The Vent and Rant Thread

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by issybird

That's objectively wrong. These are assaults on your palate; a hollowed out berry with a candle in it doesn't compare.

A glass of a light-bodied Grenache is perfect for grilled swordfish or tuna.

Canned pineapple on pepperoni pizza maybe awful, but a few slivers of barely ripe pineapple adds an unexpected 'zing' to a vegetarian pizza.

Originally Posted by issybird

No one here eats decorative pumpkins; they're nasty. Canned pumpkin for eating.

Canned pumpkin - didn't know such a thing existed.

[Renate]

I'm ranting on the tyranny of pepperoni pizza.
If you're buying the frozen "slice of pizza/slice of cardboard" pizzas 70% of the stock has pepperoni.
The other 30% is "meat lovers" pizza with 12 kinds of road kill.
Pineapple on pizza is a fine taste direction if you like it.

[Rumpelteazer]

It seems no good deed goes unpunished.

Last month my uncle died and at the funeral his late wife's family gave my mother a photo book of her family and a small stack of loose pictures. Last Sunday I took those home with my to digitize them so that everyone can have them. Scanning with my flatbed scanner isn't really an option because it's a thick photo book. So I've been using the Google Photoscan app on my phone. And honestly, the photos come out better than when I would scan them (colour wise especially). They're not perfect, some have a bit of glare and some I manually have to set the corners of the photos, but it's giving pretty good results. I plan on copying all the pictures to USB sticks for my parents, aunt and uncle and my cousin to give to them when we go visit later this month.

The photos range from the 1920s up until the early 1980s. A lot of photos of football (soccer) teams, church groups and friend groups, also a lot of them taken at social gatherings. And a bunch of professional/formal pictures. There's no real rhyme or reason how they're stuck in book. I think my grandmother just had a shoe box of pictures and each page grabbed one and then found other pictures that went well together. Most of them are black and white and a part of them are colour but have a yellow/orange cast over them.

I'm hoping to finish today but yesterday I shared the Google Photo album with my parents and sister and that's when trouble started. My father believes what he sees on TV and thinks I should magically be able to sharpen/edit/colour correct the pictures with one click. Sure Google Photos has suggested some improvements for part of the black and white pictures; make the white whiter, the darks darker and sharpen it. But to me it makes the images look unnatural and removes all the character from it. And most of them are a bit blurry, they're old snapshots. I tried a couple of things to colour correct the oranged photos without success.

I also don't want to edit them and provide the originals to everyone so they can decide what to do with them. If my father wants professional results he can go to a professional. Be glad I'm willing to spend hours digitizing them, because the rest of the family sure doesn't know how to do that or cares to do it.

It is nice to see all those photos. The sport/religious/friend groups doesn't mean much to me, although I think I have been able to pick out my grandfather in some of them, who died when I was 5. But having my grandparents' wedding pictures is really nice and I think in some of the photos of gatherings are my great grandparents (both sides).

[Renate]

Here's a tip:

You don't have to write the names of the people on the back of a photo because obviously everyone knows who all these people were and what the occasion was.

SMH

[nana77]

@Rumpelteazer: if you want to give it a try, for your own collection, https://rawtherapee.com/ is a nice set of tools (it can modify more pics together, also); https://www.kornelix.net/fotocx/fotocx.html instead is nice but only for GNU/Linux distros.

A little rant about "Picasa", that was a nice program forsaken by Google.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

It is nice to see all those photos. The sport/religious/friend groups doesn't mean much to me, although I think I have been able to pick out my grandfather in some of them, who died when I was 5. But having my grandparents' wedding pictures is really nice and I think in some of the photos of gatherings are my great grandparents (both sides).

You should ask your parents (& any other older relatives) to identify people in the photos for you. This is something that is much harder/impossible to do later.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by issybird

We're a nation of immigrants; we borrow, we adapt. And if the olde country doesn't like it, they don't have to follow suit.

<rant>
Ah, but the big companies and US created media is foisting it on us in Ireland. I've no objection to Americans doing these things in the USA. It should not be foisted as the normal for the rest of the world, especially in the places that created the traditions.
</rant>

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by Renate

Here's a tip:

You don't have to write the names of the people on the back of a photo because obviously everyone knows who all these people were and what the occasion was.

SMH

Especially the football teams, one of which is from 1924. I suspect that has my 13 year old grandfather in it somewhere. The church group photos are with my adult grandfather, but I doubt my mother or aunt know the other people in those photographs are.

Originally Posted by nana77

@Rumpelteazer: if you want to give it a try, for your own collection, https://rawtherapee.com/ is a nice set of tools (it can modify more pics together, also); https://www.kornelix.net/fotocx/fotocx.html instead is nice but only for GNU/Linux distros.

A little rant about "Picasa", that was a nice program forsaken by Google.

Thanks, I'll have a look after I get back from vacation. For now everyone has to deal with the unedited scans.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

You should ask your parents (& any other older relatives) to identify people in the photos for you. This is something that is much harder/impossible to do later.

We're going to visit my aunt and uncle later this month and my cousin and her husband will be there, too. So, let's see if I can get some names from them.

The envelope with the loose pictures also contained my grandparents' birth certificates in it, my grandparents' "family book" (where they're marriage was registered and the births of their children were also registered) and the certificate for my grandfather's knighthood. So I scanned those, too.

I'm now ordering USB sticks so I can get everyone their own copy.

[Quoth]

One of my Great Aunts is notable by the fact that she, herself, raided everyone's photo albums and cut out her head from all of them.

No-one knows why, or if they did, they never said. Mostly only my generation of the families is alive now. There may be two much younger cousins of my mum alive. I met one for the first time since early 1960s only a couple of years ago.