Arctangential

I took a few more pictures with my new camera, thought I would post them up:

This is just some stuff I had lying around on my desk. Taking pictures of something from straight above is pretty tough, especially when it’s pretty high up, so I don’t really like the angle these are at, and the framing is a little bit messed up because I had to crop out some other stuff to rotate them a little bit. I still kind of like the picture though.

This is the first real “art” picture I’ve tried to take. I think it turned out pretty good, apart from a few things. I think if I had it to do again, I’d put a smoother and lighter backing behind the lamp, like some very slightly off-white pasteboard or something like that. I also wish it was lined up a little better. Part of the problem is that the shade is a little bit crooked, and then it’s very tough to hold the camera just steady enough to line everything up perfectly. Maybe others wouldn’t notice, but it bugs me each time I look at it. I’m also not sure it’s perfectly centered. I’m going to have to work a little harder on precision in the future. However, I like the way it turned out in general, and I think I got the exposure just right.

I got a new camera this weekend. I’m not entirely sure why, but it sounded like a good idea at the time. I recently bought some 18″ bolt cutter for the same reason, but I’m not going to talk about them right now. Instead I want to talk about my camera.

Actually, I don’t want to talk about it too much, since there’s not a lot to say, apart from it’s a pretty fancy camera, and I like it, but it is going to take me some time to learn what all I can get out of it. This is the one I got.

Here is a picture of it, and is also the last picture I will take with my old camera:

The fact that I had an inordinate amount of trouble getting my old camera to focus the way I wanted is part of the reason I got a new camera.

Here is a picture of my old camera, which is also the first picture I took with my new camera:

And here is a picture of a plant, which I think turned out pretty well:

I finished Speaking Tongues yesterday at lunch. Very good stuff.

I’ve always enjoyed McDonald’s work, and this collection of short fiction is no exception. His writing is very literate and quite philosophical, but is always firmly rooted in science fiction tropes and does, I think, a very good job treading the fine line between those two. It’s hard to summarize all of the stories, but they all shared a common theme, that of asking what it means to be a human, or more accurately what it means to be a person.

For example, one story (the eponymous story) just consists of interviews with various people — an artificially intelligent construct, a religious woman, a high-ranking official in some non-specific totalitarian Orwellian state, and a schizophrenic man. They all, in their own way, discuss the manner in which what a person experiences affects the way that person acts. The AI, whom we meet first, discusses this in the most frank terms, explaining that he feels that he doesn’t think because, “All I know, ultimately, is what I’m told.”. The religious woman discusses how she was recently feeling bad because she wasn’t properly submitting to the will of her husband, but she’s feeling better now because the preacher “ministered” to her, and now she fully understands that she has to obey completely God and her husband. The Orwellian leader exhorts his citizens to practice only “right thoughts” and never to give in to the temptation of “wrong thinking”, and the schizophrenic just babbles, but with enough information thrown in to give you a good idea of why he might be the way he is. It loses something in the retelling, but it’s a very thought-provoking piece, and I think pretty representative of the rest of the work, if not in subject matter or structure, at least in the level in inventiveness and the kind of philosophy.

Anyways, I’m now reading the second of Elizabeth Boyer’s fantasy series, The Elves and the Otterskin.

I finished The Sword and the Satchel this afternoon. It was not bad.

This is a book that came out in the late 70’s/early 80’s glut of Tolkein “inspired” fantasy novels following a resurgence in interest in the originals. It’s your basic fantasy adventure story, set in a distinctly Scandinavian locale. I don’t recognize any specific locations based on the real world , but humans are often called “children of Ask and Embla”, and the main bad guy, a fellow named Surt, is trying to bring the Fimbul Winter to the land. The story itself is fairly generic; a group of people travel across the countryside in order to defeat Surt, who’s a kind of ghost who has taken over the bodies of many leaders in the past in attempt to further his winter-related plans.

The hero of our tale, a young man named Kilgore, has the chance to fully kill this ghost because he has a magical Alfar (elf) sword that he earned by being the only one who could pull it from a tree (not kidding). He goes on this adventure with a kindly old wizard and an ancient queen whom he rescues from a spell cast on her by the previous incarnation of Surt. They have Many Exciting Adventures, and finally defeat the villain, leaving the queen to rule her newly-freed land, while Kilgore heads back home.

There are 3 more books in this series, so I presume they will have more fun and adventures. I’m now reading Ian McDonald’s Speaking in Tongues, a collection of short stories. I really like McDonald, I’ve read almost all of the rest of his work, and I’m looking forward to this one as well.