After Elbow Falls

A recent ramble with Sean started at Elbow Falls. From there we went down to Diamond Valley (Black Diamond, if you hadn't heard about the name change.) to check out the Sheep River just north of town. Neither of us had been there before and I'm not sure it's worth another visit. We did not walk on the ice. 

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We stopped for lunch in the Longview Saloon. OK food, and a friendly waitress. We waved to Dave in the Flic Film store, but didn't stop.

6. From there we headed south to Chain Lakes. We were astonished to see people still driving on the ice after all the warm weather we've had. I'm sure that somewhere there is a way to know if it's safe. I was thinking of the scene in American Gods where people from a local town put a wrecked car on the ice, and have a pool on when it goes under.

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8. The light was kind of odd, and I was exploring it a bit, looking for abstracts in the ice. Other than this one, nothing worth posting.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

Last of the film photos from Elbow Falls. You might recognize this little pool.

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

A mid December selfie.

Looking for reflections

Spring is often a good time to look for reflection photos. Even a puddle of filthy water can make for a nice photo, if the light is right, and there's something interesting to reflect.

These are from a walk in Fish Creek.

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Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film 

Another from the recent Elbow Falls ramble.

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

Except I don't think I did, although there is a photo from the same place, here. It's from a secret place in downtown Calgary. You get a bonus here, just because. Never let it be said my readers don't get the occasional bonus.

90 days, or so ago

OK, busted. It's just the oldest in that folder, from Feb 7 when Michelle and I went to cSpace to look at prints. This was figuring out focus and exposure so I could stand there and she click the shutter. You can see that version here. Though really, she is much more photogenic.

Three examples

Here's 3 views of the same place, which happens to be just upstream of Elbow Falls. The first was taken late April 2023 during the late afternoon. The other two were taken a few minutes apart late Feb 2025, during a late morning ramble with Sean.

Scroll down and take a look at them. You've seen the first one before, here, but that's ok, it's worth another look.

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You can easily see that the point of view is slightly different, but it's the same pool of water. The photographers of you will have noticed there are two somewhat different shutter speeds, and one drastically different one. You can tell by the texture of the water. #1 is the longest, probably about 2 minutes, 2 is the shortest at 1/800 which isn't quite fast enough to freeze splashing water, and 3 is 1/25 which gives the water a bit of a flowing texture. I find that about 1/15 or so, depending on lighting and water flow, gives flowing water a wonderful texture.

As an aside, picking the shutter speed for water can be difficult, depending on exactly what sort of image you're trying to present and what exactly the water and light is doing. This is one of the best examples of our brain seeing something very differently than what the camera sees.

But where I'm going with this is that I think of these images quite differently. The first is clearly a long exposure photography done on film. There was minimal editing to the image, beyond the choice of shutter time. It isn't what our eyes would see, but there's an air of reality to a slightly unreal looking image. I think it's a beautiful example of a photograph as art. In addition to the exposure time, I looked at the scene quite a bit before choosing where to put the camera, and then it took a while to get the focus where I wanted it.

The second is a digital image. I don't know what editing happens as the light hits the sensor, and the camera computer processes it, and my home computer converts the RAW image to a JPEG, with of course, the modest amount of editing done in Lightroom. A cell phone camera would probably produce an image similar to this one, but the water would almost certainly be frozen, and the image would be brighter. The computer would have done a lot of processing to "improve" the image.

Which leads to the third, which I think is digital art. It doesn't look quite real, so I don't think of it as a photograph, or particularly a digital image. It almost looks more like a painting where the artist put a lot of effort into rock detail. Beyond the choice of shutter speed, there was a lot of editing in Lightroom, pushing it beyond what I think of as normal photographic processing. I'm not sure I'd call it "over baked", since it doesn't really have that look, but if someone were to say so I wouldn't argue much.

There was less than 2 minutes between the second two photos, and there was another, different, photo in between. I am not saying that the longer I take with an image the better it is. Some of my best images are a few seconds from seeing the scene, and clicking the shutter. Much of the time I don't have to putz around with the manual settings. I've done this a lot, and can get pretty close by guess and by golly. And when I'm off a bit, I'm familiar enough with the camera I can tweak the settings in a few seconds. I find during events I'm more likely to lose photos from missed focus than screwed up exposure settings.

I've been thinking a lot about images and the differences between a film photograph, a digital photograph, and digital art. Then layer on top of that the difference between seeing an image on a computer screen, in a book, or printed to hang on a wall. None of these have been printed. 

Which, as an aside, and maybe some of my computer buddies can answer this. I get that images were displayed on television starting in the late 40's. But when was the first image displayed on a computer screen, assembled from zeros and ones, that actually looked like a good photograph?

I happen to like the first image best. After all, it was image of the year for 2023. but I get where other people will feel differently. Feel free to tell me in the comments which you like, and why. I'm not saying that one is better than the other. It all depends on what the creator's artistic vision is. 

Doing things old school, with a manual film camera, developing the film, and printing it via an enlarger takes much more time and is much less conducive to sharing with other people. It's hard to say how many people have seen any particular image on my blog. Some of the images I've sold to clients, which they have then displayed in their social media might have got more traction, but I've no way of knowing. It's entirely possible the print hanging on the wall at cSpace for a month was seen by more people than any other image I've produced in any medium.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

Taken near the same place as the 3 photos above.

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

From mid 2016, shortly after getting the camera.

90 days, or so ago

Purely a documentary photo. I was asking a photo group what that bracket was for.

A diabolical chain of accountants

We got an offer from the Honda dealer to buy our Fit for (they say) 110% of current market value. Except they determine what that number is, and it will have only the loosest relationship to what the car is actually worth. They want to resell it, and it will be for more than they pay us, regardless of whatever the "market value" might be. So either the "market value" is unrealistically low, or they've found someone so desperate they're willing to pay more. I get that. Such cars are in high demand because they are a perfect city car. Great on gas, fit into tiny parking spots, reliable, lots of room in the back for stuff. Why ever would we want to sell a car that suits our needs so well?

But it got me thinking. What happens if we take them up on the offer? It generates several transactions, each at a profit for them or their staff, where there are no transactions now. One is buying our car, two is them selling that car, three is us buying a new car from them (they hope and will try hard to accomplish), or perhaps three is buying a used car from them which was made possible by transaction four, them buying that car from the current owner, who probably then had to buy another car. And maybe the person buying our car is in turn selling theirs. There could be a whole cascade of transactions out of it. I'm certain an accountant thought of the scheme, and can track the cost and profit of every bit of it to the penny.

While I'm on the topic, buying a car is a horrible experience, one of the worst because there's so much money involved. The first vehicles I saw on a Honda web site today was a CRV for $55,000. That is a large fraction of the amount of money we borrowed to buy this house. I'm pretty sure you don't have to look hard for a car or truck to cost the same as what we bought the house for, and you don't have to go to the exotic sports car showroom.

If you go to a dealer, you are facing experts in separating you from your money, and lots of it. They're much like the casino owners, they want it all. No matter what the sign on the car says, nobody outside the industry really knows what it actually costs to get the car onto the dealer's lot. 

And then there's all the top up extras. It used to be that one could buy a car with a specific list of upgrades. You could get power steering but not power windows if you wanted it that way, though the more complicated the order the longer the delivery time might be. Now there are tiers of upgrades. If you want the nice leather seats, you're stuck with a sun or moon roof. 

I firmly believe that cars long ago passed their optimal development and are now well into opulent degeneration. They are a tool for idiots to display to other fools that they are somebody because they drive X brand of car. We've designed a world where nearly everybody is forced to buy a car, and they are becoming less and less practical. Look in the next parking lot you drive past. How many big ass pickups are there? How many big SUV things? There might be a bunch of mini-van's but they aren't as common now, and really, how many people have a family that big? Cars like the Fit, or Civic, or their lookalikes are a minority.

I digress, back to sales. All that is before you get dragged into the finance manager's office for a pressure cooker round of finance options razzle-dazzle that normal people won't understand, and aren't given the chance to check the math. I was furious the one time we leased a vehicle, and I found out I had to buy the life insurance policy that they held on us, in case we died, so the car would be paid off. There was a similar one if we defaulted. I was THAT close to walking out on the deal. I told them that if they thought we weren't good for it, they wouldn't be leasing to us, and if they wanted to cover the risk, that was their choice. It got pretty acrimonious. I've never leased since, and I'm not likely to.

Then there is the undercoating, fabric protection, and chip guards, and god knows what else they've come up with to sell in the 8 years since we last bought a car. 

Shall we talk about trading a vehicle in to buy a new one? They can structure the deal any way they want, looking like they're giving you a good deal there, and hiding where it's a really good deal for them. It's a pretty safe bet that they're going to do their best to get you coming and going, to say nothing of pushing you for a decision while you try to think about it.

All of which is being done to us by people who are trained to extract the maximum amount by hiding the truth with deceptive statements. It's a game to them. They know what buttons to push. They see dozens of people a day, and sell however many cars in a month, month in and month out. Most of the people you meet at a dealer are very good at their jobs. They have no shame. There are some dealers that fire the salesperson with the lowest sales. Even the guy that "slips you some inside info" or "warns you to watch out for x tactic" is in on the deal. If you're thinking that's like the dodgy 3 card monte game on a street corner with a shill helping to rope in the suckers, you are exactly right.

In contrast, in the past 50 years, here's the complete list of cars I've bought.

66 Ford Falcon used.

78 LeMans, new, it lasted about 150K Km.

83 Honda Accord hatchback new, (best car ever) 340K Km

95 Dodge Caravan, new, (the brutal leasing experience) 150K or so Km, we were fortunate to get out of it just before it totally gave up the ghost.

2004 Honda Accord, new, sedan, about 210K Km. It was still running well, but we could see some expensive repairs coming and bailed out.

2016 Honda Fit, new, current car with about 140K on it. So far so good.

I don't have many photos of the Fit, so you'll have to make do with a couple of already blogged photos.

The blog here has a couple photos of the Accord hatchback. I don't think I have any photos of the Falcon, LeMans, or Caravan.

So over 45 years or so, I've bought 5 new cars, and the industry had changed dramatically every time. No wonder I'm not particularly good at it, and fear getting fleeced. Since we bought the Fit, the industry has changed again. Where electric vehicles weren't common, they now litter the landscape, and there are now several varieties of them. I don't at the moment understand the pros and cons of the various choices but it seems like I'm going to have to. Even worse, one needs to understand how electricity is generated for your area. If it's from coal, all you're doing is trading emissions from you internal combustion engine for fly ash emissions from the coal fired generating station.

I completely believe that some of the things wrong with the world today can be laid at the feet of accountants and the fetish of believing that only things that can be measured are important. I was taught during economics class that the free market would deliver goods and services at a variety of price and quality levels, and the consumer could choose. Now it seems that the only criteria is price, and cheaper is better. What happens is a race to the bottom where the accountants doing their counting pennies and fractions of pennies, drive management to cut costs where ever they can. 

That explains why the big meat packing plants do their own inspections, and sell tainted meat. Why powdered milk is cut with noxious, but cheaper fillers. Why bridges and other infrastructure fail because inspections and repairs are seen as expensive. Why the Walkerton water supply was contaminated with e coli, killing several people and sickening thousands. Why Facebook has perverted it's purpose from connecting people to selling advertising.

The accountants can't measure safety. They can't measure happiness, pride, joy, or the sense of belonging to a group working towards a greater purpose than an individual. They don't care about people, just numbers. They don't care that a business might have roots in the community; if the numbers don't look good as they think they should be, they'll dismember it and sell off the parts. To be fair to them, it isn't the accountants doing the dirty work of actually firing people. They've talked the managers into doing it for them. Some managers I've met didn't take much persuading; they liked laying off people.

Lots of what we see as economic activity is actually destructive, merely the manipulation of markets and the buying and selling of property for no reason but to privatize profit, and socialize loss. One example of many, is the billionaire sports franchise owners persuading the taxpayers to subsidize them as they build an ever bigger, newer, shinier play palace, or in other words, the monuments to their egos. If building such an edifice was a good financial deal, they wouldn't let anyone else in on it. Various levels of government fall for it, again and again, just like the sucker that thinks they know where the cards are.

More and more I get why people want to retreat from the world.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film and Linda, with her mom

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

Pantser followup, revisited again

Way back in 2018 I wrote about the perils of being a pantser, here. There's another place on the blog where I've put some snippets, though they've all been revised since then. I'm wondering if I should remove those, and publish the snippets on the blog.

I know my non-writing readers are scratching their heads. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of writers. Plotters and pantsers. Plotters are obsessive compulsive planners, building character traits, story arcs, world building, essentially everything but the actual writing. Such books can come across as mechanical and plodding. Pantsers are the opposite. We fling our characters into situations to see what happens. It's no surprise that we write ourselves into corners, or our characters don't take that left turn at Albuquerque. Endings are difficult for pantsers.

A writing joke for you. What is it that all writers want? To have written. Though that's sort of a love hate relationship, because after writing comes editing.

One writer asks herself, what's the worst thing that can happen to this character? I woke up one morning with a security guard saying to my main character, "Excuse me, ma'am. I need to see your access card. It's supposed to be worn so it's visible." What happened after that? 4,000 words that flowed like wine, generating the start of a medical conspiracy to make the world a better place, that leads into Elixer, and indirectly to something on the verge of being written. The books all pretty much much have links to each other in one way or another.

I've mentioned the great writing project off and on over the past several decades. The beginnings are lost in the mists of time, but I think somewhere in the early 1990's is about right. The texts have migrated from computer to computer, from writing tool to writing tool. The current setup is a 12 year old laptop running Scrivener that I think is one version behind.

I'm going to write this out, partly for me to summarize, and partly for you to do whatever you like. Like topsy, it's grown, and I'm losing track of some of the branches. Some of the things that are in the same writing project no longer go together, or go better with something in another project. The timeline is a bit hairy in places, since they all take place in the same universe, but not necessarily the same world. 

The Plant Novel (yes, I'm good with titles) introduces Ceridwen (Dwen) Burns and some of the other characters. It starts mid 1993 or so, with Dwen interviewing at the plant, which bears a startling resemblance to Bonnybrook Wastewater Treatment plant, where I worked from 1983 to 1990. This started as a mystery romance, with human bones being discovered in a plant tank and her meeting Les. For a long while she isn't sure if she wants to screw him blind, or punch his lights out. Let's just say it's grown. I now know who put the bones there, why, and how. Those things baffled me for a while. It's very elegant.

Scrivener tells me there are about 250,000 words overall, though some of that is in chapters that are early versions that were rewritten, or have been dropped. One of the most recent bits of this is one chapter titled Moira that is 84,000 words long, and mostly covers the period from about 2005,to 2020, though flashbacks show events before that, though some things still need to be nailed down.

Bone to Elixer was intended to be the join between the Plant Novel, and Elixer, hence the title. It also explores some of the science fiction elements that came from some very strange shift work hallucinations. It's about 75,000 words.

The Sweet Elixer started as a NaNoWriMo story, and has grown. It starts about 2008, with Dwen being a minor character. It goes to about 2021, with an epilogue set in 2026 or so. One of the minor characters from the Plant Novel stepped up and is a major player here. All this was written before COVID, and has not been revised. I'll need to decide if COVID happens in this world. It's in the same world as the Plant Novel, and tells a story about what happens if stem cell technologies get invented. There are about 118,000 words. 

There is the imaginatively titled DW_nano2015, and it will surprise nobody when I say it was done as the 2015 NaNoWriMo contest. It has about 145,000 words, and is mostly an action science fiction story that grows out of Bone to Elixer, over about the same time frame, though I'm struggling to fit some things in. Let's just say Dwen is a very busy woman, and no wonder she is short on sleep. Just to intrigue you, Dwen gets shot in this story, though she survives. Afterwards she learns something that affects her life.

I talked about writing about the bad guy from his point of view, where he is the hero of the story. Regan (and yes, I was channelling The Big Sleep)  is only about 23,000 words, and the time frame is not certain. Some of his machinations drive events in DW, at least I think so. There is at least one scene I really like, but as written it doesn't fit anywhere, which illustrates the problem of pantsing. This, and one of the scenes in Bone to Elixer is the jumping off for another as yet unwritten branch of the story.

If you've been doing the math, this is about 466,000 words altogether. It is not remotely a commercial property, especially not the way the world is now, with AI flooding the world with shitty writing and photography. But it amuses me, and it's a fun intellectual exercise to fit things together, and think about how best to write a scene. Even now, I'm finding typos, better ways to write a scene, and linking up connections.

Characters include, in no particular order, Dwen, Les, Belinda, Ronnie, Llewellyn, Zoe, Rob, Mary, Maeve, Mitch, Eric, Ken, Bill, Kurt, Stu, Blair, Carol, Marcel, Ed, Betsy, Penny, David, Hardisty, Janice, Kelly, Ross, Erin, Jordan, Thomas, Audrey, Amber, Franklin, Nicole, Tannis, Theo, Bjartur, the Rah team (though other than Moira we don't see much of Kendra, Sierra, Sarah, Clara, Cassandra, and Laura, though I'm pretty sure they help Kendra escape her abusive parents in a piece I haven't written yet), the half sisters Porsche, Mercedes, and Morgan, Regan, Scage, Silence, Tia, Gart, Borden, Stevens, the mysterious Curtis who runs an oddly classy hole in the wall all day breakfast joint. Plus more. Some are related to one another, some are married, many are friends. Not all of them meet each other. I once held a coffee and cookies patio party where many of the characters showed up to chat about the work. 

Shall I reward you with a snippet for getting this far? I think so.

Belinda looked up as the door to her control room opened. It was a quiet night, with nothing left to do but routine equipment checks, so she was sitting with her feet on the desk, head balanced against the corner of the annunciator panel, sort of thinking through a sewing project, not asleep but not completely awake either. She expected another operator dropping in to chat, but spasmed awake when a complete stranger strolled into the control room like she belonged. 

“Good morning, Miss Vesterby.” The stranger’s voice was clear and confident. She moved the other chair towards the middle of the room in a graceful arc. 

Belinda took her feet off the desk and sat up, thinking her night shift hallucinations had never been quite this focussed. Her visitor was a tall woman wearing dark grey clothing with a distinctly military cut. A quick glance down revealed practical boots without a height disguising heel. Wisps of blonde hair poked out from a dark cap. A face more handsome than pretty looked back at her with frank interest. 

“I can’t remember the last time anyone called me that,” she said, hoping her voice sounded calm. “I prefer Ms.” She thought that was a much less provoking response than ‘Who the hell are you and why are you in my control room?’

The stranger slowly sat, still poised for action. “You might think it presumptuous to call you Belinda like we were friends. Just being here could be thought impolite at the least.” 

“The City would think trespassing and go on from there. I’m going with startling, but I’m guessing that if you’ve gone to the trouble of getting here you’ve got a good reason. So you’ve got my attention, unless I’m really face down on the desk, asleep and dreaming. This wouldn’t even come close to my strangest dreams.”

She smiled and shook her head. “No. Unlike all the other operators, you’re awake.”

“You know my name. Are you going to tell me yours?”

“My name is Amber. We’ve never met, though we were briefly at the same event. We have several acquaintances in common who were at that event. They have a shortcut to this facility, and I know the same shortcut. That’s how I’m here, and it wasn’t that much trouble.” Amber relaxed into the chair but her eyes were alert.

Belinda slowly nodded. “The reception Dwen and Les went to. You were at the door as they were leaving. Hair up, fancy dress slit to your hip, and heels, not that you need them.”

“I wasn’t sure if you had noticed me. As for the why, I hope you’ve figured out that I’m not here to hurt you. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is a private place for us to chat about a proposition I have for you.”

Belinda pursed her lips and looked thoughtful. “I’ve never been propositioned at 3am here, so that’s new. There’s nothing else even remotely entertaining to do, so fire away.” She settled back into her chair, but didn’t put her feet up.

“I guarantee you’ve never heard anything like it, unless you lead a much more adventurous life than I realize.”

“I probably don’t.”

“You know how in movies and stage plays there is the action up front where the audience can see it, and then there’s all the invisible action backstage, or that you only see in the ‘making of’ extras?”

“Sure.”

“You are one of a few people in the interesting position of knowing there’s a backstage to this world, without being able to go there.” She gestured around in a way that was expansive yet efficient. “I heard about a recent shopping trip you were part of, so I know you’ve seen some of it played out.”

That goes on for another 15,000 or so words, including wheeling an unconscious mercenary to a rendezvous with fate in a mop bucket, a terrifying psychological interrogation, and discussion about a homicidal inner bitch. 

Here's a screen shot of Aeon timeline, which is what I've been using to track dates and characters and should be using it more. In an ideal world everything here would line up with a chapter in Scrivener, but it's a work in progress. I use it to try to sort out the sequence of events.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

Linda 2018

Newfoundland

The view near L'anse aux Meadows. It probably looked exactly like this a thousand years ago.

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

Carcrosse desert.

90 days, or so ago

A sunrise.