I don’t even know. It’s just stupidity, left and right. I still have five minutes to go and the walkie-talkie count is up to about nine, I think. Fear the Walkie-Talkie.

This show couldn’t possibly suck more, and yet here I am watching. What a fucking idiot.