52Frames – 2022-06 – Depth of Field

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A purple crocus blossom, isolated by shallow depth of field.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Depth of Field”, with an extra credit (which I claimed) for “f1.4”. I have exactly one lens able to go up to 1.4, and that’s not its best aperture to say the least 😉 (the chromatic aberration is strong there.) But I was still adamant on claiming this extra credit, because I don’t shoot that wide open enough, and I thought it would make a nice training for me 🙂

I had seen on Instagram cloudsnug mentioning he was seeing the first crocuses in his garden – which made me take my camera on a trip to the Arboretum / Rentenwiese, where I had been delighted by early flowers last year. And indeed, there was snowdrops and purple crocuses, so I spent a bit of time trying to catch a reasonable low depth of field picture of them. It was also a good exercise in manual focus training! I will admit that I would have preferred working with either my 50mm macro (instead of my 50mm non-macro) or with my 100mm macro – but I still very much enjoyed the time I spent at the park.

A rant about music streaming services

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I was happy with Google Play Music. It worked, it worked for me, it worked in the way I wanted, I was happy. And then they switched to YouTube Music, and said “oh look, you can have all the same features, and it’s brilliant and great!”. Spoiler: no, no, it’s not. Among others:

  • Last time I checked, while there was still a way to have some uploaded music (which is a neat way to fix the lack of the catalog, BTW), there was no way anymore to play these seamlessly with the rest of my tracks – I needed to first choose between both sources and then choose my music. Like, seriously, I do not give a single fuck where the music comes from, and I don’t know on top of my head whether it comes from your catalog or mine.
  • One of my main use cases, namely “take all the music of my library and shuffle it on my Sonos”, is just not working: the Sonos app decided that what was important to the “all tracks” list was the few music videos I had put a like on YouTube-not-Music. Not sure if the fault is Sonos’, YouTube’s, or myself, and again, I don’t give a fuck – that’s a deal-breaker for me.

So I tried looking at other options.

  • Spotify: the handling of albums and tracks is shit; if I want to add a full album to my “all the tracks”, I need to do that individually by song. It gets old really, really fast. And what broke me at the last attempt was the fact that I tried to play a specific album in order on my phone AND WAS NEVER ABLE TO DO THAT. (Yes, this was on a paying subscription.)
  • Apple Music has been my go-to recently. The major issue for me is the Linux support. It goes through a web application – great. If I want to shuffle my track library, I need to pick a song, start playing it, and click on Shuffle afterwards. Okay. Except that if I do that, it creates a shuffled playlist OF THE SONGS STARTING WITH THE SAME LETTER AS THE SEED. Additionally, the interaction with Sonos is not great – it takes ages to be able to start my “shuffle all tracks” – to the point that it starts displaying systematic error messages before it eventually gets there. Took me a while to understand that it was eventually getting there, but for now I’ll consider that a minor annoyance.
  • Tidal, which I just looked at – also two issues. The first one is that there’s things I definitely miss on their catalog (if I can’t get some Rammstein sometimes, I get a sad). The second one is the same issue as Spotify’s: adding an album to the library does not add the individual tracks to the library.

I have the impression that my set of requirements is simple, but apparently I’m special, yet again – and I fucking hate that. My list of requirements:

  • Have a music library that allows the following:
    • Have a list of tracks in my library on which I can shuffle everything. Ideally, interface wise, I want a track list and a large SHUFFLE button and be done with it.
    • Be able to add to said library either individual songs or full albums, and not have a difference in the playing interface between these two.
    • Have enough of a catalog that I don’t often get annoyed by “this album is not available there” (I don’t have super weird tastes. It still happens more often than I’d like), or allow me to upload what I miss.
    • I can’t believe I need to put that in requirements, but THE ABILITY TO PLAY AN ALBUM IN ORDER.
    • Ideally, not have to go through a gazillion hoops of “HEYYYYY DO YOU WANT TO DISCOVER THIS??” to achieve these goals. No, I do not want that.
    • Ideally, also have an “artist” view that allows to shuffle all the titles of a given artist that are in my library.
  • Support all the reading features on:
    • a Linux computer,
    • an Android phone,
    • a Sonos environment.

There. That’s it. This was a set of features that used to work with Google Play Music, and work brilliantly at that. I’ve been frustrated with music streaming ever since. Some days are worse than others; I guess this is one of these days. End of rant. Suggestions that do not involve “plopping an MPD server somewhere with a bunch of MP3s” (I am emphatically NOT doing that) welcome.

March 2022 update: When the set of requirements is impossible, the only solution is to loosen the set of requirements. Since the one thing that was breaking most for me on essentially all the platforms was the Sonos support, I reconsidered my use of Sonos and loosened that one. Now instead of playing music while I’m working on the office’s Sonos, I put my headphones back into rotation, start my shuffle on my computer instead, and limit the Sonos to “single albums” and “small playlists” use case. With that out of the way, I finally went back to YouTube Music – it’s not ideal, but the fact that there IS a way to upload music is actually a nice solution to catalog gaps wherever they are; and the fact that it gives me ad-free YouTube is a nice bonus.

52Frames – 2022-04 – Black&White Photography

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Black and white photography of the Prime Tower in Zürich. The Sun visible on the lower left side of the picture distributes a large amount of bubble-like lens flares all around the image.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames is “Black&White Photography”. I was around the Prime Tower this afternoon and took a few pictures. On this one, I accidentally experimented with lens flare too. I thought they looked kind of cool, so I explicitly made them pop more during the post-processing – in which I also tried to have nice window texture!

52Frames – 2022-04 – Minimalist

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The start of a sprint track - a red surface on which six numbered corridors are painted in white.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Minimalism”. I was at the local athletic ground earlier today with my camera for Other Photographic Project Reasons, and I figured that the numbers on the track (pun intended) could be a nice “minimalist” shot. I took a few of these, at different places (there’s three or four such numberings for the corridors all along the track), and I ended up liking this one best. And then, when I started editing, I realized the track was definitely more worn out at the start than after that, which I thought made for a nice bit of story-telling.

#balisebooks – January 2021

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The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage РBren̩ Brown

A series of lectures by Brené Brown where she talks about shame, vulnerability, emotions in general, and wholeheartedness.

Brené Brown is one of these people who has been in my field of awareness for a long time, but whose work I hadn’t looked into much yet. I think it may be a good thing, because I think I was more receptive to what she had to say than I would have been a year or two ago. She’s an academic who studies shame (which is, apparently, a great way to have people react weirdly when you tell them what you do), and Power of Vulnerability is a recording of a series of lectures (I listened to it as an audiobook) on the topic and on what her research says about shame, vulnerability, and a quality she calls “wholeheartedness”. I found myself nodding furiously at numerous time, going “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck” at numerous others, and it was the kind of text for which I kind of want to get a copy where I can highlight stuff manically.

Oddball, Sarah Andersen

The fourth collection of “Sarah’s Scribbles”.

I really like Sarah Andersen, she’s hilarious and very relatable, so I got her first three books of Sarah’s Scribbles a while ago, and completed the collection this month. It’s still very funny, and it has a sticker set 😉 I’m considering putting a couple on my laptop 😛

Rapture In Death, J.D. Robb

In the fourth book of the … in Death series, Eve Dallas investigates a series of unlikely suicides.

In Rapture in Death, three people vaguely connected to Eve Dallas die from suicide – but something doesn’t quite add up in Eve’s opinion, so she investigates. I continue enjoying this series, although this one had a pretty disturbing scene (apart from all the dead people, I mean) which kind of spoilt my enjoyment. But we got to see a bit more of Roarke, who’s shown as actually competent (on top of, you know, hot, rich as fuck, nice, and pretty snarky), which was nice; it’s also nice to have an established relationship that is a source of stability and not drama. It’s nice to know that I have a long (long) series in which I can pick the next book and find familiar ground, and still have all the books independent enough (so far) to not feel the need to read the whole series at once. I appreciate that very much.

The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey

Book cover for The Echo Wife. It represents a mirrored diamond ring; the title is written in the middle as if it were split by the mirror too; the name of the author (Sarah Gailey) is mirrored on top and bottom of the cover.

What happens when your husband replaces you with a clone of yourself?

In The Echo Wife, Evelyn is the lead scientist in a company that makes clones. Clones are, for Evelyn, nothing more than specimens: they’re grown as adults for a specific use, prepared and primed, and discarded as biological waste when they have had said use. The book starts shortly after Evelyn divorced her husband, after having discovered that he had made a clone of her – a more “compliant” version of her. Said clone calls Evelyn one day: the husband is dead…

This was for sure a gripping read. Gailey holds the suspense until the end (which I actually found satisfying), and the ethical questions and ramifications around human cloning are a fascinating theme. I’m somewhat skeptical about the apparent absence of anyone questioning the ethics of what Evelyn does (completely in the open), but I’ll let that slip for the purposes of a good story – and it actually makes the book and the questioning just on the right side of creepy (I thought.) Note that this book definitely needs to come with a content warning about domestic abuse.

Murder by Other Means, John Scalzi

In the second book of The Dispatcher series, Tony Valdez has a few people around him dying in ways that make him more than suspicious.

Another Audiobook – and actually the sequel of the very first audiobook I listened to 🙂 In The Dispatcher’s world, people who get murdered have a 99.9% chance of, instead of dying, waking up naked back in their own home. That creates business: Tony Valdez is a dispatcher, someone paid to actively kill people just before they die with a high probability – so that, instead, they have a very high chance of surviving. Of course, there are also other, shadier reasons to call for a dispatcher – and Valdez just had a contract of this type. Following that, he runs into a bank robbery where one of the robbers is part of the 0.1% who… don’t wake up. And that’s just the beginning of things going to shit for Valdez.

This was an entertaining listen: the story was perfectly adequate, and Zachary Quinto’s narration was fantastic. A nice way to spend a few hours while walking around.

52Frames – 2022-03 – Complementary colors

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Bromeliad seen from above, on a black background

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Complementary colors”. It turns out that I have a beautiful new house plant that has red and green leaves – so let’s go!

After trying to get a properly sharp picture by hand-holding the camera, as usual I gave up and got the tripod out, and even had to set up the electronic shutter on top of the remote because that thing is NOT stable when the camera is looking down – I have a tripod whose central column can be turned horizontal, but it’s very wiggly in that position. It took a bit of processing to get a clean black background, to remove a couple of sadder leaves, and to get rid of the (white) plant pot. But there, I have a shot 🙂

52Frames – 2022-02 – Hello from…

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Night photography of a row of trees in the fog. The street light give a yellow hue to the tree "tunnel".

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Hello from…”, which is usually interpreted as “take a picture from around where you are this week”. I titled mine “Hello from… the fog!” – we had glorious fog yesterday evening, and I went for a short walk to clear my head fairly late in the evening. When I left home, I considered taking a camera with me, and decided against it: it felt like my phone and the gigantic amount of automatic processing would do a better work than I would trying to stabilize things in these kind of circumstances. I think it was the right call: I played around with and without the night mode, and I got a few cool shots, including this one – taken with the night mode.

52Frames – 2022-01 – Self-portrait

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Self-portrait; a woman wearing a Doctor Who swirly t-shirt standing in front of a black background.

It’s a tradition: the first week of the year in the 52Frames project is “Self-portrait”. This year, the extra challenge (which I claimed) was to use Rembrandt lighting. So, for once, I knew I had to setup proper studio lights before I started, so I did that:

A photography setup showing a camera on a tripod, a high bright light on the left and a lower dimmer light on the right.

The setup didn’t require much adjustment / takes: I did raise the camera more than it was in the first takes, and I also dimmed the left light compared to what it initially was. I also learnt to pose myself by facing slightly the dimmer light, which worked better than the initial takes where I didn’t have that consideration.

Edits were somewhat less straightforward than desired, because the black background (… the curtains in that room 😉 ) are slightly reflective, and the initial version was a bit distracting.)

And, there we go, first shot of the year – we’ll see where that goes 🙂

Some #balisebooks

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Spoiler Alert / All the Feels – Olivia Dade

Contemporary romances set in the world of a successful TV series… and the fanfiction around it.

Spoiler Alert and All the Feels are both set around the same fictional TV series called Gods of the Gates, in which the male protagonists of each book are both actors and best friends. In Spoiler Alert, Marcus is also a closeted fanfiction writer – and he meets April, who’s a cosplayer in that universe. In All The Feels, Alex has some PR issues after picking a fight in a bar; he’s assigned a minder, Lauren, to make sure that he doesn’t hurt the reputation of the production any further.

I loved both books, and I enjoyed seeing these two romances bloom at roughly the same time and seeing references to the other book in both books. I laughed out loud many times, and the handling of the fanfiction element was absolutely great. I also got a lot of warm fuzzy feelings when it came to the main characters starting to accept themselves and making real progress along the book – especially since I could identify pretty strongly with one of them.

Leviathan Falls – James S.A Corey

The last book of The Expanse series yields a very satisfying ending.

There’s always a bit of anxiety involved with starting the last book of a series that one loves – will the series end in a satisfying way that gives closure and a proper goodbye for characters that have existed in one’s mind for a few years at least? I’m happy to report that Leviathan Falls is absolutely in this category. The world presented in the first book evolved a lot during the few decades spanned by the books, and yet still feels very consistent. We started with some people, met new ones, lost some along the way, got emotionally involved with a lot of them… The Expanse, to me, is much more of a “character” series than a “plot” series – not that the plot is lacking (far from it), but I’m far more involved in the characters than in the plot. And in that regard, the ending was very satisfying to me. I still have a few novellas to read in that universe – this will probably happen this year; and I also still have a few episodes of the series to watch (I love the TV series as well!); in any case, I’m happy and grateful for the hours I got to spend with these books.

Across The Green Grass Fields – Seanan McGuire

Another book of the Wayward Children series – it has HORSES! Or, well, close enough.

Many of the Wayward Children stories follow the same narrative device: a child finds a door to another world and spends a few years there. In Across the Green Grass Fields, Regan loves horses, and “her” door leads to a world full of centaurs, unicorns, kelpies and other equine species. I very much appreciated the exploration of the world and of the social conventions of Regan’s world and, as usual with this series, the whimsy of the world and the delight of the language make it a pleasure to read. I was a bit disappointed by the ending, which felt a bit rushed to me, but I was still happy to have read this installment of the series.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman

Life is short, task lists WILL take all the time you give them – what to do with that?

In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman develops the sobering idea that time management is an illusion and that there is absolutely no way of “getting everything done” – partly because the “things that need to be done” will fill up the void anyway. He finds that liberating – since there’s no way to make it so that you will DO ALL THE THINGS anyway, give up, prioritize, and do what you can – if there is not enough time for you to do all the things that you must absolutely do, then your perception of what you must absolutely do is wrong, not the other way around.

I liked the book a lot and it feels like it has a lot of interesting/challenging things to say, but that I’m not necessarily ready to hear them yet because my brain goes into an anxious loop of “I… do agree with everything you’re saying, but I REALLY DON’T WANT TO, and I really don’t know what to make of that, and ‘now what'”. That said, it was for sure interesting food for thought and it did give me ideas and insights about how I could try to make my days work better – not because it gives plans for that in any way, but because it allowed me to take a step back and see the problem differently (… we’ll see how that goes 🙂 ). I would definitely have enjoyed it more if not for my own anxious relationship with time which made that book pretty challenging for me – but this may well be a re-read later down the road.

52Frames – 2021-52 & 2021-53

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Close-up of popcorn

For the two last challenges of year 2021, I went for the “lazy” option – not being home and not having my proper computer to edit decided that for me, essentially.

For the 2021-52 challenge, the theme was “Combine Three Challenges” – I went for three themes that went well together, namely Details, Texture and Fill the Frame, and made a picture of the bowl of popcorn in the kitchen.

A green field, blue sky with a lot of plane trails and light clouds, bright sun.

The 2021-53 theme was “Break the rules”. My first idea was to do a tongue-in-cheek picture of a “No photography allowed” sign, but it would have meant actually making and setting up the sign, and I got a case of the lazies. We went for an afternoon walk, and I purposely snagged that snapshot – breaking both the rule of “don’t shoot directly at the sun” and “don’t put your horizon line in the middle of the picture”; I also broke the meta-rule of “don’t upload 52Frames from your phone” 😉

And with that, I have finished 53 out of 53 pictures in 2021, finishing 52Frames for the second year in a row – let’s see if we can get a third year in a row!