Today is Highly Debatable Humor Day, when we celebrate those examples of humor where the appeal could be wildly subjective; if you don’t find it amusing, well, you’re in accordance with a certain percentage of victims listeners/viewers, so just take heart in the idea that you’re not alone.
I kinda jammed it all together with this one. What started out as an idea for a longish photo post soon revealed itself to be way too long for a written and illustrated page (yeah, even for me, so you know that’s saying something.) Plus I had a couple of other incidentals to mention, and hadn’t done a podcast recently. So we get this podcast/slideshow/video clip compilation that probably doesn’t do justice to any format. And yet, I’m still not shooting vertical video on a smutphone…
Further details on schtuff therein:
The Original Ceylon Tea Company – Best Earl Grey that I’ve found yet.
Tardis Tea from Adagio Teas – Also very good – the tin is cool, but The Girlfriend’s Sprog stole that from me. Also check out the IngenuiTEA infuser, because screw tea bags (there’s an off-color joke in the making there, but I think we’ve had our fill of those for the time being.)
Two things that I neglected to mention regarding the video clips – they made it into the first attempt that was thwarted by post-nasal drip, and I forgot them the second time around. I obtained a little 96-LED portable light source that runs on 4 AA batteries or a USB powerbank, and that’s what was used for the two clips seen here – it’s light enough to be supported on an articulated arm (on its shoe mount or 1/4-20 tripod socket,) works fabulously for macro video, is reasonably diffuse, and is even dimmable. There are lots of versions on Ebay, and I have to say it was well worth the trivial price.
The second bit is, I’m still using the off-camera monitor, which helps with macro work significantly, but it has one effect that you can see in the video: aiming the camera is no longer an intuitive thing. For instance, holding it in a bracket down below waist level and framing with the monitor means that tracking a moving subject, or simply pointing the camera in the right direction, is a lot more challenging. Yes, I need more practice, thank you Captain Obvious, but I’m offering this as a warning to those getting started in it like I am.
Now, the part where I mentioned that the camera had some kind of tracking error that led to weird lines towards the bottom of the frame? Yeah, maybe you didn’t see that effect at all – it might actually be the fault of the video player that I’m using in Linux, and/or the screen resolution of the same. I also had some weird issues with the first rendering of this hybridcast, stray frames appearing at the very end of fade effects, and that is a known issue with the OpenShot editing program; a little websearch provided a simple solution, so never neglect your Google-Fu when you run into an issue (the solution, should you encounter the problem yourself, is to move the offending clip to an extra track, which seems to eradicate the frame blip for some reason.)
Did you notice that I had the directions reversed on Bar Sinister and Bar Dexter? Good – keep it to yourself, hotshot.
And finally, a reiterated public service message:
