Along with Opeth, Lacuna Coil are another of my absolute favourite bands and I was extremely excited last year when I saw that they were touring here again, since they haven’t been out since 2016 when I last saw them. Prior to that I saw them (twice) in 2007, then 2008, and 2009, and I believe that’s been the entirety of their Australian presence.
They played at Liberty Hall which is at Moore Park, which used to be an absolutely shit location to get to but with the advent of the light rail it’s an absolute breeze now! It’s all of two stops from Central and the trams run super-frequently.
I’ve been to the Hordern Pavilion at Moore Park a couple of times for other shows but haven’t been to Liberty Hall before, and it was a fair bit smaller than I was expecting. It was a fine location though, and I was significantly closer to the stage than I was at Opeth. 😛
This was also one of the very few concerts I’ve been to that hasn’t been just me seeing the band by myself, I met up with @damonism who made the trip up from Canberra for it!
The opening band was Future Static who are from Melbourne, and they have two women, one on lead vocals and the other on bass plus backing vocals, and I’m always endlessly impressed by anyone who can sing and play bass at the same time! They were quite good, and unlike Opeth’s opening band Caligula’s Horse, they actually have their songs for sale on Bandcamp instead of their page being an empty placeholder. 😛
Lacuna Coil came on bang on 9pm and played for not quite an hour and a half. I was delighted that they played two of my absolute favourite songs of theirs (Kill The Light from their Dark Adrenaline album and Spellbound from Shallow Life), and man can Cristina Scabbia still belt it out. She hits these notes in some of their songs that are just so crystal clear and pure that the hairs on the back of your neck stand up! I also had completely missed that they had a new album release last year oops, so a few of the songs weren’t familiar to me.
As with at Opeth, and Heilung before that, I took a bunch of photos in RAW format on my phone and processed them this morning, very happy with how they’ve turned out. These are my favourite ones, the full set is on Flickr.
And just for giggles, compare these to my absolutely garbage photos of when I saw them in 2007. 😅 Obviously technology has come a long way since then but man, I didn’t even straighten them or ditch the utterly blurry photos.
Opeth are one of my all-time favourite bands, I first saw them back in 2003 and have seen them… uh… probably six? times since then, though not since 2013 when we moved to our house and it became more of a pain getting home late at night. With the advent of the Metro now it’s significantly easier, at least as long as you’re going in the general area of somewhere that’s serviced by the Metro, and so I leapt on the tickets when they went on sale for Opeth’s show at the Sydney Opera House. It’s a slightly odd venue for a metal show because it’s all seating, though the seats do that flipping-up thing you get in movie theatres (I appreciated the seating because I’m an old 😛), but the sound and the lighting were excellent.
I arrived pretty much bang-on 8pm when the opening band was starting, and missed the first half of their set because I was waiting in the merch line to get a tour shirt, but the last couple of songs that I was in the concert hall for were really good. The band is called Caligula’s Horse though irritatingly they have a Bandcamp page with absolutely nothing on it. They’ve got a kind of epic prog metal thing going on, so definitely check them out if that’s up your alley.
Opeth came on right on schedule at about 9:10pm which was a nice change from things running late. I’ve seen a few bands that were just boring as hell on stage, where the vocalist doesn’t interact with the crowd (looking at you, Megadeth), but the frontman from Opeth is thankfully very much not in that vein, and I’d forgotten how hilarious he is, he’s got a very dry sense of humour. Some choice quotes follow:
Encouraging the crowd to sing along to To Rid The Disease (one of the songs off their Damnation album, the whole album doesn’t have any growling):
Feel free to sing along!
…the lyrics are a bit shit, it’s because we’re Swedish. Just correct the grammar and sing along!
On the fact that the track names on their latest album (with the exception of the last track) are named “§1”, “§2”, “§3”, etc:
We had the record labels come to us to ask how people are meant to find the tracks on Spotify given when they’re named like that.
I don’t care! We’re not naming our tracks based on how easy they are to find on fucking Spotify!
On the fact that the crowd was sitting:
I’m an awful concert-goer, I’ll always sit down. For us playing here, it’s better if you stand.
But if it was me, I’d sit.
Towards the end of the show when he was doing the giving a shoutout for each band member:
And we have a youngster on drums, Waltteri Väyrynen! He’s 30. 31? He was born the same year we put out our first record.
It hurts.
The setlist was interesting, there weren’t any songs off their most proggy mid-era albums. The Devil’s Orchard from their Heritage album is probably the closest, that album was definitely where they really started veering into prog, but I think it’s also probably the heaviest song from the album.
The last track there was the encore, and I’ve definitely seen them play that on multiple prior occasions as the encore final track, and man is it an excellent song to finish on!
As with Heilung in 2023, I was able to get some pretty decent photos (though a straight-up metal band is less of a theatrical spectacle compared to Heilung!) and with the improvements in my iPhone 16 Pro I didn’t even need to run them through any denoising. These are my favourite shots, the full set is on Flickr.
I’m excited to see what forgotten gems from the past show up, and also being reminded of how terrible I was when I was first starting out taking photos.
And oh boy, has it delivered on that second part in particular! I make a point of checking both my formerly-Tumblr-posts Memories page where I post all my random iPhone photos as well as the Flickr one each day, and in August of both 2008 and 2012 we were in Boston (in 2008 it was the first time I was visiting Kristina overseas back when she was still living there, and in 2012 we went back for her birthday) and I’d posted all the trip photos to Flickr.
Looking back at the 2008 photos (and all the photos I’d taken prior to that), they’re very much just happy-snaps… there was zero processing done on them, they were awkwardly-framed and weren’t straightened — crooked horizons ahoy! — and there was no culling, I’d just post them allll. I have a collection created for that trip where you can see the full horror (check out the sheer number of photos in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery album for example… why did I need to post that many?!).
In 2009 I borrowed an old Canon EOS 400D from a co-worker at Apple for a while, which was my first exposure to a proper DSLR and properly-shallow depth of field, as well as shooting in RAW, and doing actual post-processing. I had way too much fun adding heavy vignetting to everything, but I was starting to cull my photos rather than just dumping everything online!
Going back to Boston, some sample photos from Rockport and Boston Public Library on 2012’s trip shows the improvement from 2008. For some reason I was pretty far into too-heavy-handed territory with the post processing specifically for the Boston trip photos, but you can see the greatly-improved framing and composition.
From there on my skill has been on a upwards path, and thankfully I’ve stopped doing the EVERYTHING MUST BE REALLY HIGH CONTRAST thing I was doing for a while there. 😛 For travel photos specifically, the easiest way to see the progression is the “Travel” category of posts I have set up here! Some choice examples:
A while back I’d toyed with the idea of reprocessing my older photos, in particular the 2012 Boston ones, but I realised that way lies madness and never-ending editing, and I wouldn’t have a nice historical record of my photographical endeavours like I do now.
On Monday last week we woke up at arse o’clock in the morning to catch a flight to Auckland! We’d been to Queenstown two years ago but hadn’t seen the North Island yet.
We hired a car and stayed in Parnell for the first two nights which was quite lovely (it’s also apparently one of the most expensive suburbs in New Zealand which I’d 100% believe), and the first partial day we were there just involved wandering around the neighbourhood taking some photos.
The second day we drove out to Piha to see the black sand beach which was extremely cool. I couldn’t capture it in the photos but when you look at the sand against the sun it really sparkles thanks to its volcanic origins!
We also went to the Arataki Visitor Centre and tromped through the forest on a walking track. It was very neat but the only photos were a vista from the centre and the big totem pole there as well, because the forest itself wasn’t particularly photogenic. 😛
After that we walked from our AirBnB to the CBD, and quickly decided that that was a large mistake due to the sheer amount of construction going on and blocked-off streets. It made Sydney’s construction look positively pedestrian!
There’s a pizza chain in New Zealand called Sal’s that claims to do genuine New York-style pizza, so we walked to the closest one for dinner and gave it a go, and oh my god. Kristina said it’s about 95% of the quality of the actual New York-style pizza she had when she lived in New Jersey. She’d been talking about how good it was for years, and I now finally understand it!
Day 3 we drove to Rotorua, which is about three and a half hours drive, so we broke up the trip by stopping in at Hamilton and visiting Hamilton Gardens which were absolutely fantastic. It’s divided up into a bunch of incredibly well-designed and well-maintained gardens from throughout history — plus some whimsical ones — and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Indian Char Bagh GardenItalian Renaissance GardenJapanese Garden of ContemplationEnglish Flower GardenChinese Scholar’s GardenTropical GardenSurrealist GardenTudor Garden
After that we continued on through to Rotorua itself and went for a lovely walk through Whakarewarewa Forest which is a forest full of massive redwood trees, then visited some work colleagues of Kristina’s — and Colin, their miniature wire-haired dachshund — who live in Rotorua and went out for a delicious dinner at Macs Steakhouse on Rotorua’s “Eat Street”.
Unfortunately the B&B we were staying at (“Sandi’s B&B”) wasn’t good… turns out it was on a major road that has large trucks going down it extremely loudly at all hours of the night, some enough that they’d actually vibrate the bed, and it had the world’s stupidest problem where there was a pear tree that was growing over the top of the cabin we were in and the fruit was ripe enough that the pears were randomly dropping onto the roof with an extremely loud THUD. Sandi made us a full breakfast in the morning which was delicious but it didn’t make up for the ruined sleep. 😴
Rotorua is known for its geothermal springs so on day 4 we visited “Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland” and it was very impressive. The sulphur smell was something else, especially since it came it with steam so it was both humid and smelly!
Our last full day we started with visiting a wildlife park called Paradise Valley Springs, after having another shitty night from trucks and pears thudding on the roof. We were there first thing in the morning so nobody else was around which was pretty sweet, but the farm animal section didn’t have very many animals in it and it seemed like they’d have liked some more company. We figured that it probably seems a lot more social when there are other people there.
The absolute best part of the day, however, was the visit to the Cornerstone Alpaca farm that broke up the drive from Rotorua back to Auckland! They had a whole presentation before we went out to see the alpacas, which was quite interesting, and the tour consisted just of Kristina and me. They’re so soft, and very pushy about getting food, haha.
After that, our final night was spent in a hotel in Newmarket. We wandered around and took some photos which you can see in the album above. We made a second stop at Sal’s for dinner, and afterwards were poking around the cable TV channels in the hotel to see what was on, ended up watching the first game of the T20 England versus South Africa cricket match, and Kristina ended up quite enjoying it! I was explaining the rules as we went along and she’s pretty well got the hang of it now, to the point that we’ve at least temporarily subscribed to Foxtel Now to be able to watch more T20 games, hahah.
Our flight back to Sydney on the sixth day didn’t leave until 4pm so we went to the Auckland Museum to kill time after we checked out from the hotel, and it was actually really neat. The whole ground floor is a massive Maori and Pacific Islander exhibit with all sorts of cultural artefacts and details of their history, and on the second floor was a fascinating exhibit on volcanoes.
Next time we go back to New Zealand I reckon we’ll probably be hitting up the South Island (Te Waipounamu) again, but it was definitely a good trip — sans the terrible sleep in the middle at least, anyway.
I had last week off work, mostly due to being in desperate need of a holiday, I didn’t go anywhere but just chilled out at home. I did do a bunch of coding on my website though!
I’d been using Tumblr to post my random snaps from 2009 to about 2016 or so and cross-posting them to Twitter, before I found that Tweetbot had custom image posting functionality where you could post images to a URL that replied with a specific format and Tweetbot would use those image URLs in its tweets. I added functionality for that on my website and had been saving tweets and images directly since 2016.
Last year, it occurred to me that I should import my posts from Tumblr to my website in order to have everything in one place. I obsessively tag my Flickr photos and as a result am able to find almost anything I’ve taken a photo of very quickly, and while I hadn’t quite gone to those same levels of tagging with Tumblr, all my posts there had at least some basic tags on them that I wanted to preserve when bringing them in to my website, so I had coded up a tags system for my Media page and a script to scrape the Tumblr API and suck the posts, images, and tags in. I also wrote a very simple little React app to be able to continue adding tags to new posts I’m making directly to my website.
The one thing that was missing was the ability to see all of the current tags, and to search by tag, so this past week I’ve been doing exactly that! I have a page that shows all the tags that exist with links to view just the posts tagged with a given tag, and on the front page the tags that a post has are clickable as well.
I realised I had mucked up the tagging on a few posts so was going through and re-tagging and updating them, and it struck me just how much I used to rely on those camera filter apps to hide how shit photos from old iPhones used to be. One of the ways I’d tagged my photos on Tumblr, and I’ve continued this even now with the new direct-posting-via-a-custom-iOS-shortcut that I’ve got set up on my iPhone, is with the name of app I used to edit the photo. Going roughly chronologically as I started using each app:
Instagram was only a very brief foray, and VSCOCam was by far my most-used app. Unfortunately it went downhill a couple of years ago and they Androidified it and now all of the icons are utterly inscrutable and you also can’t get RAW files taken from within the app back out again in anything but JPEG. Apparently there’s a thing called a VSCO Girl which I suspect is part of what happened there.
My most recent editing app prior to getting the iPhone 11 Pro has been Darkroom, it’s extremely slick and integrates directly with the regular photo library on your phone and offers a similar style of film-esque presets to VSCOCam, though fewer in number.
With the iPhone 11 Pro, however, the image quality is good enough that I don’t even feel the need to add obviously-film-looking presets to the images. I take the photo, hit the “Auto” button in Photos.app to add a bit of contrast, and usually use the “Vivid” preset to bring the colours up a bit, but otherwise they’re pretty natural-looking.
That said, I’ll probably end up heading back to Darkroom at some point as I do like my film aesthetic!
I upgraded to the iPhone 7 nearly three years ago and was very impressed with the camera, and here I am again being impressed by the camera in a new iPhone! Or more specifically, three cameras, since the iPhone 11 Pro comes with 13mm full frame-equivalent, 26mm-equivalent, and 52mm-equivalent lenses.
I absolutely love the look of the iPhone 11 Pro, especially in Midnight Green as Apple has been using for a lot of its promo shots. Someone on Ars Technica described it thus and I think they really nailed it:
It’s a touch retro, a touch cyberpunk, with a hint of bounty hunter droid (somewhere between 4-LOM and IG-88)
The cameras themselves are extremely impressive as well. Sadly there’s (currently) no way to get RAW images out of the ultrawide 13mm-equivalent lens, so you’re stuck with JPEGs, but the images direct out of the phone are still quite impressive. I’ve gone for three walks on my lunch break so far, two with the ultrawide (1, 2) and one with the regular 26mm-equivalent shooting in RAW with Halide.
That last shot was taken with the telephone lens on the way home from the train station.
I’ve also found myself sharing way more photos on Mastodon lately thanks to the combination of image quality, ease of taking photos even in dim lighting (Night Mode is extremely good), combined with our 40Mbps upstream NBNHFC connection and the custom iOS shortcut I have to post things to my website before sending them to Mastodon. It’s all very frictionless.
Another fantastic part of this whole setup is using Lightroom and my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro to fully edit photos I’ve taken with the iPhone and then send them on to Flickr. My standard for images to go on Flickr is ones that are Proper Photography, if you will, rather than just snapping an image of something that’s happening or something that’s cute, and of good quality. The iPhone 11 Pro delivers that in spades, and not having to use a computer for Proper Photography is an absolute delight. There’s still some kinks — I obsessively tag my photos on Flickr and Lightroom Classic on my computer has a big hierarchical list of tags that all get uploaded along with the image, and sadly there’s no hierarchical tagging available at all in Lightroom Mobile or CC, so I have to manually add them all after the fact — but it’s incredibly freeing nonetheless.
The iPhone 11 Pro is just effortlessly fast, whatever I want to do just happens immediately without any sort of needing to think about it. It was an extremely worthy upgrade from my trusty old iPhone 7!
Ten years ago today, on a very cold and windy but at least sunny day at Dee Why headlands, Kristina and I got married!
TEN. YEARS.
I have no idea how it’s been ten years, it doesn’t remotely feel like it’s been that long. I’ve mentioned on this blog before, and on LiveJournal before it, that everything is so effortless, and it still remains true!
We originally knew each other from Everything2, which is still around but very much dead compared to the old days, and has been for many years now (my registration date there is May 2000). There was a bit of a mass-migration from E2 over to LiveJournal a couple of years afterwards, and I have a happy birthday wish from Kristina on one of my LJ posts from 2003! She said I was always “That guy in Australia who likes metal”, but we got to chatting more towards the end of 2007 and then on a whim decided to come visit in March of 2008, and the rest, as they say, is history!
With both of us being keen photographers we tend to be behind the camera instead of in front of it, but we’ve got a few photos together over the years!
The first one of us together, in August 2008 in Boston the first time I visited (we don’t have any of the two of us from March when Kristina first visited Sydney). This was right before I trimmed my goatee entirely down because it’d started just triangulating outwards and getting all wispy.November 2008, we were up in the Blue Mountains when we got the call that the engagement ring was ready to be picked up!Then our wedding, of course. I love this photo so much!December 2011, being all arty!This was taken in May 2014 when we bought the Fujifilm X100S. Kristina looks so hilariously unimpressed.December 2015!Then an attempt in February 2017 at taking a photo with the two of us and Beanie. It didn’t go so well.And finally the most recent one of us together from December of 2017, taken with the flash and massive parabolic umbrella directly behind the camera.
Kristina and I have been married for ten years (!) come June, and we had a very small wedding and no honeymoon because we were completely broke at the time. We decided we’d do a big trip for our ten-year anniversary to make up for it, and decided on Switzerland. Kristina had been there about fifteen years ago and loved it, and was really keen to show me around and also to take photos with a proper camera and better eye for composition.
We went for a weekend away up to a place in the Hunter Valley billing itself as an “eco retreat” and it was pretty great! We were able to bring Beanie along too, which he loved. Kristina had the great idea to get one of those extendo-leads so he was able to roam up to five metres away and smell all the smells while still remaining technically on his lead.
The whole place is entirely off-grid: electricity comes from solar plus battery storage (though they also included instructions for how to start up the backup generator in case anything happened), the toilet is a composting one, and water is all captured from the rain and stored. They did have a somewhat anaemic ADSL2 connection though, so I don’t know if you count that as still being entirely off-grid. 😛 There was zero mobile phone signal though, the whole time we were there our phones said “No service”.
The place was decorated in quite the rustic style, with all sorts of old bits and bobs around, but it was all totally clean and dust-free.
There was no electric kettle, only an old stovetop one, and you don’t realise how spoiled you are until you remember just how damn long it takes for a kettle to come to a boil on a gas stovetop!
The whole place was completely and totally silent in terms of any sort of human noise, the only sounds were from the trees and birds, and it was absolutely delightful. Sunset down the shallow valley that we were in was quite nice too.
At dusk we saw a couple of wombats, though Beanie had to bark at them probably because they were low and had four legs and so looked somewhat dog-shaped, but we also saw some kangaroos! Beanie was absolutely fascinated by the kangaroos, we were watching from a goodly distance and he was sitting there absolutely laser-focused on them.
The kangaroo is the little tiny spec right in the middle where the field starts turning into the side of the valley.
My only complaint with the place is the number of bugs that manage to come in at night! Only about half the windows have flyscreens on them, so we had to run around and mostly close the place up once dusk arrived. All in all it was extremely relaxing, though. A++ would relax again.
I first played the original SimCity Classic back in the early 1990s on our old Macintosh LC II, and absolutely loved it. Laying out a city and watching it grow was extremely satisfying, and the sequel, SimCity 2000 was even more detailed. I played a bit of SimCity 4, which came out in 2003, but the latest entry in the series, titled just “SimCity“, by all accounts sucked. The maps were significantly smaller in size, and it required an internet connection and was multiplayer to boot.
It’s actually possible to play SimCity 2000 on modern machines and I definitely got stuck into it a few years ago. This is a screenshot of my most recent city!
If you’re wanting a proper modern SimCity 2000-esque experience though, Cities: Skylines is what you’re after. It came out in March of 2015 on desktop, and was ported to Xbox One in April of 2017 and they did a damned good job of it, the controls are all perfectly suited to playing on a controller as opposed to with a mouse and keyboard.
The level of detail of the simulation is fantastic, you can zoom all the way in and follow individual people (called “cims”, as opposed to SimCity’s “sims”) or vehicles and see where they’re going. There’s a robust public transport system and you can put in train lines (and buses, and trams, and a subway, and in the most recent expansion called Mass Transit, even monorails, blimps, and ferries!) and see the cims going to and from work, and how many are waiting at each station and so on.
We recently upgraded to the Xbox One X and a shiny new OLED 4K TV (quite the upgrade from our nine year-old 37″ giant-bezeled LCD TV!), and it makes for some very nice screenshots. These are from my largest city called Springdale, currently home to ~140k people!
