MAXXUM self portrait

This is a lens I picked up Saturday in a camera bag of stuff at the flea market and I was taking a picture to put it up to trade for something I can use and I got stuck looking at the colors in the reflection. I still haven't figured out where the green patch came from.

NEX C3 with kit lens @ 55mm, off camera radio controlled flash bounced off the ceiling at five o'clock, directly under a skylight with a window at the top and a warm white fluorescent bouncing off ceiling top left, daylight white balance.

The father of lies

Ol' Bill has put himself in a lot of really horrible situations, it's where he wanted to be and who he wants to be, watching other people die horribly is cool, something to brag about.

61 years ago today: Those Who Witnessed Castle Bravo Looked Into Armageddon

Night

This is from a few evenings ago as the Moon was setting. NEX C3 on a tripod with the 18-55 kit lens @ 18mm and all manual settings including focus, f3.5 ISO 6400 and two seconds exposure. Lots of stars in the original 16 mp shot but it took quite a bit of processing to get them to show in something that can be squeezed onto DU.



And here is what astrometry dot net says is in the picture.

Flight

Shot some birds flying into the feeder today, I don't have an autofocus telephoto so I prefocused to one side of the feeder and took a lot of shots trying to get them as they flew in. Out of about 200 shots or so I got these I like. It was getting late in the day and the light was starting to fade for the last three shots.

Sony NEX C3 with an adapted Yashinon 200mm f4 @f8 ISO 3200 and 1/1250 sec..

I'm a hard person to love these days and I'll tell you why

I was a teenage geek when Trek came on the air as a weekly series and it was stunning. Showing a hopeful and above all intelligent approach to life and civilization on and Earth that was assumed to be diverse, cooperative and peaceful. Chekov and Uhura and Kirk and the others and no one noticed sex or color or race or nationality as anything special or any impediment, Uhura was obviously as competent as anyone else, Chekov's impish nationalism cracked me up.

And above all there was Spock.

Nimoy-Spock managed to turn geeky into dignified and oddly cool, an amazing thing in our culture really, a role model I had a hard time pulling off. I was old enough to be sure it was make believe and young enough to be idealistic. Star Trek and the entire crew became a fairly big thing with me until the show was canceled. And of course I continued to think about the role model I'd found.

Fast forward forty years of steady upward climb to lower middle class for thirty of them and then in 2003 the wheels started coming off, prolonged bedridden illness, depression, vast bills, loss of job and the coup de grâce, my thirty year marriage fell apart and I was divorced reasonably amiably but horribly hurt in 2008.

I took my grandchildren to see the 2009 Star Trek reboot, all five of them. About halfway through the scene with Nimoy I realized I had tears trickling down my cheeks and it took me a little while to figure out why. Sitting there with my beloved descendants I didn't and don't believe we have a hopeful future ahead of us like the one in Star Trek, with a benign Federation and an open, egalitarian and post-capitalistic society. I realized that I think my grandchildren will probably not have the same opportunity I had to thrive in an open and relatively free society albeit a less than perfect one in many ways. I think the future is more likely to be Bladerunner or Clockwork Orange or Snow Crash or Rollerball or Elysium or any number of other dystopian films and novels I have experienced. I now think the power of human greed and hate is just too strong as I watch what is happening in this country and in so many places around the world.

I have lost hope.

From the stars our bodies largely come and to our star they will eventually go, we are all starstuff but some of us shine a little more brightly than others. Godspeed Leonard, our atoms will in due time be mixed and we will all indeed be as one.

You gave me hope and then, through no fault of your own showed me I thought it was gone.

I keep having to stop and dry my eyes to see the screen, I've been that way since I heard Leonard had left us.

We really will one day all be as one..

I took my grandchildren to see the 2009 Star Trek reboot, all five of them. About halfway through the scene with Nimoy I realized I had tears trickling down my cheeks and it took me a little while to figure out why. Sitting there with my beloved descendants I didn't and don't believe we have a hopeful future ahead of us like the one in Star Trek, with a benign Federation and an open, egalitarian and post-capitalistic society. I realized that I think my grandchildren will probably not have the same opportunity I had to thrive in an open and relatively free society albeit a less than perfect one in many ways. I think the future is more likely to be Bladerunner or Clockwork Orange or Snow Crash or Rollerball or Elysium or any number of other dystopian films and novels I have experienced. I now think the power of human greed and hate is just too strong as I watch what is happening in this country and in so many places around the world.

I have lost hope.

From the stars our bodies largely come and to our star they will eventually go, we are all starstuff but some of us shine a little more brightly than others. Godspeed Leonard, our atoms will in due time be mixed and we will all indeed be as one.

In a country where labor unions are compared to ISIS by a state governor, what is far left?

To me far left means pure socialism, no private property, no capitalism, government control of all means of production and so on.

Evidently if you do not think labor unions are as evil as the the most brutal and barbaric terrorist threat now on the planet then you are on the left and if you are any further left than that you are far left.

There are a lot of us here who just don't seem to realize how far to the right the average political view has been pushed by people like Governor Scott Walker. It's a deliberate strategy on the part of Republicans that's been going on for decades and a surprising to me anyway number of Democrats on DU seem to want to completely ignore it but rather give those who want to push in the opposite direction a hard time.

As a member of what has become known as the "far left" those who attack me here don't anger me

No, attacks on the "far left" on DU make me depressed and discouraged, less likely to be engaged rather than more, less likely to care what's happening rather than more. I've already left DU for months, it just wasn't worth the deepening sense of depression I was feeling. I went over to Discussionist and argued with right wingers who also screeched "far left" at me but at least there I wasn't supposed to be on the same team so I didn't find it so much depressing as amusing. But I grew weary at Discussionist of continually having "shape of the Earth? Opinions differ." type of arguments so I eventually ended up back here at DU.

I spent over a decade listening to right wingers screeching about the "far left" on my radio while I was commuting until I finally realized that all they were trying to do was piss me off at which point I quit listening to them.

"Far left" is a conservative Republican meme that has been pumped into the national consciousness through quite literally thousands of radio stations and a full time 24/7/365 cable propaganda outlet. It's a phrase from Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich designed specifically to drive a wedge into the non-conservative Republican bloc in America.

Once again, I don't get angry when I hear "far left" on DU, I get more cynical and more depressed and more likely simply to wash my hands of politics altogether and pursue other interests of which I have several that make me actually feel positive rather than negative emotions.

Psychological type and religion/church?

Reading a thread just now on this forum I realized that the article in the OP was fairly obviously written by an extroverted person, the author was going on and on about the value of community and a meeting space and groups and all I could think of was how wearying it would be to deal with groups of people all the time. I'm fine with up to about half a dozen people I know fairly well or a large completely anonymous crowd where I don't have to interact except perhaps superficially like a concert but interacting with strangers or near strangers on a relatively prolonged basis is mentally or emotionally tiring and I want to get away to somewhere more solitary fairly quickly. Put me in a cocktail party with a bunch of strangers and it's my idea of Purgatory.

To be blunt I'm an introvert, not an extreme one but I have the tendency and being alone quite a bit doesn't bother me much if at all because I'm good at amusing myself, I always have something I want to learn or see or a book to read a project to work on, people who are wrong on the internet and so on.

Anyone else find the idea of getting together with a largish group like a church not super attractive?