'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

It's been too long since I was last in Brighton - probably last time I was here was for Christmas shopping last year. Unusually it's actually sunny! Most years it's been very wet and windy, but today it was merely windy (and less so than past years).

Really I'm here for Christmas shopping (the Lanes and the North Laines are usually excellent for unusual gifts), but I can't visit Brighton without heading to the beach. Oh, I live on the coast these days, but Brighton beach is different (for starters, Fareham doesn't have a beach!).


( Photos! )


I didn't stay for Burning the Clocks - it was starting to rain, and I didn't fancy hanging around in the cold and wet waiting for it. Perhaps another year!

For several years now I've tended to head to Brighton for my Christmas shopping - the Lanes and North Laines are full of so many quirky shops that are excellent for silly presents - and this year was no exception. For a change I drove down (to avoid having to rely on Southern Rail, or Southern Fail as they are known as these days), and it was actually a fairly straightforward drive. I even managed to park in Churchill Square with no problems.

I ended up meeting talismancer in town for lunch, followed by investigating various random shops in search of presents before he had to head off elsewhere. It's interesting to see all the changes in the shops - some old favourites are still there and have even expanded (Daydream Nation has moved from being well-hidden at the top of a clothing store to less well-hidden and taking over half the shop), some have evaporated (there used to be a good model shop near Churchill Square), and others are ticking over quite nicely (Dave's Comics and Dave's Books are exactly where they were in my university days). Anyway, I found a few presents for different people, and even one for myself - a small painting/print of West Pier caught my eye in a art shop that I've walked past several times, so I entered to discover a veritable Aladdin's Cave of random artwork. I swear extradimensional space is involved.

After shopping I trundled across to Sussex Uni for my traditional annual SWARM visit, where I hardly recognised anyone. It does look like less and less of the old SWARMites are turning up, though there's a few people I did remember from other visits and I ended up playing a couple of games (though not Magic, oddly enough). First up was Race for the Galaxy which I was managing a reasonable showing at until Kat stormed ahead to victory, followed by a new one for me: Machi Koro. This is an interesting construction game where actions can happen on anyone's turn - each player takes it in turn to be the active player and roll some dice, but depending on the resulting number and what other players have built it could be their opponents that benefit. Kat after a slow build once again stormed to victory (I'm beginning to spot a theme here...), but I'm happy as at least one long-shot strategy of mine paid off (a Tech Center with a ludicrous amount of tokens stashed on it, which I activated once and got nearly 30 coins out of).

Cross-posted to deviantArt


Scanning the last negative (Red 0787) I was struck by how I'd happened to take two photos of the same subject with almost exactly the same framing on two very different days. A bit of experimentation with Corel later and here's the result: winter fading into spring.

Other than resizing one photo to line up on the other (more or less - the two were taken at different angles and so an exact match isn't practical) and applying an alpha blend, these photos are straight off the film scanner, film grain and all.

Random film time! Today's mystery film is... Blue 1626! Another one from late in my university days. One evening pleaseremove was round, and we (along with most of the house) spontaneously decided to drive to Beachy Head to watch the sunset. I posted a couple of digital photos back in 2007, but I also took the Nikon F-301 with me.

The film is another rebranded Fujicolor 200 (I probably bought a bag of the stuff from Boots) so I'm trying the same settings as last time.

As a random aside, the back of the film has been gunked with something or other, which Boots presumably didn't notice when developing it as the marks are visible in their prints. Since it was the base side rather than the emulsion I attacked it (very gently!) with a few drops of isopropyl-alcohol-containing lens cleaner which quite happily dissolved the gunk. Infra-red cleaning took care of the rest. Result!

( Photos! )