But the new year is soon at hand, and while there's really no good reason not to better yourself at any other point in the year, the new year offfers us an opportunity to reflect on who we've been and think about who we want to be. This, I think, is one of the few remaining good tradtions of modern culture: the New Year's Resolution. This is the only time when one might see a genuine effort at repentance, even if it isn't repentance in the fullest sense.

I'll be honest, I don't really have much to write about here. I simply thought it would be a little bit tragic to leave an entire year without making a single post. Maybe I'll be more active in the coming year. I'd like to be. I've been working on some entertaining personal projects in the last few months, and I have been ruminating about a possible career shift. Both of which I think would make for prime "content", though I'm rather disgusted at that idea. And having said that, why should I post anything or have a site at all? I don't know. Maybe I'm just so addicted to the internet that I can't imagine living without an online presence of some sort. Maybe it's just fun. Maybe it's an effort, and experiment, to see if I can be online in a way way that isn't poisoned by memes, irony, and cynicism. I really just don't know. I hope you've enjoyed my self-indulgent, incoherent, introspective blabbler. It will happen again. When, I don't know.

Thankfully, the height of my expenses would not begin immediately. My parents, being incurable pack rats, still had their old film cameras. I dug them out of the closet and began to examine them to determine what kind of repairs I might need to preform. My dad's camera, though in excellent cosmetic condition, had a fatal operational defect. Though the exact cause was not to be known, the mirror would catch on the back of the lens after releasing the shutter. Try as I might, this camera would need a professional's touch. My mom's camera on the other had, while having some cosmetic damage and some debris in the viewfinder, seemed to be perfectly functional. The light meter even seemed to work properly. So, equipped with a functioning camera, I set out to buy a roll of film (a challenge in it's own right in the current year)

And now to break with this weird narrative writing style. I don't know what prompted that, but you shan't have to endure it any longer. The camera I ended up with is a Minolta SRT201, a fully manual 35mm camera from around the 1970s. The only electronic part in it is the light meter. As stated earlier, the camera is fully operational, though I intend to clean the viewfinder and replace the light seals after I'm done shooting the current roll of film. Finding film to shoot in a brick & mortar store was a bit rough. I ended up finding a 3-pack of FujiFilm Supria X-TRA 400 at CVS. Walmart had a spot for Kodak UltraMax, but no film on the shelf. I've gone back since then, and they just have the Supria 400 now. Unfortunately, there are no camera stores in my vicinity, otherwise I would have gone there. I also found a few rolls of expired Walgreen's branded film in my parents' camera bag which might yield some interesting effects.

I've now shot one roll of the Supria 400 and one roll of expired Walgreen's film. Being the way that I am, I decided to process the film entirely at home. This involves two major steps: developing and scanning. The developing process is actually quite straightforward. It's a little different for color vs black and white, but it's well documented and not too difficult at all. Since I've been using color film, I decided to purchase the CineStill C41 developer kit. I did not buy their temperature control system, because I already own a sous vide machine. The equipment required for home developing is pretty universal: a light-proof tank, a changing bag, a timer or stopwatch, and nitrile gloves if you care about getting chemicals on you. For color developing you'll also need some way to keep the chemicals at the right temperature, like a warm water bath. I used the aforementioned sous vide machine. Then it's just a matter of putting in the chemicals in the right order for the right amount of time. Color processing technically has an extra bleaching step vs black and white, but, in CineStill's formulation, the bleach and the fixer are combined into a single "blix" step. Anyway, I developed the roll of Supria 400 that I bought, and, as far as I can tell, nothing went too horribly wrong. I did drop the developed film on the floor a couple of times, but there was only a little damage. I'll try not to do that next time.

For the scanning step, there are a couple of options for home scanning. The Traditional method involves a high-resolution flatbed scanner. These tend to be quite expensive, and they don't often play along too nicely with free software systems. The other method, which I decided to employ, is called DSLR camera scanning, and it's exactly what it sounds like. You basically take a picture of you film with a digital camera. I read somewhere that the amount of information in a frame of 35mm film amounts to between 12 and 14 megapixels, so you can get away with a pretty inexpensive camera. I bought a used Canon EOS Rebel T2i which has an 18mp sensor. It also has mirror lock up which is a nice way to reduce vibrations. You don't want to use just any old lens, though. A macro lens with at least 1:1 image representation (true macro) is best. You also want a relatively short focal length. I made the mistake of buying a lens with a very long focal length. It turns out that lenses with longer focal length also have a longer minimum focusing distance, so I ended up with my tripod extended to its maximum height and the film on the floor, a very difficult to use setup.

After you've got your film developed and scanned into your computer, you're going to want to convert your negative into positive image. There are many different pieces of software you can use to accomplish this. I chose to use darktable since it's free software, and it's "negadoctor" module seems to work quite well. There's also a plugin for Gimp for converting film negatives, but I haven't looked too much into it. I'm not sure how well Gimp handles raw image files, either. I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of converting negative. I only know the basics, and I don't think I'm very good at it yet. I've managed to get a couple of images to come out looking right, but I don't know if that's due to poor exposure, poor developing, or poor use of software. Time will tell as I get better at all three of those.

I plan on buying a better macro lens which will at least make the scanning process easier, if not make my scans sharper. I also intend to switch to primarily black and white film, in part, because the film and the chemicals are cheaper than color, but also because I find myself artistically attracted to black and white. I see a lot of things that make me think "I want to shoot that in black and white," and I think there are many situations where color doesn't really add to the composition and may even hurt the final picture.

And now for the moment none of you have been waiting for: I've added a gallery page to my website where you can view selected images I have created. Don't get too excited yet; it's not that good. This first roll in particular was mostly shot before I actually read anything about composition, lighting, exposure, etc. I don't know if I'll ever produce "good" photography, but I will at least improve, and my progress will be visible in my gallery.

P.S. I don't read my blog posts before I post them.

• 1350g Orange Blossom Honey
• 5g Lalvin ICV-D47 Wine Yeast
• 1.5g FermFed DAP Free Yeast Nutrient

I mixed up the yeast and the FermFed in a little bit of warm water, and then I mixed up the honey and the water in a gallon jug. It takes some effort to get all the honey dissolved, but it will all dissolve. I then pitched the yeast mixture into the honey water (this is properly called must). Lastly, I put an airlock on the jug and put the jug in my wine fridge (set to 65F) to let it ferment. After two months, the fermentation had stopped enough that it seemed ready to transfer into another container for aging. You don't really want the mead to be sitting on the sediment layer (called the lees) since it can impart some yeasty flavors. It sat in secondary for three months until today when I bottled it (this is generally considered the minimum amount of time to age a mead).

The mead came out very well. It was a bit sweeter than expected. I had a starting gravity of 1.094 and a final gravity of 1.010 which makes for about 11.2% ABV. I had expected it to ferment to dryness (FG < 1.000), and I don't quite remember the ratio of honey to water necessary to achieve this. More research is required. I ended up with seven 16oz bottles of which I intend to draw out my consumption so I can see how it changes as it ages further.

Here's a low quality image for no real reason:

I bought a bike. For whatever reason, I've decided it's a good idea to start riding a bike to work. Actually, it's not whatever reason; it's several legitimate reasons. The first and most important reason is that I really need the exercise. At this point, I'm not even sure I can make the 3.3 mile trip to my workplace, and that's really bad. I'm going to work my way up for probably a week or two and then start with riding to work once a week, then twice a week, then thrice, etc. until I'm up to riding to work every day. The second reason is gas. It's honestly not that much of a deal since the bulk of my gas goes toward my weekly half-hour commute to church, but every little bit helps, I guess. I did the math, and I would save about $400/year at current gas prices if I were to bike to work exclusively. That figure will increase with gas prices.

Ah, and I suppose you might like to know what bike I got. Since bikes are so expensive these days I decided to get a used bike on eBay. I ended up going with a Specialized Crossroads XP from about '94 or '95. It seems to be in pretty good shape, but it will need a tune up. I'm also going to be adding a rear rack for panniers and trigger style shifters. I rode it around a bit, and the grip shifters are just a pain. I might need to get new wheels on account of my bulk, but that might be an expense for a later date. My hope is I'll be able to lose enough weight before the wheels become an issue.

My bicycle research also brought me down a rabbit hole of bike infrastructure and urban planning. That may be a topic for a future article, but I can sum up my feelings on the matter: I hate American cities, I hate suburbs, I hate cars, I hate stroads. I really think the car-dependent infrastructure of American cities is a major component of my disdain for cities in general. Maybe cities wouldn't be so bad if they were actually human oriented and people cared to make them beautiful.

I feel the need to preempt this question of "why is your website so ugly?". I don't want people to venture on to my website and think "wow, this guy has no idea what he's doing." While that may be true to some extent, I do actually know how to make a website look good. So, why is my website so ugly? Why not spruce things up with some images and CSS?

My website is the way it is as a bit of a statement. I really dislike the modern web. It's so unbelievably bloated. You really don't need a bunch of convoluted JS/CSS and several MBs of assets to do, well, really anything that you might need to do online. That's not to say you can't use any JS/CSS in a good website, but it's gone so far out of hand these days that I think I really need to just use none of it at all to get the point across. If you haven't already, go watch The Website Obesity Crisis . It's a great talk about just how fat the modern web has become (this was in 2015; it's only gotten worse in the intervening years).

An additional benefit to avoiding CSS and JavaScript it that it makes the website very easy to maintain. I don't have to worry about styles or positioning or anything like that. I can just put words on the page plain and simple.

In conclusion, I hate the modern web. I don't think that improved hardware means you should immediately fill those resources with useless garbage. JS/CSS should never be essential to the function of your website; it's seasoning, not a meal.

I made it pretty hastily in GIMP, but I don't think it turned out too bad. If you've got a button you'd like me to add to my site, you can contact me. Keep in mind, these buttons must be 88x31 pixels and must be .gifs. They should also be animated or memorable in some way.

This really seems like a cool/fun way to advertise other people's sites. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone elses buttons.

I've also removed all of my Stray Thoughts blogs. The Stray Thoughts project served its purpose to help me leave Twitter, but I don't really need my immature, scatterbrained, unfiltered thoughts to be out on the web. I'd like to give more attention to this blog and develop some writing skills.

I've made a couple of changes to my computing practices, as well. In order to improve my sleep schedule and my attention, I've switched to a dumbphone. I was spending way too much time listening to podcasts in bed, and I was often distracted during the day by Twitter, messaging, and games. I picked the Sunbeam F1 Orchid. Sunbeam is a small company, and they seem to have a decent enough mind for privacy (cell phones are inherent tracking devices, but every little bit helps). The Orchid model has navigation and weather. I'm not sure if I'll use these, but it's the same price as the less featureful models, and I like having the option.

Finally, I've moved my computer out of my bed room. I'm hoping this will help me use the computer less. At the very least, It will make my bed room a more focused space to be used for sleep, dressing, and prayer.

I'm hoping to take some more steps into minimizing my computer use. I may even go back to living in the framebuffer on my laptop (I did this for a time a few years ago with reasonable success, though web browsing is difficult). I'd really like to use a web browser only when necessary. RSS reader, email client, youtube-viewer, etc. Basically, the modern web is evil and should be used as little as possible.

Ultimately, I am an abysmal writer. Ever since my earliest school days I have performed below average in this area. But this is one of the things this blog is meant to address. A large portion of my reasoning for this website, even, is to help me develop skills. So please bear with me while I assault you with my horrible writing. I will try to do some of each of what I've listed above, and God willing, I will become a competent writer in the process.