The Cat’s In The Cradle With The Silver Spoon

Game cases came in on Saturday!  Here is the Jag collection as it currently stands.

I have a couple of more to do.

I’m also working on the booklets…

They Show You Photographs Of How Your Life Should Be

All of this camera equipment you can buy is marketed as "Professional Equipment."  I have a problem with that. Namely that you don't need a camera or lens branded as professional to take good, quality photos.

I'm going to start out by saying that I do not view myself as a professional photographer.  I have been told by many people over the years that a good portion of my work is indistinguishable from such, but I do not view myself as such.

My preferred camera is a Nikon Nikkormat FS which is the most stripped down, absolutely nothing fancy (not even a light meter!) 35mm SLR camera that Nikon ever made (that I am aware of), but I have been recently relying more and more on my Nikon D40x. I love that Nikon hasn't changed their lens mount since something like 1965, so all of their old SLR glass still works!

Also! So cheap!

Anyway, the following photos were not taken with that.

They were taken with my Olympus FE-4000 point and shoot camera.  It's a mediocre little portable camera.  I like it though.  It can take some surprisingly good (and dare I say it...Professional quality!) photos if you set it up correctly.

Long story short, it's not the equipment that makes the pro, it's the pro that makes good use of the equipment at hand.

Yes, there are some specialized lenses for certain things, but I've been able to take some pretty similar photos with some pretty cheap, fifty year old glass.

There Goes Tokyo

Did some yard work today.

Used my sledge hammer to take down a tree and part of a fence.

Is it too presumptious of me to name the hammer Mjölnir?

Also, Atiller The Hun left a path of devastation in it’s wake…

A Spoon Full Of Sugar

Down At An English Fair

Found some pretty BA covers for my cartridge based video games today.  Looks like I’m only going to have to make two or three from scratch.

Hooray! Thanks thecoverproject.net!

I’ve Never Been To Boston In The Fall

Finished up the programs for The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything Of Penzance today. That was an interesting project.  It was brought to my attention after the show on Sunday that the woman who was in charge of doing them left a few names out of the cast of characters page…Including her own daughter.

I‘ll Make My Final Stand

Taken from the May 2018 issue of America’s First Freedom Magazine.

Put On Your Sunday Shoes

Flashback: The Quest For Identity showed up today.

This is the one my brother spent an insane amount of time trying to track dow the Genesis version of when he was younger.

I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General

Went to see Pirates this afternoon.  My wife has some sibling in the show.  It was fun.  Not super amazing, but fun.  There were some bugs with the sound that detracted from my enjoyment of the show.

I’m also not a huge fan of the venue…I understand that the building is old (something like 100 years!) and continually occupied by the same business, but they have really let the place go and they are slowly restoring it. 

Anyway.  My camera did something I haven’t seen in a very long time…It told me that it was out of memory.

I know, right?

You know what? It was!  So I pulled out the backup camera…An old Nikon 35mm with 18(ish) exposures remaining on my only roll of film.

IT WAS GLORIOUS!

Seriously. I love the challenge of only having so many shots.  I really need to buy up some more film for the summer because as much as I love my digital cameran it is spoiling me.

The House Is A Rockin'

So I have found my first Jaguar project.  I am going to adapt the game Dragon’s Gold by D.C. Owen. 

It was originally written (so far as I can gell!) for the Timex Sinclar 1000/1500.

My father brought one of those home in about the mid ‘90s along with a book titled “51 Game Programs for the Timex Sinclair 1000 and 1500” by Tim Hartnell.

That computer was a lot of fun, but extremely annoyng as well.  Some of the games were a lot of fun (Frogger was impressive), but the trick was you had to write the games and compile them before you could play them.  Not the easiest thing in the world to do. The computer’s keyboard was not a keyboard as we know them today. On no, It was a flat panel, smooth plastic job.  And the keys stuck. Oh how they stuck. One day I spent somewhere between 2 and 4 hours writing out Frogger.  I was nearly ready to go when someone set a glass of water on the table and caused the whole thing to reset itself.  Fortunately I had saved my code onto a cassette about an hour before, so I didn’t lose too much data.

I got Dragon’s Gold to compile and run exactly once. Every other time I tried ended in a similar fashion to Frogger. Anything from a cat knocking a power cord out of the wall to an incredibly finniky tapedeck to the thing just randomly resetting itself.

In the early 2000’s I decided I would take a crack at adapting it for the MS-DOS world and rewrite it in QBasic.  Before I could get very far, however, I ended up joining the Army. After getting injured and waiting to be transitioned back out I pulled out a notebook and started writing it out from memory.

By hand.

Because I’m crazy.

Somewhere along the line (probably when my apartment melted!) I lost said notebook.  Probably not a bad thing…My simple text based adventure game was suffering from “Feature Creep” wherein I was attempting to add too much to it.

So here I am. About to restart this from scratch for an actual video game console. Here is hoping I get somewhere with it!

I’m Your Ice Cream Man