Lovely day with my nerdy family

[mothwing]

I had a really lovely day today. My father is kind enough to repair my computer. Its cooler had fried the motherboard and the CPU, and he's setting my PC up with a new motherboard and even better video and sound cards we still have from my brother's old PC. I really appreciate that he is willing to take so much time to set me up with a PC that I'll only  be using when I'm staying with my family. My family will be using it as a data storage PC, too, so it's not for my benefit only, but I'm still extremely grateful that he's willing to do that. My brother and I tried to help, but we couldn't really, so we went and watched this movie:

In the afternoon, my mother and I looked at the algae which grow on the walls of our aquarium. There were myriads of snail's eggs in them and weird little worms we couldn't identify and (uncharacteristically for her) didn't bother to find out about. I have had a silly and over-romanticising affection for labs and microscopes ever since I was about three and I still sometimes envy my family for being able to work with microscopes on a regular basis. I'm the only one who doesn't. My father only occasionally uses them, though, and my mother analyses car accidents involving wildlife for insurances, and she has her lab with microscopes at home.




I am really proud of the pictures I did manage to take of these things because they are not only translucent, they also tended to move in really inopportune moments, although as soon as I had set up the camera and the microscope in a way that made it possible to take unblurry pictures at all, they tended to just sit there, the heat must have been getting to them.


If anyone knows what that is they get a cookie. Strange little worms.


Snail's egg and another of those things trying  to get out of te picture.



Later today, after dark, my brother and I scared the neighbours and passers-by by taking pictures in the dark to test my camera's abilities at night and my brother's tripod - that was awesome. There's light frost on all the plants in our garden, some of which had already started blooming because of the warm winter. Still, with or without flash, it's hard to get things focused in the dark, and my live-view function doesn't really work well with little light - so we had to use torches to make sure that our pictures were focused. I guess our neighbours are used to our crazy.




I am absolutely startled at how freaking amazing my camera is with very little light, it has an ISO range I always dreamed of. <3


With the help of my brother, holding a torch and lending his tripod. <3




Yeah, I'm no good with tripods because I hate not being able to move the camera at once whenever I want, so I ended up being laughed at a lot for randomly lifting up the odd leg of the thing instead of patiently unscrewing and adjusting, re-checking, adjusting, etc.  Most of the pictures I did manage to take were out of focus because someone pointing a torch at the thing being photographed in a freezing garden is not a perfect system to make sure that the pictures are in focus.


We also had a blue torch!

Comments

[krakelwok.livejournal.com]

I like Knights of the Dinner Table. The comic strips have incredibly poor illustrations but the dialogue writing is extremely funny.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know the Knights! I love the comic strips and have been deliberating whether or not to buy the comics for a long time - they seem to be worth it, but I'm amazingly illiterate when it comes to comics and therefore stuck to the webstrip. I forgot, have you ever done any tabletops?

[krakelwok.livejournal.com]

OK, it went like this: my best childhood friend introduced me to Lord of the Rings which my brother never really got into. He read it but I think he never finished it. Likes the movies, of course. Over LotR I discovered the legendary Games Workshop miniature games, the actual tabletop games. I introduced those to my brother and building and painting miniatures appealed to him more than to me. He's always been into building rather than just drawing. He bought many miniatures and learned to paint them very professionally, winning the Golden Demon trophy twice. (That being an official price Games Workshop gives out yearly. It's their second-highest price after the Slayer Sword.)
Through Games Workshop games he and I fell in with a crowd of nerds but unlike me he got into the whole fantasy gaming aspect more deeply than I did.
I find pen & paper role-playing systems and their campaign worlds interesting but I rarely play. I think my brother doesn't play as often anymore now, either, because all his former nerd friends study all over Germany.