Happy MondayTuesday!
Thanksgiving long weekend, followed by a short week wherein there is just as much to do as in a regular week is not as much of a holiday as it seems. However, there was, and still is pie.
Things have been too busy around here lately to have an opinion on anything, so here you go all at once. *g*
First, let me say that this season so far is everything I'd hoped for last season, namely story pacing. I didn't dislike season 4 in the least, I just found that they could have moved some of the storylines along a bit tighter, maybe explored some of the other characters more, or taken a look at some of the effects of the changed timeline a bit more in depth. Definitely a function of only having 13 episodes to wrap up the story, but I've found the storytelling to the point (handwave that you can't make a laser powerful enough to cut anything out of a CD player's components), and very little time wasted on handholding new viewers. When the showrunners promised this would be a love-letter to the longtime fans, they weren't kidding. Of course it's not going to please all of the people in all of the ways, but really, as long as there's no cop-out at the end, no poof!, no sudden reset - "oh surprise! It was all an LSD trip!" (and I really don't think they'll go that route, not when they've made clear for seasons that they've always had an end-game in mind), I'll be happy. Sad that it's over, but happy just the same that we've got an actual ending.
That said, I've been steering clear of fandom because I've already seen a few comments in places by people who are upset that they aren't going to get their season 5 wishlist fulfilled. Nobody around here, mind you - y'all have been nice and grown up about not ruining anybody else's squee. I just want to watch this show finish without any sour fandom notes.
Read Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. When
mrspollifax recced it to me and said "it's one of those books you find yourself still thinking about days after you put it down", she wasn't kidding. Not just the plot, which I'll not spoil here, but the structure of the story, two seperate but entwined plots moving each other along, one taking place in the past, one in the 'present'(which is actually some future Oxford), and good use of the unreliable narrator to direct and misdirect the reader. I'd figured out a lot of the 'how did this happens?' before the end, but most of the fun (if you want to call it that, given the subject matter) was discovering how it all played out through the character's point of view.
Then I followed up with The Hunger Games. Maybe that was a bad order to go about reading them, or maybe I'd been expecting more from the book because of all the hype surrounding the movies. It wasn't a let-down at all, and I don't want to say 'oh, well it's because it's Young Adult fiction', because I've read some excellent YA fiction in my time. But, I felt as though it were a retread of a bunch of other stories, such as Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, and Stephen King's The Long Walk (which, iirc was an homage to The Lottery?), both of which are still fresh in my mind years after reading them in elementary school. That said, Collins does use Katniss' POV well to keep the reader as much in the dark as the characters are, the story doesn't plod too much, and Katniss grows as a person as the story progresses. The one thing The Hunger Games does accomplish very well is getting getting the attention of kids who might not otherwise be interested in reading. And getting kids interested in reading when there's so many other things demanding their attention these days is a win, either way.
Seems I haven't made a post here in ages without spamming y'all with pictures. Wouldn't want to break that trend. ;)
I managed to find some cheap graduated neutral density filters and filter mount online a while back, and by cheap, I mean inexpensive - not brandname, but good enough for my level of photography that I can play with them and decide if this is something worth splurging on more expensive glass or resin filters. Basically, what a graduated ND filter allows you to do is use a slower shutter speed or a wider aperture than you normally would be able to use in bright conditions in order to allow more light (and hence, brighter colors, or that misty look to waterfalls and oceans) through the lens. You can also use them to even out the ground and the sky in a landscape shot without the need to over- or under-expose one or the other.
So, even though it was snowing/raining out the day they arrived, there I was sinking into the not-yet-frozen river bank to try them out:
Strange to think that this shot below was taken exactly a week before the one above:
I'm actually surprised it came out at all, since I'd just gotten back from an emergency trip to the optometrist's, sporting a pair of eyes dilated like a lemur's, though relived that I was not, in fact, going blind. Could not focus to save my life. So what better way to spend the afternoon when I couldn't see my computer screen anyhow? You guessed it. Walking around with two pairs of sunglasses on, taking pictures. Yes.
Er, I don't have a story about this one, except that for about three days, I had a very pretty drive to work. Then we got 80km/hour winds, grass fires, and finally snow.
This bird is angry. Or embarassed that I caught him falling off a sunflower.
Oh, and I finally relented and got Adobe Lightroom last night. I know you can do all of the same photo editing (and much much more) with CS5, but I just can't, or don't have the time, to wrap my head around those workflows when all I want to do is adjust some shadows and lighten some mid-tones, ya know? I leave CS5 for people with more patience and talent than I, and stick to image composition within the camera. However! Lightroom is a lot more my speed, with intuitive workflows more geared towards the kind of tweaking I do. I even managed to salvage more than one of those pictures of the northern lights to something that might almost be printable.
Also posted at DW, where
people have commented. Comments welcome here or there.
Things have been too busy around here lately to have an opinion on anything, so here you go all at once. *g*
First, let me say that this season so far is everything I'd hoped for last season, namely story pacing. I didn't dislike season 4 in the least, I just found that they could have moved some of the storylines along a bit tighter, maybe explored some of the other characters more, or taken a look at some of the effects of the changed timeline a bit more in depth. Definitely a function of only having 13 episodes to wrap up the story, but I've found the storytelling to the point (handwave that you can't make a laser powerful enough to cut anything out of a CD player's components), and very little time wasted on handholding new viewers. When the showrunners promised this would be a love-letter to the longtime fans, they weren't kidding. Of course it's not going to please all of the people in all of the ways, but really, as long as there's no cop-out at the end, no poof!, no sudden reset - "oh surprise! It was all an LSD trip!" (and I really don't think they'll go that route, not when they've made clear for seasons that they've always had an end-game in mind), I'll be happy. Sad that it's over, but happy just the same that we've got an actual ending.
That said, I've been steering clear of fandom because I've already seen a few comments in places by people who are upset that they aren't going to get their season 5 wishlist fulfilled. Nobody around here, mind you - y'all have been nice and grown up about not ruining anybody else's squee. I just want to watch this show finish without any sour fandom notes.
Read Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. When
mrspollifax recced it to me and said "it's one of those books you find yourself still thinking about days after you put it down", she wasn't kidding. Not just the plot, which I'll not spoil here, but the structure of the story, two seperate but entwined plots moving each other along, one taking place in the past, one in the 'present'(which is actually some future Oxford), and good use of the unreliable narrator to direct and misdirect the reader. I'd figured out a lot of the 'how did this happens?' before the end, but most of the fun (if you want to call it that, given the subject matter) was discovering how it all played out through the character's point of view.
Then I followed up with The Hunger Games. Maybe that was a bad order to go about reading them, or maybe I'd been expecting more from the book because of all the hype surrounding the movies. It wasn't a let-down at all, and I don't want to say 'oh, well it's because it's Young Adult fiction', because I've read some excellent YA fiction in my time. But, I felt as though it were a retread of a bunch of other stories, such as Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, and Stephen King's The Long Walk (which, iirc was an homage to The Lottery?), both of which are still fresh in my mind years after reading them in elementary school. That said, Collins does use Katniss' POV well to keep the reader as much in the dark as the characters are, the story doesn't plod too much, and Katniss grows as a person as the story progresses. The one thing The Hunger Games does accomplish very well is getting getting the attention of kids who might not otherwise be interested in reading. And getting kids interested in reading when there's so many other things demanding their attention these days is a win, either way.
Seems I haven't made a post here in ages without spamming y'all with pictures. Wouldn't want to break that trend. ;)
I managed to find some cheap graduated neutral density filters and filter mount online a while back, and by cheap, I mean inexpensive - not brandname, but good enough for my level of photography that I can play with them and decide if this is something worth splurging on more expensive glass or resin filters. Basically, what a graduated ND filter allows you to do is use a slower shutter speed or a wider aperture than you normally would be able to use in bright conditions in order to allow more light (and hence, brighter colors, or that misty look to waterfalls and oceans) through the lens. You can also use them to even out the ground and the sky in a landscape shot without the need to over- or under-expose one or the other.
So, even though it was snowing/raining out the day they arrived, there I was sinking into the not-yet-frozen river bank to try them out:
Strange to think that this shot below was taken exactly a week before the one above:
I'm actually surprised it came out at all, since I'd just gotten back from an emergency trip to the optometrist's, sporting a pair of eyes dilated like a lemur's, though relived that I was not, in fact, going blind. Could not focus to save my life. So what better way to spend the afternoon when I couldn't see my computer screen anyhow? You guessed it. Walking around with two pairs of sunglasses on, taking pictures. Yes.
Er, I don't have a story about this one, except that for about three days, I had a very pretty drive to work. Then we got 80km/hour winds, grass fires, and finally snow.
This bird is angry. Or embarassed that I caught him falling off a sunflower.
Oh, and I finally relented and got Adobe Lightroom last night. I know you can do all of the same photo editing (and much much more) with CS5, but I just can't, or don't have the time, to wrap my head around those workflows when all I want to do is adjust some shadows and lighten some mid-tones, ya know? I leave CS5 for people with more patience and talent than I, and stick to image composition within the camera. However! Lightroom is a lot more my speed, with intuitive workflows more geared towards the kind of tweaking I do. I even managed to salvage more than one of those pictures of the northern lights to something that might almost be printable.
Also posted at DW, where
people have commented. Comments welcome here or there.