52Frames – 2020-19 – One Roll of Film

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For the 52Frames theme this week, the challenge was to submit a picture with a maximum of 24 takes (or 12, or… 1 🙂 ). In all fairness, this is not necessarily much of a challenge for me, since… there’s probably more pictures than not where I take less than 24 takes.

That kind of theme/constraint doesn’t really steer my creativity – I still went through 24 shots of a slice of agate, playing with a pair of lumecubes to illuminate it in different ways. This one was my favorite – I particularly liked the golden reflection on the border on top.

And just for fun, the full roll of 24 photos in Darktable:

The State of the Balise in times of The Virusâ„¢

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This is going to be a very personal post – and I’m not sure it’s going to be of much interest to people essentially going through the same things as I am or, most probably, worse – on the other hand, this is the kind of things I’d like to read from the people I care about, so… let’s work with that assumption.

I was tempted to go for a “what’s good, what’s bad, what’s super bad” (or the other way around) structure, but instead I’ll talk around themes – seems easier to organize my thoughts this way.

The situation around here

In Switzerland, we do not have a strict lock-down: it’s strongly advised to stay home as much as possible, but nothing is legally enforced there. Restaurants, non-essential shops and leisure facilities (sports and culture) are closed (some shops are starting to reopen); gatherings of more than 5 people are forbidden. Working from home is encouraged if at all possible. Standard recommendations about keeping your distances and washing your hands are obviously repeated at every occasion. The Swiss Federal Council holds a press conference once to twice a week, they talk about the evolution of the situation and the measures in place.

We’ve been following the recommendations pretty strictly: we’re both working from home, and we stay home. We’re going out once a week for grocery shopping; we wear (homemade) masks when we do. Pierre has been to the dentist this week, but other than that… we have basically only seen each other for the past month and a half.

Work

Work is mostly good. We’re lucky that a/ we can both work from home without large hassle b/ we have enough space in our apartment that we’re able to have two separate home office spaces. This is one of the things I’m most grateful for, because it allows me to keep some sense of normality… and sanity.

I normally work 60%; I started tracking my time because I had a feeling I was working way more than that, and even with tracking, I… do work more than that. Granted, it’s a period of the cycle at work where we’d all tend to work more, so it’s hard to tell if I’m working more because of that or because of working from home and not being constrained by “shit, I need to leave now if I want to catch my train”. In any case, I think it helps with feeling useful and with having something to do that doesn’t leave much space for significant worry. It’s sometimes a source of stress too, but it’s “normal stress” (as opposed to “Virusâ„¢-related stress”).

We have daily calls with a few colleagues – some status report, and one explicitly “social” call where we try to re-create the mood of our office kitchen during coffee breaks. This helps a lot in not feeling isolated, and keeping in touch with lighter topics.

Still, it starts to weigh on me. I miss seeing my colleagues. The other day I got all teary-eyed at hearing the laugh of a colleague during the weekly status meeting – good thing I didn’t actually have to talk during that meeting… From a professional standpoint, I also miss being able to clear misunderstanding quickly, and to be able to call out to someone as they’re passing when I have a question or something they can help me with. We make do, but it’s definitely less comfortable (and it typically takes more time too).

Keeping busy on my own

I’m lucky there as well: I’m definitely on the “introvert” end of the spectrum, and my usual ways of keeping busy haven’t been impacted much by the current situation. I read, I play video games, I watch TV, I code, I practice calligraphy… all these are definitely on. I miss going out with my camera, but I’ve still been able to make a few images around the apartment. I’ve been keeping up with 52Frames, and there’s a Scavenger Hunt running – so I have some creative prompts to get stuff done.

I had started going on walks around Zürich at the end of winter – I miss doing that. I have a strong inkling that one of the first places I’ll go back to when I feel comfortable doing that is the lake – go see “my” tree, probably sit on a bench nearby with a book. I’m probably going to miss the full flower season of Seleger Moor – they MIGHT be able to re-open earlier than expected, but I don’t expect to be able to go there by then, because it’s pretty far away by bus.

I continue playing Slay the Spire and World of Warcraft, as well as Wizards Unite (who did a kick-ass job at making things work without going out); I started playing Deponia, Cook Serve Delicious 3, Islanders. I’m resisting the urge of re-joining EVE Online. And I reaaaally want a Switch to play Animal Crossing, but that’s probably not coming back in stock anytime soon.

The issue there may be general apathy: I do have a ton of things I can do, but there is a distinct lack of energy and motivation to do everything I could do. I’m not exactly bored, more… numb, I guess. This is not pleasant, but it’s not exactly unpleasant either. I’m sometimes annoyed by it, but it doesn’t last long – it is what it is.

Being social

See what I was saying in the previous point about being an introvert? Weeeell, turns out, I may be less of an introvert than I thought I was. Because fuck, I miss everyone – I miss everyone so much it hurts. I do manage to stay in touch with some people – but not nearly as much as I’d like to. And at the same time, I’m actually “socially tired” at the end of the week, and I do realize that I need to pace myself, and I hate that.

I miss game night, I miss casual gathering with friends around a meal and/or a drink, I miss… people. I miss hugs. And I feel terrible for the fact that my keeping in touch with people sucks as much as it always did – a mix of “not having enough energy” and “being afraid to be a bother” and “being afraid of being clingy”. I’m even hesitant to say here “if you feel like reaching out, please do” – because I don’t want to put that kind of expectation/pressure on anyone either. Constant second-guessing of social interactions is exhausting.

Fitness

Anyone who knows me may be very surprised to see that title in this blog post 😉 One of the first things I ordered when we started staying at home was a pair of 2 kg dumbbells. I felt terrible ordering them, because it felt like the epitome of superficial non-essential buys.

I am, in short, SUPER HAPPY I bought these weights. Before all this, I’ve been going back to Jazzercise at least semi-regularly; and right now, I’m relying heavily on the Zoom classes from my studio and on Jazzercise-on-Demand. I intend to write a longer post about that – stay tuned.

Generally speaking: it’s been a life line. Since I’m not even walking outside, I actually get an itch to move – so I do that. It helps. I might end up doing more exercise now than I used to. In parallel, sticking to “regular food plan” with little to no extra (no “oooh, this cake looks delicious” in the office kitchen 😉 )…. well, I seem to be one of these people who actually lose weight during these times. Well, I’m definitely not complaining about that.

Mood

Now… this whole blog post was much more upbeat than I am feeling. I am profoundly grateful that I’ve seen a therapist for a while now, because it would be so much worse otherwise, but it’s still tough.

On a day-to-day basis, I am much closer to tears, all the time, than I usually am. Which says something, because I already tend to cry more than many people (I… think.) Anything has the potential of setting me off, which is exhausting (because… emotions are exhausting).

There’s also far more full meltdowns. I haven’t kept count, but there’s been more than a few in the past 6 weeks, which would have been the norm at some points in the past, but hadn’t been the norm lately. It’s a bit disheartening to find myself sobbing uncontrollably again – but then, well… I guess emotions have to get out somehow, and right now… there’s a lot of emotions going on.

I was concerned about anxiety, but that one has been surprisingly quiet. It’s not absent, but it’s mostly okay. It does spike from time to time. The major circumstances where it spikes is when going out. Grocery shopping is hit and miss, and generally a large source of stress – panic triggering either because of “I fucked up the social distancing and I’m a terrible person” or because of “I’m in the way and I shouldn’t be where I am and I’m a terrible person”. Fun times. I’ve had more than a few very shitty nights because of anxiety, and it IS keeping me awake around 4AM way more than I’d like. Still, I was expecting it to be much worse than it is, so… not great, but could be much worse.

Worry is another beast though. I always felt like I had a strong disconnect between worry (the things that are crawling ’round my brain) and anxiety (the thing that make my stomach and gut twist and wring). In “regular” times I tended to have strong anxiety, but low worry; these days I have low-to-moderate anxiety, but high worry. I worry both about the situation and how “going back to a less isolated situation” is going to look like. At the very beginning, there was definitely a worry of “collapse of the civilization” and “we do not have enough food in the apartment to last for any extended stay”. These worries did subside, thankfully – the food one comes back again from time to time, but more on a “global” basis. Other than that, I worry for myself (“getting sick”, “getting sick to the point of needing ICU care”, “dying”) and for my loved ones (same worries). I worry about seeing friends again and not knowing how to interact with them again. I worry about not being able to set boundaries that match what I’m comfortable with. I worry about not knowing what I’m comfortable with. I worry about going back to work by train and the logistics involved (handling of masks in particular). I worry for the scary economical situation in which some people currently are. I worry for the scary economical situation in which some people may end up. I worry about how long it’s going to take before things feel normal again – whatever “normal” may mean by then. I worry about the fact that things may never feel “normal” again. I worry for my mental health, too. I worry about the numbness and the tears – and I worry that when things feel “normal” again for most people, it won’t for me – or that my new “normal” may be significantly worse than my pre-Virusâ„¢ normal. I worry for other people’s mental health – I worry that this whole situation is going to end up literally traumatic for a large number of people.

So, yeah, I have enough worries to fuel some high-quality brain-churning here 😛 I am, however, grateful that there’s a number of things that I’m not worried about – including my own economical safety (as long as not EVERYTHING goes to shit, but then…) and the fact that the number of people that I know are in higher-risk groups is actually fairly small.

Meditation helps. I had been lacking some consistency in my practice lately, but I found myself going back on the cushion way more regularly – maybe not every day, but close. And again – I’m grateful that I had started working on that way before things started – I don’t think it would be nearly as useful if I didn’t have a somewhat significant number of hours of practice already.

People help too, but it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. I have a lot of people I can count on – and I don’t think I thank them nearly enough for supporting me. Things are a bit bittersweet sometimes, because I absolutely miss seeing them in person, and sometimes it’s too much – but I’d much rather have them in my life, even by videoconference, than not. As I mentioned earlier, I do have a significant amount of guilt about “not reaching out to some friends enough”, combined with “not daring to do so and feeling clingy”. That one is annoying, and it’s probable that I’m erring too much on the “being afraid of being clingy” side of things, at the cost of my guilt… and possibly hurting people by not reaching out. And even with the people with whom I am more or less constantly in contact, I’m scared of complaining too much, of needing too much support, of being needy. Social anxiety in times of isolation, check.

Apart from all that, the “background” mood is pretty numb and apathetic. Motivation and energy levels are occasionally there, but definitely less often than not. I often lose hope, not necessarily in the fact that it’s going to be okay eventually, but in the fact that it’s going to be okay within a time frame that I can grasp.

But – to end this on a slightly positive note, still… I’m mostly okay with not being okay, and that’s HUGE progress compared to the situation where all this would happen, and on top of that I’d hate myself for feeling that way. And while I’m kind of lacking hope about the current situation, I do have hope that hope will be back. So… let’s wait until hope is back 🙂

52Frames – 2020-18 – Low-key

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “low-key”. I kind of wanted to take a low-key portrait of myself – it would have been a nice complement to last week’s high-key portrait; but my regular black curtain currently has a desk in front of it (so that makes it more awkward to work with), and….. I got lazy.

Thankfully, my husband is NOT lazy, and he made some delicious peanut butter chocolates today. And is there anything better than dark chocolate for a low-key theme? I don’t think so. So, there: chocolate.

Cool Stuff

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Why Is Everyone Suddenly Obsessed With Sourdough? [text] – an interview with Robin Sloan, who wrote a very fun book called Sourdough. TW current events, but then sourdough.

Garbage Math [comic] – XKCD is tackling the problem of “what happens if you put garbage in your math”, and it’s great.

Hopepunk, the latest storytelling trend, is all about weaponized optimism [text] – an article about the term hopepunk, which has initially been coined as “the opposite of grimdark “- more about the definition and the concept in the article. As well as a list of books and series and music and and and, in which I’ll probably have to dig into the ones I don’t know yet (and maybe update for “after 2018”).

A distant quasar has the most powerful wind ever seen. And yeah, it’s a doozy [text] – here, get a dose of mindblowing scales with an article discussing a very powerful quasar. With a very large black hole.

What to Buy When Starting a French Bar at Home [text] – David Lebovitz has a new book out, Drinking French – and he’s had a lot of content lately on his blog around the topic. As a French woman without a French bar, I quite liked this “okay, where do I start” blog post 🙂

How to make Mini Oven from Mini Bricks [medium-length video] – err, what the title says. It’s cute and fascinating.

This Is Your Brain on [current events] Dreams [text] – I do try to avoid things that talk too much about current events, buuuuut I did like that article a lot – mostly because I did notice an uptick in vivid dreams lastly 🙂

How to Make A Roguelike in One Day [short video] – this made me smile. Aaaaand kind of want to program a roguelike. (No, it’s probably not happening.)

#gettymuseumchallenge [images, twitter] – The Getty museum in California challenged people to recreate famous artworks, and there’s a ton of good stuff in there – either impressive, funny, or both.

ISLANDERS [game, Steam] – I’ve been playing ISLANDERS today – it’s a minimalist city strategy game building. Think Suburbia meets Mini Metro. It’s pretty, very relaxing, cheap, and I’m going to go and start another game.

The City We Became – N.K. Jemisin

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I loved this book enough that it absolutely deserves its own blog post, so there we go.

The City We Became starts with the premises that when a city becomes old enough and large enough and… “enough”, it becomes somehow alive, and embodied by a human avatar.

And right now, it’s New York’s time to shine. But things don’t go exactly as planned. First, something or someone is apparently fighting hard for New York not to be born. Second, New York is not represented by one, but by several avatars.

For the rest, I’ll let you get to know New York’s avatars and their fight to save their city against the what threatens to destroy them all – with the help of a couple of other cities, thankfully.

I’ve been to New York twice, and I wouldn’t say I know the city well. It’s large and loud and great and overwhelming, that’s for sure. But I did enjoy seeing it through Jemisin’s fantastic prose, recognizing a few bits here and there, and it definitely made me want to go back there. Some book settings are described as “the city acts like a character in itself” – Jemisin took that one literally, and her city is plain brilliant (and quite snarky).

Some readers on The Internets criticized the amount of “on the nose wokeness” and/or “SJW agenda”. I say bring it on. Yes, it was a tad on the nose sometimes. And it was SO GOOD. I did, however, have a large issue with this book. My brain couldn’t stop interrupting my reading every 5 to 10 pages fangirling about HOW GREAT IS THIS BOOK AAAAAAAAH I LOVE IT.

And you know the best thing? It’s planned to be a series. And I already look forward to re-reading this one before I read the next one. And if you want a taste of it, the prologue is available on Tor.com’s website under the title The City Born Great. It’s… almost identical to the prologue, that is 😉

Authors, beware: The City We Became is my current yardstick for “best book I read in 2020”. You have been warned 🙂

Time tracking with timewarrior

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I’ve been working from home for a bit more than a month – or, as we say around here, “doing home office”, which is apparently a typically German turn of phrase 😉 Since I’m working part-time (60%), and days and hours tend to melt into each other, actually tracking the time that I spend working has proven pretty useful for me to dose the “right” amount of work: make sure I’m working the hours I’m supposed to work, make sure I’m not working significantly more than the hours I’m supposed to work. For those who know me a little, they’ll have an inkling that my issue is more the latter one than the former, with me being much more worried about the former than the latter 😉

I had done that sort of tracking a long while ago with some software called arbtt. It was fairly neat when it came to automating that tracking (and that’s why I’m mentioning it here explicitly): it uses the mouse focus to determine on which window you are working, identifies said windows by their titles, and allows to define rules to classify which belongs to what. I ran that thing for a while when I was working as a freelancer, and that worked pretty well – if you’re not allergic to Haskell. (My window manager is in Haskell too, so I can survive :p )

This time around, I didn’t feel the need to fight with arbtt rule system to fit everything into categories that would be too fine-grained for my liking; after a bit of poking, I found timewarrior. There’s a package on my Ubuntu, so I just installed it, and I started tracking.

In timewarrior, you track by associating tags to intervals of time. For instance, when I start working on documentation, I open a terminal and type

$ timew start work doc

and it starts an interval tagged with work and doc. I have a very coarse set of tags: my current tags are doc (writing documentation), qa (helping our QA department with testing our software), meeting (daily and weekly status meetings, mostly) and social (when I’m socializing with colleagues, not necessarily being productive per se, although such discussions are very often fruitful). To that, I add a generic work tag to these all categories except social, so that I can easily tally my whole work hours. I’m not actively developing these days, but when that comes back, I’ll handle tags for that as well. I also track lunch when I go for my lunch break 😉

Whenever I start a new interval, it automatically closes the previous one – so if I switch from timew start work doc to timew start lunch, the interval lunch starts, and the interval work/doc is closed. If I want to stop the current interval without starting a new one (typically at the end of the day), I just go 

$ timew stop

and no interval is running anymore.

To display what’s been logged so far, timew summary is the way to go. I actually experimented with tracking my Sunday yesterday, and if I want to know how long I spent cooking, I can look at my cuisine tag that way:

[isa@wayfarer ~]$ timew summary :yesterday cuisine

Wk  Date       Day Tags       Start      End    Time   Total
W17 2020-04-26 Sun cuisine 11:28:00 11:59:00 0:31:00
                   cuisine 18:04:59 18:28:09 0:23:10
                   cuisine 18:44:23 19:05:10 0:20:47 1:14:57
                                                            
                                                     1:14:57

It gives me all the instances and a sum of the time I spent overall during the day. This is particularly useful for my work usage: I tag everything I do for work with work, and that allows me to keep track of the amount of work I’ve put in the day.

If I forget to start or stop an activity, it’s trivial to do a posteriori if I’m in an “open” interval, slightly more tricky but still feasible if I need to re-insert things in the middle of other things. Generally speaking, I haven’t found something that I wanted to do that I didn’t find how to yet. The interface can be somewhat clunky, but it’s surprisingly input-flexible (the easy example is that I can do “timew start work doc” or “timew work doc start” or even “timew doc start work” – and it’ll start tracking an activity with tags doc and work in both cases).

The documentation is also very good, allowing both discoverability of features and reference. There’s also ways of getting pretty charts, to export data as JSON, and to develop extensions.

Obviously, if you’re looking for something that synchronizes between several computers, or that you can use on your phone, or or or…. this may not be the software for you. (Although running it somewhere on the internet and tracking via SSH would probably be a viable option). Me, I just want to open a term, type timew start mystuff, close my term, and be done with it – and I don’t care about tracking different things on different computers, because the context of what I’m tracking is different anyway. If your needs align with mine, I can only recommend you have a look at timewarrior 🙂

52Frames – 2020-17 – Soft

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Soft“, with an extra credit for “High-key”. Since I can’t remember doing much high-key photography, and probably roughly 0 high-key portraits, that was a nice occasion to experiment.

I kind of knew I wanted to do that today, so I did wash my hair this morning so that they’d be lighter and more fluffy/electric if I brushed them just before I took the pictures – which I did. Definitely playing the long con here.

Anyway, this afternoon I setup my tripod, my camera, my lights, the diffusers for the lights, my remote, and I took a few self-portraits. Or, you know, casual quick selfies 😉

https://balise.smugmug.com/Blog-images/n-gQbTMB/i-HPTLZFs/A

I normally expose to the left of what I actually want, which means that for this one I exposed center 😉 That’s my original picture, with the same crop as the final one, for comparison:

https://balise.smugmug.com/Blog-images/n-gQbTMB/i-kQFkB23/A

The processing was pretty fast because I also knew what I wanted to do there – both in terms of exposure and colors, and in terms of softness. I played with the corresponding Darktable modules (mostly filmic rgb, soften, local contrast, color zones to decrease the read component, white balance) until I got a result I was happy with.

All in all, from “start of setup” until “picture processed and everything back in its place”, this was a fairly short endeavour – an hour and a half, roughly. It was made easier by the fact that the “photography” side of it was actually fairly limited: once the lights were setup and I was happy with the camera framing, I did a single sequence of shots, and I didn’t have to go back to the camera once that first sequence was taken – the first results were “good enough” as they were.

Cool stuff

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I remembered I had some backlog on older cool stuff from between January and…. some time later, so here, have a few cool links.

The Deep Sea [image] – an illustration (to scroll) about what lives at what depth of the ocean on Earth. The rest of the links of that website are also pretty cool, in particular The Size of Space.

The best of 2019 wildlife photography awards – in pictures [photos] – the time for pretty wildlife pictures is now.

Eric Wastl – Advent of Code: Behind The Scenes – Leetspeak 2019 [long video] – Eric Wastl, who runs Advent of Code, talks about the experience, the puzzle writing, and why he does all that.

How to exit vim [mostly text] – literally what the title says, in a very… technically correct way.

Unit Conversion & Significant Figures: Crash Course Chemistry #2 [medium-length video] – Hank Green is a cool guy, Crash Course is great, and I really liked that video because it explains things I remember grumbling about during my studies in a very clear way.

An 18-carat gold nugget made of plastic [mostly text] – people playing with materials and doing fun stuff, like making 18-carat gold that’s far less dense than traditional mixture with silver.

This Astrophotographer Makes the World Turn and the Sky Stand Still [images, some text]- some fun animation of a long timelapse where the stars are stabilized but in the image (but the foreground… not). Pretty trippy.

The donut packing problem [text with images] – someone did math about donut shapes and their ability to fit into boxes.

Turing Trains – computational train track layouts – because making Turing machines out of model train tracks is one of the nerdiest things I can think of.

Background Matting: The World is Your Green Screen – video of a person + picture of the background = green screen. That’s quite cool – and they seem to have beautiful results.

The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories – a Q&A with Donald Knuth. Funnily enough, I reached to TAoCP book 2 this week-end 😉

52Frames – 2020-16 – Fast Shutter Speed

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Well, I think this one may hold the record for “number of shots taken for a single image” – I currently have more than 300 pictures on my drive for this theme (with a LOT of them actually not showing anything).

The 52Frames theme this week was Fast Shutter Speed, with an extra credit for Drip Water Photography. I kind of always wanted to experiment with drops and liquids and so on, so it was actually the right opportunity for that. I first vaguely looked on the Internet to try and get an idea of how to achieve that, enough to get me started, experiment, experiment again, experiment again, and eventually make images I liked 🙂

The very beginning of the experiments looked like this:

I hadn’t colored water yet, and I was trying to setup focus in a reasonable way, by using a small red thing (technically the plastic brush for the garlic press :P) where I would expect water to drop when I’d drop it. I had set up a couple of lights too, because for sure I needed MOAR LIGHT to be able to increase the shutter speed at a level I wanted.

The final setup ended up with the water plate set on a higher plane (actually, the yellow kitchen trolley behind me, minus the yellow cover), the same set of lamps, and a bit of ink in the water to get a more colorful shot.

What ended up working, generally speaking:

  • After a few experiments at both slower and more rapid shutter speeds, this one was taken at 1/500s – anything from 1/250 to 1/2000 seemed to work okay to get at least SOME images.
  • This means: Light. More light. Even more light. Seriously: never enough light. The reason for me to move the plate higher up was to get more of these precious photons, considering the fairly high tripods that my LED panels were mounted onto (I could have played it differently, but in the end that worked out as I wanted).
  • Pushing the aperture as much as possible DOES help making sure that more things are in focus – this one was taken at f/10 (on a 50mm with a full-frame camera). Even if that meant underexposing a fair amount, I think that eventually paid off.
  • ISO 100 was a must, because that was the only way I didn’t get a picture that was essentially noise – especially since I did tend to underexpose (mostly by lack of available light and trying to cheat on focus more than creative choice)
  • I removed the remote quite quickly because I got lazy when it came to check exactly I could get repeating shots with that thing – I ended up setting up delay + burst of 10 pictures directly on the camera, and timing the water drops in the time where the camera was bursting, and hope for the best
  • Experimenting with different ways of dropping water (from more or less high, more or less quickly) was actually pretty fun. I think this one was shot with drops coming from fairly high above, fairly quickly: the water is fairly disturbed.
  • I only played with a little plastic bottle that had a drip opening – I’d like to play with different sizes of drops, I think.
  • Better having a fairly low angle on the water surface – that might require handling the background, but the results are in my opinion just more interesting.

So, yeah, that’s how I spent most of my Easter Monday. And it was a ton of fun, and I think I’ll re-experiment with that sort of things later, because I’m very far from having any kind of mastery on the process, and it’s a nice, fairly low-tech thing to experiment with (with the exception of the lights, I’ll admit).

52Frames – 2020-15 – A Different Angle

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Late submission this week for 52Frames – the theme was A Different Angle. I was on my way to try and make a picture of a light fixture from below (lack of inspiration was striking again), when I saw my tripod in its shelf in my corridor.

Two things happened then – “you know what’s not typically seen from that angle? A tripod, seen from above it”, and some cheeky part of me going “The brief said…. ‘This is NOT a tripod type of challenge’…. well, watch me”.

So there, you get a picture of my tripod, from above. Also, projections do not preserve angles generally, so there, different angles with the shadow, boom.

Yeah, this is a weak entry – but I got the camera out this week, which is the important point. And I even did some non-trivial edits on this one too, so there’s that 😉