Team Fortress 2

On nights like this, I won­der how I’m going to kill the time before it’s late enough to fall asleep, wor­ried that I’ll be bored on a Friday and con­se­quent­ly faced with the fact that I’m so very alone. I was crav­ing some kind of human con­tact tonight, but spend­ing time with peo­ple takes too much ener­gy nowa­days so I decid­ed, instead, to play Team Fortress 2.

I pur­chased it on an impulse, but this was still three years after TF2 first came out. There’s a very good rea­son I avoid­ed buy­ing it for so long: it’s the sequel to Team Fortress Classic, one of the games I was most addict­ed to in my life, and a huge time sink1. An entire day could go by with­out real­iz­ing it when I was play­ing TFC, and I pur­pose­ly did­n’t buy TF2 when Aaron was get­ting into it too; I knew I would­n’t stop if I had friends encour­ag­ing the habit.

TF2

 

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  1. Also the same rea­son I haven’t tried World of Warcraft. [↩]

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Bobby's number two

I’ve been itch­ing to play around with some new footage late­ly cause I love edit­ing and it’s been a while since I had a good sto­ry to tell, so when Tiana invit­ed me to Bobby’s sec­ond birth­day par­ty, I could­n’t resist. I also recent­ly pur­chased some new gear in prepa­ra­tion of a wed­ding I’ve been hired to film in the Fall (with a sec­ond one poten­tial­ly lined up), and I’ve been look­ing for an oppor­tu­ni­ty to field-test a new bag, shoul­der strap, and mono­pod.

I tend to get real­ly shy at Tiana’s par­ties cause I feel like I’m the only one who does­n’t know any­one else there, but she does a good job of mak­ing sure I’m nev­er left alone for too long and includ­ed in most con­ver­sa­tions. She’s also the only oth­er per­son I know to actu­al­ly design cus­tom invi­ta­tions. This time, how­ev­er, she was sport­ing a perky new hair­cut, and no longer a veg­e­tar­i­an (for now). Such is the pow­er of St. Hubert.

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Space Station

The International Space Station hap­pened to be pass­ing by when I was out doing some astropho­tog­ra­phy. It’s a very high-pro­file object because it’s a lot brighter than any stars (it’s light com­ing from the solar pan­els reflect­ing the sun at us), and it blazes across the sky at an amaz­ing speed. This last point is made obvi­ous by the fact that all the stars appear sta­tion­ary in the pho­to1, while the ISS made a bril­liant streak.

Also vis­i­ble near the bot­tom of the pic­ture are two low-fly­ing air­craft. The one in the bot­tom left cor­ner had blink­ing lights, which is why it appears as a series of dots in a line.

International Space Station

16mm focal length, f2.8 aper­ture, 13 sec­ond expo­sure, ISO1600.

I only had about two chances to take this shot at this shut­ter speed, not because the ISS dis­ap­pears behind the hori­zon, but because it even­tu­al­ly flies into the shad­ow of the Earth while it’s in the sky and is no longer illu­mi­nat­ed by the sun.

My astropho­tograhy teacher once showed me a pic­ture he got of the ISS where the fins of the solar pan­els were vis­i­ble. To put into per­spec­tive how dif­fi­cult this was, he explained it like this:

At it’s longest dimen­sion, the ISS is only about 109m wide, which is rough­ly the size of the nee­dle anten­na on top of the CN Tower. It’s also orbits about 400 kilo­me­tres above the earth, which is rough­ly the dis­tance from Ottawa to Toronto. So to cap­ture the ISS in a tele­scope at that mag­ni­fi­ca­tion is like being in Ottawa and point­ing a tele­scope at Toronto and see­ing the anten­na on the CN Tower…as it’s mov­ing at 8 kilo­me­tres per sec­ond. In American terms, this would be like stand­ing with a tele­scope in Las Vegas and resolv­ing the char­ac­ters of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles if it was mov­ing at 17000mph.

  1. They do move, but at a wide focal length of 16mm the streak­ing is min­i­mized. [↩]

Everlong

I rarely think of the one who loved me most, even though she still thinks of me. This isn’t on pur­pose; it’s a sim­ple case of me mean­ing more to her than vice ver­sa.

I’ve avoid­ed such an unre­quit­ed obses­sion with my last love. I stopped all con­tact, cut myself off from any­thing that’d pre­vent me from heal­ing or mov­ing on, and I’m proud of myself for hav­ing the strength to break such self-destruc­tive habits.

But I can’t hide from my own mem­o­ries. When touched and inspired so sig­nif­i­cant­ly, one can’t help but remain for­ev­er changed.

Between the choice of giv­ing things a chance and los­ing me for­ev­er, she chose the lat­ter. So I won­der if she ever thinks of me now, the one who will always have loved her most, or whether I’ve just become anoth­er one of the wound­ed boys who stag­gered and fell so help­less­ly against her graces.