welcome to camp telophase

We had storms come through yesterday evening. Yesterday was also trash pickup day, and our street is slightly inclined, so you can guess that there were large rivers of runoff flowing curbside, right through where the trash bins had been put out. Most people had put their bins away by the time the storm began, but a few hadn't. Wind blew open the lids of several, which most likely produced a noxious soup inside them ('round here we put trash in plastic bags before tossing, but there's always ones with holes or something else that causes nasty-smelling leaks).

And one of the bins from up the street decided to go walkabout. We caught sight of the bin majestically sailing all the way down the street--we had no idea where it came from, and it was raining pretty heavily--so didn't bother to chase it. It was a magnificent(-ly hilarious) sight, and the capper came when the bin followed the rules of the road and halted at the stop sign.

( Proof! )

Bought a GoPro camera this week, because I WANTED ONE and not because I had any need for one. We are both highly impressed at what this thing can do. It uses a 64G microSD card, and will also shoot at 1080p. So you get 3.5 hours of hi-def video onto a card THE SIZE OF MY THUMBNAIL. Actually, slightly smaller than the size of my thumbnail.

The limiting factor is battery life: I set the camera on the windowsill to film the bird feeders while we went to theg rocery store and breakfast, and the battery died after a bit over an hour of that. XD If I count the time earlier this week I spent messing about with it, it will probably film for about 1.5 hours before crapping out. You can get a separate battery pack that will just about double that length.

I plan on doing minimal editing (mostly to remove the boobtacular shot as I set the camera up at the very first--I'd be tempted to leave it in, but it's also extremely unflattering of my face and head XD), then uploading the results to YouTube so you can have an hour of bird- and cat-watching if you need to just chill.

The finch babies are out and pestering their parents, by the way. I can hear one going FEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDME from my office as I type this right now. With luck I've got at least one doing that on video. :)

Deleted Shower of Evil clip from Star Trek: Into Darkness featuring Benedict Cumberbatch's chest. Skip to 1:30 if you don't want to bother with J. J. Abrams pretending that there was an actual reason to put Carol Markus in her underwear.

Was mailing that previous link to myself, and accidentally sent it to DW instead.

It's a /r/bestof link that points to a series if comments in /r/askhistorians that I intend to read later. (Too much hassle to log in and delete it on my phone, so you get an explanation of it instead.)

Sent from my iPhone