A little vacation
I'm taking some days off from the blog due to being depressed as fuck to the point of feeling physically ill. The worst is past; getting better, slowly. This is going to mean skipped posts. Come back on February 1st, I promise a good old-fashioned art post that day.
It's high time I switched over to Blogspot, so that's coming up in the near future too. Long ago, I already squatted dracova.blogspot.com, so it's just a matter of surmounting some procrastination.
Snagged a pair of Carson binoculars on eBay for a total of ~$5, after applying a discount earned for buying box components in October. The binoculars are 7x35, wide-angle, with BK-7 borosilicate glass lenses. Old, discontinued model (hence cheap); new in box, however. Careful analysis suggested that they were good, but I could be wrong. Still worth the gamble given the price. Have you seen the prices on some of the NIB brand-name optics? Insanity; over a thousand dollars sometimes. Perhaps it's all because I grew up in a sociopolitical anomaly, but no practical pair of binoculars should cost over a hundred dollars. Then there are all those crazy numbers, like 10x21 for a pair of compact hunting binoculars... Does it really have to be 10x with such a relatively small front aperture? Compact emphasizes stealth, so does it need to have such a magnification with an obviously small view angle? And then there are all those continuous zoom binoculars with loopy numbers like 20-60x. From what I gather, continuous zoom is garbage with binoculars because it invariably uses a mechanical linkage to synchronize and results in shifting focus. Select-zoom is the only proper way about it.
It's high time I switched over to Blogspot, so that's coming up in the near future too. Long ago, I already squatted dracova.blogspot.com, so it's just a matter of surmounting some procrastination.
Snagged a pair of Carson binoculars on eBay for a total of ~$5, after applying a discount earned for buying box components in October. The binoculars are 7x35, wide-angle, with BK-7 borosilicate glass lenses. Old, discontinued model (hence cheap); new in box, however. Careful analysis suggested that they were good, but I could be wrong. Still worth the gamble given the price. Have you seen the prices on some of the NIB brand-name optics? Insanity; over a thousand dollars sometimes. Perhaps it's all because I grew up in a sociopolitical anomaly, but no practical pair of binoculars should cost over a hundred dollars. Then there are all those crazy numbers, like 10x21 for a pair of compact hunting binoculars... Does it really have to be 10x with such a relatively small front aperture? Compact emphasizes stealth, so does it need to have such a magnification with an obviously small view angle? And then there are all those continuous zoom binoculars with loopy numbers like 20-60x. From what I gather, continuous zoom is garbage with binoculars because it invariably uses a mechanical linkage to synchronize and results in shifting focus. Select-zoom is the only proper way about it.