Concerts are certainly a funny bit of entertainment. When you go see a movie, you are going because you like the director or the actors or the idea sounded interesting. You see that movie and that’s the end of it. The same holds true for Broadway shows or Operas. But when you attended a concert, you have a few opening acts you probably don’t know. This is somewhat alleviated nowadays for the well prepared by a quick trip to Spotify or Youtube. After finally seeing The Protomen during last year’s Warped Tour, I was excited about seeing them in concert. My ticket informed me that I’d also be seeing Cowabunga Pizza Time and Lionize. Of course, the difference between concerts and other forms of entertainment is no accident. Opening bands are limpets on the bodies of larger acts, hoping to gain exposure to the fans of the main act. This works best when the organizer has paired up bands that work well together thematically. But, this is the obvious reason why you never know the time the main act is going on stage.

When I was growing up, I used to draw comics all the time. So when I heard about web comics I thought it was natural to create one of my own. Dan and I worked on I’m Not Mad for a few years, but it eventually fell off due to limitations in my ability to create female characters in Blender. When I got my drawing tablet (a Monoprice), I thought I might get back into it. But I have come to terms with the fact that I will never have the time commitment to get back into it. I will fulfill my desire to create by photography and blog posts. I’ve always been loathe to let go of URLs and taking stuff off the net, but we have The Wayback Machine. You can see I’m Not Mad at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.notmadcomic.com

Back when I was looking into doing all my photography on Linux I saw that whenever I would add a tag to a bunch of photos that it would crash Digikam. I filed a bug and was told it was a problem with Baloo that would be fixed in Digikam 5. I wanted my photos to have metadata that would be indexed in Dolphin and Baloo search, so I tried to deal with it as I moved to doing all my photography on Linux. But after it kept crashing as I worked on my July photos, I had enough. I turned off Digikam and Baloo integration and am no longer having crashes. Here’s what it needs to look like in the settings if you’d like to do this too:

One of the best parts of three year olds is their willingness to help. I will show this video to Scarlett when she denies ever being enthusiastic about helping us. She even dragged a stool over to be tall enough.

Scarlett had been obsessed with Mickey and the Beanstalk so I HAD to snap the photo that heads up this post. But there were also some interesting things going on at PDX as I made my way home:

The day after the wedding we headed out to Mount Hood. While I learned how to ski at the Sugar Mountains in North Carolina, I did most of my skiing at Mount Hood when we lived there. When we first moved up we went to Mt Hood in August and there was some snow there. This was a much hotter year, so you had to go to the top of The Magic Mile to get some snow. I actually heard some people complaining about the quality of the snow….in July…..

Besides crazy bees that literally stole some of my beef, it was a pretty beautiful wedding. Here are my favorite shots:

One thing’s certain, I still can’t believe my little brother is married. The youngest of the first trio - I still find it weird to say he has a wife.

Just a couple photos and a video of the day before the wedding:

[video width=“1920” height=“1080” mp4="/images/2015/09/VID_20150704_220049.mp4"][/video]

Here’s a letter Governor Jerry Brown sent to Ben Carson when he said that climate change was irrelevant:

Dear Dr. Carson,

I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to the Golden State. It’s come to my attention that while you were here you said the following regarding climate science:

“I know there are a lot of people who say ‘overwhelming science,’ but then when you ask them to show the overwhelming evidence, they never show it…There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused. Gimmie a break.”