Leaving Los Angeles

Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Well, I guess this is more or less the end of the line. Everything that you heard is true. The channel is dead and I'm gonna start looksmaxing content. Monica Baxter and I are moving. We are departing the city of Los Angeles to head towards greener pastures because just about anywhere is greener than LA. We've been down here for over a decade. We were originally transplants like most people are in this city. Monica from the East Coast and me from the s**t part of Napa's wine country. We came to LA for school and, you know, when we flunked out, we transitioned into the moviemaking biz for a while, which kept us locked into LA as one of the few places in the country where we could actually live and do our careers. Things have certainly changed a lot since then. I am no longer a visual effects compositor who works for five months on a huge movie for no credit. And even Monica has pursued animation quite aggressively, which landed her a new gig up in Northern California. Hence the big move. That and I guess the homicide rate in Burbank was spiking. So it was time to go. Do yourself a favor. Don't sign up for the Nextdoor app. Ting, are we moving? All right, what's up? I'm packing it all up. Year's worth of stuff. Everything's going in boxes. Today's Monday. We officially move on Sunday. I'm looking forward to it. It's just we've got a lot to do. All my cameras are going with me. Don't worry. They're not going with the movers. I'm sure everything's fine, but I'm not gonna risk it. It's great because the YouTube channel was born in this office. You know, I started doing it in this office all those years ago. Things are gonna look a little different. Better, hopefully. I'm getting a bigger office. Anyway, most of my days at the time were simply just packing up boxes, getting ready for the movers. That doesn't mean I didn't take a moment to try and connect with my son. So that's a pretty good reel too. This one's my favorite. It's important to be a father sometimes, even if they're ungrateful. Try to connect with them. But before I'm locked out of the gate for good, I wanted to put one last roll through my Mamiya 7 of my apartment complex because for some reason it's painted Nickelodeon orange. So the only problem is right now, I don't have any Ektachrome. I shot all of it the other week in Colorado. All right. Hi, I was just calling to ask if you have any Ektachrome in 120 available. So I guess my line of thinking was pretty much, you know, this high C-ass building color contrasts quite well against blue sky. I thought maybe it'd be a classy pairing for the Mamiya 7 and some Ektachrome with a warming filter just to make those orange tones pop a little more than usual. I mean, I don't know. I've shot this damn building a thousand times over the years and can never seem to get it quite right until now, at least. I don't know what kind of toxic fumes I was huffing on the job site here, but I actually do kind of like these. I think in the past, my distaste for images of this apartment came from familiarity. So I struggled with never really breaking that imaginary wall, separating photographic objectivity from something so personal and subjective to me. He's a very tired boy. So am I. We have the going away party tonight at Golden Road. So hope to see you there. Hope you're not wearing the same thing so we don't clash. I've been quite busy packing all day. Very tired. Very exhausted. Not even close to done. I'm going to finish packing, moving stuff for eight hours tomorrow and then hop in the Phantom and drive six hours. I've been calling the Lexus, the LS400, the Phantom because it's all black and it's got blacked out windows. A lot of my friends like to say it looks like a 1990s drug dealer car. I need to find a better storage solution for the cameras. So I think the day after tomorrow we'll go to Ace Hardware or something and pick up a toolbox maybe. Tomorrow's the big day. A lot of mixed feelings about it. Don't have to deal with a hole in the ceiling anymore that looks like a wiener. Moving day came and went super quick as a bunch of people much stronger and better looking than me hauled everything out of our orange stucco rat hole and I spent the afternoon doing an oil change to spec. Torquing the oil filter to 75 foot pounds like the guy online said to do. All right, just said bye to a bunch of people. Very sad. People I've known for a long time and it's time to hit the road. I have the entire car pretty much packed up right now. It doesn't look like it on camera but it is pretty much filled to the brim. All right, five and a half hours to the Bay Area. Let's do it. It'll stop doing that in a second. Hitting the road and leaving this city that I spent the past 15 or so years in felt some sort of way. I couldn't really put it to words so I thought instead I'd read the timeless words of Robert Frost trekking through a snowy forest. F*** that s*** player, I'm out of here. I like LA, mostly because of the food though and not really so much because there's traffic out the ass literally f***ing everywhere at all times of day. But you know, it was never the place I wanted to live the rest of my life and I was definitely looking for an excuse to leave for many, many years. Though I was a little apprehensive at first because they do say 90% of people die within 100 miles of where they grew up so I'm not exactly thrilled that it looks like I'll be contributing to that statistic. All right, here in beautiful, exotic Coalinga, California. It's a s*** hole. It's not that bad actually. I've broken down here before, about halfway now. I think Monica and her dad just wrapped up with the movers so they're gonna get in a car with Baxter and also do the exact same drive. Let's get out of here. Let's go to my new apartment at night with probably no lights. Anyway, I made it up to the bay pretty quick because you know, it's a V8. Okay, made it to the new apartment. There's nothing here but there are lights at least so that's good. Check this out. We got a new bed, a purple bed actually. We splurged and I'm very excited to lay on it because it is very comfortable but I have half a billion things I have to bring in from the car first. This is the kitchen. It's not very big but Monica's already moved some stuff in. Monica and her dad arrived later at around 2am, no problem and brought the star of the show himself along with him and yeah, he instantly made himself comfortable on our expensive ass purple mattress like he owns the place. Furniture comes in tomorrow. I still found some time to get some work done though so we're all good. In the meantime, I headed over to Home Depot not only to take a sh** but also pick up a new camera storage system with important starboard attachments. Once assembled, I started populating it with my tools aka my cameras and lenses that I have too many of. I decided to go with a tool chest for several reasons you know, other than it's what everyone on Reddit does. You're not supposed to see that one yet. The first casualty of the move. Being in drawers, the gear itself won't get dusty. It isn't really on display which won't activate my gas but also keeps the, I guess, the clutter hidden and the tool chest will lock for whenever I'm out of town which makes me feel a lot better. Yeah, don't worry. I did eventually find all the body caps for these cameras. I'm not just raw dogging these sensors to the environment. 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The new apartment was now full of a bunch of our crap and we probably need to spend the next six or so years digging through it. I was assigned to start putting together the office space which I interpreted as get drunk and play with power tools. Okay, so this is the guest room. It kind of looks like a little bit because we've had a few guests stay with us already. I think basically the idea is to clear all this crap out and then put a huge mural of something up on this wall. And I think I have just the shot for it but it's an old photo on eight by 10. It definitely needs to be re-scanned. I decided to go with a classic from an old ass video you've probably never watched but it's one of my personal favorites. An eight by 10 image that I shot on HP5, I believe. I wanted to do a 30 by 40 inch size print which is pretty massive, but luckily eight by 10 has more than enough resolution to talk all the ---- at once about smaller formats. I scanned it on my trusty Hasselblad X2D version one five separate frames at a hundred megapixels each. Stitch together and made for quite a high resolution scan. The final image I submitted to print was 17,780 by 13,335. And at a hundred percent we were just starting to see some grain but I'd have to wait a few days for the prints to come in. Additionally, that ultra high resolution scan must've been such a sweaty and drippy banger that my computer decided it was tired of all this ---- and didn't want to work anymore. Which yeah, I totally feel that but not right now because it kind of fucks me. All right, so first real hiccup in the road. My main PC is not booting. I don't know what the issue is. Ordered a new power supply unit. I think that's the problem. Let's unwrap it, install it and hope for the best. Nothing. So here's the deal. The problem wasn't power supply unit. Did some more testing with some crazy wiring. Basically narrowed it down to it's the motherboard ---- itself and died. And I looked it up and that motherboard is not even a year old. So something must've happened to it. Whatever, got to order another one and take it all apart and then replace it. **** you. Fucked up computer. Cool like a sign though. Anyway, yeah, the office is mostly set up. I'd say the apartment's like 40, maybe even 50% done. I'll show you guys here in a sec. Tomorrow I'm catching a 7 a.m. flight down to Burbank so that I can drop off the keys to the old apartment and then hop on the bike and ride it all the way up here. It's gonna be a long day, but at least Tim is free and he's gonna come with me and spend a night here. Maybe two nights. We'll see. Thankfully this room is pretty much done. The living room. It's looking pretty good, I think. Yeah. I also successfully cooked my first meal in the new apartment. Don't be too impressed. It was just a chicken quesadilla, but you know, one thing at a time. I'm not gonna be baking baked Alaska first things first. Whatever, and possibly one of the longest days of my life. That's right, longer than the time I fell asleep in the Home Depot bathroom and got locked in there overnight. I still had one more important and totally awesome thing to do. Move my motorcycle up north. All right, see you in 14 hours. All right, well, just landed here in Burbank. There's the old stomping grounds. And it's a bit of a weird feeling coming back to an apartment that's completely gutted. This place is dirty. I mean, we've lived here for 10 or so years, so it's kind of to be expected. Um, but yeah, this is probably the last time I'll ever be in this apartment. Bittersweet. You guys want to see the office? What's left of it, anyway. Here's my tiny ass weirdly shaped office. This is where I used to record The Talking Heads. I'd put the camera right here and just point it this way. All right, good to gooch. Leaving LA a second time felt even stranger. But I knew this time it was a bit more permanent. I don't know, it's just a weird feeling, I guess. Weird in the same sense that I noticed no motion detection lights ever seem to see me. But I'll unpack that some other time. So I hopped on my perfectly tuned Honda 1100. And I was off to the great state of California, of which I was already in. We took the 5 North, which is such ass, dude. Amongst the cow yards and cherry farms, the weather was as good as it can be out there. And at least the gas prices were pretty reasonable. But whatever. We made good time and didn't fall asleep on the road, despite the 5 North being kind of just a straight line. But a warm and welcoming feeling washed over me once we finally turned on 580. I'm officially home and in the land that I once hailed from. So, go ahead. Bump the MACDRE 40 and nicotine a yadda da meen do. That night to celebrate, we decided to see what this viral buzz ball movement that's sweeping the nation is all about. Next morning, rocking the first official hangover of the new apartment, my prince had come in. Photo prince, not like prince from a fairy tale. Ain't nothing magical about moving all your ---- 400 miles, let me tell you. Once that was done and I realized the next day that the buzz ball gave me the legendary two-day hangover, I was reminded that my motherboard was still a total piece of ----. You're literally rock and metal with electricity shooting through you. You have no reason to break. Well, the new motherboard arrived. We're going to install it and hope that everything is fine. It seems like everything's been breaking on me lately. My car was having issues. My bike was having issues. Now my computer. I'm having issues. Let's get the motherboard out and boot it up and just see what happens, I guess. Okay, the final step. The GPU is going in and then we test it on a monitor and hope that it boots the first time, which it almost never does. It's happened to me once though and it's one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. Okay, the moment of truth. What we've all been waiting for, the deciding factor. If it doesn't work, no video this week. Let's give it some juice. This isn't the last of LA that I'll ever see. I still have plenty of friends here and plenty of reasons to visit. A 45-minute flight is nothing. It's a cakewalk. It takes me longer to start pissing. Anyway, to close this thing out, I wanted to say that we're both pretty excited to not only be closer to family but, you know, closer to a lot of the friends that I grew up with since I was a youth. It's a new chapter in our lives and we're still getting settled. And best of all, Baxter has more room to run around in even though he sleeps 25 hours a day and the only time I've seen him run is to his food bowl. So yeah, I made this whole ass video just to tell you, you won't be seeing any of this anymore. This background in this tiny heat dungeon of an office. But, you know, I suppose someday I'll probably miss it all.