hiidenkonttibeta

Ambassador from planet Frog (no, listening a lot of eX-Girl does not have any side effects) is visiting Oulu! Why don’t the newspapers cover this event? Luckily we have the freelance press (=わたし) doing a story. He didn’t grant an interview (too busy with his visit to a shop selling children’s clothing?!), but he agreed on posing in the shop window (probably a custom of his planet):

In other news, there’s again a lot of homeless trees on the streets. People get them for the christmas, and cold-heartedly just throw them out of the door when they get bored with them.

One day the trees will gang up and beat the sap out of mankind.

Digital cameras feel most attractive when there’s a stack of films waiting for scanning. 今日に I scanned indexes for one film, and there’s at least three more films from 2003 still unscanned. I scan indexes for every frame at 705dpi (resulting in about 960×640 pixel images), and then I pick the best shots and scan them at full 2820dpi. All in all, there’s maybe 18 rollfulls to check and scan. I’m hoping to do some serious updating in my photo galleries with the results of that fatiguing marathon.

The only thing that is keeping me from switching to digital SLR is the focal length multiplier. With EOS 10D’s 1.6x multiplier a 15mm lens is required to get an angle of view equivalent to 24mm lens in film camera! Canon 16-35mm/f2.8L could be close enough, but it’s a huge barrel compared to 24mm/f2.8. A 1.2x multiplier would be bearable – a 20mm lens would do the job. Thumbs up..

“Arma Ulea” arms exhibition is held yearly in Oulu. This was the first time I checked it out.

The pistol in the last picture is Česká zbrojovka CZ-75, the weapon Rally uses in Gunsmith Cats. Toni pointed it out to me, I would never have spotted it myself.

No, I didn’t get one of the masks. But I have this disturbing vision of having one as a decoration on the top of the bookshelf. On a head of a mannequin. With Lappish four winds hat. Or maybe a bright pink anime hair-style wig..

I’ve got two русский камеры, both old Leica copies, or maybe rather Leica derivatives. One is a Zorki-4K with 35mm/f2.8 Jupiter-12 (not original lens, I got it separately):

and the other one is Fed-2 (ФЭД-２) with 50mm/f2.0 Jupiter-8 (Юпитер-8):

The problem is, one of these cameras has film inside. But I don’t know which one (or both?), since it’s about six months from the last time I used these cameras. Of course there’s no any kind of indication about it. Fed’s frame counter is at 4, Zorki’s in 2. From this I bet that the film is in Fed, and I’m going to open Zorki now and look inside.

… woohoo! Zorki didn’t have film. ラッキー! I’ll shoot the remaining 20 frames with Fed some day (and feel really dumb if it doesn’t have film either..)

Visited library to pick up some reserved CD’s – and it’s quite impossible to avoid picking up some random albums too:

Cradle of Filth: Dusk and Her Embrace
Dawn of Relic: One Night in Carcosa
Babylon Whores: Death of the West
Black Sabbath: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Entombed: Wolverine Blues
Lacrimosa: Fassade
Katatonia: Discouraged Ones
Goblin: Volume II 1975 – 1980
To/Die/For: Jaded

But the eX-Girl album is just so great that I can’t give up listening to it :-)

Chant these magic words over and over
Relax and follow me
I will make you remember

Beyond being human
Beyond age and time
Beyond borders and gender
Come and go freely
Come and go

エクス・ギール: SASUKE

One of the smartest things to do on a やすみ is to stay up late and sleep long. Getting back to work feels even worse after sleeping too little the previous night. きのうは Loppiainen でした, it’s a religious holiday of some sort, but that’s as much as I know. It’s not even my religion, but it’s a day off for みなさん and that’s what matters. はる is nicer than あき in that matter, there’s もっとやすみ.