Matthew Caron

I'm headed back to North Dakota where I'll be spending time with some of the fabulous academics who make up the North Dakota Man Camp Project, we'll be doing oral histories, interviews and photographs of people living in temporary work force housing springing up around the Bakken Oil Boom -- truckers, roughnecks, engineers, and all the people who support them -- carpenters, welders, pipe fitters. It was a really amazing experience when I went in February. Looking forward to seeing another face of that state this time. We'll be in Western NoDak around Williston and I think south maybe as far as Killdeer.

Here's a post from the last time I was there which contains beautiful photos of a snow covered landscape.

If you want to follow along, I'll be updating the blog as wireless allows (who knows when that'll be) but also I'll be tweeding with the hashtag #OilCampsND

Here's me in NoDak during our last trip in February. I'm packing lighter this time.




Clickenzee to Embiggen!

Add me: [LiveJournal] [Facebook] [Twitter] [Google+] [Tumblr]
[Roller Derby Portraits]

http://eclipsephase.com/mashups-eclipse-phase-vs-dont-rest-your-head-part-ii

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MassadAyoob/~3/-mWC-HghZsI/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/?p=2293

Back in the grim days following the Columbine High School atrocity, I pushed hard for the “Israeli model” of armed school personnel. After the Maalot massacre, an all-volunteer program was put together for school personnel and family members of students who were trained by Israel’s civil guard and reported to school with concealed handguns. It was fabulously successful in both stopping and deterring armed terrorist attacks on schools. The concept has much in common with the hugely successful FFDO (Federal Flight Deck Officer) program for armed airline pilots. (It matters not whether the “terrorist” in question is motivated by religious zealotry, politics, or madness. What matters is that a protector with a gun be in place to stop the evildoer with a gun.)

After the recent Sandy Hook atrocity, not only did the NRA come up with a plan for something similar here (while also pushing for more armed police assigned to educational institutions as SROs, or School Resource Officers), but we’ve seen similar plans actually implemented in places like Texas, Utah, and Arkansas.  It is a solid, realistic approach to a genuine problem.

I call your attention to an excellent little book published in December of 2012, “School Administrators Guide To Practical Handgun Training.” The author is Richard Rosenthal, a retired lawman with an impressive 40-year career behind him. The first half of that was twenty years with the NYPD. There, he worked Homicide and Narcotics, served as a helicopter pilot, and spent many years teaching at the Firearms and Tactics Unit, which is where I first met him long ago. Retiring after putting in those twenty, he spent a like period as Chief of Police in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Having dealt with school administrators as a chief of police, Rich understands their thinking. His credentials make it clear to them that he’s not some sort of right-wing lunatic, and give him credibility in certain circles where gun enthusiasts simply will not be listened to by decision-makers. Rich is not only a master firearms instructor, but a shooting incident survivor himself. His advice on vetting and training armed volunteers and managing such a program is absolutely spot-on.

I highly recommend “School Administrators Guide to Practical Handgun Training.”  It’s available for $19.33 plus shipping here.

Behind the Scenes on the Philadelphia Weekly cover shoot with Neil Gaiman.

While it's the cover shoot, it ended up not being the actual cover photo. The actual cover was a photo I took last year of Neil taking a Behind The Scenes tour of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology given by Dr. Brad Hafford (you can read about that here. The photo that I'd actually taken for the cover ended up on a full page on the inside, which is fine, because it's a better photo and the cover had an ad on it that needed to be fit in, so the one I liked better got an uncluttered layout. There were about six different cover variants, of which I got to see the final two.




Which do you prefer? You may clickenzee to embiggen.


Anyway, the shoot was really basic and really fast. It was late at night, Neil had just gotten into town and picked trillian_stars, Amanda and I up at a house party in North Philly and we were headed back to center city. I'd wanted to do something with the Philly Skyline in the background because the story's about a speech that he gave in Philly a year ago. So we went out onto an island in the middle of broad street. I love the view down that street and I've used it a couple of times before.

Here's one that I took of Trillian on our way home from somewhere a couple of months ago -- a fog bank had rolled down and the place was lit up wonderfully.




Clickenzee to Embiggen!


One of the things that happens when you take a lot of photos of things is that you start to tuck little shortcuts away in your brain like "ah, now I know how to do this, I can pull it out of my hat later." I figured this lighting setup with this background might be useful later and it was.

So, with the idea of getting Neil and Amanda out of the street and into bed as quickly as possible, I figured the easiest and coolest thing to do would be to photograph Neil the same way, right in front of the pretty-pretty city hall. This is, I think, one of the most important aspects of a lot of my photography -- being able to move really fast. Many's the busy politician or musician who sighs mournfully when their publicist tells them they need to do a shoot for some magazine and then it's your turn to save the day by coming in and saying "I can be in and out in 9 minutes." It puts the pressure on, but it also makes you a lot nicer to work with and then people start asking for you.



Photo by Amanda


The lighting setup is really simple, there's one flash behind a shoot-thru umbrella. I'm using a Luma Pro LP605s light stand because it folds down really small and some generic double fold umbrella for the same reason. The camera is a Panasonic GX1 and a 20mm f1.7 lens -- I'd brought a Leica 45mm f2.8 as well but that had somehow broken earlier in the day and wouldn't focus -- which brings up a point -- when you're going on an important shoot, bring two of everything. I had a backup camera body and two lenses which the small footprint of the micro 4:3 format allows you to do relatively easily. The flash was triggered with a pair of Pocket Wizards.

So, shooting with the 20mm lens and an off-camera flash you have two sources of light, the flash, and the ambient street light. The ambient street light is made up of traffic lights, street lights, and the bright klieg lights aimed at city hall. The first thing to do is expose for city hall, and you do that by setting your f-stop and aperture until it shows up properly. In this case it was f 2.2 at 1/130th of a second at an ISO of 200. THEN, once that's figured out, you set the exposure for your subject with the flash power. Two light sources, two different controls -- camera first, then flash.

Once the light is properly balanced, you just start shooting. Badda badda bing.





Later in photoshop I burned in the edges to darken the bottom of his jacket and most of the street behind him -- this draws your eyes to the subject -- there are two things you want the photo to say "Neil" and "Philadelphia", and here you have it. You can read the article about "Make Good Art" here.

Hope this was useful.

Add me: [LiveJournal] [Facebook] [Twitter] [Google+] [Tumblr]
[Roller Derby Portraits]

If I could clone myself. And then shrink my clone down until he was about 3 inches tall, I could find out if Roswell would eat me if I was little without actually having to die to find out.

I'm pretty sure she'd eat me.

Add me: [LiveJournal] [Facebook] [Twitter] [Google+] [Tumblr]
[Roller Derby Portraits]

My publishing company, Posthuman Studios, is in the last week of our Kickstarter to fund Transhuman, our next book. It's been very successful, raising over $70,000 to date with over 1,300 backers helping us along.

We've unlocked some cool stretch goals and still have some awesome ones that we're hoping to hit: a new adventure from the people behind the Know Evil podcast series, a cross-platform character generator, and a conversion guide to the Fate roleplaying system.

Please check it out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/507486226/transhuman-the-eclipse-phase-players-guide

This is not a fitness blog, I promise

I just need to do a race recap.


The Broad Street run is a ten mile race through Philadelphia in a straight line from Einstein hospital to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. About 40,000 people do it every year. It was The Thing I'd set my sights on late last year when I realized that I was getting less fat and more capable. Ten miles seems like a ridiculous distance and I wanted to do it mostly because it had seemed absolutely impossible at one time and then possible, however unlikely....

When I arrived at the starting line though I began to worry. City hall marks the half way point, and despite it being gigantic and looming, it was so far away that I couldn't see it. I'd never run in a straight line like that before. I'd run in loops and I'd always been able to see the next place in the loop, realizing not only that I'd have to keep running until I got to that point that I couldn't see, but also that when I got there, I'D ONLY BE HALF WAY was freaking me out. My training had been Not Good, since I'd fractured my tibia I had only very slowly come back to running, the longest I'd run in the last two months was five miles the week before, five difficult miles. I wasn't sure if I'd have the stamina and I wasn't sure that I wouldn't re-injure myself -- in fact, I wasn't sure if my fracture had healed (spoiler: I make it and nothing breaks).




clickenzee to try and find city hall


I was right at the very back of the pack, in fact, out of 40,000 people, only about 100 were behind me. The big lesson for next year was "bring a disposable sweat shirt and sweat pants" -- it was freaking COLD and they tell you to be there long, long before you actually need to be there. They suggested I get there by 6:45 or so which was a good two hours before the race starts. Next time, I'll pull into town around 8:00.

Finally the starters gun goes off, but it's so far away that we can't hear it from the back of the line. It takes 20 minutes, maybe more for the back of the line to actually get to the starting line but finally I was off. All along the way through North Philly people line the streets, waving and cheering, it was great. After about half a mile I started passing the first people who'd stopped running and started walking but I was cautious about going too fast. I wasn't sure if my leg would hold up -- I hadn't done a long run since the fracture -- which made my training a nightmare, and I didn't want to turn into one of the people who had to stop, so I loped along with 10 minute 45 second miles.




Clickenzee to Embiggen!


There are people all along the route, and every sleepy-eyed garage band in Philly is set up on a corner playing Counting Crows covers and eventually you pass the Temple University marching band (not marching) with baton twirlers performing amazing feats of dexterity, playing "Eye of the Tiger" (possibly over and over and over again) and the whole thing is like some grand party. It's somewhere after mile three that people start to space themselves out and you're not really passing people or getting passed too much, you're just trotting along. It was around here we passed two injured people, one had fallen in a pothole and was being carried off by friends -- the other had twisted his ankle and was limping defeatedly towards the El stop. I asked if he needed a train token, he waved me off and said his father was coming to pick him up and went back to looking sad and injured. To me, being so worried about the same thing myself, it seemed like a catastrophe.

Finally, at mile 5, city hall looms up and you realize that you're half way. I got much more enthusiastic at this point. I'd been promising myself to hold back judgement until I got to seven miles, but at five I felt pretty good which was encouraging.




Clickenzee to Embiggen!


At mile six my running partner said "I just hi-fived (former Philly Mayor and Pennsylvania governor) Ed Rendell!" "Where?!" I said. "About a block back? Do you want to turn around?" -- of course I wanted to turn around. So I ran back a block, and spotted Big Ed on the side of the street hi-fiving people & wearing a Boston uniform.

Palms were slapped and I continued to mile seven with a celebrity charge. Also, trillian_stars was waiting to cheer me on somewhere between mile six and mile seven which was a great thing. It's kind of hard to express just how happy it makes you when perfect strangers shout "you're crushing it! go go go!"




Clickenzee to see Big Ed even bigger





Big psychological charge by being on the other side of City Hall,
plus having Trillian Stars cheering.





At mile 7 I saw someone holding up a sign that said "only three more miles to go!" I was tired but that sign made me realize that now it was ony a 5k, and I can run 5k while clipping my nails now, it's no longer a big deal. That amped me up, and my running companion who decided that now was the time to put the burn on and he shot off in front of me. I would have been perfectly content to keep going at the same speed, but he saw this as our opportunity to pass a lot of people so I gasped and tried to keep up.




Clickenzee to see me surge through mile 8 or something.
Also note my weird messed up walrus flipper of a right foot.


The last three miles weren't all that fun. My hands got a little numb, I felt really tired, but all around me were people walking, they'd just stopped and I wasn't going to stop, even though it felt pretty bad the last mile. Eventually I saw the finish line about half a mile ahead. We surged through the chute with what I felt was the last bit of anything I had and there was someone standing with an armful of medals handing them out to people. I took mine and felt incredibly, indescribably happy. Everything started to go white, like the world was powerfully over-exposed. Someone handed me a plastic bag filled with food and a bottle of water. I walked out onto the grass and things kept getting brighter and finally went purple and my legs were wobbly. I realized I was going to fall over if I didn't sit down, so I sat in the grass and started eating the junk food out of the bag. It tasted pretty good. There was a 270 calorie "breakfast bar" from local vendors TastyKake which was ... freaking incredible. And I ate a banana and a bag of potato chips. There was no cell signal so I couldn't text Trillian to let her know I was finished.

Later I discovered that I was suffering from something called "Orthostatic Hypotension" paired with or causing another thing called "Exercise Associated Collapse" (conveniently called EAC) which happens a lot at endurance events and is mostly temporary. It's caused by blood pooling in the lower extremities -- when running the action of running helps circulate the blood, when you stop, it doesn't return as quickly and not enough gets to your brain. There are several recommended solutions to this, one is to keep walking, briskly, at the end of your run, the other is to lay down and elevate your legs. This is sort of what I did, but I substituted "eating candy" for elevating my legs.

As the crowd started to thin out I found Trillian and we watched the very end of the race come through the finish line -- the very end of the race is made up of all of the routes bicycle cops and golf carts they use (presumably) to pick up injured runners. When the bike cops and golf carts pass you, you're not a racer anymore, you become a pedestrian. I wonder if they shut down the finish line and stop handing out medals as the last golf cart crosses the line or if some kind soul stays there to see if anybody crawls up.

Anyway. When I got home I printed out a photo of myself at the finish line and mailed it to my sports medicine doctor.

I started the race with about 100 people behind me, and I came in 26,262th. At 1:50:19, my time was about double that of most of the people in my running club, but I realized that somewhere in there, I still managed to pass about twelve thousand people. Go little walrus flipper. Go me. My only goal was to finish, and I finished.

So there you have it. Last October I was fat and out of shape and today I ran ten miles. In the interrum I survived a fractured leg and various aches and weirdos at the gym and I feel pretty good about myself. Plus I have a medal. My final thought is this: Pin your goal in a place that seems possible, though very difficult, and work towards it relentlessly. The view from the top of the mountain is worth it.

I will now shut up about exercise for a while. Have a swell day.




Have I shown you my medal? Clickenzee to see it LARGER!

Add me: [LiveJournal] [Facebook] [Twitter] [Google+] [Tumblr]
[Roller Derby Portraits]

http://eclipsephase.com/transhuman-kickstarter-stretch-goals-final-week

http://eclipsephase.com/eclipse-phase-fate

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MassadAyoob/~3/8YdT0fcQZDA/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/?p=2287

The pundits say that gun owners are a smaller-than-ever minority, and that a majority of American homes are “gun-free.” (I hate that phrase, “gun-free.” No, guns are not vermin. Anything which sounds that helpless as “gun-free” can’t be A Good Thing.)

Let’s look at some recent statistics, though.  The National Shooting Sports Foundation reports their recent survey of gun dealers that in 2012, about 25% of their sales were to first-time gun owners.

My friend and colleague Dave Workman – such a solid resource that I find myself linking to his stuff more often in this blog than any other source – observes that some 15,000 new concealed carry permits were processed last month in his home state of Washington alone. The list of permit holders increased by more than 60,000 there since May of 2012. http://www.examiner.com/article/cpl-figure-skyrockets-15k-a-single-month.

Brother Workman quotes another outstanding source of solid information, Howard Nemerov of PJ Media, who in turn cites a recent Gallup poll showing that 47% of American adults have firearms at home. http://www.examiner.com/article/waning-gun-culture-u-s-may-be-myth?cid=db_articles .  Sounds like a pretty substantial “minority” to me.

Obviously, density of gun ownership is a regional thing. You’ll have fewer guns in Manhattan high-rises, and more in rural farmhouses and on Western ranches, where guns are working tools as well as self-defense implements.

And, let us not forget, a whole lot of folks don’t want to tell strangers that they have guns, whether or not the stranger has identified himself or herself as a pollster. The media has, for decades, stigmatized gun owners. Besides, who wants to announce having in their house one of the very few things besides prescription drugs that thieves can peddle in the underworld for more than their intrinsic value, instead of pennies on the dollar?

We aren’t an overwhelming national majority, but we sure aren’t the weak and fading shadow the Prohibitionists wish we were.

Dave Workman ( left), Mas (center) and Tom Gresham (right) show how anti-gun media reacts to statistics favoring gun owners.