Andrew (R.S Admin) @ajroach42@retro.social

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You can find me at http://ajroach42.com

Hey folks, how's your week treating you?

I have been thinking a lot about the linoprinter toy I saw this weekend, and about offset printing preparation and offset printing in general as distinct from digital printing and as a method of reliably and quickly generating lots of copies of a piece of literature.

The more I think about it, the more I want to see a reliable home offset printing press come out of the maker movement.

Analog Tools are sometimes the right tools for the job.

I have a question about my #FilmPreserveationProject

I find that these old shows look Much better with scanlines added.

I'm planning on sticking a scanlined version and a non-scanlined version on archive.org, but I think I'm just going to stick the scanline version on peertube.

Thoughts?

But I think I have some safe settings that should be okay to automatically apply to everything that comes my way, and an idea of how much I can get away with pushing things in more extreme circumstances before the damage from the cleanup is worse than the damage from before the cleanup.

And I'm excited to share the results!

I'm going to stick the raw files up somewhere that I can share them in a bit, and I'll spend some time this week tweaking my audio settings to get a better capture on that front.

Right now I'm processing the video through some very light retouching. Well, no. Right now, I'm rendering the video files. Takes about an hour to render after I make an adjustment.

This had made learning what works pretty slow, and I'm impatient so I'm not enjoying that.

I got my sound bulb for my telecine rig in on sunday, and I started capturing film again.

I'm still struggling to get the audio levels right, especially because the sound is a little softer with this bulb than it was with the last one.

I captured an episode of Space Patrol using my new hardware, and it looks great! Clearer and sharper than what I was getting before (although I'm having a sound sync issue the source of which I am unsure of.)

The first half dozen action figures are finished. I'm casting and painting every evening to get the rest done. There's still a lot left to do, but I'm reasonably certain we can pull it off.

My focus at the moment is on printable fabrics, display boxes and cardbacks. Maybe I'll have something to show on that front soon.

I'm still mucus-y. I'm taking the medicine the doctor suggested, but that isn't helping. It's just OTC stuff anyway. Coughing less, now, which is good. But I'm still obviously sick. And I'm getting tired faster than I should.

That has put a serious damper on my relatively short deadlines for my current toy project, but I'll make due.

It wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it was refreshing to hear it discussed candidly. Some exhibits were a little too Ra Ra for me, but many of them presented legitimate (if a bit toothless) criticisms of our intelligence apparatuses.

I had never been before, because I expected that it would be a lot of pro CIA and NSA propaganda, but it wasn't that.

I'm still trying to digest what it was.

We went to the Smithsonian american history museum and the SPY museum, both of which were entertaining.

I was impressed by the amount of coverage the spy museum gave to things like recent propaganda campaigns, whistleblowers, and the pervasiveness of global surveillance.

One exhibit walked directly through all the data that we know of that is being collected from everyone's phones at all times.

My little brother and his wife came for a visit this weekend. We had a great time, and did a lot of touristy things that I don't normally get to do, even though they are very near to where I am (including some things that I probably would have never done of my own volition.)

It was a largely positive trip. I mostly raised the kid after our parents divorced, so it's neat to see that he's developed in to a largely functional, thoughtful adult.

I find this idea super compelling.

I don't fully get the exact mechanics at play, and I suspect the results were likely inconsistent at best, but this seems like the closest thing to a real printing press I've ever seen marketed for home use, and now I want to build a better one.

I saw a cool toy today! I didn't buy it, but I thought it was neat. It's an embossing label maker based printing press.

So Charles Lindbergh is a name I only really know because of his flight from NY to Paris. Saw a thing today indicating that he was a vocal antisemite and Nazi sympathizer.

So, you know, now you know.