Literally, the Best Picture Ever Taken by a Human

This is literally the best picture taken by a human being in the history of mankind.

I qualify human, because I'm sure in my lifetime a robot will have taken a better picture.  Perhaps it will be an automated drone type thing, perhaps it will be floating in the ocean when an elusive giant squid floats by, being chased by a school of ocean faring piranha somehow.  Maybe there are aliens involved.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the picture:

Actually, before I get to the picture, just note that I've made some modifications to it, to ensure that no one steals this amazing picture and puts it on facebook with some misattributed inspirational quote.

Please feel free to e-mail me for a copy of the original.  (Only 2500 USD, one copy, digital, 240px by 320 px.)

Oh Noes.

The end of the melons is nigh.

This is the current state of the melons.  There's not much left.  I'm desperately clinging to the hope that there will be one tiny, miniscule protomelon so I can say I'm a farmer, but it's not looking likely.

There's nothing else left in the WORLD!

I don't think it's over watering because there are holes in the bottom of the bag and the soil isn't saturated, not to mention that the damn things grew like wildfire up until last week.  Damnit!

BURN IT ALL DOWN.

Melon Dramatic

So the melons are coming along nicely.  They absolutely shot up at first, but have kind of levelled out now.  The second wave of growth is coming through.

A total of eleven have germinated, leaving six stuck in eternal slumber.  The roots are starting to poke through on a few of them, so I'll have to decide which ones to keep and which ones to guerilla plant in a park somewhere around here.

Playstation controller for scale.

The spider plants have completely stopped growing.  One of two things is responsible for this - I've been keeping the melons wet as is the way of melons apparently, and that is either too wet for the spiders, or the precipitous drop in temperature this week has stunted their growth.  Seriously, it was twenty degrees last week and now it's nine.  And raining.  What is up with that?

The next step is presumably planting them into something bigger.  These pots are designed to be planted whole, the roots grow through and they disintegrate.  I think another week or so should do it, what with the weather becoming warmer for good.  Probably.

Melons Ahoy You Pervert

Not those kinds of melons.  These ones:

They're already desperately attracted to the sun so until I plant them outside I'm going to rotate them around.  By the pictures I've seen on the internet they seem to sprawl which would seem to suggest they just kind of flop over and face the sun as soon as they can.  But we don't suffer layabouts here, so they're going to grow upwards until they get their own place.

So far we have four confirmed germinations which is good news for melon lovers, as I only have three possible spots.  The strongest survive.  The weakest may well go into a playoff for the final two positions, both living in one pot with the aim being to grow little portable melons to send back to england.  I'm not sure of their edibility, but they might make good ornaments.

The other weaklings must, I'm afraid, head off into the sunset, unless of course I can sneakily plant them somewhere around here where no one will notice.  Guerilla gardening.

Don't Even Bother Trying to Sleep

So for the past few days I've been experimenting with not sleeping.  Again.

It's a recurring theme in my life and one that I will fight against until the day I die.

During the many, many hours I've spent awake I've thought about any number of things, but instead of boring you with them I thought I'd share a picture I took with a film camera a couple of weeks ago.

It's not the enormous film camera I showed in the last post, it's just a normal 35mm camera of unknown origins.

A sunset, not a sunrise.  Despite the number of sunrises I've unwillingly been witness to, I've never found the strength of will to overcome the headaches and actually do something productive with a camera.

I like it, which is unsurprising because I'm showing it to the internet and I took it.  It's a very low quality scan (250kb) done by the photo place, and I don't have a print to see just how it would end up looking in the real world - but I really quite like it nonetheless.

I definitely suggest blowing it up to full size and just looking for a few seconds.  It grows on you.

At least it did with me.

The usual disclaimers with my insomniposts, I can't be held accountable for readability or spelling due to the fact my brain is eating itself instead of sleeping like a normal brain.

Oh and I almost forgot, I saw a cool train on Sunday:

DNS Report In!

I just tried to access this site via the url http://www.eastern-escapology.blogspot.com and it came up with something else entirely.  Either the DNS has been poisoned, leading to an entirely different site, or they changed the URL and I have no idea about it.  Basically, access this site via google using any search you want, rather than via the URL bar.

Anyway, here are some more pictures.

So all these pictures have been digitally retouched.  Interestingly, a few of them have mistakes that I can't be bothered to rectify.  Don't worry, I'll point them out anyway.  This one is one of my favourites - as such it's received a few different treatments to see what you can get away with.

Black and white helps a lot with some pictures, but it often detracts from the more mundane ones.  For this one I'm not sure why, but it looks better in black and white.  A photographic theorist will surely know the answer as to why; but an academic I am not.

This one has the slider for 'vivid,' cranked up.  The sky is boring, the shapes not well framed, but I liked it because it's fairly representative of what you come across in Japan.

This is another one of my favourites.  I was struggling to take (what I consider to be) an interesting picture of the cranes.  They were often in isolation, and it was difficult to bring the colours out from the background.  The strings of origami were often bereft of identity, so having the chinese characters in the background helped with placing them.

This is one of my b/w versions of the above picture.  I turned the red to maximum and picked out the flame.  The reflection was the hardest part to select because the tool kept doing an MS paint and selecting everything.

B/w is key for this picture.  I really like it, despite it being too busy for it to be considered 'good,' by most people.  The desaturation (is it desaturation to take away colour?  Who knows) takes away some of the complexity, while the straight line running through the centre of the picture is broken by the kid and her dad, and the people in the rickshaw.  There's a lot going on, and I find it appealing.

Often, pictures of homelessness are shown in colour to pick out the drabness of their situation, highlighting the difficulties of their plight.  B/w does romanticise the whole situation which is unfortunate, but at the same time you have the opportunity to look past the clutter and focus on the person - should you choose to do so.

These insects were everywhere.  It took a lot of stretching, pulling and coercing to get the picture like this; you can tell by the imperfections in the image.  Still, the whole thing has a pleasing simplicity that I enjoy, while the colours really stand out against the post.

So this was taken in the hotel where Kurosawa stayed while in Kyoto.  The paper had the most fantastic texture, but once again I had to torture the image in order to bring that out.  I didn't take the best initial photograph to do so, thus ending up with this grainy picture.  It's worth noting that all these are jpg's due to the limitations of the blog website.

The final picture.  If you look at the bottom right of the flame, I accidentally overlapped the green effect causing it to overtake some of the silver of the metal.  This mistake is pretty elementary and reasonably easily rectified (praise allah for layers!) but I can't be doing with it.  I spent long enough looking at these pictures that I don't want to go back anytime soon.

And that's that for these edited pictures.  I'll put more holiday snaps up in the future (there are plenty).

Ciao.

Random Photography Roundup

So this set of pictures is from last week.  I've been rather busy, and as such haven't had time to update the blog.  These pictures are from our semi-final game against Tama; who like to gouge eyeballs and generally play below the law.  Such is the way with Japanese teams who aren't physically strong enough to compete legally.  Bastards.

Anyway, I'm going to put some more pictures up tonight, and I'll annotate those tomorrow.

This first picture is our winger.  He thinks he's a fly half, but he really isn't.  There's always a cheeky smile going on around him though, which makes super closeup perfect for this guys face.

Yamagen is the club manager.  He's helped me a ton since I started playing for the Gaijin, and he even recommended me for the national 7's trials.  A nice guy, even if we can't talk because I'm terrible at Japanese, and he's terrible at English.  His written language is pretty good though, for some reason.  Maybe he reads forms all day.

Neither French nor Spanish, this basque ambassador always starts fights, and subsequently gets sent off.  I think his record is 1 minute on the field before being yellow carded.

I took this picture because the taxi doors close themselves in Japan.  Look, no hands ma!

The ground we played at was on top of a department store, undergoing repairs by the looks of things.  The scale of development is quite incredible - the number of different organisations that must come together in order to build something of this size on such prime real estate is mind boggling.  Or it might all be owned by one of the mega corporations that own Japan; a more likely scenario now that I think about it.

This was in one of the flower beds, I don't know what it means, what it stands for or why it's there, but it's 'cute,' (if that's your kind of thing) so it sums up Japan quite conveniently.

Our actual fly-half, getting on in years and only three feet tall, weighing as much as a newborn; still does a job and tackles everything.

The guy who forgot our kit in the previous game (match report link here) who plays centre, and enables a number of options with decent distribution (even if he's stopped giving me the ball, preferring the other centre!).

We lost to Tama by 1 point, so this kind of sums up the long walk home mood of the team.  We should have gone through, and I personally had three opportunities to ensure we made it to the final.  I am bitterly disappointed in my own performance, it simply wasn't good enough.

The long walk home.

Just a random couple riding past on a bicycle.  I don't know why I took this picture.

There was a giant ferris wheel at the place.  I don't know why.

The same ferris wheel.  It really was rather large.

The ubiquitous bicycle picture.

This random guy turned up when we were ruing the loss, only to turn on an mp3 player and start blasting music to no one but himself.  Bizarre.

Mao had shoulder surgery the week before this game, and the great big Samoan was sorely missed.

It's traditional (insofar as paper was invented) for Japanese people to give each other business cards at every opportunity.  I managed to take a picture of this guy as he handed one to me.

I like taking pictures when something is in the foreground, so the subject is actually only a small part of the overall picture.  I don't know why.

Another Fijian, big Joe and I have a bet to see who will score the most tries this season.  As the season is over, I don't know who has the highest tally.  Considering I haven't scored in a while, and he always scores one or two a game, I'm guessing he beat me out.

Jesse, whose shorts I lost (and someone else found) talking to someone.

I couldn't decide what was more interesting to photograph, Jesse or the water.  I took both, to make sure I had the right one.

I took a couple of pictures of these two, but I don't know which one is better.  Answers on a postcard.

And the second of the two.

Do not feed pigeons.  Ever.

When you're least expecting it, I'm there with the camera.

Natsu is the other guy who helped me go to the national trials.  He translated my form for me, and helped me work out where the station was, and what time it began.  Thanks Natsu!

Not the most flattering photo, but he's been an enormous help to me and the team, so he deserves two pictures.

The Fijian contingent is quite strong in the gaijin, and they love showing up for the photographs.

Part one of the series entitled: 'Why I don't have pictures taken of me.'

Part two, sporting a fetching burger.

Joe trying to steal the burger.

It's rare to see a Fijian not laughing or smiling.

But here is one such picture.

I wonder if he's doing a supermodel face?

Or a stroke?  Then again, I don't come off any better in any of these photographs.

Something funny on that phone.

Not looking.

He's got that bloody camera again.

He's just been told that he owes me a thousand yen.

Nik, looking how I felt.

Jesse, walking into an out of focus ferris wheel.

Everyone seems to have kids, and they go around attaching themselves to pretty much whoever wants to give them attention.

Liam has a stock photo face.  This is it.

Poor Sean, full after being made to drink too much.

Peekaboo.

Another one where someone isn't looking; it gets some nice pictures on occasion.

A picture of a person with a camera taking a picture of a person.

Let's go home.

The same deal as before, whoever has the patience for kids will put up with them.  It's a really friendly bunch.

Teaching the kids how to use technology at a really early age.

I would say he wasn't expecting the picture, but every time I turned around he was pulling a face, expecting me.  A difficult subject to capture.

Some guy looking for money under a vending machine.

The natural disposition of a Fijian; laughter.

Bored of having pictures taken of him.

And finally, a woman in a kimono that I met on the way home.  They normally have interesting patterns of flowers and whatnot, but this one was more abstract which made it interesting in itself.

And that's it.  Check back later for some more pictures.