Us, drinking on the job?? Never!

Olympus offer

[Update: would you prefer the Flag Ship camera?  Check out this amazing CyberMonday offer on the Olympus E-M1]

TCG found this: Only until November ends: the excellent Olympus E-M10 with two lenses for only $450. That is a fantastic deal on a great system camera starter kit.

Update:
(Last day today, by the way.)
EmptySpaces informs us:
"That 40-150mm lens is a hidden gem...it's plastic-y but dang is it sharp."

Great.
It's like the 45mm 1.8 I have praised: It's also a plastic body, but that doesn't stop the optics from being excellent.
Its 'partner' which came out around the same time, the 12mm, has a metal body, and costs twice as much. But it's no better; actually some say the 45mm it a notch better.

I love metal things in terms of sheer feel. Like the PRO lenses for example. Fantastic feel to them.
But Plastic can be a very, very good material these days, costs less and weighs less.

Do you know a good web host?

Do you know a good web host?
I have maybe half a dozen low-traffic domains looking for a host. Reliability is good, but good service is essential.  Good friendly service, speedy answers and handlings, 24/7.

Currently I'm still with my old host, which I love, but they are geared to very high-traffic sites, and the prices are thereafter (and they don't do shared hosting). That made sense when I had sites which had over 100,000 visitors per day, but now when I no longer have such busy professional sites, I'm hoping to find a host for a handful of domains for under, say, $20 a month.

The fifty-mm lens

I wish I could be kewl and say "I've always come back to the fifty-mm" or something.
But I can't, I just don't care much for it, sorry. As an artist I feel like I am trying to play volleyball with a straightjacket.

"But it's what's closest to the way we see things." Yeah, that's great, for documentary work.
But as a wannabe art photographer, I don't want to show things like we always see them, I want to see and show them like we *don't* always see them.

People work in a myriad of different ways. Some photograph the world. Me, I don't, really. I make pictures, using a camera. I used paint and canvas many years before my first camera, and still do sometimes. There, as with photos, I love pictures which have elements of both the real and the abstract.

Even abstract boobs too racy for US TV

Don't miss this wonderfully funny talk by Stephen Colbert about what is art and what is porn.

For example, one of the most celebrated, and justifiedly so, pieces of fine art, is Amedeo Modigliani's  Nu Couché (New Coochie?), which just sold for $170M.
(I remember in the eighties when a van Gogh set a world record with five million. I guess fine art is getting even better.)

Seriously, nude or not, it is a classic and genuinely beautiful painting, and for childishly squeamish forces to pressure media into showing it like this:

... is not just ridiculous, it is a crime against art, and a serious malfavor towards the children it's supposed to "protect". Imagine growing up in a "protected" home, having no idea that the other sex has these parts, and then turning 18 and going to college! (Or to log onto the Internet...)

Anyway, if this is porn, I wish they would tell me how they did it. I would like to start a "porn" web site, sell ONE painting of a nude for hundreds of millions, and retire in style.

Beware of phishing

Beware of "phishing" (emails pretending to be from banks or other important sites, trying to trick you into writing in your login on what looks like the real deal, but is a fake site).

This one sounds good... "somebody sent me five grand!!? Gotta look at that," and you click on the link. (Don't click on links in suspicious mails, instead, go to your browser and go directly to Paypal or whatever. There you can see if there's any truth to whatever they claim.)

I spotted this because firstly it's unlikely, secondly it was not sent to my email address, thirdly, it did not have my name in the mail, just said "dear Customer". Yeah, right.

Even the link is disguised.  If one uses Apple Mail (or surely others too), hover the cursor over the link, and a popup will show you the address where the link really goes to. In this case something containing "sharefile" and "download". So it may be a link to a virus or such malware.

Surprisingly Noisy Death of an Iceberg

Surprisingly Noisy Death of an Iceberg. 

This is so flippin' kewl.

Making a violin

From the newest musical instrument to a quite old one, in design anyway. This is a very kewl video of a pro carving out a violin. Yes, there's a surprising amount of carving!

Artiphon Instrument 1

This seems very kewl to me.

The young, beautiful, rich, famous... and happy?

Warmly recommended. (Thanks Bert.)

"There is a Twitter for you"... Oh yes?

To me, superficial communication is to meaningful communication like weeds are to flowers or crops. So you can understand my feelings about Twitter, whose very nature is designed to make weeds prosper.

 Okay... so Twitter is now advertising. (Spamming, call it what you want. I certainly did not sign up for it.)

Here we go, this is what my spam mail said:

"...no matter what you’re into, there’s a Twitter for that."
"From the events everyone's talking about to the conversations around the neighborhood, connect to what matters most to you on Twitter."

Wow, that makes it sound very relevant, doesn't it?
It even makes it sound important. Like a vital service to humanity.

But I'll postulate that far from being comprehensive, this is actually very narrow.
It may be comprehensive for people whose horizons span from "what everybody is talking about" to "the conversations around the neighborhood".
And those have their place, fair enough.

But what about if "what I'm into" is Nietzsche's philosophy? Color theory? String theory? Fractal art? Camera optics? The French Revolution? The nature of consciousness? Shakespeare? Dadaist art? Modern architecture?

Try to discuss those subjects meaningfully in parts of 140 characters.

"Teeth"

Mayby you have heard of the movie "Teeth"?
It's a film about a young woman due to growing up next to a nuclear plant has sharp teeth in her... wombabaloobabbalambamboom. And when men enters her with their... dingdingdangadangalongdingdong, and she doesn't want them to, they fare badly. I'm sure I don't have to draw a diagram.

I didn't think this could possibly be a good movie, I just saw it out of curiousity and because it was free on Amazon Prime. But Surprise, it was actually pretty good. I think the viewers who expected Night of the Living Dead only with genitalia were disappointed, and gave the movie the bad reviews it often gets. But the producers were smart and realized that this movie could not make it in the horror movie market as it is today, meaning tonnes of blods, guts, and limbs flying in all directions.

So instead they made a good story out of it, and actually gave it quite some humor.
If you find yourself sometimes rooting for the beautiful gender in the sex wars, I think you'll like this one.

Jess Weixler is the innocent but not harmless heroine.