Man, they patched the hell out of this thing.
UI improvements are the first thing that caught my eye. I can’t say anything about stability yet because, well, I’m here writing this and not playing the game because it crashed out when I started typing in chat during a heated space battle.
Still, it’s a lot of fun when I’m not waiting around for it to verify all of the files.
So, in a complete and utter turnaround from what I had advised a friend, I am going to talk about my baking experience.
Short story. This morning, I realized that hanging in the banana hanger were just about to be overripe bananas. I also had a copy of How to Cook Everything.
I think you know how this goes. I write down what I need and then go to work.
A workday, dinner, one grocery run, a new loaf pan, and about an hour of prep later, I pop the pan into the oven with the realization that this may be my first banana bread. About thirty minutes in, the smell really starts to become apparent. It’s great.
Twenty minutes later, the toothpick is clean and it’s out of the oven. I’m waiting about fifteen minutes and then I’ve got a cooling rack ready.
Now I’m looking up beginner model stand mixers.
But maybe I should see how this turned out first.
Update: Delicious!
My camera, well, maybe I should clarify, my serious camera, is the Nikon D70. It’s pretty old and secondhand. By old, I mean It’s about six years old, and that in camera years is about one hundred and fifty. Although I got a good deal on it at the time, I almost weep when I look at the capabilities of the entry level DSLR cameras today. Ah, those young whipper snappers don’t know how good they’ve got it with their Active Dynamic Ranges and their ISOs above 1600. But I make do.
It’s a heavy thing, a black polycarbonate brick that one hefts to eye level. I both appreciate and curse that weight, depending on the situation. The solid feel of the camera lends a credence to its existence in the real world, that it can somehow interact with light and make it permanent. It can’t though.
All it does is take measurements and shift bits. A lot of them. In thousandths of a second.
There’s no chemical process that results in a physical object. No negative, no paper, no developer, no fixative, no finished product. Just more bits that get displayed on a screen, dependent on that screen’s size, and color depth and brightness to try to convey the moment through electric impulses.
It’s all an ephemeral stream of data. Like the very moment it’s trying to capture.
In fact, the data is so ephemeral that it can’t even last a day on the compact flash card. I am well aware of the fact that there are adult mayflies that have longer lives than some of the image data I’ve tried to acquire recently. Looking up some open source tools, I guess that hope springs eternal in the human breast.
When I was shooting film, I don’t remember self portraits being this difficult to do. I’ve been doing a round of self portraits lately, where I’m juggling and then taking the picture. The difficult thing is my need to tweak settings after each shot.
I guess that’s the whole point of the exercise though.  I’m getting a little bit better at looking at the lighting conditions and then making a judgment about aperture and shutter speed. Ideally, I’d have the laptop out there connected to the camera so that I could see results right away, but that’s too much equipment so I eyeball it most of the time on the small screen.
I guess juggling isn’t really a good summary type activity for self portraits, although it does give me a chance to look like I’m focusing on not dropping things.
There are times when I cannot sleep.
When I awake, it is not from a physical need or a nightmare that has suddenly ended. I simply open my eyes and I am fully awake. It is like this most mornings.
It’s dark outside, but for all I know, it might as well be six in the morning. The nights in winter a long and the days short, although lately the days are getting longer ever so.
For now though, I reach over to my phone, and look at the screen. It reads ten fifteen, but when I finally unlock it, I find that roughly two hours have passed. It is the stroke of midnight, and I have been asleep for perhaps an hour. It’s happening again.
Falling asleep is no mystery to me. Whenever I am up past a certain time, my body demands it. I just shut down.
Staying asleep on the other hand, that’s a more difficult task than I can handle on some nights.