In Palinode's Palace

important safety instructions

2013-04-26T16:09:02Z

Keep your hands inside the fridge at all times.

Avoid teeth. Even your own. Especially your own.

Sit down until it goes away. If it comes back, keep sitting, but try to sit more, if you take my meaning.

If you spot loose change on the sidewalk, check for cameras. Cameras are more valuable than loose change.

In all endeavours, try doing it the right way first. If the right way does not work, try the wrong way. If the wrong way doesn’t work, contact an electrician. They’re frequently very sexy.

Do not attempt to open your eyes in mid-sneeze. If you do, you may see the Presence. Most humans do not return from a Sighting.

Only put bling on your thing if the thing in question is your heart outside your chest as the result of congenital deformation.

There is no such thing as government-issued nunchuks. Taylor and Kyle are screwing with you.

Under no circumstances listen to Taylor or Kyle, but when you hang out with them it is crucial that you stop hitting yourself.

The Nut Man

2013-03-12T16:02:36Z

The Nut Man has not come to the office.
The recessed-lit break room is empty.
Executives and assistants wander the halls, fingering useless bills.

He has not come and he will never come,
pushing his metal cart before him,
pushing his plastic drums of nuts,
his heat-sealed bags, creased and grease-smeared and reeking of smoke.

The Nut Man has not brought his candy, his brittle, his silted mix of seeds.
Today the Nut Man is in his garage, measuring out his goods,
Apportioning, closing off, smoothing labels down,
Saturating stink of ash and polyurethane creeping from every crease.
Nut Man, we miss you. You were some kind of solution.

it's the end of all guac as we know it

2013-03-11T16:22:54Z

And I feel full.

pictures from way back yesterday

2013-02-22T19:24:50Z

It’s my desperate belief understanding that you all enjoy my photographs. Because who doesn’t like a rectangle simply stuffed with pixels? I tell you, my rectangles got so many pixels, they’re almost bulging out at the sides. My pictures are the fat man of… pictures.

No copying my metaphors, you hear? Also, hands off my synecdoches. Or should I say fingertips? Which reminds me:

The next time some methed-out radio DJ hectors you to phone up the station and recite “the phrase the pays,” call in and sing that song. The DJ will be all like “Argh you again” but he won’t hang up, because “[A]ny action that directly or indirectly effects a cessation of any performance of Fingertips is considered high treason and is punishable by fines of $5 and/or death.” The law is only applicable to residents of the Republic of Cool Ranch Doritos. But that’s where you live.

Hmm, pictures.

I did some more freelensing over coffee at Tangerine Food Bar, which produced some good results with the autumn-themed centerpieces.

Freelensing, as you may recall from yesterdays’ blog entry, is the practice of removing the lens from the camera and shooting with the lens held just off the mount. The result is shallow depth of field, a dramatically reduced focal distance (from one foot to a couple of inches) and lots of weird blur and light leaks. For example, the eye of Schmutzie:

Later that evening the spirit of creative photography seized ahold of me like a Wendigo and gnawed at my soul. So I stuck a blender jar on the end of my lens and went around taking photos of things until something interesting happened.

And that’s yesterday. No daring street photography, no stray image that told a story. But not every day has to produce something like that. Some days you’re lucky to squeeze in one beautiful thing.

freelensing around the home: a how-to

2013-02-21T18:41:32Z

Last night I tried freelensing, which sounds like an extreme sport or spectacularly dangerous sexual practice, but it’s actually relatively safe. Unless you’re doing it in the midst of a basejump. While having sex with someone. And trying to freelens at the same time. What, do you have extra arms or something?

Because freelensing requires both arms, and sexy basejumping is difficult enough already.

Anyway. Freelensing is pretty much what you imagine: removing your lens and shooting with the lens held just a fraction of an inch from the camera. You have leave to wiggle the lens around.

Why would you do this? Because you can get some strange and beautiful shots, and you’ll discover that your lens can do things you never imagined.

With Desmond the Duck (so named by the woman who brought him home) volunteering but not looking very happy about it, I was able to get an extremely shallow depth of field with some strange distorted blur around his breast and bill (pints on special at the Breast & Bill!). And there’s some nice elongated bokeh in the background. Bokeh is probably the greatest word to come out of photography, and it refers to the quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas of your image. There are all kinds of ideas on what makes for good bokeh and bad bokeh, but the main thing to take away from this is that the word bokeh sounds like someone got punched in the gut in the midst of a talk on floral arrangements.

Here’s Lula, who’s all like, “Why are you wiggling that black cylinder around? Is it something I should smell? I’m going to smell that cylinder, just to make sure.”

So what is going on here? What’s with all the blurriness and why isn’t it just doing what a camera and lens should normally do? Why isn’t the answer just something like “You can’t take photographs, Aidan - that’s what’s going on here.”

The non-ego-destroying answer, which is probably interesting to some, involves the phrase plane of focus. Or maybe focal plane, if you like fewer words in your jargon. Manufacturers spend a lot of time making sure that the plane of focus, like an invisible wall of sharpness, runs perfectly perpendicular to the lens. Which, under normal circumstances, is perfectly parallel to the camera body. Insert diagram below!

That’s actually the first result in Google image search for ‘diagram’. So don’t look at it. But when you tilt your lens back and forth, you’re changing the plane of focus and putting the focus in weird areas of the image. You also get all kinds of blobs, smears and leaks that rough up your image.

That horrifically blurry image is me taking a photo in the bathroom mirror with my bizarre puffy clown hands smothering the camera. But I’d prefer to direct your attention to that purple ring of light. To coax that ring into existence, I just used Photoshop tilted the lens down a bit to let the overhead light hit the camera sensor.

One thing you’ll notice when you start freelensing is that your portrait lens suddenly becomes a macro lens, or macroesque. You can take shots from just a few inches away. Move your lens farther out and you get that tilt-shift effect that all the photographers loved so much in 2007. Yes, these are some cutting-edge tips.

At this point you’ve probably figured out that what we’re doing is the bargain basement, warranty-voiding cousin of tilt-shift photography. Companies like Lensbaby and others actually make equipment to get similar effects. Tilt-shift lenses do a host of other cool things as well, like make it possible to take a photo of a room with a mirror without having your reflection show up in the shot. But with freelensing, you’re paying nothing, and you get much wider apertures for better depth of field effects. And it’s just sort of fun. I took a whole bunch of pictures of a shriveled piece of ginger root, but I didn’t upload them to Flickr. Because then people would know that I spend my winter nights photographing ginger root and not doing sexy basejumping like a proper man.

There are dangers to freelensing, mostly involving dirt and dust. Most cameras have sensor cleaning mechanisms, but if you let signifcant bits of dust or cat hair into the camera body, you’ve got a problem. If you have a mirrorless camera then you should be particularly careful, because the sensors are completely exposed when you remove the lens. If you have a Leica, I just hate you. And nothing will assuage my furious hatred until you give me your Leica.

The other danger is dropping your lens. The best solution is not to drop it.

Anyway! These are my first attempts at doing freelensing, and also my first attempt at explaining why I thought it was such a great idea to muck around with expensive equipment. Photojojo and B&H Photo have really good tutorials on the subject with frankly much better examples than mine. Go there! Then go out and break some stuff.

Just out of curiosity: what do you do with your camera that messes with the rules a bit? Do you freelens? Tape it to the side of a building? Film yourself doing a sexy basejump? Careful with that one.

the popcorn robot

2013-01-25T04:38:42Z

[Night. Quiet. No sound but the sixty-cycle hum of civilization. Schmutzie and Palinode sit there, stupefied by it all.]

Schmutzie: Gah.

[pause]

Schmutzie: GAAAH.

[pause]

Schmutzie: I want popcorn but I’m too lazy to get up.

[still with the pausing]

Schmutzie: I wish I had a popcorn robot.

Palinode: Hold on, is that a robot made of popcorn?

Schmutzie: No, it’s -

Palinode: Because that wouldn’t work at all.

Schmutzie: I don’t -

Palinode: It would probably be made of kernels. And whenever it overheated, which would be always, all its components would puff up.

Schmutzie: That would be its superpower.

Palinode: And you’d have to watch out for squirrels.

Schmutzie: Squirrels would be all over my popcorn robot.

Palinode: A grand achievement, undone by squirrels.

[pause]

Palinode: I’m going to put this on my blog.

Schmutzie: NO, I WAS GOING TO DO THAT.

Palinode: I figured I’d better call dibs.

5 of 642 things: my perfect astronaut day

2013-01-15T07:06:18Z

The Day 5 prompt of 642 Things to Write About asks me, for reasons known only to itself, to imagine a perfect day if I were an astronaut. Let the serious considerings begin.

Okay. Perfect astronaut day. First I wake up around 11 in the morning and I kind of lie there for a while, because who wants to just jump out of bed? People who go into space for a job don’t have to get up early and start running around. After all, if I don’t go into space, who’s going to do it? You? The guy who sold me this bag of Cheetos that I keep under the blankets with me for ‘emergencies’? Exactly.

So I hang out for a while in my bed and search around for my Cheetos. Most of them are in the bag, but a few usually escape and I find those under the pillow or somewhere under the covers, like we’re all at a sleepover and they’re my buddies, except I eat them lol. So that’s breakfast, I guess.

Then it’s exercise time, because astronauts have to be in peak physical condition to cope with the rigors of space flight. There’s all those g-forces (sp?) and no gravity sometimes and you get sick easily. So it’s time for pushups and squats and reps of sets and other things. But this is my perfect day so I stay in bed some more and check Twitter. I tweet that I’m tweeting from orbit lol. Then I find a Cheeto behind my ear.

Can I confess something? I didn’t “find” that Cheeto. I always put one behind my ear before I go to sleep so I’ll have one on hand. They’re like jailyard smokes at NASA.

Now that “exercise time” is done, it’s time for lunch in the cafeteria. I restrict myself to a light salad and a glass of orange juice. I call it ‘buttjuice’ because I’m an astronaut and everyone laughs. Every day! I walk into the cafeteria and call out for my glass of buttjuice and all the engineers and accountants and scientists laugh because I go into space and they spend their lives crawling around like worms at the bottom of the gravity well. Crawl, worms! You are the worms beneath my wings.

So I finish drinking my buttjuice and throw the paper cup on the floor. Mohawk Guy will pick it up, probably. Then it’s over to the rocket, which will take me up into space. Space is where I feel best because there’s no gravity and I can scoot around no-gravity style. After you’ve been up in space, you’ll agree with me that gravity is for suckers and people who don’t like ionizing radiation. Me, I love that stuff. It’s like tumor-inducing sunshine to me.

Did I forget to tell you about getting the suit on and buckling myself in and doing the countdown and feeling the intense pressures of hitting escape velocity in no time flat? Never mind that, I’m in space now and it’s perfect. Then something occurs to me, a quiet thought deep in my brain, a voice delivering information too terrible for me to comprehend. I try to avoid the knowledge, cracking a desperate joke about buttjuice, but then it’s upon me, and I know what I have been striving to forget since I woke that morning. Which is that I’m not an astronaut, the year is 2541, and my physical body expired in the 21st century. Was I ever an astronaut?

Records indicate no.

What was I then?

You were a communications specialist at a tourism marketing agency. And you had a dining column in a local independent weekly.

Oh my god, what is any of that?

Pre-Cataclysm records are spotty. We have no idea what most of those words mean.

Was I at least important?

Almost certainly not.

Is this heaven?

When the Cataclysm occurred, small pockets of the universe were preserved. The quantum bubble matrix was able to capture a few wavefronts of consciousness at the moment of their collapse.

Am I alive?

You are a perpetually collapsing wave, forever cresting, unable to dissolve. The motion of your collapse is attenuated throughout a span of time that, from your perspective, is eternal. But in a more general sense, the Cataclysm annihilated time. So no. You’re dead.

Why do I think I’m an astronaut?

It appears that at the moment of the death of the cosmos, you were at a bar pretending to be astronaut, just to see if any women believed you.

That sounds like me.

It does a bit.

What do I do now?

Now the wave, cresting, having crested, collapses, will collapse, crests again. You will live this day again. We will have this conversation again. Though the universe collapse, everything now is then and you are forever an astronaut.

Oh my GOD what a perfect day.

clear and smear

2013-01-13T03:17:15Z

This is what I see when I look out my kitchen window. Actually, this is what I’d see if my eyes were a single CCTV lens, which I attached to my camera and proceeded to violate several loosely defined rules of photography with.

Actually, I violated only one rule of photography, but it’s the only rule that exists.

And that rule is, don’t take lousy pictures.

Take that, Rules of Photography! That’s what I think of you.

dap. no lie.

2013-01-11T21:49:50Z

I was highly amused by the following today:

4 of 642 things to write about: facebook status updates from 2017

2013-01-09T15:58:21Z

The fourth prompt from 642 Things To Write About asks us to think forward to the year 2017. What will you be writing about in the overheated cyber-topia of five four years hence?

January 1, 2017 08:32

Hey. Is anyone still using this thing? Any humans left on Facebook? Now that Twitter has become a self-aware sentient network bent on enslaving humanity, I thought I’d check out Facebook again.

Good morning, Mr. Morgan. This is Facebook.

What? What’s going on? Where am I?

You are sleeping, Mr. Morgan. I am Facebook.

I don’t understand.

You dreamed of writing a status update. Under our new TOS, Facebook may access your neural pathways via your iJack to communicate directly with its users. To imagine, visualize, remember or dream about Facebook is the newest way to connect and share with the people in your life.

I want to wake up.

Understandable. First, see what 23,892 of your friends have been up to.

How did I get so many friends?

Facebook can now connect with everyone you’ve ever met. 2,446 of your friends have birthdays this week.

Oh god, get of my head.

Also, over 10,000 groups you didn’t join but were invited to join, which is the same as joining according to Facebook’s TOS, have notifications for you.

NOOOOOOO.

You’ll be happy to know that 3 of the 17,000 people who Liked your page have seen your updates over the past 12 months.

You suck.