Change in the Weather?

So, this morning when the news came on, the predictions for the track of hurricane had shifted. Instead of a beeline for the center of the Florida peninsula, the new prediction called for Dorian to take a sharp right turn and track north along the coast for several hundred miles.

Some of my friends on Facebook were jubilant, claiming that God had heard their prayers and diverted the hurricane away from them.

They seemed confused when it was pointed out that, were their claims true, they had prayed the hurricane away from them and right into the residents of the Carolina coast, which seems like kind of a dick move.

Relatedly: Short form social media is maybe not the best outlet for complex technical topics.

.

Obsolete

Everybody's favorite hyperbolic camera shill, Ken Rockwell, wrote a piece a while back called "Future Trash", about the built-in obsolescence of digital cameras.

"Digital cameras are consumable, disposable and perishable commodities like milk, film or gasoline. Buy them if you have photos to make today and don't expect them to have value in three years. Contrast this to film gear which was a durable good more like investing in gold. Of course times change, and just as the value of gold drops if replaced by a better technology so have 35mm film cameras.

I'm the biggest cheapskate around and have been for over 30 years. I always buy my film cameras used when I can. For instance I just bought a used medium format panoramic camera system in 2005 for $5,000. New it would have been over $12,000. So why do I always buy new digital cameras, even when I know they'll be worthless for resale in three years?"

It's a subject with onion-like layers, though.

For starters, no digital camera is as durable an artifact as a true all-mechanical, all metal camera. My Leica IIIb is eighty years old and completely repairable, restorable, & rebuildable, short of something completely destructive like getting run over (in which case the salvageable bits could be used to repair, restore, or rebuild other old mechanical Leica III's.)

Contrast that with late film cameras like the Nikon 8008's that I've binned simply because they had untraceable electronic issues that prevented them from turning on, Nikon no longer supports them, and frankly I'm not going to spend a ton of effort on a plasticky '90s bit of electronica that's worth $20 in perfect working order.

As for Ken's statements about the built-in obsolescence of digital cameras, and how they were advancing in capability so fast that buying an old one to save money made no sense, it was reasonably true...in 2006 or 2008. Digital camera technology was still in its relative infancy and was advancing by leaps and bounds.

Sure, in 2008 you could buy a six-year-old pro body for about the same price as a current consumer DSLR, but sensor technology and other basic camera functions had come so far in that time that there was no point.

This, however, is no longer true.

If you bought a ten-year-old pro digital camera in 2010, you were buying a camera that bordered on experimental. The Nikon D1X or Canon EOS 1D use finicky and obsolete battery technology and when they debuted early in the new millenniums, they were breaking new ground in trying to mate up still relatively new digital imaging sensors with well-established SLR camera hardware.

Conversely, if you buy a ten-year-old pro digital camera in 2019, you're buying fairly mature technology. Ten years ago, pro DSLRs were already good enough to film scenes for Hollywood blockbusters. Cameras like the D700 or EOS 5D Mark II differ from their current iterations a lot less than they do from their predecessors.

Now, while a DSLR is not the durable artifact that an all-mechanical camera is, a pro body from Nikon or Canon has a lot of shooting in it. A D700 can have more than a million shutter actuations in it. That's a lot of shooting. And, frankly, I get more joy out of shooting my 5D Mark II than my M6, despite the latter having a more modern sensor and an image processor three generations newer. (Not that the M6 isn't a ton of fun, and more likely to be with me because much smaller.)

So, as long as you stick to about 2008/2009 or newer, there's not as much reason to avoid the used DSLR market as there used to be, at least for the higher-spec bodies.
.

Rise of the Machines

Zoe-Bot 9Xm: “YOUR SAFE WORD MUST INCLUDE A NUMBER AND A CAPITAL LETTER!”

Customer: “GAAAAACCKKK...3!”
https://t.co/Xjgq6WhnMc

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) August 30, 2019

Sketchy...

Translation: "I reacted hotheadedly in the moment and realized that walking to meet the schoolbus with a rifle in hand made me look like a barking loony, so...uh...it was coyotes. Yeah, that's it! Coyotes!"
.

Near the Flagpole + White Woman = National News

It's a hundred and thirteen to ninety-three, by the way. Homicides in 2019 so far, that is, in Washington DC and Indianapolis, respectively. Given that Naptown has 160k+ more people than the nation's capital, that's not good news for the District.

What's funnier is that it was hard to get those numbers, due to the actual topic of this post.

See, I'm gonna go out on a limb and bet a statistical majority of those 113 dead bodies have been young Aftican-American men in the sketchier portions of town. Looking at the murder map tends to bear out the geographic clustering of the murders, like in most cities. Wherever you live, you probably know where the "bad side of town is" where all the murder happens. (The area I refer to as "Thirty-Whatth and What?" here in Indy.) There is a serious and complicated crime problem in the 'hood.

But trying to get to that data was made difficult this morning because "murder Washington DC" kept turning up results to a story that even made local news here: A white woman was stabbed to death walking a dog in the Green Zone.

It's weird, the calculus that determines what's national news and what's not. I'm sure bodies were getting stacked as usual last night in bad neighborhoods across the country, but a white woman getting stabbed at random in a nice neighborhood near the national media's bifurcated NYC/DC flagpole cracks into my local news here in flyover country.
.

Trying to get off to a quicker start this morning.

After two cans of Monster Zero Ultra it's probably time to throttle back to something like black coffee.

I've got a bunch of backlogged writing to do, a lawn to mow, and I need to squeak in a range trip this morning, too.

I've been suffering from a bad tendency to languish in bed reading in the mornings; working from home can lead to this attitude where I'm like "Well, I don't have to commute, so I can just lay here in my PJs and shamble down the hall to the office at the last minute." That needs to stop, hence the forcing myself upright and overcaffeination. I reckon I'll keep doing that until old habits reassert themselves; I used to get a ton of writing done by 8AM.
.

Not an angle I'd have expected...

"The federal mandate today is to create a completely safe school environment. The US Department of Education in August 2010 declared the goal of eliminating bullying from schools. In many states, schools will be denied No Child Left Behind funding if they fail to demonstrate that they have guaranteed students' safety from bullying. Children cannot concentrate when they live in fear of bullies, and they deserve a school environment free of fear. Therefore, it is our responsibility to provide them with a completely safe school environment. School staff are now required to constantly monitor children’s social lives to prevent any bullying from occurring. Many schools are eliminating recess and shortening lunch periods to prevent the chance of children hurting each other. Some schools have forbidden all physical contact among children, teaching them to high-five each other without touching and to play the game of tag by stepping on each other’s shadows rather than tagging their bodies. Some school districts are hiring “recess coaches” to make sure that an adult is constantly supervising students’ play activity."

When articles in Psychology Today are talking about the negative outcomes fostered by aggressive anti-bullying policies and zero tolerance for physical contact in schools, it might be worth stepping back and reassessing them.
,

Force of habit at this point, really...

Today marks fourteen years now that I've had this silly stock Blogger template.

That's a lot in dog years, let alone blog years.
.

The Motor Law

 Well, the red one's not a barchetta...

...and the barchetta's not red, but either way I would be entirely up to LARP'ing some old Rush songs if this sort of silliness were to go down here:

"If you’re any kind of a car enthusiast, or you just think the personal automobile is a terrific transportation device, this news has got to be chilling. The cross-party Science and Technology Select Committee of Parliament has issued a report that says that if the United Kingdom is to reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, private automobile and truck ownership must end.

Oh, and if you think your morally pure Tesla or some other EV is going to protect your privilege for personal transportation, no, the environmental Jacobins are coming for all privately operated motor vehicles."

Look, I like living in a walkable neighborhood. I use a bicycle as an actual grocery-fetching vehicle (eight months out of the year or so). I take Uber to the airport, and am stoked about the new Red Line faux trolley service that is being put in just blocks from my house that will have busses rolling by every ten minutes to whisk me downtown and back.

But America in general, outside of a few dozen urban cores, is not set up like that. Further, I still need a car when I want to venture to the burbs to visit friends or drive to a class or go to the range or whatever. For better or worse, we are wedded to private vehicle ownership for the foreseeable future. And I like it that way, because private vehicles are freedom machines. That makes some people itch, though.

It's the Jitterbug camera!

Hey, old people! Do you find computers and electronics confusing? Do you miss getting fingerprints on badly machine-printed 4x6" glossies? Then, boy, does whatever Third World company that currently owns the Vivitar name have a deal for you!

Ironically, this commercial was made in 2010. Several of the digital cameras I use regularly are older than that, like the D700 I was shooting at the State Fair this year...

Carrington Event

Since it happened on this date in 1859, the huge geomagnetic storm caused by the planet getting centerpunched by a solar coronal mass ejection didn't fry any computers. It did electrocute some telegraph operators, though.
.

The Desert of the Unreal...

The blogger at Leicaphilia has been on a well-written tear lately about the shredding of photography's almost unique position as an art form that was also archival, documentary.

Nowadays we have this photo of Chuck, taken with an EOS 5D Mark II and an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS lens...

Now, that digital image was captured in RAW format and run through minimal post-processing. Basically I employed the auto lens correction button and auto light/level balance button to the RAW image in Photoshop to get a .jpeg for internet use.

But one of the most common ways for people to consume photos these days is Instagram, which has a dozen or so preset filters, including one that mimics the look of cross-processed film...

Now we have a digital approximation of a thing that has been manipulated in a way to approximate an actual analog capture of a thing that was processed mistakenly.

Now add a filter site like Prisma...

Photographic proof?
.

Chicken Wars?

Everyone going on about Wendy’s chicken sammich or the one from that Catholic chicken joint, Pope Yes...

Look, I’m a pretentious hipster foodie douchebag who generally doesn’t eat at chain restaurants of the sit-down type, let alone fast food joints. I’ll make an exception for Chick-Fil-A.
.

Overheard at the Gun Show...

I was trying to explain to a younger friend today what a weird scene the Applied Violence Community (for lack of a better umbrella term to encompass armed and unarmed combatives) was from 1990-2000.

"The US military had seen barely two weeks, total, of ground combat since 1973. MMA hadn't really taken off yet. You didn't carry the internet around in your pocket so you could fact check bullshit claims.

You think stolen valor, PX heroes, fabricated tough guy backgrounds, and bullshit kung fu woo-woo run rampant today? It's nothing compared to back then."

This is a thing I don't get. I'm not any kinda badass; I'm just a writer who goes out to learn stuff and then report back what I learned. I don't understand the whole wannabe-sensei thing.
.

Photos from last weekend...

Probably the coolest thing ASP makes...

View this post on Instagram

In class last weekend, @haggardchuck demonstrates refilling the @aspusa #keydefender

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Aug 22, 2019 at 7:57am PDT

The Key Defender is a neat little gizmo, but best reserved for people who are physically fit and have some hand-to-hand skills. It's a tiny spay vial with three-ish shots of a fairly short range cone-type spray.

The range problem is common to the smallest form factors of OC spray, like the little keychain size unit in the picture below. It can be mitigated some by going with a stream instead of a spray, but then you have to aim better to walk it across the eyes. Get an inert trainer and take some test shots so you have an idea of how far the thing will shoot and what the pattern looks like.

Back home again in Indiana...

While the drive out to Topeka wasn't brutal, I benefitted by gaining an hour, and I hadn't just spent two days in class.

On the return trip, I decided to exploit my Holiday Inn loyalty status by snagging a discounted hotel room halfway home. This meant I could depart Topeka late enough to miss morning rush hour and get into Wentzville, MO on the far west side of Saint Louis before evening rush hour started there. Then Tuesday morning I could make another leisurely departure and roll into Indy somewhere around 2:30-3:30 in the afternoon.

Along about Effingham, halfway across Illinois, the sky got ugly. Shortly after that, it opened up into an apocalyptic downpour. From Effingham to Terre Haute, I-70 occasionally slowed to a 40mph crawl as I tried to squint through rain that was like like a cow peeing on a flat rock just to see the taillights of the car ahead of mine.

I pulled off at Terre Haute to get gas, and got back on the interstate. It was only raining within normal parameters until I got to the I-465 perimeter highway around Indianapolis. From there into downtown Indy it was again raining streetcars and taxicabs and I could barely see twenty feet in front of the car.

Siri then started chirping for me to bail on the interstate miles before I normally would. I resisted for one exit, but by the second, traffic on I-70 had slowed so much that I got off at the Harding Street exit, then had to resist Siri's blandishments as she kept trying to steer me through the geographically quickest route home...through some of the sketchiest neighborhoods in town.

"No thanks, Siri, I'll just cut over to Illinois on 16th and head north from there. I'm good."
.

The East Is Red

Everybody all over social media is all a-twitter (if you'll excuse the expression) over what the Chinese government is doing to protestors in Hong Kong. I'm all "Forget Hong Kong, look what the Chinese government did to Maverick's jacket! That's my childhood they're messing with!"
.

School Daze

Since I was already in Topeka for Handgun Tests and Standards, I stuck around for Chuck Haggard's OC Instructor class. I've sat in on Chuck's two-hour pepper spray blocks at Tac-Con and Paul-E-Palooza and it was apparent that he had so much info on the subject that he could barely cram some of it into two hours, so I was definitely interested in seeing what an 8-hour day would include.
.

Pet Peeves...

The phobia some cultures have for pocket knives, no matter how small or innocuous, is one of those things that just grinds me to a halt.

Dude, understand this: In the ancestry of H. sapiens are many different predecessors. Go back far enough and the genus name changes from Homo to Australopithecus.

Do you want to know the difference between Homo and Australopithecus? The former had the sense to carry around a sharpened rock against expected need, and that's what made them human.
.