ziparumpazoo: (Angry Birds)
Or rather taking pictures of them, apparently. I don't have any particular fondness for bird-watching, but they do make interesting and challenging subjects. I realized I have more pictures of birds from the last month of vacation, than I do of anything else. Here's a sample:

bird1
Clearly, this bird thinks it is Batman.

bird-spam heavy )
ziparumpazoo: (Fringe_rooftop)
Vacations are apparently for cleaning out hard drives... I accidentally deleted this and then found it in the recycle bin a the last moment. Oops. Tag to a certain other, brilliant fic on the kinkmeme that has not had it's author reveal yet, but posting this now before I go and purge it again. (that'll also teach me not to use random letter combinations as document titles!)

Title Looking Glass
Spoilers Post-S4, in particular 4.17, Everything In It's Right Place.
Summary Olivia finds a window

“What exactly are you doing back here?” Peter asks from the storage room doorway. )
ziparumpazoo: (DockPhto)
Because you asked...
(and I like to talk about these things... :)

There are probably more and better documented ways to capture lightning or fireworks shows at night, but this is what I've found, though several hundred frames of trial-and-error, works best for me.

lightning2


First and most important rule of photographing lightning: Be Safe!

I don’t think this can be overstated. It’s easy to get caught up in storm-watching and lose track of what’s going on around you. Shoot from the cover of porches, cars, or other covered and grounded structures. Shoot an open field or a valley from a distance with a clear sky overhead and safe shelter nearby. Lightning always takes the quickest path to the ground and will jump from one ungrounded object to the next in order to reach it.

That said, trying to capture lightning or fireworks is one of the few times that I’d advocate that the camera makes the difference. That, or having lightning-fast reflexes. (intentional pun is intentional)

This isn’t to say that you need a thousand dollar setup to get the job done. But what you do need is a camera with a full manual mode; that is, one where you can control the aperture (F-stop), film speed, and length of exposure. )

Questions? (Or, "Crap, Zip, that makes no sense at all... please explain?")
ziparumpazoo: Tree covered in pink frost (Default)
Because [profile] a_loquita, [personal profile] supplyship, and [personal profile] mrspollifax kept me up late last night (a real hardship, I know! ;), I was still awake while this very active storm cell passed overhead.

lightning3

will the last person out of Asgard please remember to turn off the bifrost? )
***
If anybody's interested, I'm thinking of putting together a post on how to photograph lightning and other bright night subjects. y/n?
ziparumpazoo: Tree covered in pink frost (Default)
Yesterday's news. X-posting from Tumblr, not to cause panic, but because for once there is a way of checking if your account happens to be on the list of stolen email address/password combinations...

On July 12, 2012, D33DS Co. released over 450,000 Yahoo! Voices accounts containing emails and passwords in cleartext. Yahoo! Voices service, previously known as Associated Content, is provided by Yahoo! Inc. to allow writers to submit articles that are then distributed to several Yahoo! owned websites including Yahoo! News. The leak was made possible as Yahoo! Voices service was susceptible to SQL injection attack. D33DS Co. is hoping the leak will serve as a wake-up call for Yahoo! Inc. to re-evaluate their security policy.

A fully searchable version of the list — sans passwords — is up on Dazzlepod


There is also a request link on Dazzlepod's site to have your address removed from the viewable list.
ziparumpazoo: (DockPhto)
It's not that I'm taking any fewer pictures, just that I think I'm becoming more critical about which ones I release into the wilds. Probably the same goes for writing too; more time thinking about the angle and what I want to say than just dashing off words and being surprised at what comes out. I'd like to think of it as maturity, but don't tell that to the rest of myself.

IMG_4385
Winter wheat. Spring wheat is still green right now. I was really hoping for some lightning this morning, but couldn't hang around to see what panned out.

two birds and one moon )
ziparumpazoo: Tree covered in pink frost (Default)
I have finally seen Avengers. Now I can READ ALL THE FIC!!!!

Recs, people? I especially want to know what happened in Budapest....

(actually, I think this is the first movie canon that I've actually wanted to read fic in. Possibly because the way they tied in the other movies hints at a wider, richer universe out there?)
ziparumpazoo: (Fringe_rooftop)
Title Drown Out the Crowd
Category/Rating Het, Mature
Spoilers/Warnings Post-Season 4
Summary “Would it make you feel better if I said you could read me whenever you wanted, as long as you’re using your powers for good and not evil?” Peter lets Olivia experiment.
A/N Written for the Fringe Kinkmeme prompt: Olivia/Peter, glasses, whiskey, and finely tailored dress shirts. I threw in a few bonus kinks.

Olivia has never done things half-way )
ziparumpazoo: Tree covered in pink frost (Default)
Title Mnemonic Breadcrumbs
Author [personal profile] ziparumpazoo
Characters/Pairing Olivia Dunham
Category Gen
Warnings/Spoilers Minor spoilers for 4.16 - Nothing is as it seems.
Summary Olivia tries to reconcile a few things
Notes Comment fic written for [personal profile] mrspollifax. Unbeta'd.

AO3

she remembers everything about that trip... why doesn't she remember him? )
ziparumpazoo: Tree covered in pink frost (Default)
Title Giving All My Secrets Away
Fandom Fringe
Category F/M, Mature
Warnings/Spoilers That indeterminate time between season four's Welcome to Westfield and A Short Story About Love.
Summary Written for the Fringe Kinkmeme prompt: Peter wants to know what Olivia dreams about.

Below the cut, or read it at AO3

Peter wants to know what Olivia dreams about. )

BTW

Jun. 25th, 2012 02:28 pm
ziparumpazoo: (Xray)
More Glee Monday (the happy feeling kind, not the show) is going on at [personal profile] mrspollifax's LJ. I'm going to have to agree with her that there's definitely not enough Fringe there at the moment.

ETA: Not only is there Nina Sharp picspam, but she'd also written me Nina/Phillip future!fic as only she can.
ziparumpazoo: (Literature)
... or technical guides and white papers, but I have no interest talking about those at the moment.

Finished The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel last night and really enjoyed it. I'd probably like just about any excuse to go back and visit Midworld again, and this would have worked well even as a standalone story (or, three, technically). However it also felt very much like King wrote fanfic to his own 'verse, taking bits and pieces of canon that had been set up along the way, while using the characters to spin an entirely new set of stories from the original source and shows us a slightly different side to Roland. Categorize this as part of the 'Dark Tower High School AU' along with Wizard and Glass. My only complaint is that I would have liked more of Susannah, Eddie, Jake, and Oy in the telling.

The jacket from the book I just started reads as:

"More than an anthology, METAtropolis is the brainchild of five of science fiction's hottest writers Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Karl Schroeder and project editor John Scalzi who combined their talents to build a new urban future, and then wrote their own stories in this collectively-constructed world. The results are individual glimpses of a shared vision, and a reading experience unlike any you've had before. "

Collectively-constructed world. Shared vision unlike any I've had before and a reading experience unlike any I've had before? Um... dear copy writer, meet the internet - not just a collection of barking cats. *g*
ziparumpazoo: (Walter)
For [personal profile] supplyship, since the weather isn't cooperating there:
TransitOfVenus2012
Taken with 18-200mm lens, ISO-100, f/36, 1/640seconds. Through welder's glass. With bonus sunspots.

two more at sunset under the cut )
ziparumpazoo: (Angry Birds)
So I wondered who exactly I'd ticked off this morning to get notification that one of my older stories had been deleted from fanfiction.net (yeah, I know, I know...AO3- been there, done that, volunteered the hours):

Main reason for removal: Title/Summary not Fiction G rated and not suitable for all audience. The above story has been removed because it violated the guideline detailed on the upload page.

...meanwhile, much more M rated content had been left alone. The story in question has been up, without complaint for nearly four years. Curious, no? Apparently not, since I've since seen reports here, here, and here, as well as a (sarcasm) helpful explanation of the issues here (/sarcasm). Seems like the site admins have started bot-crawling summaries and wholesale deleting stories whose summaries contain offensive words. It's not personal; apparently 'bitch' is offensive.

What *is* offensive is their lack of warning (either via email, or on the main site page) or avenue for response and/or remediation.
ziparumpazoo: (Literature)
Does anybody know if Agent Tim has a last name?
ziparumpazoo: (Literature)
Four Days and Change (1033 words) by faviconziparumpazoo
Rating: General Audiences
Warning/Spoilers: Spoilers for 4.22
Summary: This afternoon she’d found out she’s about to become the mother of the apocalypse.
Notes: Written for the Fringe Kinkmeme prompt Olivia finding out she's pregnant on her own. Unbeta'd.

I dunno where all this angst is coming from guys, but WORDS! They're back. :)

The lights in the elevator were one thing; when the monitor shorted out and the keyboard stopped working, Olivia finally conceded that maybe she was going to have to take a more hands-off approach to finding Bell. )
ziparumpazoo: (Fringe_rooftop)

Title: das Über-Ich
Ratings/Warning: PG, implied temporary canon character death, and disturbing themes
Characters: Walter, ensemble
Spoilers: E4.22
Summary: Stopping the collapse isn't as easy as pulling the battery. Or is it?
Notes:Not quite a missing scene; more like an expansion of something I've been wondering about since the finale. Unbeta'd, but thanks to 
[personal profile] mrspollifax  for her pompoms. Apologies for the audacity of the title.

 

 

Walter's no stranger to the voices in his head... )

 

ziparumpazoo: (Xray)
but, I'm really enjoying Scandal. I don't know enough about US politics to actually care about a show about politics (and really, it's nice to watch something I don't know anything about so I can handwave the inaccuracies without caring), however the show mostly only uses it as a framework for the plot and not to drive it. It's, so far, very much a character piece centered around Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), former White House Communications Director, current private for-hire crises manager, woman of many layers, and all of them interesting. It's got a very West Wing feel to it, but with less tightly-packed dialog and smaller scale crises. Bonus points for having Josh Malina in a small role, as well as a few other notables in the ensemble cast.

Gosh, I think this is a the first show I've gotten hooked on in a long time that doesn't include aliens, wormholes, spaceships, the apocalypse, alternate universes, or time travel. How novel.

Profile

ziparumpazoo: Tree covered in pink frost (Default)
ziparumpazoo

April 2018

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011 121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 22nd, 2025 01:06 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios