{"id":4679,"date":"2013-05-05T13:43:42","date_gmt":"2013-05-05T21:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4679"},"modified":"2013-06-18T12:59:02","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T20:59:02","slug":"gnarl-all-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/05\/gnarl-all-around\/","title":{"rendered":"Gnarl All Around"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve accumulated a backlog of photos to blog, but I don\u2019t have any long essay-type thoughts today. All my energy is going into The Big Aha<\/em>, which is about 80% done. I\u2019m pushing pretty hard on it. During the closing phase of a finishing the first draft of a novel, I sometimes think of a predator who\u2019s wounded his or her prey, and is now crashing through the underbrush, frantic to finish the hunt. Blood-lust writing frenzy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I got a new wide-angle lens the other day, a Canon 24 mm. I\u2019d been making do with an old Leica lens on my Canon body, but the old lens didn\u2019t have autofocus, nor image stabilization, nor did the automatic metering work with it. I will say that the Leica glass has a certain creamy warm quality that I like. But the Canon lens in incredibly sharp.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So I walk around my house photographing pieces of it. Like this banister. Not that every photo I\u2019m running today is shot with the wideangle lens.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My usual morning regimen, is to do yoga on a mat in the back yard and correct a printout. At full resolution, this text is readable, thanks the new lens\u2019s image stabilization, but maybe not readable in this shrunken rez. Lying in the back yard on a nice morning while crafting some prose is about my favorite activity.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This photo\u2019s taken with the Leica lens, and it has the creamy texture. Every hat is a UFO.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing all day, and in the evenings I like to get away from the printed word, so we\u2019ve been watching more Netflix than usual, a mixture of streaming and DVD. Finished off the second season of The Hour, <\/em>a nice BBC show, although I have to turn on subtitles for shows like this, otherwise I miss about 30% of the dialogue. The Lillyhammer <\/em>series isn\u2019t bad either.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Switched over to a 100 mm zoom lens for this photo last night. As spring rolls on, there\u2019s different cadres of bugs that turn up, all of them hatching at the same time. These guys were on the globes of our street lamp, making me think of astronauts on a moon.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The 100 mm lens is, for reasons I don\u2019t quite understand, categorized as a \u201cmacro\u201d\u009d lens, meaning you can do super close-ups. Hard to go wrong when you\u2019re shooting a rosebud, although the depth of field is only a few millimeters deep and I have to click at the right moment to catch the image I want, given that my body is never quite still. Love the \u201cbokeh\u201d\u009d here, that is, the out-of-focus quality of the background.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The sun comes up really bright these days, blasting flat across Silicon Valley into my garage and bounces great caustic curve light splashes off my car. I looked up how bright the sun is, viewed as a lightbulb, and it\u2019s said to be about 300 or 400 septillion watts. The prefix for septillion is \u201cyotta,\u201d\u009d in the same sense that \u201ctera\u201d\u009d means trillion. There\u2019s an official committee that decides these things. So the sun is a 300 yottawatt bulb. Or, as a waggish friend commented, one might shop for a energy-saver 60 yottawatt sun.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I try to get out into the hills every couple of days, I never get enough of nature. Free gnarl. I think this is a eucalyptus trunk, they grow with a spiral grain, which makes them stronger I think. Last night it was really windy here, and the eucs were waving like seaweed. Always nice to be reminded that we live at the bottom of an ocean of air.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sometimes I go hiking with my neighbor Gunnar. He\u2019s originally from Norway and still has quite an accent\u2014you have to know him for awhile in order to easily understand what he\u2019s saying. He\u2019s close to eighty, and is livelier and fitter than me. He never goes to what I could call \u201ca real doctor,\u201d\u009d preferring various kinds of Indian or Chinese healers. Seems to be working for him.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Gunnar and I were down at the foot of a waterfall in Castle Rock park, which is only about s twenty minute drive from my house. Incredible that I only go there once every year or two. It\u2019s such a great place. What do I have to do that\u2019s more important than being in the woods?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah, I have to be at home running my machines.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Converting my gauzy N-dimensional dreams into 2D art. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve accumulated a backlog of photos to blog, but I don\u2019t have any long essay-type thoughts today. All my energy is going into The Big Aha, which is about 80% done. I\u2019m pushing pretty hard on it. During the closing phase of a finishing the first draft of a novel, I sometimes think of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-the-big-aha"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4738,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679\/revisions\/4738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}