Eoghann Irving's Blog, page 9

Thinking Deep Thoughts

Don't let the pose fool you.  Jaws is not prone to thinking big thoughts. Mostly she was just wondering if I was going to kick her off my chair again.

This is a case where the narrow depth of field of the lens really helped to focus attention where it needed to be though.

f/1.7 - 1/30 - 25mm - ISO 1250

Yes?

Toothless here is not an easy cat to photograph. For a start he's all black which means half the time all you see is eyes. But also any time you get down on the floor to take a photo of him he immediately walks right over to you to sniff the camera.

He does, however, love staring out the door when it's open. So I had the opportunity to sneak up on him for this shot. Basically I sat in my chair and hung round the door to snap the photo which accounts for the odd angle.  The speed of the lens let me keep the ISO very low which in turn meant I could get a lot of the detail in his fur without it getting too noisy and as a bonus it blurred the background nicely.

f/2.5 - 1/160 - 25mm - ISO 160

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Disney Tattoo

Another practice shot with my new 25mm micro four thirds prime lens. This time of one of my wife's Disney tattoos. The f1.7 of the lens is a great thing for taking shots indoors, but that narrow depth of field is challenging. It's very easy to have the wrong thing in focus. But when you've got a narrow target like this it's great.

I did do a little post processing to boost the vibrance and focus your eye on the tattoo, but not much. For those who worry about such things this was shot at f1.7, ISO 400, 1/60 speed

Outside Looking In

Trying out my new 25mm Prime micro four thirds lens (so a 50mm equivalent) and I think I like it. I'll have to get used to actually moving instead of just zooming and probably adjust my composition a bit, but it's light and fast which is great in a lot of situations.

Here you can see Mouthy, an outside cat who adopted us some years ago. He spends a lot of time looking through the door, meowing pitifully and trying to convince me that he hasn't been fed...

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Black Widow: Marvel is planning a standalone movie | Den of Geek

I'm sure this will make a lot of people online happy anyway. Personally I think there are far more interesting female characters in the Marvel Universe than the perpetually bland Black Widow, a character who basically just seems to be defined by hyper-competent which... isn't actually a personality at all.

Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige hasn’t left himself a fat lot of wiggle room with his latest answer to the question of a possible Black Widow movie. Since she debuted the character on screen in Iron Man 2, questions have been asked about whether Scarlett Johansson will get to headline her own Marvel feature. And the answer now seems to be yes, just not yet.

Source: Black Widow: Marvel is planning a standalone movie | Den of Geek

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Videogame Nostalgia

Just discovered (belatedly) that there's an Android port of the old ZX Spectrum classic The Lords of Midnight. This has triggered a multi-hour nostalgia trip.

By the standards of modern strategy games it can feel very primitive, but boy does it bring back memories.

Comic Book Review: All New Inhumans #7

Marvel has been trying very hard in the last few years to make The Inhumans a thing. There's a whole corporate politics angle to that and while Marvel won't admit it the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong. Marvel can't use the X-Men characters on screen and recent story developments have turned Inhumans into something that closely resembles Marvel's mutant characters.

The push has been a strong one and as well as their regular presence on TV in Agents of SHIELD, they are currently supporting not one but two monthly books. There's a problem with ramming things down the throats of comic book fans though. They are a rather conservative and curmudgeonly bunch who will quite possibly refuse to like something just because they think they're being encouraged to like it. And that, I think, is what is happening with the Inhumans. The online dislike is out of proportion with quality of the issues being produced.

Because if you read the books, take the All New Inhumans #7 which came out this week, it's a solid bit of superhero storytelling. New characters are being built up, existing Marvel Universe characters are folded in. It is, at a minimum, competent stuff, though not without flaws. What it isn't, however, is the the classic Inhumans "family".

Yes, in this issue does feature Gorgon and previous issues have used Crystal as a central character, but the Inhuman Royal family is not prominent in this book, far more time is devoted to some of the new inhuman (or nu-man) characters that have been created in the last couple of years. Comic book readers often talk about wanting new characters rather than the same old ones, but statistics paint a different picture and I have to conclude that the majority of people reading Marvel or DC books mostly want the same old characters, so when they see a book called The Inhumans they want to see Medusa, Black Bolt, Karnak etc.

Inhumans #7 starts off a new storyline but it continues to expand the Inhuman world by introducing yet another isolated Inhuman enclave. It seems there are quite a lot of these scattered throughout the world. Not the most original writing gambit admittedly but it is an excellent source for culture clash and political intrigue which is exactly what this sets up.

Where, I think, the book does fail though is that the focal character for this storyline, Flint, doesn't seem to have a defined enough personality to hang everything on. The character has been around for a couple of years, but the cast of the book is so large that he's really not had that much time devoted to him and as a result it's a little hard to care about him reuniting with his mother or the fact he almost killed someone by accident in the previous issue.

The flaw here may well lie in this drive to turn Inhumans into X-Men 2.0. The X-Men had decades to build up their sprawling soap-opera cast while the Inhumans is trying to do it all in one go. Perhaps they need to dial it back a little and focus on a smaller number of characters at a time.

In which case, ironically, this issue is taking the right approach. They may just be doing it too late for most people to care.

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The Ultimate Guide to This Summer’s Science Fiction and Fantasy TV

Highlights for me include the return of Person of Interest, The Last Ship and the premiere of Preacher. What catches your interest?

io9.com bills this as an Ultimate guide but since it only goes up to July 31st they're using a pretty narrow definition of Summer. Ever heard of August guys?

Summer always feels so full of things we should be doing, and yet, when there’s so much new television, why should we even bother to leave the house? There’s a bevy of new series about the supernatural, there are some welcome returns, including Mr. Robot. But this summer’s biggest show is the long-awaited Preacher—which better live up to the hype.

Source: The Ultimate Guide to This Summer's Science Fiction and Fantasy TV

Bridging the Gap Between Your Blog and Social Media

This is the first in what I think will be several posts about my efforts to better integrate my content with social networks and make it available wherever people are. Essentially I'm documenting the process as I gradually figure it out, because while a lot has been written on the subject there is no good step by step guide available so like everyone else I have to make it up as I go along.

My Blog Setup

I run my blog on a self-hosted WordPress installation. At various points I have considered just going to WordPress.com but I enjoy being able to tinker too much and what's what the self-hosting lets me do.

Right now I have 65 active plugins running and 5 inactive ones that I use occasionally. Is this excessive? Probably, but I said I like to tinker. The number goes up and down as I try things out, but it has been increasing significantly recently because communication between blog and social media accounts is complex.

At the core of my latest attempts is Indie Web Camp which has an IndieWeb plugin. This is actually a compilation of a number of other plugins that collectively enable the core feature set I am looking for.

The Name of the Game is POSSE

Or as Indie Web Camp defines it Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. What I want to be able to do, what I should be able to do, is create the post on my own blog and have it go everywhere else. Why? Because re-writing the same thing for each individual social media site is a ridiculous waste of my time, it's not like I get paid for this stuff. Also because it's my stuff and I want an archive copy.

There are a number of different ways to do this and in truth none of the ones I've tried so far are 100% satisfactory to me so I have cobbled together a combination. Let's look at some of the options though:

1. Brid.gy

We're going to be talking about Brid.gy more in a bit but one of its functions is to publish your content to several different sites including Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. No Google Plus though, but that's mostly Google's fault for the lack of API. The other negative is the posts do not look pretty. It works, but it's sub-optimal from my perspective.

2. Jetpack for WordPress

Jetpack is the Swiss Army Knife of WordPress plugins. If you have a self-hosted WordPress you probably already have this. That's a plus if you don't like to have lots of plugins installed. There's a function in Jetpack called Publicize that will let you auto-publish your posts to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Path, LinkedIn and Google+. It works, mostly (I have issued with the Facebook posting where it just randomly stops and I have to relink it) and the resulting posts are reasonably attractive, even including an image. Unfortunately it will only post the excerpt of your blog and doesn't let you customize how much text that is or anything else about it really. The big negative for me is the fact it randomly stops working, your mileage may vary.

3. Social Networks Auto Poster (SNAP)

This is the most powerful of the three options and offers a lot more services to post to. Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter are there, but so is Flickr and Google+ and Instagram and Pintrest but you will have to pay to get those last three and $49 is a rather hefty fee when you're not monetized. That's a shame because there are far more configuration options available here that control how your posts will look on the various sites. I love that flexibility but I'm also a cheapskate. Also I have been unable to get Tumblr posting to work, I get weird error codes, I may figure it out eventually.

So what do I recommend. Well, the money doesn't bother you then SNAP seems like the best all round. If, like me, you're a bit cheap then you cobble things together. So I use  Jetpack Publicize for Tumblr and G+ while I use SNAP for Facebook, Twitter and Flickr and on top of that I use the Medium plugin to sync with Medium.

Limitations

Everywhere you look you run into limitations. There are other ways you can hack this together, auto-posting from your RSS feed, using IFTTT scripts, but the more external services you rely on the shakier the whole thing becomes.

One of the things you can't do with this system for example is specify a particular Collection on G+ or set of people on Facebook to share the posts with. It's all or nothing.

Ideally I would prefer to send the entire post to Facebook and G+. I know that sending links significantly reduces readership, but for the moment at least that's not an option that's available to me, and posting natively everywhere isn't a credible option.

But Wait, There's More!

Of course syndicating your content out from your blog is at most half the battle and arguably less than that. There's still the matter of getting comments back again and then there's IndieAuth. But I'll leave that for future posts.

And the Doctor’s New Companion Is…

We're not straying too far from type here. The Doctor's new companion is still female and young. But if this trailer is anything to go by Bill as played by Pearl Mackie is going to bounce of the Doctor a little differently to the last two. I'm optimistic.

I also really like this method of introducing the new companion. Rather than just giving us a press photo we get an idea of how she will act and speak in character.

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