MPJ

History of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge who among others were the first to take several images per second in one effort - all in scientific purpose back then - to study locomotion of birds, animals and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first who took series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less in the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun shaped camera capable with one trigger pull to capture 12 images in a row within one single second and store them all on the single 90mm film. He used his gun to study various motion of animals, fish and insects within his so called 'animated zoo', including dropped cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet. ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera It was not long after initia...

I do have regrets. Everybody does. One is that I was born before the Internet and possibility to be worldwide and online when I was young. To be able to expand my own neighborhood outside the front yard fence. Well, on second thought, that is not entirely true - sometimes I feel the opposite and there is no real regret. Childhood without networking and computers was not that bad at all. As it seems, the word 'outdoor' for me and my son today has almost completely different meaning. Without the almighty Internet, and it is not too hard to imagine - boredom in my time was easily experienced indoors and to break it fully you would have to go outside. It was as simple as that. But without this habit of mine, blogging to be exact, I think I lost many things from my childhood as well. Tangible things. Like all of my еssay exams from the school. I lost all of them. It's not that they were that good or something. Just, if I had Internet back then I would most likely wrote some ...

Do you like stories or movies with dystopian premise in the background? I do. It's simple. They feel extremely real and believable and reflect the very possible future of nowadays societies throughout the world. In some of those worldwide cultures this is reality now. Just check the news feed from the middle east or glimpse couple of images from devastated cities ruled by unknown people with covered faces and guns in their arms and you will understand what I am trying to say. Anyway, generally and even though I maintain post-apocalyptic thread on the blog, I don't really like all those stories with zombies or vampires or pandemic virus strains capable of turning the entire human race into horror. They don't seem plausible to me for many reasons I tried to explain before*. However, believable dystopia is another thing entirely and the story that perfectly represents it on multiple levels is Dan Haight's "Pac Fish" series with first book I recently read, called...

The year was 1975 when I was browsing small dusty workshop located next to the garage within our house backyard. It was perfect combination, I was about to turn 7 years old, eager to explore the darkest corner of my childhood realm and the dark workshop was the most mysterious chamber in our entire family estate, no bigger than four cubic meters occupied with heavy and old greenish oak cabinet with couple of drawers and compartments filled with tons of different tools, mechanical devices and various interesting stuff I didn't know their origin and purpose. It was, more or less, the year when I started to break things in order to find out what was inside or to find how something works, foolishly believing that I would be perfectly able to put things together back. Well, from this point of view in time, I can't remember if there was at least one mechanical device I "inspected" in such manner that I successfully restored after unscrewing all the bolts and junctures...

Long ago I started to experience that one extremely memorable dream. One of those that doesn't fade out with first morning sunshine. Instead, it was regularly popping the surface of my mind making me wondering if these vivid images, haunting me every now and again, were just product of my imagination or perhaps there was something more hidden beneath. In the dream I wander the narrow streets of an unknown city one after another and after a while I stumble to the big square with large monumental building decorated with dark reddish bricks with no signs or any familiar markings I can recognize. I was always wondering where all these colorful images originated from and somehow always had that feeling that I am probably missing an important link to fully understand the whole picture. Recently this final link suddenly appeared and during our vacation last week I accidentally found my dream site and all missing pieces finally placed together forming a memory almost 40 years old. Someh...