Car music happened this morning. I drove to the movie theater parking lot and put vocals on four songs. Three of them were written beforehand, one was written on mic. I don’t do that very often anymore, but I had run out of tracks to sing and wasn’t quite ready to stop so I threw it together on the spot. Sweet.
The view from “the recording studio”
I was originally thinking of spending some time playing guitar today but I don’t think I will have quite enough time, what with our plans to go to Vermont to visit the kids this afternoon. Instead the goal is to write some more lyrics so I can have another successful car music tomorrow, and set up some song forms so that I can have a lot of songs ready for rhythm guitars tomorrow as well.
The goal is 50 songs by October 1st. 27 songs are done, 46 are in progress. It doesn’t look good, but it’s still doable. I’ll let you know how it goes.
In the three years plus that we’ve been mostly working from home, we’ve been hit by a lot of nasty storms during business hours. We’ve never had a power outage though.
Until today. It only lasted for a minute, and the wifi booting back up actually took longer than the actual outage. Still, our perfect power streak has come to an end. Now we just need the storm to end.
I bought the clock in this picture two years ago when I had a Covid-19 scare and was quarantined in my step son’s room while he was away at school. Those few days sucked out loud. I bought the little clock from amazon because there wasn’t a clock in Harry’s room that wasn’t on a computer screen. When my isolation period ended the clock moved to our bedroom and later when the cellar rebuild was finished it moved down stairs to my new office space.
I noticed it was ticking really loudly this morning. Three hours later I realized the second hand wasn’t moving anymore. The battery wasn’t dead, but the clock apparently was.
Rest in peace, cheap piece of crap amazon clock. You served me very well over two years of life. I thank you.
I cooked my lunch on the grill in the back yard today. It’s cold inside the house and roasting hot outside. In between hamburger flips I took a few random pics with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. As I did so I posed the question to the universe: If I do start using Hipstamatic regularly again, will I be the only person on Earth doing so?
I posed the question to the 900,000 folks on BlueSky Social and no one responded. I went to Flickr and searched for images tagged “hipstmatic” and sorted the results by date taken. There seem to be a few people there still using it. I checked a couple of Hipstamatic groups as well and they are still getting updates with recently taken images. Based on that I would not say I will be the only user left on Earth. I will say that I am one of the only users left. That’s okay with me.
As usual, I used the shake to shuffle function to randomly assign film/lens combinations.
Someday I am going to buy a medium format film camera. Consider this as me practicing for using a square format option. You’re welcome.
Okay… so if I am not going to have a point and shoot camera that at least rivals my iPhone 14 Pro Max, then I should really start using my iPhone 14 Pro Max’s camera more often, right? That’s just logical, even if you are a friggin’ snob like me, right?
It’s been over a year since I’ve thought about camera work flow using my phone. What are some of the things I used to do? Edit on Camera+? Okay. Edit in CameraBag? Do I still have that app? I haven’t used that one in many generations. Okay.
Hipstamatic. If I start using Hipstamatic again, will I be the only red head on Earth using it? Yeah, maybe. I still have the app on my phone, but only because it was there when I initially restored the new phone from a backup almost a year ago. Do I have any of my in-app purchased film/lens packs? No. None. Fortunately I was able to restore all of those purchases… and there were a lot of them.
To test drive that the two main settings I used to use in Hipstamatic are still functioning (shake to shuffle and save the original photo with the filtered photo) I decided to bring back and old “favorite”*, Hipsta-Kitty!
Granted, The Hipsta-Kitty was our Miss Patches and she has passed away, so this is more like Hipsta-Kitty Mark II, but it still works. Here is Robin, who slept through most of this.
This one is the winner
So yes, shake to shuffle and save the original both still work, and all of my favorite combos are still there, and all of my previous purchases have been restored. Should I end up going with my iPhone 14 Pro Max as my go-to point and shoot, Hipstamatic will once again be there for me… even if I am the only living creature in the known (or unknown) universe (or multiverse) still using it.
Groovy.
ADDENDUM: I hit publish, forgetting I was going to add a footnote. So I will add the footnote to the addendum. Right on.
*When I say “favorite”, was hipsta-kitty ever really anyone’s favorite or was it just me verbally yanking the universe’s chain? Probably the yanking.
The road trip for today is not happening, but there are signs around the house that something was in the works. One such sign is a small shopping bag full of protein bars and sugar free Gatorade (fruit punch flavor).
This is another sign:
I mean… we weren’t going to stop anywhere that would have been photo worthy but… it’s me so… yeah. Three friggin’ cameras. Mirrorless, point and shoot, and film. Nerd Deluxe.
