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Spent the weekend at Long Beach Comic Con.

10th year of the con, still smallish but very comics & art focused (unlike other “comic cons”).

7YO was fascinated by the droid builders as always, and played a lot of laser tag. Wife cosplayed as Prof. Trelawney. I went to see Marv Wolfman & Christopher Priest talk about their careers as writers and editors. We bought some art cards, prints, toys & discount books.

Blog: https://hyperborea.org/journal/2018/09/long-beach-comic-con-2018/
Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/albums/72157700841439474

#lbcc2018 #ComicCon

On Wandering.shop

Fair food keeps getting more and more outrageous.

Spotted at the county fair last night:

Deep fried Twinkie dogs and Zucchini Weenies have been joined by triple-decker donut burgers, chicken-in-a-waffle-on-a-stick, and the donut chicken and ice cream sandwich. But for sheer “because we can” ridiculousness: deep-fried filet mignon. What a waste.

Fairpocalypse/

#countyfair #fried

On Wandering.shop

…

@janellecshane This is all I can remember seeing off the top of my head at other food booths:

Deep fried Oreo
Oreo Churros
Deep Fried Snickers
PB&J Sriracha Funnel Cake
Cinnamon Roll Ice Cream Sundae
Gouda, Bacon and Jalapeno Grilled Cheese
Ravioli on a Stick
Gouda and Ravioli Grilled Cheese

On Wandering.shop

Kara Danvers found the ice cream!

Spider jockey attack

Photo taken at: WonderCon

Spider jockey attack!

#Minecraft #Wondercon #Wondercon2018 #cosplay

Back from Oregon & posting more eclipse photos!

Photo taken at: Woodburn, Oregon

Back from Oregon & posting more #eclipse photos! We took a family vacation up to Portland & went down to Woodburn for the day of the eclipse.
Seeing a total solar eclipse in person was amazing. Photos just don’t do it justice.

For one thing the corona is really bright. Not harmfully bright, and not enough to block out stars and planets, but enough that it drowned out the shadowed moon when I tried to do full-sky shots.
The sky was dark blue like twilight, with a light orange band around the horizon. Where the sun would be was the solid black disc of the moon, surrounded by the streaming white corona, looking like a home in the sky.

It lasted a little over a minute. It felt like no time at all.

More thoughts & pictures at the link in my profile, in case you’re interested.

#eclipse2017 #solareclipse #solareclipse2017

Expanded on K2R

Total Solar Eclipse 2017 (Gallery)

Early in the eclipse, seen though glasses.

The outlet mall at Woodburn was offering eclipse parking for $20. Lots of people took them up on it, some of them with more elaborate equipment than a pair of glasses. Like this filtered telescope.

Binoculars also work great as projectors (just don’t look through them!)

Light filtering through trees creates hundreds of tiny pinhole cameras, projecting the image of the eclipse!

Moments before the total eclipse. The camera’s auto-correction makes it look normal, but it was a lot dimmer than usual. Not yellowish like golden hour light or reddish like wildfire smoke (we got plenty of that later in the week), just…dimmer.

Corona! Photos really don’t do it justice. The whole sky turned dark blue, like twilight, with the shadowed moon looking deep black, like a hole in the sky. And the corona is *bright*! That’s something I’d never really grasped from photos: it’s not harmfully bright, and it’s not enough to drown out stars and planets, but it’s still *much* brighter than the sky around it.

Something that photos never prepared me for: the sun’s corona is still very bright, just not harmfully so. In this shot, it’s bright enough to drown out the black circle in the center. But the fact that you can see Venus and the sun at the same time is kind of a hint as to what’s going on…

Special coffee drink for the eclipse. Not sure if all Starbucks had it, or only those within the total eclipse’s path.

RAM also had a special beer for the eclipse.

Expanded on K2R

H2O: Walking By The Los Angeles River

Los Angeles has a weird relationship with water. Most years there isn’t enough rain to support the region’s population, agriculture and industry without importing it from surrounding areas. Some years there really isn’t enough. And some years there’s so much rain that floods are a greater threat than drought.

The region’s flood control system is built around that threat, channeling storm water out to sea as quickly as possible. In many places, rivers are lined with concrete, typically with a narrow channel in the middle to keep it flowing during dry spells and a wider channel to prevent flooding. This stretch of the Los Angeles River in Studio City is a good example:

Other parts of the river are much nicer, even navigable at times, but this stretch really is just a concrete drainage ditch inside a bigger drainage ditch.

Unfortunately what’s needed in flood years ends up hurting us in drought years, sending too much of the rain we do get into the ocean instead of collecting it. In recent years they’ve been testing systems to recharge groundwater reserves, but if drought becomes more common — and indications are that it will — we’re going to need to revamp the system.

Down the Narrow Hallway

A few years back I saw a Tennessee Williams parody at the second stage of the Hayworth Theater in Los Angeles. It was a few rooms opened up and converted in the office section of a historic building, complete with the old-style lighting, molding, wooden floors and carpet that you see here. The “lobby” was the entry level for the back stairway, where they’d somehow managed to cram in a bar and a couple of tables. Then you’d walk up the stairs, around a corner, and down this long narrow hallway until you reached the right door.

The building dates to the 1920s, when offices had character and weren’t just boxes. The theater seems to be gone now, as it’s since been turned back into offices. Because apparently that’s something Los Angeles doesn’t have enough of?

Photo Challenge (WordPress): Narrow

Don’t follow the lights!

Photo taken at: Madrona Marsh Preserve and Nature Center

Don’t follow the lights!

#halloween #spooky #woods

Shooting the moon. It’s been going through cloud banks…

Shooting the moon. It’s been going through cloud banks, fading in and out of view, usually only the brighter, uneclipsed part visible. We’re at an intersection at the top of a hill facing east, along with a lot of other people. Someone just pulled up to the stop sign and asked, “What time is the eclipse?” Response: “Now!”

On Facebook
On K2R

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland cosplay…

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland cosplay out there, so here’s a feature post on my wife’s Alice costume from Comic-Con International.

She made the necklace and the vest, and beaded together two narrow belts to get the right look. Blouse, skirt, tights, belts and boots (plus material and beads) were obtained through shopping trips and online searches. Katie’s aunt helped adapt the pattern for the vest and do fitting. I helped with finding the pattern, sewing, transportation, and keeping our three-year-old son from melting down on those many shopping trips looking for just the right pieces.

Check out our SDCC 2014 photos to see pictures of her with other Wonderland characters, plus our usual collection of sightseeing and cosplay photos.

Two night shots from after WonderCon

Two #night shots from after #WonderCon. The lower image is a #fountain outside the #Anaheim Convention Center. The upper is a corridor of the well maintained but nearly #empty Anaheim Garden Walk mall. The anchor restaurants at the front look like they’re doing fine, but behind them, the mall is barely occupied.

Eclipse Mosaic

Lunar #eclipse mosaic, starting around 11:00 and finishing around midnight Pacific time, just as totality set in. #moon #stargazing #notaphone

–Instagram

Four views of the moon over the course of tonight’s lunar eclipse, starting around 11pm and running until about midnight. I actually got some shots at the second stage without the phone line in the way, but I liked the way this looked.

–Facebook

Expanded on K2R

Abandoned Railroad

This week’s photo challenge is “abandoned” — kind of like this blog was for a few months. 😉

A few years back, I explored a disused spur of railroad tracks branching off of the main line into a light industrial area of town. In many places, the tracks had already been ripped out, leaving only gravel paths (and in some cases stepping stones, as seen below) between buildings that no longer needed freight access.

I found this floppy disk sitting on the track, and the combination of an obsolete data technology and what I thought of at the time as an obsolete transportation technology just struck me.

The funny thing is, trains in the form of light rail have made a resurgence in the last few years. Los Angeles’ Metro rail system, started in the 1990s, has expanded dramatically. I actually commuted myself along the Green Line at one point, and while normally that meant driving halfway there to pick up the end of the line, there were a few times I tried picking up a connecting (well, not quite connecting) train from Metrolink, at a station not far from this spot. In fact, the track in the first two photos has since been converted into a footpath connecting a shuttle stop to the commuter rail station.

TODO: Import to K2R, link forward and back to Obsolete (2009).
QUESTION: Import the original 2014 post (with suitable tag/link changes), or update the text and post it as new? Also connect to this Mastodon post (local archive copy)

Smoke from a wildfire burning northeast of Los Angeles. Sky to the west is totally clear. Sunlight is orange.

Smoke plume from a wildfire burning northeast of Los Angeles. It hasn’t had time to diffuse through the whole basin yet, and the wind has cleared out all the smog, so the sky to the west is a gorgeous blue and the distant mountains and skyline are completely clear.

Eerie: Cave Ghosts, Moon and Fog

On learning that this week’s photo challenge is “eerie,” I started thinking of all the photos in my library that might fit. My mind immediately went to this one, a shot of a nearly-full moon behind ragged clouds taken, appropriately enough, on Halloween last year.

Just about all of my “eerie” shots involve the moon, or clouds/fog, or both. For instance, this view of fog pouring over a hillside at sunset, and the shadows of the trees inside it.

Or this one, a this scanned photo of a lunar eclipse from 1994. I’m fairly certain that the bright splotch is the moon, and the rest, including the ring and the sharper image at upper right, are lens artifacts. It’s been so long that I don’t remember any specifics of taking the photo.

Finally I remembered a series of photos I took at the Thurston Lava Tube in Hawaii, trying to use natural light (with only the cave walls to brace the camera) and picking up ghost images of the other tourists wandering through.

I have some more shots of that cave over at K-Squared Ramblings. That’s also the blog where I’m trying to do NaBloPoMo this month. I started yesterday with a post about yesterday’s shooting at LAX and the spillover it had on the parts of town near the airport: roads closed, constant helicopter noise, sirens, and thousands of stranded travelers leaving the airport on foot, trudging over a mile dragging their luggage in a ragged line. You know, if I’d thought about it and found the right position for a photo, that would have made for a good “eerie” image.

Beric Dondarrion and Catelyn Stark

Beric Dondarrion and Catelyn Stark on Flickr.

More Game of Thrones cosplay. (Thursday at Comic-Con 2013)