Yeah, yesterday didn't go according to plan at all.
I ended up not having the house to myself for the entire time, and the people came back much earlier than anticipated.
No film, no store trip, no food prep for Friday evening at work.
I did manage to fix the iPod Mini that had the not fully functional click wheel. I need to buy a new battery for it though,
I really need to pull the film out of the Sprocket Rocket and develop it.
I will, in theory, have the house to myself from about 10am until I have to leave for work. I guess I can work with that.
Wow. Just wow.
All the work I did yesterday was for naught.
Sure, the bathroom drama is under control. Sure, the bike is in decent working order again, but wow.
All for naught.
Had the "pleasure" of taking today off work to clean my house. At least I got the dicey part of the bathroom repainted.
That weird moment when I had a realization at work earlier:
A week from Thursday there really isn't anything else holding me to that place.
A business deal I was transacting with someone since late October closed last week, my pittance of a bonus will arrive in my bank account on Thursday. It's weird that they are doing it quarterly now instead of annually. Yes, the amount is a great deal less than previous, but it will happen a little more frequently.
Suddenly there are, for me, four different points where I can walk away and not feel too cheated by losing out on it instead of one.
Needless to say, I'm tempted. If I end things at work and go to a different schedule, I have the suspicion that things will get back to where they were last year when I was working a couple of daytime shifts a week. Which I don't see myself surviving.
Figured out the PC. Apparently a Windows update changed the boot order and tried to get it to boot an OS that doesn't exist on a drive that isn't even plugged in. I should probably do something about that at some point.
In other news, the cake is done. I'll give it a try tomorrow.
There is a lot more going on in this Moral Star document than I originally thought. Usually it is 3 or 4 entries, and that's about it.
This appears to cover most, if not all, of what I was writing about in 2021, which is odd considering how much actually happened that year. It appears to go from February to November. Not sure how many entries, I'm honestly tempted to print it out and read through all 17 or so pages of it, but only a little tempted.
I added a few entries, but when I went to check on something else, I found that my main PC is not functioning properly. Annoying.
In other news, I'm going to make a "Dr. Pepper Texas Sheet Cake," but it will get a little weird because I don't have a sheet cake pan, so I'm going to have to wing it.
I was thinking that I had something to write here, but nope. Today I ended up at work, despite being a Saturday. Working on a Saturday is not something we usually do anymore, honestly.
Anyway, I will get around to more of the Moral Star posts from the past eventually. I left work, went to Target, picked up a Sam's Club order, went and unloaded groceries and went to Chic-fil-A.
After that, I played with my Cricut machine, but didn't do much more than cut out fabric dinosaurs, because why not?
I was going through an old hard drive a while ago and came across, among other things, a blog document.
It was from 2021 and covers the end of my UPS Store career through to The Sickness.
I also found scans of the handwritten code for a computer game I was trying to make work, along with scans from the original book for a different type of computer.
I should let an AI bot try to update the game for me.
Anyway, I'll go through and add the 2021 entries, which I'll tag "Moral Star Part 2" since that is what the file is, for some reason, named.
I'll also add the game code scans into 2003, where they belong.
Today I went back to the Children's Museum. It is always a great place to visit. Did I take pictures? Sure.
Did I take pictures without people in them? Not really, not this time. I did make it up to the overlook today, which looks down on the dinosaur exhibit. That was pretty cool. Also, random stuffed bird.
I was listening to The Presidents of The United States of America this evening at work, and all I can think is that the song Naked and Famous seems to do a pretty solid job of describing the occupation of "Content Creator." Or, at least, what most people tend to associate with that occupation, at least post Covid.
Really? Covid isn't a word in the Firefox spell check database? That actually surprises me.
Also the Sci-Fi Channel cast of MST3K is about to get back together and throw out four new episodes under the MST3K brand?
What fresh hell, 2026? What fresh hell?
Apparently Firefly may get the chance to exist again in an animated format.
Huzzah for that...I think?
Took the Sprocket Rocket and ran a roll of film through it this afternoon. I'll develop it one day this week, I hope.
I'll be interested to see what sort of nonsense I ended up with. I should have a couple of pictures of the same person in three different places in the same frame. I suspect the next time I try that, I'm going to need a tripod, but whatevs...It's all about the experimentation, right?
Decided to play a C&C Red Alert skirmish game a few minutes ago. One of those doesn't usually take longer than 15-20 minutes.
Not this time!
I finally came across something that my current desktop PC cannot run that isn't Windows 11.
Apparently the raw .mkv file ripped from a 4K Blu-Ray is too much for that thing to handle. I'm guessing it's the GPU, but who knows. I'll circumvent the problem by continuing to not buy that type of disc, unless absolutely necessary, and encode the .mp4 before I go and name whatever video I'm trying to get, instead of naming before encoding.
Tragic.
I'm sitting here writing.
Because why the heck not?
What am I thinking about?
The food I plan to make this weekend, of course.
Egg casserole, pineapple cheesecake, jambalaya, pepper lime chicken, probably some chicken fajita. Hamburgers. Maybe chili or meatloaf? I don't know.
What else do I need to do?
A bunch of laundry, clean the bathroom, probably clean the house, <Pause to play a quick game of RA2> fix some damn thing or other, blah blah blah. That's the way of the day. Lists and things. Ideally write. Maybe I need to color something? I don't know.
Ugh.
This drama at work is seriously cutting into my time to just exist. I was there until around 2am writing emails, making signs and making sure people clearly knew what they were walking into at 6.
It's been unpleasant, but it is what it is.
My PC 20 years ago had the following specs:
"Windows Vista irritated me to no end.
An AMD Sempron 1.61 ghz processor, 512 MB RAM, 80 gb of hard disk space, and a 128 MB ATI Video Card were not enough."
I wonder how hard it would be to replicate those specs and try running the Windows Vista Beta again. I can match the ram, hdd and probably the graphics card without any issues virtually, but I'm not sure about the processor speed. I'll have to look into that, but it sounds like a fun project to revisit...Twenty years later.
Okay. After several failed attempts, and a little bit of research later, I've finally gotten somewhere with the DigitaLiza sprocket scan mask.
Clearly, I have some more work to get done, but I now have a recognizable image, along with the sprocket holes.
I'll be the first to admit, this is probably not the best film to test this with, since I don't have a reliable color profile/memory to work with. It is the dubblefilm jelly. Which is a bit odd...
I'm pretty sure I know what needs to be done, so hopefully I have something acceptable fairly soon. I'm out at a place I took some photos a while back, and I brought the Sprocket Rocket, but I kind of forgot the film and I really don't feel like going to get some anywhere.
Apparently the drama in the Middle East is directly affecting my job...In an extremely negative way. This looks to be the first in a series of very unpleasant days.
In other news, the Sprocket Rocket camera and scanner mask are now a thing. I'm hoping to be able to use the camera soon. I'll try to figure out the scanner mask later this evening or in the morning though.
Here is what I ended up with from the Revolog Echo film:
Unlike the jelly, this one I'll probably buy again. I can think of a few interesting ways to use it, and the effects aren't overdone to the point where they take away from the images, unlike the jelly.
Admittedly, I was using an untested lens for that one, but it still seems like it would be too much.
I bought a couple of rolls of effect/experimental film on Friday and used them both over the weekend. The first one I shot was the dubblefilm Jelly 200.
I am not thrilled with the results, at first I thought it things came out looking like they do because I hadn't done a normal roll of film in good light with the lens, but it looks more like that is the intended look of the film:
While I appreciate the look it is trying to go for, the effect is just too much. I assumed, initially that my exposures were way off. But after looking through the sample images on the website, I'm guessing I wasn't too far off with my metering. I could do a little messing around and do a series of under/correct/over-exposed images, but I really don't want to spend another $17+tax on a roll of film I wasn't thrilled with.
I really hope the other roll I bought turns out a bit better.
It's interesting how something always comes up that falls into the category of "situationally appropriate" when I'm reading or listening to music.
My iPod usually lives on shuffle mode these days, and for whatever reason, when it is playing, whatever song happens to be playing at the time accurately describes shenanigans that are currently happening. Same thing with books. Usually, whatever I'm reading has something to say about something that is on my mind.
I've been thinking quite a bit this last week or so about how I feel like there is a huge part of myself that I need to keep hidden from the people that I live/spend time with, and the following bit from the book I was reading this week comes up:
"That attitude, that we had to wear a mask, even toward our family, it was one I could never understand. A lot of people, men and women, thought like that, and I didn’t get it. And now I was afraid Donut had inherited that same attitude directly from Bea and her mom."
I realize that tends to be a topic that is pretty heavily discussed in books, to some degree, but that just hit me on Friday. A day I was doing a lot of hiding from reality and just trying to be me for a while.
I went to the camera store expecting to make an ill-advised purchase, and I surprised myself by not, in fact, doing any such thing.
I ended up picking up two cheap lenses:
A Tamron 70-210 AF for a Nikon (AF doesn't work on my DSLRs because they don't have screw-type AF, but whatever) and a Soligor 35-70 + Macro lens for my Minoltas.
I also picked up a 3 pack of Fuji 400 film, along with a roll of dubblefilm Jelly and dubblefilm Echo, both 200 speed, both look like a lot of fun.
I used the roll of Jelly when I was walking on the canal, and I took the types of photos I normally would, so this will be interesting when I develop it later. I used a roll of Fuji at the same park I posted pictures of from the Tamron lens, I'll be interested to see what the difference is from manual and metering vs what I get from the automatic mode on the D3100.
Okay.
Here's the D3100 with a known functional Nikon AF-S lens:
I guess I'll try it again during the day.
