I'd like to start off this journal entry by eulogizing the PhotoCam. Just—my entire saga with it has been a shitshow. I literally had a working one eat itself on Tuesday.
Let me list off all the attempts at getting a single working camera so far:
- The first one didn't power on and had a battery door that wouldn't stay closed.
- The second one was never shipped and eBay wound up refunding my purchase automatically.
- The third one was a Pretec DC-600, and its battery door won't stay closed, but at least it works? It takes pictures? But without a reliable means of transferring them off the camera (PhotoRec on the CF card usually does the trick, but sometimes shots are inexplicably not recovered despite existing on the camera), it's a crapshoot if I can retrieve what I took.
- The fourth one, another PhotoCam, finally powers on and has a good battery door! Then I formatted the memory. And it failed the format. And now the camera reads actual corrupted data in trying to retrieve photos, save photos, or even just get the amount of shots left in the roll. Sometimes, it fails to even survive the boot.
At this point, I'm just convinced I'm not supposed to have one of these, and that's okay. I finally got to see what kinda pictures it took, roughly (the Pretec and the PhotoCam Plus do not take exactly identical shots, the PhotoCam definitely has a better sensor with much better indoor capabilities). I suppose if I had a microsoldering setup, I could try to open up the first camera and transfer its flash memory chips to the fourth camera. I'll probably have something like that someday, so I'm keeping it all in the same box and waiting until then. Not like I can break either of them further.
If I do want a retro camera (and believe me, I still do), I think I'm better off aiming for something slightly newer. Something natively USB, something a little less odd and esoteric. It's not gonna be as ~aesthetic~, but oh well. Honestly, just as cameras, the Canon Powershot series has always appealed to me. I now have the S30 on my radar, especially since it can do manual white balance and RAWs, which is mind-blowing to me in a point-and-shoot. (And apparently it can take 640x480, in case I still want to LARP. Obviously, it has a much better sensor, so it'll still look nicer than the PhotoCam, but hey.)
In much more productive news, I've been writing again. I don't know if I've ever addressed this publicly, but Pokémon has been on my mind again, back when I used to write fanfic for it in 2015 or so. Some of my first (not so great) moments with being creative came from my work on, and the reaction from friends to, Pokémon fanfic. It was all a little bit unfortunate. Being creative is hard and emotionally taxing enough without someone blatantly only being interested in your characters if they can get their drowning kink from it. Definitely not the nicest way to dive into writing and characters at a young age.
I've been wanting to do a fic that's sort of a gigantic tribute to my old characters, me as a teenager, and the music I liked back then for a few weeks now, and I wrote 1,500 words, the entire first chapter, over a few hours into yesterday morning. It was easily the most automatic and least effortful writing I've ever done. The shame of ~writing fanfic~ is well past me, and I can't be happier about it. The lads all loved it too. I'm getting to bring back some of my oldest characters, Woopers and Minuns and Totodiles, and finally do them justice in a way I wasn't quite able to do almost a decade ago.
At the moment, I don't really have a great place to share it. mari.somnol really needs that redesign before I can start getting art and writing back on there, and I'd need art before I can submit the lads to toyhou.se (oh yeah, that's something else I gotta do more of...). Maybe I'll try for an invite to AO3. I've always thought it's a good looking site, even if I still can't navigate it for shit. Mostly, I'm looking to write it and put it in Somnol. The rest of the internet can read it or not. If Somnol likes it, I'm happy.
