Day 145

Roadside Sun


Home Depot, then more Home Depot, then again.

I'm just about to shoot Adobe Bridge in the face. If I name the folder containing today's pictures "145", the pictures won't rotate, but they will if I name the folder anything else. It's not a big deal, but it obviously shows that something is messing up internally.

A few months ago I swore off MTV because it sucks. For one thing: IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MUSIC! They don't show videos unless it's the middle of the night, or during TRL - a show dedicated to showing the top ten most requested music videos of the day - in which only clips of the videos are shown. Also, the way music videos (and most current pop-culture television shows, movies, and commercials) are moving is towards fast jump cuts, a million images per second, and rapid focus shifts. It gives me a god damn headache. Flyleaf's video for Fully Alive is one of the best examples of all the above:



It's amazing how well you can actually recognize what's being shown to you in a 1/4 second long shot, but when they come so frequently, your eyes just glaze over, they can't keep up with the rapid shift of subject location, and no short term memories can be formed. It's nearly impossible to recall any single shot you saw within the last 30 seconds, just a general feeling and visual concept. And why in the hell do they need to slide out of focus sooooo much? Grrr. Anyways, back to MTV.

I've been pretty good about not watching MTV's shitty programming until tonight. Ally and I decided to watch the VMAs to see what kind of good videos have come out in the last year. Well, we were sadly mistaken: you don't get to see any videos, much less any good ones. The "clips" they show while announcing the nominees are only about 3 seconds long, and there are so many sound effects and clapping and general white noise going on that you can't even here the music being played in the video. The stupid animations/videos that are used as the delivery of these clips (eg. guys playing ping-pong, then the table turns into a tv screen and a video clip is shown on it) are shown for longer than the clips are.

We got to see 5 awards being presented, each with 5 video nominees. I think that only about 8-10 videos were actually nominated out of 25 possible slots. There was no variety. It almost looked like whoever's record label payed MTV the most money was just "nominated" for every category. It had nothing to do with the quality of video (as the lack of video-showing was evidence of), nor the quality of music or originality or anything else that actually makes a video good. It was a total popularity contest. Perez Hilton, a guy that I'm (sadly) kind of a closet fan of, was über douchy when describing how he's a part of the VMA voting committee, and that he voted for Britney Spears (who won TWO - a number two higher than she can count to - awards: one for best pop video and the coveted video of the year [who knew she even made music videos that have actual humans in them? (this isn't the video that got nominated)]) because he thinks she needs a comeback and "ohmigod she looked so pretty tonight!"

In conclusion, my lens is still working just fine. I think. It's just a little wobbly, but if you don't shake it or pull on it, it doesn't wobble. Although I can't tell if the rapid focus-falloff towards the upper left of today's photo is due to the f/5 aperture or if it is in fact the lens.



That spiral was made by drilling into a penny, and that hole in the guy's forehead was made by drilling into said penny.