Collection of film with a Fed 3 camera

Some months back I decided to finally make use of my 35 mm cameras and take photos. However, being that the cameras I had were both built in Ukraine SSR, I decided that I should pick up film from AliExpress and use that. This whole process ended up becoming an ordeal because I eventually had to drop the use of my Fed 3 camera due to the fact that its lens plus a lens I stole from a Fed 5 I also owned (which has now become my mother’s) had a problem.

My “new” Nikon F60 just after purchase

Nonetheless, I persisted thanks to a purchase of a new-to-me Nikon F60 and took a number of photos with an assortment of film purchased from the Internet’s bargain store. Most of the photos were taken during a single weekend where I watched my softball team play in our year-end tournament–sadly without me playing due to an ongoing knee injury.

It had been since 1997 or 1998 since I got any film developed because I never really developed an interest in photography until I was in university in the 2000s. Please ignore how ignorant I am about film as I learnt everything on digital first.

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CHINA LUCKY SHD100

Cost: C$14.48 Exposures: 36 ISO: 100 Cost per exp.: C$0.40

This is the only roll I used on my Fed 3. Now, you may be wondering, how did I know that the lens was scratched before getting it developed? Prior to placing this roll into this camera, I got some film shot on Ilford stock and it disappointingly had some rather unusual marks on the lens.

Now a Fed 3 and Fed 5 both use an M39 mount for the lens, so you might think that I could have done that with the Fed 5 I was going to give away and you’re right. However, I did take photos with the other camera as well and it too had some weird scratches.

Chalk that up to buying cameras on eBay and not testing the lenses, but alas. I did at least get some shots which contain the scratch pattern you see here.

Image showing some leaves on a tree in late-July

As evident here, it’s a bit grainy but overall not too bad. The contrast is quite apparent and you can tell the leaves apart. However, you might notice the middle of the image is blurry and that is not the fault of the film.

Teammate up to bat with the lens scratch in the middle

It seems to struggle with the sharpness in the shot, but I honestly think it is just me not having the image at all in focus properly, which is a problem when you’re trying to use a rangefinder for the first time after being used to using a DSLR. That scratch is super apparent and the one on the other lens is not much better.

Moving forward, all photos were taken with a Nikon F60 which does not at all have any problems with its lens–even if it did, I have other lenses anyway.

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35mm Color Print Film Professional Wide Exposure Range ECN 2 Process Colour

Cost: C$6.44 Exposures: 8* ISO: 200 Cost per exp.: C$0.81

Oh boy. Where to begin? This film may never be developed for a variety of reasons.

First off, in its description, it cannot decide between the American spelling and the spelling of “colour” we in the rest of the English-speaking world use. However, that is really a minor nitpick here because you might have noticed an asterisk on exposures.

It says it does eight, but my camera only got two images out of it. The autorewind kicked in after two shots and that was that. Maybe it had to do with the short roll, but that was only part one of two with my experiences here.

Image of the roll compared to a similar-looking Kodak one

When I took the roll to be developed, the clerk at the counter was rather perplexed by it. First of all, she initially thought it was a Kodak roll which of course in the above image you can clearly see it tries to mimick. In fact, it looks like a Kodak roll I later used as a “control” for a lack of a better word here.

To add to this, the film process was something unfamiliar to me: ECN-2.

When speaking to a friend online about it later, she remarked that this film is coated with an extra layer atop that when processed as any other roll would gum up the processes. This was something she had first-hand experience with and it’s apparently not super common.

The clerk had to refuse the roll as a result. Of course, when reviewing the listing, this stood out.

1. Universal to Use: 35mm color print film is also suitable for portrait and fast action photography. Suitable for 135 cameras.

“Universal to Use” is taking quite a bit of a stretch because while it worked fine in my camera, it’s quite a pain in the ass to get it developed by anyone reasonable.

Now, I did not go and take this sitting down so I went to see if anyone local would get it done. Looking around, it seems like nobody does it locally and I would have to learn to develop this film by hand. I do not have that confidence yet and considering that if I do find someone to process the film, it might not be worth it for just two exposures.

Having seen what photos taken with ECN-2 look like, I can sure tell you that this is disappointing because where it is used is for motion pictures it makes some rather stand-out photos.

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35mm Black and White Print Film

Cost: C$10.18 Exposures: 8 ISO: 200 Cost per exp.: C$1.27

I have since seen “My Heart” available for sale in some gift shops locally. It is the most expensive per-exposure film I have gotten developed, but the quality did not look too bad.

Teammates coming in after an inning is over

It is lost on me why there is a ghosting pattern on the right as it does not appear in other shots, but I have to wonder if this film was actually ISO 200. I was taking a photo from a shaded area which might have produced a darker image, but it wasn’t that dark when thinking back to the time of day.

Teammate pitching the ball

When the lighting cooperates, the detail on the jersey comes out quite decent considering I was maybe eight to ten metres from the woman throwing ball. The ball itself looks fairly static but it is evident that it itself is moving fairly fast–maybe 40 KM/h at this point, we’re in the second-lowest level for this league after all.

However, at this price point and number of exposures, the film overall is underwhelming.

So the way I ordered it off of AliExpress, it was super confusing because at C$10 for the roll, it was easily the most expensive not only as a standalone roll, but by exposure, but the page itself was super misleading because was it eight rolls when indicating “pieces” or were they just using “pieces” to mean exposure?

In any event, this is something I am noticing when ordering film on AliExpress so just bear that in mind if you’re going on a photo adventure with strange film from abroad.

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VIBE 400 Black & White film

Cost: C$5.97 Exposures: 36 ISO: 400 Cost per exp.: C$0.17

Is this a European or Asian brand? Well, it’s the only one I can find about on Wikipedia and it’s probably my favourite out of the four I purchased.

Plants on my window sill at home

This image is sharp and the grain adds to the photo instead of subtracting like I have seen before. Even in the shaded areas, you can still make out detail.

Shot of teammates on the field with one running and one waiting, and a player from an opposing team looking upwards.

I believe that the banding on the left might have to do with the the development process as it shows up in the negatives, but that aside, you can see so many details in this one shot. The player on the right is moving quite fast (she is a fairly speedy runner) and even though it is quite sunny, the gravel on the softball diamond is still showing its texture.

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Kodak Gold 200

Cost: C$21.26 Exposures: 36 ISO: 200 Cost per exp.: C$0.59

This was purchased from a local retailer due to my running out of film. Kodak Gold 200 is pretty standard film to come by in Canada and is perfect for sunny days and softball tournaments.

Player after having hit a ball and initiating running towards first base

One of the things I noticed that gets lost in colour photography is that sometimes little details just get washed out. I mentioned with the Vibe 400 film that you can make out detail in the gravel around the diamond, but in this shot and the one after, it is just washed out by the light. This could be a consequence of the ISO I must admit, but even then I think it would still be clearer if this shot were to have been taken on non-colour film.

Softball player having just hit a ball

This was only shared as a “control” so to speak just to confirm that yes, my camera was working fine.

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Conclusion

Collection of rolls of film plus some bonus ones that are not the main focus of this post

This was a silly exercise and taught me a lot about film and its differences. One big thing I didn’t anticipate is how some rolls of film have something called DX encoding which tells a camera everything from its speed (ISO), length, and exposure tolerances.

Of course, with the Fed 3 and 5 cameras, there is no need to worry about this because there are no digital parts on the cameras to read it so you have to do thsi sort of work manually. However, my F60 understands this encoding and would refuse to take photos if said bars were not there. I had stickers to force the camera to use the film fortunately, but one of the rolls only had it printed on instead of having a metal coating.

I wish I had made note of which one it was but it might have been the funny ECN-2 one, which might explain why it only got two shots out of it, but I digress.

If I were to buy any of these rolls of film again, I absolutely would buy the Vibe again. They’re fairly inexpensive and cheaper than the Ilford I’ve used in the past, and I’d argue that they’re slightly better quality. However, if I were to go through this exercise again, I’d definitely try different film and stay away from anything that requires a weird development process.

Should you be one of my friends reading this and are interested in trying out ECN-2 developing, let me know and I’ll be happy to send the roll your way to find out what the two shots ended up looking like.

Lastly, I will be sharing more photography stuff on this blog in the future. Taking photos with 35 mm film has been an enjoyable hobby so far and is unlikely to ever be polluted further by technology the way we have seen with digital cameras today. They’re as pure as you can get for technology-based hobbies and I hope that it remains that way.

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SkyTrain Mark V arriving at the station

Sorry for the lack of posts for the past while. I have been unbelievably busy. Enjoy this new blog format!

I had the fortunate luck to catch a brand new Mark V over the weekend and I have a lot of thoughts on why this train is good and why we’re sort of at the end of Expo Line expansion. Overall the train is really good and iterates well on four decades of experience by local transit officials.

Since then, some thoughts have been percolating in my head over what these trains mean and what I think the future holds for the SkyTrain system as a whole.

Interior of a Mark V showing the next station

The Mark V came into service last week here in Vancouver. What makes them special is not the LED displays which show all sorts of useful information nor the wonderful indigenous art laminating the glass dividers between the doors, but it is the length of the trains.

Train interior looking outside showing the train at the very edge of the platform

These trains now occupy the full length of the platforms on the Expo and Millennium Line. Getting to this point has taken 40 years since the opening of original Expo Line, which tells you a lot about how forward thinking we were thinking with everything then—I wish the same could be said for the Canada Line, but that is a whole different topic.

When I made an appearance on Gareth Dennis’ podcast, Railnatter, I pointed out that the Expo Line once the new extension is completed will put it at just six kilometres short of the Northern Line in London (58 KM compared to Expo’s future 52), to which he had a bit of a negative reaction to.

His reaction was right because it’s actually the city’s busiest line. I’ve had the ‘joy’ to use the Northern Line while working in London and it’s not a pleasure to be on. There is no real alternative to the line when it’s busy and many of the stations are either really crampt with narrow platforms or have interchanges that will test your claustrophobia—try Bank between 4 and 7 PM on a weekday and you’ll quickly understand.

Interior of Clapham North on the Northern Line, which is something like 2-3 metres wide platform-wise

There are very few metro systems in the world that have lines that exceed the Northern Line. San Francisco has one BART line that exceeds 100 KM, but its excuse is that it’s hemmed in by geography and operates in a very non-metro-like way I find.

China has two systems that are between 800 and 900 KM total trackage, but only Shanghai’s has three of which exceeds the Northern Line—and unlike the BART, the redundancy in the system is quite apparent.

So why do I care about the length? It’s simple: capacity of the system. You can only move so many people on these trains comfortably and metro systems are not meant for long distance travel. I am a bit baffled at Chinese systems doing 80-100 KM, but I am certain it works for their use cases and provides a heck of a lot of redundancies, but it will not here.

These trains are going to be maxed out by the time they finish passing through Surrey. While commuting patterns have shifted in the years towards staying within Surrey, the two largest economic centres remain downtown and Broadway, both of which are in Vancouver and are already on the system or will be before the Expo Line expansion completes.

Even at north of 600 people per trainset and even if you were to push the 70 second headways the system is capable of achieving, these sort of trains are meant to be for short journeys despite how many people it’ll move. This is what our system was designed with and there are only a few examples where you can buck this trend.

Two potential routes for SkyTrain in Vancouver going to the North Shore

We’re never going to really go much east beyond the terminus being built at Langley Centre. Perhaps the Expo Line will be part of the extension to the North Shore, but it’s looking like the powers that be in Victoria don’t want that and quite honestly I think it’s the right idea at least for now.

What about the rest of the valley then? Aside from maybe an extension of the Millennium Line out to Pitt Meadows or Maple Ridge, which really would run into the same problems as the Expo, we’re probably looking at alternatives from SkyTrain when trying to get out there from the western shores of the region.

I have made remarks around this problem in the past both in video and written form, but as it stands, your options for getting to Abbotsford or Mission for the most part relies options such as taking a crowded bus that runs hourly, riding a train that only leaves from the valley in the morning to then return in the evening, or driving a car.

The West Coast Express is a really pathetic system even though it does punch above its weight all things considered.

If this region is going to grow, if we’re going to resolve our housing situation, and if we’re going to reduce our greenhouse emissions, we’re going to need to think big and also systematically.

MVX and its grand vision of regional rail going into the Valley and even towards Squamish and Whistler

Buses are one part of the solution (the Fraser Valley Express operated by BC Transit is a great idea), but I think we need to get more serious with high volume movement of people. The folks behind Mountain Valley Express have the right idea, but it’s going to be a waste if we don’t align everything around it. We did this with SkyTrain back in 1985 and we will have to do this with any new mode of transportation in the future.

If we’re going to go on an infrastructure building spree in this country, let’s get people moving en masse. The Mark V is a symbol of the progress we have made and the progress we have to still make.

Also, to close off: good riddance to the Mark Is. They were good for the time, but they’re rubbish now and I am glad to see TransLink slowly taking them out of the system. I’ll be pleased to see them as heritage vehicles periodically, but I look forward to never having to be forced to ride in them again.

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Depiction of the Butlerian Jihad from the books

Earlier this year, my friend asked me to come over to her place to watch Dune Part One so she could the next day drag me to see Part Two in cinema. After that weekend, I gained a new set of worlds to explore: a universe once tainted by artificial intelligence but no longer thanks to a war with “thinking machines”.

This wasn’t my first experience with Dune, as I had at one point in my past watched the David Lynch rendition, which came out the year I was born. However, the Denis Villeneuve version captured my attention due to its non-goofy approach to the story, and as a consequence I now find myself reading through the books.

One plot device of the (known) universe in Frank Herbert’s Dune is the lack of anything resembling a computer as we know it. Approximately ten thousand years before protagonist Paul Atreides appearance in the story, the established royal houses were engaged in a war — dubbed the “Butlerian Jihad” — with thinking machines where humanity was victorious.

Thufir Hawat, a mentat as depicted in Dune (2021), played by Stephen McKinley

This victory led to anything resembling a thinking machine considered as forbidden technology and instead led to humanity being dependent on but not limited to mentats (human computers basically), analogue technology, and genetic modification including eugenics (unfortunate).

In the real world of 2024, we don’t have to worry about computers having sentience and we never will in 2025, 2026, 2032, or 2038 — check in with me in 2039 for an update. The suggestion that it will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) any time soon is absolute nonsense — the power requirements that AI-championing OpenAI is desiring is the equivalent to the output of some countries.

Just to map one cubic millimetre of the human brain required 1.4 petabytes of storage, meaning that to do its entirety, based on its average size of 2,174,340 mm², you’d need 3,044,076 petabytes of storage. If you convert that to zettabytes, you’d end up with about 3, which about 2% of what is suggested as the entire Internet’s total storage capability.

This is for one human brain. The entire Internet infrastructure is suggested to consume about 800 TWh of electricity, meaning that to simulate this one human brain, you’d need 16 TWh just for storage — this is enough to power all of Cuba just to put it all into context and we’re not even considering all of the other technicals we’d need to examine to pull it off.

At 640 grams each, you’d have 64,000,000 KG of these bad boys floating around for just one brain, putting them all at around 20% the total weight of the Empire State Building

We cannot map the entire brain without having to have nearly 100 million of these hard drives spinning at any given time (imagine the failure rate you’d have to contend with) and yet we’re expected to believe arrogant pricks like Sam Altman have any clue about what its usefulness is?

Even if we play into the fool’s statement that we only use 10% of our brains (this is untrue), we’d still need just over 1 TWh for storage for a human brain. Why are we suggesting that we go and speed up climate change in favour of a machine that relies on a garbage in garbage out philosophy?

Recently, I became aware that I was put on someone’s list as “someone who doesn’t get AI/NFTs/crypto” — here’s the thing: I do understand it, but what I don’t get is why do these types of people who champion these fads never take a step back to understand them?

I have a decade and a half experience with computer security and have seen so much change, but what hasn’t changed is the creature in front of the display. Humans are complex creatures; we don’t understand why we have consciousness and yet we have clowns in the world who suggest we can replicate some or all of it?

Quantum computers probably won’t help either here — if they even ever work.

The idea of classical computers with their binary states achieving the intelligence of a human brain is short-sighted — the idiocy I already am making an argument for here.

A thousand lines of code is more than enough to power a large language model, which forms the basis for the AI software we see commonly today, but to suggest that is enough in contrast to the billions of years of evolution that led to our species being here today is pure hubris and will lead to us hoisting ourselves by our own petard.

Were the Butlerian Jihad were to start today, I know which side I’d find myself on. Stop boiling the damn ocean to make soulless art, worthless and insecure code, and education materials of which are lacking in facts.

You have a brain; use it, exercise it, and find what you’re actually capable of.

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Press release from the Saskatchewan Party on September 13, 2024

Often I find myself writing about transit and thinking that many lives would not have been lost were we to have more publicly funded transit options. However, despite all of that, we have governments that don’t ever equate the use of transit and the reduction of vehicular alcohol abuse.

Earlier this month, The Saskatchewan Party released details about its slate of candidates ahead of the election writ being dropped. What was interesting was a line stating that there are five candidates who have past drunk driving charges.

Scott Moe, both current leader of the Saskatchewan Party and Premier of Saskatchewan, is also included in this list of having an impaired driving charge in 1992.

However, what is not mentioned here is that he has had two other incidents including a 1994 charge of a hit-and-run and a 1997 collision that took the life of a mother of two sons.

In the 1994 incident, Scott Moe never received a breathalyzer test but did admit that he had consumed alcohol earlier in the day. However, there is a contradiction in all of this because this is what the police charge stating:

…control of a motor vehicle that was involved in an accident with a vehicle at the Shellbrook Co-op with intent to escape civil or criminal liability, fail to stop his vehicle and give his name and address…

With Moe clarifying in an interview when he was confronted over it:

I exchanged information with the owner of the other vehicle and I called in the accident to the police.

Of course, since he apparently only called in the accident to police, there would be no evidence of him being under the influence at the time. We will just have to take him at his word that in 1997 when he killed 39-year old Joanne Bolog and injured her 18-year old son.

No alcohol was cited here, but he was charged with driving without “due care” and “failing to come to a complete stop”.

Especially rich considering that in 2019, the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team had sixteen players killed when their bus was hit by a truck in a much similar fashion. The driver of the truck, who was just a permanent resident at the time, is now facing deportation.

Scott Moe commented on the tragedy:

“Nobody sets out one morning with any intent of being in a car accident of any type […] [to] some degree I feel for Mr. Sidhu and his family.”

Moe is just lucky that he has a certain degree of privilege that lets him get away with his past behaviour.

I could comment on other reasons for why Scott Moe (and his Saskatchewan Party) are a danger to others, but it doesn’t really matter what happens before you enter public life because it won’t matter when you are in office as Premier of a province anyhow.

Then-Premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell

In January 2003, while leaving friend and Vancouver-area broadcaster Fred Latremouille’s Hawaiian home, Premier Gordon Campbell was arrested and pled no contest to driving under the influence of alcohol.

In Hawaii, it was merely a misdemeanour and not a criminal offence such as the case is in Canada, so he was fined US$913 and sent on his merry way under the condition he be checked for alcoholism and participate in a substance abuse program.

Calls for his resignation were made from groups such as MADD, but he managed to survive another seven years in office only resigning in March 2011 after being bogged down by a poorly implemented sales tax.

Drunk driving is OK because these two idiots never faced the music for it.

This was mirrored from cohost after being posted as my final piece there before it went into “read-only” mode.

This is my last long-form post on cohost and I figure I’d give you my thoughts before I go.

I’ve been on some form of social media for better or for worse since December 2000. To put into context where I was at in life back then, I was 16-years old and was still in secondary school. I was not an adult but found myself amongst many people who were often twice my age. These were people who themselves before then didn’t have Internet access in the same form I did at my age, and yet here we all were congregating together.

This of course was the Something Awful forums and while not social media explicitly (really “ur-social media”), it had all of the functions of social media baked within.

At the same time, I also joined LiveJournal, which is why I found cohost rather liberating. While the stories I could talk about from the Something Awful forums could be relatable to someone on cohost, because of its primitive nature, they would not compare to what I saw on LJ. However, both shaped the Western Internet good and bad and it’s why I have always had hesitation to comment on the affairs of this website.

However, since this website is about to cease to be anything but a time capsule in just a few weeks, that hesitation is no longer there as the audience is beginning to disperse.

One of the things that made cohost interesting is that it was rather insular. This is not a negative, but things didn’t escape the confines of this website often. Memes such as Ryan Reynolds’ becoming carbon and “Love Honk” did escape this website, but CSS crimes while cool did not spread around because they simply could not.

Somehow search indexes loved cohost URLs and it led to the local transit agency becoming aware of my posts, but they didn’t drive people to come here and participate.

Something Awful for example had a lot of content leak out to the point where it was basically freebooted for someone else’s profit. All your base are belong to us is a perfect example as after a forum member made a song to commemorate the meme, someone lifted it to create a video and it then spread like wildfire.

This wasn’t a bad thing for the forums ultimately as it led to more people joining the place, but the song’s creator, JRR never really saw a cent for it and sadly passed away in 2011 without people outside of the forums noticing.

LiveJournal was a different beast. It is more of an analogue to cohost than SA and often when describing this website to people, I tell them it’s like what Tumblr and LiveJournal birthing a child would be.

However, LJ never really had memes like AYBABTU, but it did however birth a toxic culture that fortunately never saw the light of day on this website. I won’t elaborate on what this culture evolved into, but much of the ills of the Western Internet can be focused on one particular account that went out of its way to document all of the misgivings individuals users engaged in.

These sites have aged in weird ways and ended up as neighbourhoods I could not navigate anymore.

And that is why I am sad to see cohost go the way it did. Its demise was never surprising as launching a social media website in the year 2022 is risky, but it still saddens me as it was my home on the Internet. I was one of the original test users with a two-digit user ID and was excited to see this go somewhere especially in light of my departing Twitter.

cohost was never perfect and was never destined to be–it didn’t need to be. I have long-practiced the philosophy of not letting perfect get in the way of good or as I put it, looking for satisfaction. I could go on and on about the flaws of this website, but it’s not important to me as this website actually tried a new approach to things.

I think that for many of you, you will never understand this mindset I hold. It’s easy to lash out at the site’s creators for doing things in a way you think is wrong, for not having the right policies, for not adopting the right features, and so on, but it’s another to go and look at them pragmatically–I can point out so many shortcomings I witnessed on part of the ASSC here, but I will not because it’s not pragmatic.

They tried. They put the work in. They listened. They worked what they could. They taxed themselves. Even in shutting down this place, they told us what is up. They told us how much it cost to run this place. Many of you were right, but did you ever try yourself? How did you come to that conclusion?

I’ve run a startup myself and I never once vented out what I thought was wrong.

Some of the worst behaviour I ever saw on the Internet has been on this website and yet somehow I still wanted these individuals around because I wanted them to see them succeed because their success was cohost’s success.

This website drove four people to burn out–Tumblr somehow has 2,500 employees I will point out here. Workload and user behaviour definitely played its part in their role in how this website succumbed, but I don’t see it as a failure because they pointed out a huge problem with the Internet: capitalism reigns supreme.

We don’t have good online communities anymore that are accessible. cohost does have accessibility issues I must point out, but its barrier to entry is significantly lower considering it was never really riddled with algorithms such as what is seen on Facebook. The capitalism machine has turned that social media website into a place where some countries cannot share news, people in their 60s respond to AI-generated posts and say it is truth, and selling a video card on the website often requires you to know where the closest CCTV camera is pointed at.

cohost never devolved into a place to post shrimp Jesus and I’d argue it hasn’t devolved at all. It pointed out the problems with running a service on the Internet. In a better timeline, this website would have thrived and many would clamour to have the coolest user names, the coolest CSS crimes, and the best love honk remixes.

cohost was a success because it did cool shit™ and it did shit no other website has ever done.

When this website ceases to permit new posts and is then confined to the Internet Archives, it should be looked at fondly. I want this post to be in the IA and I want people to hate what I have to say. I’ve been on the Internet long enough to not feel bothered by what I am posting here and the responses that it delivers.

When you find your new home on the Internet, remember this: don’t let perfect get in the way of good.

Make whatever your new home is your home. Learn to cultivate what you see and filter out what you do not want. Do not expect others to make their home on the Internet inviting to you, but you should also make good neighbours with those whose gardens have similar flowers as you.

You may not always like everything about your neighbours, but they’ll be there for you when you need your garden appropriately watered while you are not there.