I love this color. It happens to be one of the colors of my son’s school. The other one being gold (golden yellow, not metallic gold) so I want to find some golden yellow laces to wear to my son’s baseball games.
Shameless show off post. I sanded, finished, and installed the two planks of poplar. This isn’t even all of my pieces. Just the ones I can fit on my wall and on the butcher block countertop.
📷 Fujifilm X-T30 | X-Fujinon 28mm
🔴 Kolari Vision 850nm
I shot IR in 720nm for years but last year I purchased an 850nm filter strictly for monochrome IR
I’m looking for three of any of the ten Sinister Observation limited edition sub set cards, minus Archangel, who I already have. In exchange, I can offer you three near mint to mint condition Apocalypse, Bishop, and Archangel cards from the Hunters & Stalkers limited edition sub set.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be all three of you already own one or two of them. Just want to try and trade as much as I can before taking to the used market. If anyone’s interested, DM me.
I recently started cleaning out my basement and came across all my old Marvel cards from when I was a kid that I’ve been holding onto and lugging from house to house with me for the past 30 years. My brother and I were obsessed with X-Men when we were kids. We had dozens of action figures and both collected the comics and cards. When he moved to LA, he gave me his old binder of cards so I had a LOT to go through. With a new season of X-Men 97’ coming out in July, I thought it would be fun to reorganize them all while I watch the old animated series as a refresh. For being as old as they are and not being stored particularly carefully, they are all mostly in surprisingly good condition. Very few bent corners and creases and they survived years of being in a basement that is far from climate controlled.
I started out by buying all new card pages because the ones I had from the 90s were beginning to show their age. As a kid, I had originally just organized all my cards in alphabetical order so I had multiple different collections and sets all mixed and mismatched next to one another. So I decided to reorganize them according to year and collection, and then in numerical order. Once I did all that, I went through all the duplicates and chose the best condition cards to keep and place in my new binders.
I discovered I had most of the 1994 Marvel Masterpieces collection with art by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt . I was only missing the Spider-Man and Fin Fang Foom base cards and Spider-Man and Captain America Holofoil cards so I decided to hop on eBay and complete this collection. I also completed the 1995 Ultra Fleer Hunters & Stalkers foil set and the Spring Break set.
One thing I noticed while doing all this is just how good the artwork was back then. It was detailed and vibrantly colored. The limited edition subsets were all creative and really cool looking. The Marvel Metal was such a unique collection, and one I am definitely going to work on completing. I want to complete them all, to be honest. I need another expensive hobby like I need a kick in the nuts but hey, everybody needs hobbies. Anyway, out of curiosity, I hopped online to see what passes for cards these days and I was pretty let down by what’s being offered today. The art today is so…blah. Kinda generic and soulless. It’s a little disheartening. It made me really appreciate what I have and that I kept my cards in such good condition.
It’s been really fun reminiscing my childhood hobby the past week or so. I’ve been feeling that heavy nostalgic feeling that almost feels like a little like grief so this has been therapeutic for me. Sorry for the long post. If you read it all, thank you for sticking through it and taking a walk down memory lane with me.
90s kids unite!
This was the first lamp I ever bought and it’s still my favorite of my smaller ones (obviously my grande is my favorite overall). But I just love the color contrast of this lamp. I added a couple of drops of yellow MF dye to punch up the color and it came out perfect. It adds a great vibe to my music room.
A while back, I got really inspired to find some abandoned places around my town to explore. There was one long forgotten building that used to be a paper press. Most of the place was unmemorable but there were a few locations that stuck out. This is one of them. I shot it on Fuji Pro 160NS, which had a lower contrast color palette closer to Kodak Portra. The soft, warm light from the setting sun provided a nice glow and long, horizontal shadows in the foreground. I wish I printed color in my darkroom because this would definitely be hanging on my wall.
I saw a post on here a couple weeks ago regarding these lesser known lamps on Amazon and decided to give it a shot. Originally it had white wax and blue fluid, which arrived so cloudy it was almost opaque. I filtered it, saved the fluid for a future project, and dyed the wax black. It’s got a stormtrooper vibe to it now, especially with the rounded off cap like the stormtroopers helmets. I toyed with the idea of cutting a stormtrooper helmet silhouette on my Cricut to put on the front and the Empire logo on top but I’m not enough of a fan of Star Wars to do that. For now, I’ll leave it blank.
I have some thoughts on the lamp overall. First the positives:
• First of all, it’s excellently packed. It came packed in custom cut foam inserts. Not styrofoam. Foam. After dealing with Schylling’s and Jambo’s abysmal packaging, this was a nice touch.
• The base and cap are, in my opinion, nicer than Schylling’s. The metal seems about as thick as other lamps today but I like the fact that the entire base is one piece, not two pieces like Schylling and Jambo lamps
• The on/off switch (second picture) is the up-down button type, which I like more than the clicky wheel type, It feels more tactile
• The shape of the globe is obviously a big draw. It’s different and more unique than the popular shapes out there
• Mine came with both a 25W and a 30W reflector bulb. I’m assuming the one in the lamp base was a replacement put in by a previous customer before they returned it. But I’m just glad they include reflector bulbs. The ones Schylling gives you is so cheap and barely warms the lamp
• The top of the globe accepts a regular old beer bottle cap (fifth picture)
• And finally, the price is decent, being in the low 30s.
As for the negatives, which aren’t many:
• I’m not crazy about is the wax. It’s the cheaper, slightly translucent type you see in pretty much any other lamp that isn’t from Schylling. I much prefer the opaque wax you get with Schylling.
• Idk if this is from the wax or the dye (true black from LLC) but when I dyed it, it seems not all the dye dissolved and now it’s got a ton of black specs in the wax (third picture). From afar like in the first picture, you don’t see it. But viewing it up close in the warmup stage and when the wax starts to pull apart, you see the black specs. I’m hoping it dissolves with a few more cycles, but I’m not optimistic because it doesn’t seem to be improving.
• Lastly, because of the nature of how wax behaves and hangs out at the surface of the MF, the much wider area at the top of the globe means a lot more wax will be chilling out up there (fourth picture)
Overall I’m pretty happy with it. I’ll buy a few more and tinker with them.
Im rehabbing a lamp at the moment and while I wait for the wax to cool and solidify in the bottom of the globe, I’m looking at next steps and I’m a bit confused. In the wax replacement tutorial on LLC’s website, she coats the globe, adds the wax, and then just added straight distilled water when it solidified. That seemed weird to me because I’m pretty sure you need to add surfactant to the distilled water, right? I checked the instructions under the Surfactant on LLC’s website and it says to add 8-10mL of surfactant to the distilled water + 1-3mL of magic surf to adjust flow. I’m interpreting that correctly, right? Add the surfactant to the water and then pour into the globe?
Need some help. I filtered my grande and attempted to recap it. I wiped the inside of the neck with alcohol and installed one of those black drain plugs everyone recommends while the lamp was up to full temperature. On top of that, I heat applied heat shrink to hold it snug. Well, it’s still popping up. What am I doing wrong?
Obsessed with this color lately. Custom off-white leather Chucks and an off-white chevron hoodie
I’m relatively new to the sci-fi genre. I read a lot of horror before this and got bored of it so I tried Dark Matter to switch things up. I ended up reading the subsequent two shortly after. I read all three of these books in as many months and loved them. I loved Crouch’s pacing and the mind bending science behind all the stories. I’ve seen others by him and none of them have that sci-fi quality to them like these did. I get pretty bored when the story goes nowhere too so I appreciated his ability to keep the story flowing.
So I’m looking for exactly that. Great sci-fi stories with a faster pace to keep me engaged. I should include that I love the idea of time travel and alternate dimensions as well. Freaks me out.
In all my visits to Boston for Red Sox games, I’ve never once made it to their flagship store on the wharf. I think I’m going to make that a goal this summer.
Got a lamp for my desk at work. First Jambo. Not a huge fan of this wax but it’s good enough for work, I suppose.