Tomato & Red Pepper soup is a cheap one from Morrisons. Very rough tasting.
I added Worchestershire Sause, patt of butter, sweet chilli sause, sage, rosemary, paprika, garlic paste and ground black pepper. I think that was all. Has made it into something very tasty.
Having it with some blue cheese on buttered toast. Sadly the cheese isn’t up to much.
When I read about how prepared homes in Canada are for cold weather, it makes sturdy brick common in UK houses feel more like ancient stone. And the more I think of it the more I think of stereotypical Transylvania; the dark dank streets, suspicious and isolationist serfs wandering around in cheap tatty clothing, old and imposing little forts of homes, owners ready and primed to shut the curtains at visual intrusion.
Is it that hard to imagine the UK falling into a second Dickensian age?
Got a realisation brewing. Can feel it on the edges of my forebrain.
A lack of realisations fuels conspiracy I feel. Most modern conspiracies (EG; 9/11:”the government did it”) stem from seeing some entity profit from it in a way that could only be done by having prior-knowledge of the event. But that’s wrong, because we haven’t realised just how good at wringing a profit from ANY event large entities are. They got to be large because they’re so good at exploiting any and all events.
Most people have had the feeling that goes along with a realisation before. That of walking into a massive room and having the lights switched on. That feeling of, while not comprehending it completely, you first start to see the many magnitudes of scale larger the reach of that thing is. That moment more of humbling shock than of clarity.
Something’s brewing about the idea of “fairness” or lessening suffering I think.
So I’ve been trying to find an affordable video editor to avoid the mutlitude of format-incompatibilities with the various freeware I’ve tried so far. A few days ago I installed “VideoPad” which until the 15th of Jan is on 30% discount making it about £45.
Of course that’s £45 I shouldn’t be spending, but.. well some quick and dirty edits seem to show it working fine merging videos of different resolutions and framerates. Okay framerate conversion is rather rough looking, but whatever it’s doing it’s FAR more tollerant than the other programs I tried (remember the one that wouldn’t combine clips because one was 30fps and the other was 30.00003fps? Or had the codec info case-sensitive so it thought they were different formats?).
The built-in capture util sadly wouldn’t let me change the video card input port. But NCH bundle their software to link-out to associated software. I clicked the link within VideoPad for “Golden Videos” a small capture program intended for capturing from tapes. But best of all it actually fucking works with my RealTek soundcard AND captures without dropping frames at full PAL resolution.
I have litterally been in tears of joy, because since I switched to Windows XP I have tried everything I could think of to get full-frame full-rate capture working. The best I’d been able to manage was installing an old copy of WinDVR to capture to mpeg2 and to disable onboard sound, instead throwing in an old (noisey) PCI Soundblaster card. And that had even odds of bluescreening the machine every time you started the program.
More than 6 years trying to fix one issue and a solution just dropped in my lap.
Okay this program’s ripping to Xvid rather than uncompressed, but it looks better than mpeg.
I’ve ripped a few old tapes to the PC now. Some are very good looking, others not so much. The Furry-artist interviews I did at that convention in the USA have suffered quite badly, as the camera did not travel well and started conking out at points due to temp/humidity, as well as being set to LP for a large portion. The audio, with a few FZZZTs asside, is actually very good though. It’s given me the idea to chop the unwatchable portions of video and fill them with sketch-animatics of the artists and other reference images. It could actually work quite well in the end.
Mostly I’m glad I found the impromtu interview with Ashryn. I thought it was the last thing I recorded there and since it wasn’t after the last “proper” interview on the last tape, I assumed I must have done the whole interview without pressing record somehow. But no, just got the order mixed up in my mind and it’s still there.
I should be able to do something good with this, even if it is 6 years later than I’d intended.
Also found video of my grandfather showing how to make his famous apple tarts, and some footage of one of his birthday parties. Is bittersweet to watch.
And ancient footage, even a short bit of the folk I worked for down in Hastings when I first got a video camera (not the huge one I got later), followed by the big Exeter Therians meet back in 2001.
Lot of lost history on these tapes. Just like the lost chat-logs and photos I’ve saved from the old tiny HDs.
So many things that were lost and gone are suddenly found.
I’m trying really hard to recall fragments of TV shows I watched when I was a child.
In particular right now, a show that I think routinely involved time-travel. I think it was British though I may be wrong. Had a time machine with a sort of transporter pad and a robot head face thing to one side. Looked like this I think:
And I think the time-travelling kids had some sort of return-buttons on their belt-buckles?
(EDIT: Might have been located in a medieval tower, which is where the machine sent them back to? Think it was destroyed at some point. Recall it laying all smashed up like the tower had collapsed on it.)
Pretty sure this was well before The Girl From Tomorrow. Possibly Pink Windmill/Puddle Lane era? (that’d be 1984-1988) That’d be the same period at that schools educational drama about the ghost of a knight that lived in a tower, right?
It might have been the same show that had a bus that turned into an airship? I remember one with a propeller at the back, lots of bicycle parts used.
Same era as a film I used to re-rent at the video rental place up the road (along with the Claymation Adventures of Mark Twain) that had a flying tandem bicycle in it with flapping wings (It wasn’t in black and white, but was very grey, so pretty sure it was filmed in 70s/early-80s England that one).
Another one, another Australian import I think, had something to do with a psychedelic clock in a shopping centre and some small glass balls that were missing from it.