Sleep Farter

Up Your Decor - Small spaces, BIG ideation!!!!

Hi, decorators! You know, you don't have to re-ideate a whole room all the time! You can just ideate on a small scale, like half a room, or maybe just a toilet! So, really, you don't have any excuse for not decorating the hell out of everything around you constantly! Here are some less-than large ideations to get you started. DO IT NOW!!!!!

Imagine how happy your child will be, waking up every morning with this whimsical trellis, or sort of house-shaped thing headboard, populated by these hyper-whimsical grinning characters! Your daughter's or son's or whatever's first thought every frikkin' day will be the reminder that all you want to see is a smile on their face all the damn time. Nothing else is acceptable!!!

Are you constantly trying to figure out where to store all your clean towels? Well, with this unreasonably convenient toilet shelf, keep them right over the toilet! It's easily made from 1x10" lumber and 3/4" F/Z-grade plywood. Then, just stain it a rich fecal brown, or just leave it "au natural" and wait for nature to stain it for you! Mmmmmm, you can really smell the nature! "But," you may ask, "What do you do when you need to take the lid off the toilet tank for ordinary maintenance or something?". You're right! You may ask that! Shut up!

GEOMETRYYYYY!!!! It's all around us! It's gonna get ya! If you forget that, then geometry will smell your weakness and move in for the kill! Never forget it, by painting your boring old closet doors with these eye-twistingly vibrantly bright vivid geometric shapes! All your favorites are here! The seemingly friendly circle! The deceptively reliable square! The not-good-enough-to-be-a-square rectangle! The enigmatic triangle! Know your enemies! Never forget!

Are you tired of waking up with your head not stuck in some kind of pseudo-library cove in the wall? Sure! We all are! There's got to be a better way! Well, stop it, because there is!!! This sort-of-library looking headboard cove deal is made from wood and stuff with nails! The fabric of spacetime gets a little sketchy inside the cove, though. It's hard to tell if there's a mirror in there or if that's a doorway to another room or just an ordinary extra-dimensional space behind the bed. Also, is that a side wall to the left of the mirror or just a divider concealing the storage space behind the shelves. Who cares! Let the scienticians figure out how you built it! It's bed time!

If you're feeling flush with cash, you can outfit your
sort-of-library-wall-headboard-hole with antiques, as
shown in our example. This is Kandinsky's Horse
Pawing At The Back Door. Fancy!

And this saucy little number is an Olmec effigy
of Gerald, the god of Wearing a Bird on Your Head.
Ooooo! Spooooky!

Up Your Decor - What a treatment!

HEY DECORATORS! It's me! Your interior design goddess Vorbia! I know! It's been a while, huh? I've been.... getting treatment! "What kind of treatment?" you reasonably wonder? NEVER MIND THAT! Go to hell, you bastard! Window treatment! That's what kind of treatment!

Anyway, dearest friends, it's all autumnal outside, and you know what that means! It's time for spring decorating season! That's because, if you're Spring Decorating right, spring isn't long enough to fit it all in! GET ON THAT SHIT IMMEDIATELY!!!! DO IT NOW!!!

Hey, look! Numbers and letters! Everybody loves numbers and letters! If you're like me, and you'd better be, they're how we keep track of things and keep track of our track keeping! Why not decorate a whole room (Just one???) with this dynamic and vivacious alpha numeric theme? Even your milk-churn umbrella barrel will need a number, if you're to know exactly which milk-churn umbrella barrel you're staring pointedly at! How much fun is that! Let me count the ways, using pretty much every surface in the room!

Ooooo! A reading room! So scholarly! Wade is reading a decorating magazine in our super groovy shag-o-delic orange shag reading room, with lighting scheme courtesy of K-Mart Strategies Department! Just in case there's not enough light (Can there ever be?), there's a very mod globe light to illuminate even the black levels to 100 IRE! You're not going to believe this, but the shelving unit is made from - are you ready for this? - plywood! Can you believe it? It even has shelves that face the wall, for all your reading
material that Must Not Be Found. You know what I mean. 

Don't leave your kids out of the fun! Sure, the kids play in the yard all the time, but sometimes they'll
need to get out of the rain, right? With this super mod playhouse, they can pretend they were stranded
on a grassy veldt when their rowboat crash landed, half burying itself in the ground. Just image the
fun they'll have, pretending to draw straws to find out who they'll eat first! 

Have you ever been locked out of your house? Perhaps by a loved one pretending to be afraid of you?
HA HA HA HA HA! I love that joke! You can get that whimsical, fun feeling all the time by simply
nailing shingles to your bedroom wall! Good times! Also, during Private Time, it'll feel like you're
having sex in the yard, just like an animal! Pretty erotic, huh, tiger? Gosh! What has two thumbs and
is getting all hot and bothered? Me am! That's who! Well, I hope the neighbors don't have windows!

Bee Looked Smaller

Goodnight, Moon

Knitting & Crochet Designs for Female Space Colonists.

Greetings, colonists! This day, The Astronet brings us news of the most current exo-garments for you to acquisition, for the enhancement of our continued existence. All praise to the Mighty Engines!

Observe the trappings of our model, Fnu! Fnu is barely concealing her appropriate shame in this daring ensemble of perforated multiplicity! Fnu's immodest contrivance consists of a mammary-wrap, pelvic cradle, and shame cape, all of cunningly interwoven linearity fibers.

Each piece is optically transparent in the main, such that they provide negligible protection from alpha particles, as well as from the observation of male-designated appreciants, if you know what I mean! Attired in such things, Fnu will have her choice of partners at the Mate Selection Ritual, and all shall be eager to make their seed with her! Lucky Fnu! Thank The Leader!

Consternation and uproar! Let all in the Collective get a load of Glebda and Framulette in their matching linearity fiber coordinates! No, not galactic coordinates, silly! We have, of course, lost the knowing of galactic coordinate calculation, as the Flight Directive Journals were destroyed in the Wreckage of our Glorious Arrival. This is known. No, we mean to speak of cooridnated  fashions!

Glebda is looking kicky in her pink tank and promiscuity skirt! The tank can be fitted with attachment points for a standard EVA helmet, so she can venture outside the arcology without missing a beat. So, she'll be a sensation at the moisture farms, as well as the Joint Ventilation and Filtration Committee Selection Panel Discussions!

Meanwhile, Framulette has chosen to add the thermal retention jacket to her yellow ensemble! All garments, again, are selectively transparent on a per-pixel basis for uncontrollable potential partner titillation! Shameful and delightful! Praise the Mighty Engines!

Astonishment! Is that The Lawgiver, come to view the fashion proceedings with us today? Wait! No! It is not the Lawgiver, but merely our model Zapua in her self-made authority smock, with a jaunty waist tie! Suddenly, this hideous Lawgiver charade is amusing to me, for her authority smock is like unto that worn by the Lawgiver! Ha ha ha ha! Oh, that clever Zapua!

Zapua may very well be in radio contact with The Lawgiver, thanks to the high-fidelity earcups built into her hair arrangement. The earcups are receptive on the inter-dome security bands as well as the general use bands, and feature redundant I/O error correction, with total harmonic distortion of .004%. That's what I call hair with style! We'd better be careful what we say around Zapua! Ha ha! Thank The Lawgiver!

To become eligible for these fine garment units, see your object registrar and simply fill out the requisition form, and transmit your inquiry to Central Control via the next communications beam.

Thank The Leader! All Praise to the Mighty Engines!

Vintage Lens Test - Three fast fifties (and a wee bit of radiation).

Waaaay back in 2011, we did a lens test featuring three goofy old lenses, which give you fun or "arty" effects when stuck on your otherwise perfect modern camera. Since then, I've leveled up my photography skills (I now get a special attack) and have expanded my old lens collection, by sort of dragging a fishing net through Ebay.

UPDATE: The Fotodiox adapter on the Nikor has been found to be a blurry piece of junk, and definitely let down the Nikon in this test. For a re-test of the Nikor without the horrible Fotodiox adapter, please go here and more sample images here.

The Lure of Vintage Glass.

It's hard to say "no" to really old lenses. They really don't build them like they used to, and modern lenses that DO approach the tank-like build quality of old lenses come at a premium. For example, there's a famous German company called Voigtlander that makes really good modern manual-focus lenses that go for at-or-beyond the one kilobuck price point. If you're interested in an all-manual control (no auto-anything) lens, I definitely suggest buying an adapter and investigating vintage equipment. One thing I can tell you is that, in the couple of years I've spent messing around with old lenses, the fact that you have to work the lens manually has accelerated my understanding of F-stop, depth of field, and angle of view in a way that modern automatic lenses failed to do. One man's opinion. Your mileage may vary.

Adapt Adopt, and Improve.

On the subject of adapters: The camera I shot this test on is an Olympus E-M5, which uses what they call the "micro four-thirds" lens mount. One of the cool things about the M43 standard is the fact that, with the proper adapter, you can use just about any lens ever made on your camera. Now, one of the bad things about micro four-thirds is the fact that the smaller sensor size means that any lens you put on it is more "zoomed in" than it should be. This is called the "crop factor". Without getting too far into the geekdom of it, basically a 50mm lens becomes a 100mm one when you stick it on a M43 camera.

That is, unless you use one of a new breed of lens adapters that has corrective optics in it, that basically "focuses down" the image onto the smaller sensor,  so that things look the size they were meant to. A happy side effect of funneling the light in this way is that the image is brighter, too. Less wasted light gives you a brighter image. More light means lower ISO means faster shutter speeds means less blurry pictures. Generally, these kinds of adapters give you an extra F-stop's worth of brightness. Yes, please. These new adapters are called "speed boosters" (because you can use faster shutter speeds) or "focal reducers", which sounds to my ear like a more descriptive term.

Yes, these are pricier than a regular adapter, which is about twenty dollars. Some of the Metabones adapters go for up to five hundred. Oof. However, if you're planning on buying heavily into a particular family of lenses, it can be really, really worth it to have a really good focal reducer/speed booster to make them all work better on your camera. Each of the three lenses tested here are from different "families" - Canon, Nikon, and Pentax. So, I have a speed booster of different quality for each. My Canon adapter is from Metabones, who I'm pretty sure came up with the first speed booster.  They're the best in the biz. The Nikon adapter is made by Fotodiox, and costs about 1/4 what the Metabones costs. The Pentax lens is an "M42" threaded lens mount, and the adapter I'm using for that one is also a cheapo model. Hey, I'm not made of adapters! The disparity in quality of the corrective optics in these adapters will doubtlessly have a small effect on the sharpness of the images, but I can't see any appreciable drop in image quality from the cheapo adapters. Build quality? Oh, you absolutely get what you pay for, there. The Fotodiox adapter (with the red ring around it) was not machined precisely, an I had to carefully sand it down to get it to fit on my E-M5. The Metabones has never given me trouble. Oddly, the no-name M42 speed booster fits perfectly, too.

Sheesh. Sorry about all the tech babble. On to some testing.

Prime Targets.

All three lenses in this test are 50mm primes with big, fast f/1.4 apertures. "Prime" means "no zoom". What I've found out is that, if you're going digging for some vintage lens gold, prime lenses are good candidate. There are some brilliantly made prime lenses from past decades that rival the best of the best examples from current product lines... if you don't mind manually focusing, that is. As far as the aperture goes, you have to adjust that by hand as well, but I usually shoot with the aperture wide open to grab as much light as possible, because I hate flash. Lenses like these can be found on Ebay for $30 - $120.

Zoom lenses? You can definitely find those at Chez eBay, but here's a secret: the magic mojo of making a zoom lens that looks good throughout it's full zoom range is something they figured out how to do relatively recently. Zoom lenses built before 1990 or so are not very desirable. I have several, and they're fun to tinker around with, but even a cheap modern zoom lens will be sharper, smaller, and faster than a vintage zoom.


Meet the contenders. This is an exhibition, not a competition. Don't make me choose. I love them all.

On the left is a circa 1972 Canon FD-mount 50mm f/1.4.

In the middle is a Nikkor F-mount 50mm f/1.4 from about 1966.

On the right is a 1963(?) Eight-Element Pentax Asahi Super-Takumar 50mm f/1.4 with an M42 screw-type mount.

There's something about Asahi

Here's a funny thing about the Asahi lens. It's kind of radioactive. Many lenses in the 60s and 70s had lens elements made with thorium, which gave the glass desirable refractive properties. You can search for yourself on the topic of "radioactive thoriated lenses". The radiation given off by these lenses is only alpha waves. It only travels an inch or so from the glass, and is easily shielded by almost anything. Gamma rays are the ones that go through steel, make your sperm go funny, and turn you into Spider-Man. You might develop health problems if you slept with this lens under your pillow for about ten years. Apart from something like that, there's no real risk.

A side effect of thorium lenses is that, over the years, many of them have developed a yellow tint in the glass. There's some debate as to why, but it seems as though the radiation given off by the thorium in the glass stains the glass yellow. However, this is curable. Exposing the rear element of the Supertak (as the kids call it) to strong ultra-violet light for a few days will clear it right up. I used a GE CFL blacklight bulb to cure mine. I put it in a box lined with foil, with the back of the lens pointing at the bulb. Worked like a charm. It took about two days.

Incidentally, this Saturday on UHF, they'll be showing "Asahi-Super-Takumar vs. Mecha-Asahi-Super-Takumar". I love that movie.

Sample Set #1: Fiestabot

Here's Fiestabot all dressed up for Cinco de Octobero. Oh, Fiestabot. You're always getting up too late! Please disregard the framing discrepancies in these shots. I was leaning a little closer sometimes.  They're all 50mm lenses, so things should frame up identically with each. Also, all of these were shot with the aperture wide open at f/1.4, with no post processing. These are straight out of the camera.

The Super-Takumar has good contrast and nice soft bokeh in the background. Maybe there's a reason this lens has such a cult following. The depth of field is nicely shallow, but not absurdly so.

The Nikkor, with wide open aperture, is really really soft. Also, it loses contrast wide open. Believe it or not, I focused on his "face lens". Some lenses just get soft at wide apertures. In fairness to the Nikkor, there's a picture down below shot at f/2. It sharpers up and looks normal. However, I like being able to open up this lens and get the dreamy Barbara Walters effect. This would be great for portraits. The look is a bit like an old Diana lens, actually.

The Canon looks a lot like the Super-Takumar. I'm having a hard time telling the difference. Both are really good fast fifties. Nice contrast and shallow depth of field. The blurry background outside the window seems a little darker than with the Super-Takumar.

 Sample Set #2 : Done the dishes.

Really nice colors. Really sharp where you focus, and DOF is shallow, but not too. I focused on the orange glass, and the blue dish towel is still in focus an inch or two in front of it.

No surprises from the Nikkor. Soft and glowy. Next.

I think the Canon has a slightly shallower depth of field. Again, I focused on the orange glass. Notice how only a little bit of the blue towel in front of it is in focus.

Sample Set #3: Drums from Doumbekistan. These are Egyptian drums called Doumbeks. Similiarly-shaped drums are found all over the world. In Africa they're Djembes. In Turkey they're called Darbukas. They all work the same.

Sample Set #4: Xanthophyl and chromatic aberration. 

Chromatic Aberration or "CA" is that blue or purple fringe around the black tree branch in front of the white sky. It's present in most lenses to some degree, and shows up in areas of very high contrast where dark meets light in a hard edge. The Super-Takumar has some nice fuzz at the edge of the picture, where you can see the leaves going out of focus. Great saturation.

In this picture, I stopped the aperture down to f/2, or else the sunlight would have been a fuzzy mess. F/2 is still a pretty wide aperture, and the Nikkor has the "swirly bokeh" that some lenses do. Look around the edges of the picture where the blurs form concentric circles around the center of the image. Technically, it's a flaw, but lots of people love it. I do.

The Canon just looks nice and normal here. Yes, there's the CA, but most lenses would do that in this situation. Even wide open at f/1.4, it's still pretty sharp.

Sample Set #5: Atomic Clock.

This image shows the lenses' vignetting (darkened corners). Again, all lenses do this to some degree. Purists dream of a lens that is infinitely sharp and has no dark corners - and, if you ask me, no personality. The Super-Takumar shows us its good contrast and slightly warm color. Very nice.

The warm color of the Nikkor wasn't apparent in the other samples, but here, it's obvious. The green wall has lots of yellow in it. I'll have to remember that one. If you were to narrow the aperture to sharpen it up a little, you'd still have nice warm color, since adjusting aperture shouldn't effect the saturation.

The Canon has slightly cooler colors than the other two. It still has some vignetting that I like very much, and is still super sharp.

Summary:

Asahi Super-Takumar 1963 - Sharp and with warm color and smooth bokeh. Depth of field is nice and thin, but not crazy-thin. The radiation won't hurt you. A physically small lens, if that's important to you. Mine is a slightly rarer eight-element model produced some time before 1966. The seven-element version appeared in 1966, and should be a bit cheaper, and most people say they can't tell the difference in the images they produce.

Nikkor F 1966 - Way soft and dreamy wide open, but sharpens up if you close it up a little. If you use it in low light, you'll miss being able to open it up all the way without the glow. A great special effect portrait lens that acts normal if you stop it down to f/2 or f/2.8, which makes it an exciting rare find. Build quality is beautiful. It's a heavy lens with a retro design clearly of The Sixties.

Canon FD 1972 - Similar to the Super-Takumar, but with cooler colors. It acts like you want a fast fifty to be. Sharp and accurate with super-thin depth of field if you want it. Also has beautiful build quality and heft.

This is not a competition, so I'm not going to choose a winner. The winner is (gasp!) you!... if you know what to look for on eBay or in resale shops. The seller should mention three things.

-Scratches. Some? None? At the center or near the edge? Edge scratches aren't the end of the world. Near the center, and it's gut-check time. Can you find another copy of the lens without scratches?

-Fungus. Yep. Lenses grow fungus in them, over the years. Little black dots, usually on the inner elements where you can't reach it, where moisture get trapped if the lens was stored improperly. Fungus is a deal-killer. Cleaning a lens costs more than you're likely to pay for the lens.

-Aperture blades action. The words you're looking for are "snappy" or "quick" and "dry". A sluggish aperture may get stuck open or closed. Also, visible oil on the aperture blades tells you that someone had the lens open, trying to remedy sticky blades at some point in history. Oil on the blades doesn't scare me too much, personally, so long as the blades are snappy and quick.

Thanks for reading. Maybe we need to do a test on vintage zooms? That should be an adventure.

1972 Pontiac Luxury LeMans - A bargeload of Seventies restraint.

How's you car feel? A little bigger than you need? If you're in America, it probably is. But here's an ad from 1972, to make you feel better about your vehicular extravagance. It's an ad from Pontiac, trying to show you that you can still be pampered in your "mid-size" car. See? Prudent reserve from the GM of 1972.

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"All the luxury you want without buying more car than you need." This is assuming you have a surprising number of corpses to transport in the capacious trunk, or perhaps hundreds of pounds of weed to smuggle in the body panels. In your '72 Luxury LeMans, you can do it without going overboard, Captain Ron.

The copy really is worth the read. The feature list is like a what's what of Huggy Bear's credentials. Fender skirts, baby. Liberal (but not heavy-handed) bright metal trim. Yards of plush carpet, clear up to the lower door panels. And, if you're feeling a little bummed out by the austerity of your modern bourgemobile, you can fantasize about what your life would be like with a set of deluxe wheel covers. You can say goodbye to your days of persuading the proprietor of you local hub cap shop* to bring out his good stuff. "No no, Pepito. I'm feeling saucy today. I want you show show me some DELUXE wheel covers. Maybe something in a concentric beveled circle, with a red doohickey in the middle. This thing you've shown me barely has a doohickey at all. I don't think you grasp how saucy I am today." Well, forget that noise. Your new Pontiac Luxury LeMans comes with deluxe pie tin- err, wheel covers.

The instrument penal has the look of rare Ceylonese teak, which is a very rare look indeed. There are just a few places in the world where that look still grows, and some of it can be yours! It's safe too, with a steering column that's more than willing to absorb all your energy. All you have to do is have a sternum that's ready to absorb the steering column. Hey, you give a little, you get a little. And, it's easy to park and economical to operate, because gas was going for pennies per gallon. This means you can get the Luxury LeMans to the end of the block on just five bucks' worth of go-juice. All this, thanks to the sensible restraint of 1972. Now, don't you feel bad for all the crazy stuff you've reasonably believed about The Seventies? Me neither.

*Reputable hub cap shops:

- Rin Tin Tin's Tins
- The Bashful Wheel
- Andy's Capps
- Circle Jerks
- The Dish Ditch
- Starsky's Hubcap Hutch

Wisconsin Cheese Makers Guild - Christmas Cheer 'round the Year.

Today, we have a gift for you. With so much of the country suffering from a scorching heat rash in all the worst places, please enjoy some freaky Christmas cheer, from the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Guild. No, I am not making this up.

Vicki Lawrence and the largest member of The Lollipop Guild (who apparently is doing double time in the WCMG) would like you to have that lederhosen feeling all year round. Although we can't see any in this picture, I promise you, these two have some lederhosen in the house somewhere... probably in the lederdungeon, where they get freaky together. Vicki must really know how to curl a guy's moustache.


You know how once a year you tell everyone you love them with a cylinder of cheese as big as your head? You need to be able to get that just-gave-a-head-sized-cheese feeling all year round with this wonderful cover from the 1971-72 WCMG catalog. Only, the text has to go, so you can write in your own personal message. We got the P.A.G. Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Squad right on that, so now you can make your own cheesy greeting any time you need to. As a serving suggestion, we made it into a condolence card, with space for you to let your friend or loved one know that YOU know how much their life blows at the moment. But don't stop there. Use the blank one to let everyone know how much you care about something or whatever. You're welcome!

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Click for big.