Over the weekend, we went to a peach/nectarine/apricot orchard out in the far east bay. This turned out to be an excellent excuse to take stupendously cute baby photos. If that floats your boat, enjoy!
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There’s nothing quite like bringing an infant child of your own to Pride to make you feel just a wee bit heteronormative. Nonetheless, we went — and were rewarded with far more awesome things to look at than in years past. Special thanks to all SF Pride participants who realized that civic recognition of gay pit bull owners (and oh yes: they had a parade section of their own) is all well and good, but hot shirtless guys dancing on floats is better.
Yet more cute baby pictures; this batch off the SLR rather than the years-old point&shoot or the phone camera, so some of them are even “good” in an objective sense.
(Small warning: there’s one hilariously disturbing pair of images in there. I’d say more, but it would spoil the surprise. Don’t worry, it’s not the crowning.)
Dear friends who are better versed in such things than I:
Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture?
For context: I have been shooting with a DSLR in jpg mode for about 1.5 years now. Mostly I’m looking for something that will let me (a) process a ton of photos quickly and painlessly and then upload them to flickr, and (b) let me quickly correct basic stuff like white balance problems. The primary machine for this will be a 2006 Mac Pro.
Yes, I am inviting a modern-day emacs-vs-vi flamewar. Fire away.
Also a bit belated: in January of 2008, for Miranda’s birthday, we drove down to Monterey for the weekend to stay at Asilomar, and see the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monarch Butterfly sanctuary.
And in the “better really damn late than never” files, finally my photos from 2007’s Folsom Street Fair:
In September of last year, Miranda and I did a strange thing: we came back to New York, not as residents but as visitors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Manhattan was still there. I’d say it was waiting for us, but the truth is that New York waits for nobody.
I took a few pictures, as I tend to.
Yet more overdue photos.
On September 8, 2007, my dear friends Fred Cooper and Susan DiLeo were married, and I had the honor of officiating.
About half of these photos were taken by Miranda, as my super-powers do not extend to being in two places at the same time.
Okay, last one for tonight.
One of my geekier… okay, probably hands-down my geekiest obsession is videogames. Not World of Warcraft or anything of that ilk, but videogames: big cabinets with blocky graphics and beepy sounds that you experienced in these wondrous places called “arcades” with hundreds of your fellow caffiene-intoxicated 16-year-olds, preferably under black lights with terrible 80s buttrock playing on an overvolted PA system.
…ah, nostalgia. Arcades basically don’t exist any more (except occasionally as adjuncts to laser-tag facilities and amusement parks), and “arcade games” are these days a backwater of an industry that long since moved into the living room. But for a few days each summer in California, a bunch of die-hards go through a ridiculous amount of physical effort to build the arcade to end arcades: hundreds of vintage videogames and pinball machines, some of them stupefyingly rare or never released at all, all set on free play in a conference hall in San Jose. It’s called California Extreme, and 2007 was the first year that I was ever able to attend.
What follows are, for the most part, pictures of old video and pinball games. I suspect that for most people, this is about as boring as pictures of streetlights or parking garages. But if you’re a certain kind of nerd — my kind of nerd — this stuff is better than porn.
Well, better than most porn.
In August of 2007, I got to help “Snow White Lies in Wait” was meant to explore the evolution of myth as a community building tool designed to reflect and adapt to the lives of the tellers, to a static medium (i.e. through books and movies) appropriated by the aristocratic bourgeoisie as a didactic tool used to impart moral lessons and capitalist ideology. The piece involved hanging 20 apples from hooks pierced through my legs.
Yours truly and Melissa Gira did gofer and photo/video work, while two professional piercers handled the more delicate aspects of the performance.
Just in case the last bit didn’t register: this photoset involves blood, needles, and hooks in flesh. (Also the abuse of unsuspecting produce.) There’s no actual nudity, but I’m guessing it’s probably not worksafe in most cases regardless. And did I mention the flesh-hooks? If that sort of thing is unpleasant for you, for the love of god pass on.
