@janetteb @thane16 @ps1l0v3y0u @nerys @whisht

Yes, the bushfires were fairly close – about 50km / a half hour drive away. We saw nothing until last Saturday when the sky filled with a light smoke, turning the sky orange-brown and the sun a vivid red. Something that would have signaled the end of days to those unscientific folk in times gone past.…[Read more]

@ whohar @nerys @PS  oh yes! Sibelius’ style was something I came to appreciate much later in life. @PS I first read that post without my glasses & read “prism of the Frog.” Ok, there, better research THAT one, as I’ve never heard of The Frog. I thought it’s probably a libretto by Aristophanes with music by Schoenberg because that’s EXACTLY what…[Read more]

@thane16 @nerys @mudlark @whohar @whisht

Much (though far from all) my knowledge of Classical comes via the prism of Prog. Mind you first time I heard Tapiola by Sibelius it was a ‘building a library’ program… basically a Head of David like 1/2 hour wall of sound interspersed with two terribly educated gents asking each other… ‘which one do yo…[Read more]

@nerys oh oboe! Never was I more embarrassed when I auditioned for uni, played 16 bars of ‘When Johnny comes Marching home, Hoorah…” & promptly fainted. Not my finest, but panel placed loo rolls under my head to avoid too much pain 🙂

@psIOv3yOu

whichever way you look musicians are cult figures of their time & rock jumps on the societal hills…[Read more]

@dentarthurdent I remember when a neighbour showed me this album & I said, wait for it….“it’s nothing like the white album, is it?” Later, I asked “who are Dink Floyd?”

He buried his hands in his head at that point. Fortunately he took it upon himself to educate me (as so many men tried to do!).

I got better!

@nerys the “when you’re small…[Read more]

@nerys   I was joking about the VHS.   I can’t see it ever coming back into fashion, for several reasons:   Compared with DVD’s, or other electronic storage, it’s much lower quality, much bulkier, VHS players are mechanically  highly complicated, the tape wears with each playing, jumping to a specific place on a track requires the whole tape t…[Read more]

@nerys That happy circumstance happened to me just once. Decades ago I had a turntable and a couple of dozen LP’s. When cassette tapes came along, they were so much more handy (even though of doubtful sound quality) that I never listened to records any more. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of my LPs in their artistic sleeves. Then CD’s…[Read more]

@dentarthurdent @winston @nerys @janetteb @mudlark @thane16

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year all. Best wishes for the year ahead.

@thane16 Lovely to hear from you.

@nerys and @dentarthurdent I share your distrust of cloud storage. I have multiple hard drives, one backup I carry with me, one is in a sideboard. I once had two backup hard-drives in my laptop bag which was stolen. Have also lost hard drives so I no longer…[Read more]

@mudlark    @nerys  @thane16  @dentarthurdent  @ps1l0v3y0u       and everyone else, just took a moment to say hello and Happy Who Year! We are still a few hours to midnight here and then the old year passes and a brand spankin’ new one begins. So exciting and full of possibilities.

Does anyone make new years resolutions? I have the usual ones lik…[Read more]

@nerys      f/2.8   Wow.   That’s pretty nice.    The TZ80 is f/3.3 to 6.4.    I’m – almost – tempted to consider and FZ, but the same argument applies as did to my Konica (though obviously less cogently) – I can’t take photos if my camera isn’t on me, and the TZ is small and light enough to just carry as a matter of habit.   TZ has a Leica lens…[Read more]

@nerys Your FZ’s are a step above mine, in lens size certainly. I did love the light-gathering capability of my Konica film cameras with great big hunks of glass, but when I went digital I wanted something more portable. I also wanted a wide angle – 35mm or even 28mm, it was surprising how difficult that was to find in those early compact…[Read more]

@nerys    As you say, extra shots in digital cost virtually nothing.   Great, compared with 50c-a-shot film, but it can be a problem.   I don’t weed out nearly as many as I should.   Ones that are out of focus or accidental shots of my feet are obvious candidates for deletion.   Deciding which of several similar okay shots is the best is just to…[Read more]

@dentarthurdent that is impressive and requires dedication. My filing system is more akin to @Nerys. I store all my images in folders roughly dated. No details attached. I have photos of places which I have forgotten the name of. Recently I made up a slide show for our eldest as a 30th gift. (it was started as an 18th gift so has taken a fair…[Read more]

@nerys Sorry if it looks like I’m bragging. But its just so nice to be able to go and swim every day (and this year Summer seems to have arrived early, at least up this end of the country). What I also love about summer are the long evenings, it doesn’t get dark until 10pm or so (of course anyone in the mid-latitudes can say the same). It always…[Read more]

@janetteb @nerys @whohar

Merry Christmas / New Year / solstice.

I’ve been absent [minded] for a while, time always sneaks past when I’m not looking. Been swimming every day, here (water’s warm!) And also indexing all my digital photos, of which I have literally tens of thousands, I tend to binge on shots. A luxury I could never afford with film,…[Read more]

@janetteb @nerys

Yes! Here’s to everyone having an enjoyable festive period, however you choose to celebrate it.

@nerys. We have or had the video of Curse of Fatal Death. I am going to be bringing it to our Cult TV podcast next year. I really enjoyed it and it is interesting to watch now post Moffat because there are so many of his ideas in there. At the end of our original recording there was an interview with Moffat and he was asked if he would work on Dr…[Read more]

@winston   @nerys    I think a lot of the anti-society attitude stems from the myth of the hardy pioneering individual who did everything for himself and was beholden to no man.   So that, reinforced by the successful American Revolution (which was really a rebellion), morphed into the ‘all government is a threat to my freedom’ frame of mind. …[Read more]

@nerys    Covid did bring out the beast of us and the worst of us.  There have always been racists ,bigots and haters of all shapes and sizes here in Canada and around the world but the rest of us told them they were dispicable and held them accountable. When the big orange menace emerged from the muck he took a big stick and lifted up the rock th…[Read more]