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the healthiest life

2023-10-03

2 minute read

I'm sick again, for the third time in three months. It's frustrating. I worry it's because of going vegetarian. I think the next step is to get a blood test, then see what steps I can take. I am by no means living the healthiest life. Beer is a friend I know well and see often. Sleep is an on and off again lover. I have a propensity for stress that I have yet to address in any active way.

Despite my complaining I am actually feeling good. Things feel like they are settling down a little. I'm finding some small routines, and cooking food that I enjoy. I've got plenty of cultural stuff on and I'm keeping my Sundays clear for the unexpected, and for my weary soul.

weary soul

I finally edited some photos from my trip. It helped that I abandoned the idea of doing them chronologically. Instead I chose photos that felt right, starting from one "seed" photo. It took me a long time to choose them and longer to edit them. I intially was going to select by metadata, but I realised a lot of the cool photos I'd taken were in airplane mode (which works well as a battery saving mode). I'm happy with the method I finally chose, a mix of both thematic and visual intuition. Finally, I took a long time to choose what poem to post with them. I settled on Before Summer Rain, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow. I can't find Snow's translation online, and I don't have the patience to type it out, but here's another similar one:

  1. Suddenly, from all the green around you,
  2. something-you don't know what-has disappeared;
  3. you feel it creeping closer to the window,
  4. in total silence. From the nearby wood
  6. you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
  7. reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
  8. so much solitude and passion come
  9. from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour
  11. will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
  12. away from us, cautiously, as though
  13. they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.
  15. And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
  16. the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
  17. childhood hours when you were so afraid.

a decorated statue of Mother Mary a "no fishing" sign a statue of a saint holding a cross, emerging from tree foliage a plane window view of a small river running into a long straight irrigation channel a plane window view of a port with some ships around it

I used app.color.io to do the colours, which I like even though I was clumsy with it. I do like the crasser changes I can make with some other tools, and I'd love to strike a balance. It's also more suited for grading multiple shots from the same or similar lighting, where as each of mine were quite different. We'll see how we go, it still does feel light years ahead of any other colour tools I've used so far. I'm eternally frustrated that these programs aren't more like Ronin. To add the border I ended up using an Image Magick script that I found through a bunch of googling.

mkdir out
for f in *.jpeg; do
convert $f -background "#ffffff" -gravity center -extent 1700x1700 "out/${f}";
done

I forgot that someone made an ffmpeg visual editor, so I might try that next time - or see if I can find an image magick visual editor? idk

idk

time for bed

listening to

Wendell Walker - Andy Shauf

questions