• 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 29th, 2023

help-circle
  • Heck, journalists get threatened for their work anyway. It’s a fact of life in this profession.

    I’ve been in radio and TV since the early 2000’s and have been a newspaper writer since the mid 2010’s.

    We’ve gotten letters with bullets in them, ‘anthrax’ letters (they were all the rage post 9/11) and most recently we had two attacks with fireworks explosives on our building. Mind you, this is just a local newspaper. We’re not exactly the New York Times.

    I couldn’t tell you what reporting might’ve prompted it. Could’ve been the articles we wrote about wind farms, could’ve been climate change, could’ve been local politics or the soccer scores.

    Because these days, people get seriously outraged at basically nothing. Even the most neutral, strictly-the-facts reporting can set some folks off. So it’s not exactly surprising that a ‘controversial’ topic like anything related to climate change prompts threats.

    But: we keep reporting. Because fuck them. Facts are facts. Don’t like it? That’s a you problem.



  • Couple years ago, I visited a historic grand prix that featured classic F1 cars. They also had open pits, so you could walk up and ask questions and literally stand next to the cars.

    I was standing next to a 70’s F1 car when they performed an engine test. I was wearing thick, professional earplugs and the biggest Peltors you’ve ever seen. When they fired that thing up, I lasted all of five seconds before I walked out. At that point, it was no longer sound but sheer pressure. You could feel it in your chest.

    As for how the mechanics do it? Easy, they’re all deaf as a post. Even the best earpro can’t prevent that kind of hearing damage, especially if that’s your chosen career. If you’re worried about good earpro not being enough, best advice is to put distance between you and the object/career path involved.






  • It’s very annoying in general. I’ve got a visual disability. Meaning I see about 20 percent.

    When shopping, I know where all of my most used items are, and where the general category of products is. But if they move things around too much, it’s really exhausting trying to find what I need. And no, I don’t really want to bother staff to ask where things are; I just want my shopping done quickly with as few annoyances as possible.











  • I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard an average user say: ‘I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.’

    Phones by and large are seen as a locked system: you specifically choose to buy Android or iOS and stick with that.

    There’s really no incentive for companies to make different OS installs easy. I’d say there’s plenty of reasons not to: do you really want to give the average user that much power to fuck up their phone? I assume there’s also some security implications if they made it too easy to fiddle with.

    So yeah, it’s difficult because you’re fiddling with something that wasn’t meant to be an end-user thing in the first place.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if they made phones much more open in terms of hardware and software, but the big guys aren’t going to do it.


  • I own a few Minolta’s, including the X500 and X700. Those were basically the last of their manual focus SLR’s. I love classic bodies like that; metal built bricks that feel solid and chunky to use. I also bought a ton of Minolta glass back in the 2010’s when they stuff went for pennies on the dollar on Ebay. Good glass is good glass, right?

    I’ve never shot HP5 myself; I tend to be more of a Fuji shooter in general with Acros for my B&W needs. I’ve developed my own rolls, especially when I had to shoot that in cut-down form in Minox cartridges. Not exactly the kind of thing you take to a one hour photo place :D

    Though I’ve also shot stuff like Tri-X 400, Ektar and a bunch of other stuff from Kodak and Fuji over the years. But the thing I absolutely LOVE to shoot is slide film. Velvia 50 & 100 in particular. Absolutely amazing to see slides on a lightbox. You get a lovely depth and color that you just don’t really see in other negatives in my opinion.

    I actually just bought a Fuji X-S20 camera which includes a bunch of film simulations, including Acros and Velvia. That’s how much I love shooting those, that I want to bring that fun factor to digital as well :D Also own a Fuji X100S, which I found out is a ‘TikTok trend’ apparently…


  • I’ve got plenty of stuff that’s older than I am. I’ve got mechanical cameras dating back to the 1930’s, electronic camera’s from the 70’s, watches dating back to that time as well. And there’s game consoles dating back to the NES, like many here.

    I like old tech. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad or unreliable. If you treat stuff well and maintain as needed, a lot of things will outlast you. I’ll be shooting film in cameras that are a hundred years old in a few years.