I had been experimenting with a Van Dyke and I would soon be shaving it off, so I took a few self-portraits with the facial hair. First a straight-forward one:

Then I couldn’t decide between a high key (which I rarely do) or a straight-forward black and white, so here are both:

Going back to where I was before posting Halloween costume photos, a baseball game I went to as part of Dan’s wedding festivities. Got some good shots relative to my usual luck. Had to push things a bit to be able to get the shutter speed I needed so the ISO’s a bit higher than I would have preferred.

Jumping forward (I’m still generally working on photos from August because I’ve fallen behind with other responsibilities and playing some video games for Extra Life), we get to Halloween photos. Once again these awesome costumes were sewn by my mother-in-law.

I used to hate Hunger Games because I considered it to be yet another example of America getting credit, fame, etc from another culture’s work; Battle Royale in this case. Eventually, I got the Hunger Games Trilogy from a Humble Bundle and read it, realizing that while the plots were the same in the abstract (kids are sent to an Island to kill each other in a dystopian future) they were different in the messages they were communicating to two different cultures. In the case of Battle Royale it was a response to a growing distrust of the younger generation that led to a novel in which the youngsters are sent to compete both to sow seeds of mistrust, but also as a punishment. In Hunger Games it’s less about being able to mistrust your best friends and more about mistrusting people from other states (or districts in the parlance of the book). That youth are used is more a function of entertainment value (kids at or near their physical peak) and the first book is almost more of a satire of reality TV with a lot more of the typical YA dystopian tropes coming in the second and third entries in the series.