Farmer Town

 As I type this, I'm playing Drake's "Trophies" up next is "No Hands" and capping off the moment with 50 Cent's "I GET MONEY" #ELC #TMT #DT6 #GS9 #CME #MNS

   I've avoided and violence throughout my life.

  A man approached me.

    Good shmorning. Whatcha gonna do when farmermania runs wild on you ?

I did boxing 3 years ago and have a white belt in jiu jitsu. This won't stop me from talking like an expert on this. I'm going to make bold claims and I can't be called out because I don't have comments turned on.

  I'll keep it ten toes with you Farmerholics, Big Vegas did me dirty. All but one of my betting picks imploded but I still live to fight another day. All I'll say is after tonight, Damon Jackson is a certified real one and Woodley isn't shot just yet (check the end of this post or my next post ?). To cope with my gambling losses, I'll talk about my Martin Shkreli renaissance.

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  I guess this is a gambling blog now.

  I've taken a break from trading stocks and forex. They used to call me Robert Dinero. Retiring at the top of the game. I have moved on to an even more degenerate form of gambling.

School restarts in a few weeks.

Sabu vs Rob Van Dam. ECW Guily as Charged. January 9 2000. First it was Tekashi.

Another summer is almost over. Here's something to play as you tie the noose. Tracklist to be added later.

 

Artist of the month: Sheck Wes I'm 21 now, I just hope I dont go bald within the next 6 years. In other news...

Ryan Hall catching BJ Penn in an imanari roll into a heel hook. I'm writing this a couple minutes before the Till v Whittaker prelims start.

I'll start with the update first.

Kanye West recently stated he would run for president in 2020

WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS AND/OR ARE SUFFERING FROM DEPRESSION. DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK

Its hard to make it in tech. The Mean Streets of Silicon Valley.

Once the gloves touch, the bouncing begins.

The first editorial rush of a project I should have been working on for some time now.

It took Steven Soderbergh 50 years before he could finally recut 2001: A Space Odyssey to a shorter runtime.

Here's how I rank media:

Someone else uploaded this and you can find the whole thing here . This year long ad campaign won two Clio awards for Innovation and Integrated Campaign

Having a large image messed the format up. This post was originally supposed to be about WWE superstar Shinsuke Nakamura but it changed halfway in the middle of doing some work. Red. My favourite shades are somewhere in between red and a deep pink. The current shades in my palette are HTML codes #ff0095 and #ff001f. Paste the codes here to see how they look.

I've been thinking about colour a lot recently. Next two posts will be titled RED and BLACK . The topic of this post will be about the Undertaker. The Undertaker is a legend of the game. Loved by everyone. A persona loved across multiple generations keeping people interested throughout the whole time. In the close to 30 years of the Undertaker, he has evolved but the essence of the character has remained the same. The nickname of "The Phenom" sums it up pretty well. Pro wrestling is a very unique and immersive form of storytelling which can't be replicated by most movies and by no book. Some video games come close. One of my favoutite parts of the Undertaker is his entrance. One of the most iconic. The arena bathed in blue-purple (closer to blue) light, with flame pyrotechnics, spotlights and strobes. They'd place the camera at a lower angle to get the shadow from his hat covering half his face. He'd always walk slow, his actions and pyro choreographed...

YEEZUS Tour, 2014. Masks by Martin Maison Margela M

I take screenshots of everything I watch. I would normally use the Windows Key + Print Screen feature but this would save the images as PNGs which took up a lot of space. I had to use Darktable, the open source alternative to Lightroom, to convert all these images (a couple thousand) into JPEGs. I installed Lightshot, a screenshotting tool. I set up a hotkey so now my screenshots are saved to a folder as JPEGs so that works well.

Its hard to explain just go watch it. Top 3 of the year. I did try to watch The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover   but around 4 minutes in the nudity and atmosphere was too much for my tastes and in disgust, I deleted the film from my computer. I'm supposed to be watching Spiritual Voices but its 4 hours long and I don't want to but I'm done with schoolwork and have nothing better to do.

A lot of people miss Group B rallying. The 80s era of rallying when the WRC was dominated by the FIA's Group B class. This allowed manufacturers to go wild, no longer held back by homologation or perfomace limits. The popular phrase "0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds on gravel" is used to express just how powerful these cars were. The Lancia Delta S4's engine was able to produce 1000hp during some tests. These are F1 levels of power on a hatchback blazing through country roads. However nostlagia for Group B is mostly expressed by people around my age who weren't alive during this era of rallying. The cars were simply too fast and dangerous. Mechanics would find severed fingers inside the intake from crowds trying to touch passing cars . The drivers' reaction times were tested having to do their best to avoid crowds (especially during the Rallye du Portuglal). Peugeot 205 performing a Scandinavian flick.

A post on Group A and Group B rallying will be up by the end of the week. I still have coursework to do.   Lancia. The most successful marque in rallying history.   Unfortunately a lot of the content from early Group A rallies aren't in English.

I always knew there was a connection between trap music and illegal night time racing. Built a whole playlist around it.      I recently discovered PINKFLAMINGO a group that goes around documenting various car communities around the US. These communities are located in areas known for trap music (Altanta, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles) with even rapper Lil Yachty and his Ferrari featuring in one of their documentary films.  The culture of Japanese illegal street racing is being kept alive in the US. Just search "Atlanta street racing" newsclips on YouTube. A culture that declined in 1999 after Tokyo police started to crackdown on it. All that's left now are VHS tapes that circulate on obscure Japanese blogs and forums half of which are on blogs.yahoo.co.jp, a service that no longer exists. With their editing, wide angle lenses and 4:3 aspect ratio, the anonymous PINKFLAMINGO manages to capture this revived subculture perfectly. Fireworks and Donuts...

A favourite from this week was The Conformist (1970) also photographed by Vittorio Storaro. A movie about Clerici, a man in 1930s Fascist Italy with a desire to conform, to live a 'normal' life. Without going into too much detail, I believe that the message of the film is that all fascists are closeted homosexuals struggling with their sexuality Clerici grew up in an affluent household and was molested by his driver. In the final part of the film, after the fall of Mussolini, it ends with appears to be Clerici finally accepting who he is. The ending is open to interpretation. When it came to cinematography 2 things stood out. The first was the aspect ratio. 1.67:1 (or 5:3). A very strange choice. I would normally expect a 4:3 or 1.85:1 anamorphic for a film like this but it works. The second is covered in the video above. While watching, the centre line stood out when it came to framing subjects. I added a 4x4 grid to help see how the composition was lined up. A si...

I recently started a Letterboxd account here . I watched Francis Ford Coppola's One from The Heart . I only watched it for the cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, who worked with Coppola on Apocalypse Now . The story was simple and very straightforward that turns into a musical halfway through. There are major themes but I don't feel like talking about them. The production design was amazing but there were moments where I could clearly see the edges of the sound stage. Otherwise a pretty interesting movie and I recommend it. Films like this will never be made anymore. Columbia Pictures.