A new treasure trove of Webb images has arrived!

Kinda a space nerd so I can’t help but check these images from the Webb telescope, download the HR tiffs and do some clean up on them.

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

Today I learned: Strobes go boom.

Of course I have a ton of photo gear laying around the studio but I never knew the strobes could blow up. Yikes. Here is a thing from Strobist to help avoid that.

Have a flash that's been sitting, unused, for a long time? Or did you buy a used flash with an unknown history? Turn it on the wrong way and you may be in for a bit of a surprise.

Example: Paul Buff Flashes

1. Dial the power control slider all the way down before turning the flash on. If the flash is a powerful model such as a WLX1600 or WLX3200 (with capacitor switching) make sure the quarter-power switch is not engaged. (You want all of the caps to be involved in the process, and they are not so at the quarter-power setting.)

2. Turn the flash on.

3. Pop the flash for 5-10 shots at the lowest-power setting. (If you can trigger the flash remotely, that probably would not be a bad idea.) This process will partially cycle the capacitor while giving it time to reform the thin, insulating oxide layer that it needs to work properly.

4. Raise the power level one stop and repeat step #4, slowly working your way up to full power. This will help to avoid the possible "thermal runaway" vicious cycle described above and will in many cases safely rejuvenate (or "re-form") a capacitor that may have deteriorated over time.

Why Are Alaska’s Rivers Turning Orange?

The thaw of permafrost soil under a wetland allows bacteria to start reducing that oxidized iron, Cooper thinks. And reduced iron, unlike oxidized iron, is soluble in water. If it's carried by groundwater out into an oxygenated stream, it can once again be oxidized. When that happens, it will fall out of the water as “rust” and turn the stream orange. While digging trenches on marshy ground near Timber Creek this past August, Cooper and Dial found water as deep as 1.5 meters under the once frozen soil, as well as dirt the gray color of reduced iron. New groundwater flows have developed in the thawing earth, Cooper said, and they have “really awakened a lot of these geochemical processes that have been basically stalled out for 5,000 years because the ground's been frozen.”

We stumbled on another burn among the raking willow shrubs as we descended toward the creek, and the trickle from the lumpy black crust there was strongly acidic, too. Below the black spots, an orange slime covered the rocks of the Anaktok, rubbing off on the hands of Alexander Lee, an Alaska Pacific University philosophy professor who was helping to sample fish and invertebrates. A small stream coming down from the hills had a highly acidic pH of 3.5. “Wow, this is crazy,” Dial said.

New Work in the Wild! Nike SB Ishod Wair

Some stuff we worked on with the nice people at Big Giant just went live on Nike SB.

Photography by Jerry Buttles.

Pretty fun being a crusty old skater myself. Sweepers and laybacks, like everyone else my age ya know?

Pretty cool custom couch. Was asked to keep it very film-like. So a lot of little subtle tweaks going on.

Any of you Portland people out there, try to stay warm and stay off that ice… yeeesh…

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

Interesting read on Greige and the blandification of everything. Another interesting piece I read, that I will try to dig up, is about how any “authentic” space, like a coffee shop, wine bar or straight up bar bar, has all been smeared into the same styled spaces because of social media. Once on barista posts their new paint, every other barista on instagram does the same shit. I’ll look for it. Anyways, some takeaways from this piece.

“Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford.

...

Attempts have been made to classify structures like this one and the ethos behind their appearance: SimCityist, McCentury Modern, fast-casual architecture. We prefer cardboard modernism, in part because The Josh looks like it might turn to pulp at the first sign of a hundred-year flood.

...

In 2020, a study by London’s Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab used image processing to analyze photographs of consumer objects manufactured between 1800 and the present. They found that things have become less colorful over time, converging on a spectrum between steel and charcoal, as though consumers want their gadgets to resemble the raw materials of the industries that produce them. If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit once offered a warning about conformity, he is now an inspiration, although the outfit has gotten an upgrade. Today he is The Man in the Gray Bonobos, or The Man in the Gray Buck Mason Crew Neck, or The Man in the Gray Mack Weldon Sweatpants — all delivered via gray Amazon van. The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital. “The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow,” wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended rainbow produce? Greige, evidently.”

Podcasts!

So as I sit here drawing every day for 10 hours, I tend to listen to a lot of podcasts. Here are some of my regular ones I go to. Got a long car drive or a run, check some of these out.

Politics

Stay Tuned with Preet

Good in-depth legal discussions where they usually explain all the complexities of some of the fuckery going on in the world.

The Lawfare Podcast

Because Preet was not deep enough in the legal weeds for you, have a bunch of lawyers really, and I mean really, dig into current court cases and legal fuckery going on. Trump’s Trials and Tribulations are always informative.

Pod Saves America

A bunch of ex-election professionals talk about the current state of politics and elections. Generally a bit funnier, but also much more opinionated than the above.

Music

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

Do you happen to be looking for a 4 hour podcast on The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”? Hoo, boy do I have the podcast for you. It covers the culture of the time of the songs and the impacts of it and all sorts of other sprawling interesting tid bits. The Velvet Underground episode is also really good.

Bandsplain

Why does this or that band have such a cult / cultural impact? Well, here ya go. Op Ivy? Check. Fugazi? Check. Insane Clown Posse? Sure, why not. Go for it.

Recording Studio Rockstars

Look, just sweep the mids. Wanna learn about LA-2A Tube Compressor? Pultec? How to mic drums? How to best EQ? Well, here ya go. Audio nerdy goodness.

Games

Massively OP

Focused on the MMO genre of games. WoW, GW2, New World, etc…

The Nextlander Podcast

Just good overall general gaming podcast that covers all genres and systems.

Wheee!

Tinkering with some FLIP stuff with help from a tut. Thought I just throw thi sup here cause it’s fun. Hopefully will develop it a bit further.

Music Fridays!

Happy freaking Friday everyone. A slightly different music Friday here. I just went ahead and posted a page with a bunch of recordings of my different bands. Some rehearsals, so be forgiving with those, some videos and some EPs. Just figured why not post some of this stuff instead of just sitting on it. Anyways, here’s a bunch of crap-o-la to listen too, lol!

Happy New Year!

Happy New year everyone! Spent some time in lovely Oceanside, Oregon to recharge a bit and had a lovely hike with friends in Forest Park yesterday. Here’s to 2024. Have some iPhone snaps. ;)

The Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft

Old piece I stumbled upon about how World of Warcraft used to mostly be ran by invisible bunnies that would be used to trigger events and aim turrets. But this is the take away quote that made me laugh.

“The WoW team’s tools have become more refined over time, so they don’t have to duct-tape rabbits to lasers as much anymore. “Sometimes,” McCathern said, “you don’t know designers need a kitchen until they’ve made ramen in a flower vase with an iron.”

Random Tumblr reblog because it refuses to die.

Rebloged from Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr.

“J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman are such a funny contrast to me, like

Rowling: Oh, and by the way, I put gay characters in my books.
People: Is there anything… showing that?
Rowling: No. Also trans women don’t deserve respect
People: wtf

Gaiman: Here are some immortals that transcend all human concepts of gender and attraction who use a variety of pronouns, and also some clearly canon human queers.
People: Are the immortals queer?
Gaiman: That is an entirely valid way to view them.
Other people: Ugh, pushing a modern woke agenda. It used to be-
Gaiman: Fuck you”

Tumblr is the platform that no corporation can kill. I have been going there for over a decade and never even made an account. It’s like the last vestige of something the internet was supposed to be.

The, "New Not Normals?"

The New Yorker asks, “The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era?” It’s a damn good question. Some outtakes.

“Online life has befuddled more than enlightened us. The New Dark Age is “an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity,”

…

“She traces the dawn of the Age of Unhingement to the election of Donald Trump, but sees its true expression in post-pandemic times, as we’ve been confronted with the realization that there are more horrors to come, and there is little sense of normalcy to return to.”

…

“The modern era, the long twentieth century, offered a kind of teleology of progress, a line on a chart going upward and to the right. Systems worked; certain logical frameworks—for markets, for politics, for labor—reasonably applied. “What if the gravitational center is just kind of lost?” Tooze asked. “There isn’t any longer that anchoring; we drift in a permanent state of being out of equilibrium.” Defining any kind of era implies that the era may at some point come to a close and make way for another coherent stretch of time. Tooze told me that he tries to resist that kind of “stability thinking.” Our current age is not dark; it may simply not be an age in the first place, because a linear, finite period of historical time may be an outmoded framework for our current reality—in which case, the scariest part would be that it doesn’t require a name at all. We just have to live through it”