One time, driving back on the highway with some friends, the mid afternoon sky suddenly turned purple for a couple seconds. We all saw it.

I’ve never been able to find any explanation of what happened. Closest I’ve got is maybe a transformer exploded, but it didn’t make the news or anything.

12ft had a few months of being great, but I think they ended up selling out or giving in to legal pressure, and doesn’t do anything on several major news outlets anymore

I’ve been extremely happy with the Nikkor 200-500 5.6, especially with a 1.4x teleconvertor. I see the lens on mpb.com for around $900 if you can stretch that much.

That lens is just barely hand holdable, but I’d go ahead and grab a monopod (I have the Benro MSD46C SupaDupa, and it’s great but I’m not 100% in love with it, I’d see what’s good on the market this year if I were you) and the Wimberly MH-100 gimbal head. Smallest/lightest/cheapest gimbal head ever, but absolutely capable in every way. This combo works shockingly well for me in almost all circumstances tbh, haven’t felt a real need to upgrade it in any way yet.

blackout.photon-reddit.com seems to be down for me. Any idea what’s up with that, or other places that are visualizing traffic?

This website seems to be down for me right now, dunno where else we can see comments and posts numbers. All the other blackout trackers seem to just be tracking #subreddits

I could be wrong, but my understanding from Backblaze data/articles is that if your HDD made it past 1 year, it’s probably going to last at least a decade. Drives tend to fail early if they’re going to fail.

A warranty warning is fine, though still more obtrusive than I want personally. I haven’t lost a disc at all yet tbh, including well over a decade of pretty hard use one several. I’ve got local parity and cloud backups for when that inevitably changes though.