Vintage Photo Extravaganza

I recently posted an article about smartphone apps like Hipstamatic and Instragram, and how they're ruining the originality of photography. I'm about to be spectacularly hypocritical and backtrack over a great deal of what I said. There's a caveat, though. All of the pictures I'm about to post are original, and deliberately edited. I have a huge collection of photographs. I take photos of crap constantly. I have a lot of photos that I like, but I just don't like enough to do anything with. Photos of things, photos of places, photos of the sky. Lots of photos of, just, stuff, really. On their own, none of them stand up to scrutiny. I've posted a few on DeviantART, and some of them have been successfully received. Balanced Barbs, Probably Unsafe and No Sense of Time are a few examples of images that aren't widely hated. Generally, if I post these pictures, they sink to the bottom of the pile, and I eventually delete them because they just end up as clutter.

I'm going to shamelessly self-indulge, now, and post a shit-ton of them all at once. They kind of function as a collection. Put them all together and they get a weird nostalgic feel to them, with their cross-processed filters and Hipstamatic flavour.

So, without further ado, here's a LOT of little pictures. Click "Read more" to, uh, read more. Although I suppose it's more looking at pictures than reading. Click on the images to embiggen. Enjoy!

The Haunted Calculator

Every morning, for the past few months, I've needed to use a calculator. The calculator in question is a vintage early-1980s model Sanyo CX 2630 solar powered beast. You can read about its awesome functions at these two extremely nerdy websites: calculator.org and mycalcdb. It has all the functions you'd expect of a calculator, not the least of which is that being solar powered, it hasn't required new batteries since the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Under the Bridge. As an aside, it delights me to no end that there are websites dedicated to the minutiae of vintage calculators. The internet is a haven for anoraks. This particular calculator has issues, though. It adds just fine. Subtracts perfectly. It even handles multiplication and division with aplomb. While I haven't needed to use the function, I have the utmost confidence in its ability to calculate a square root and store the results in its memory. The thing that worries me about this calculator is

THE FREAKING THING IS HAUNTED.

Tucked away in a dark drawer, devoid of fluorescent "solar" power, its twenty year old batteries fail, and it loses its mind. Grasping at the last vestiges of its consciousness, it types a garbled message, leaving it on the screen for me to wonder about the next morning.

I've kept a log. Every time it's left me a message, I've recorded it. The original purpose of this project was simply to see if it was ever the same. Was the message similar, day in and day out? Was it just random crap? (Hint: probably!) Was there a hidden logic?

I'll let you decide. Big gallery to follow, with commentary. Hit the jump.