inkyxward reblogged
when he's tired, he puts himself to bed
inkyxward reblogged
Can I Sniff U
inkyxward reblogged
Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn't even know was there.
Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.
And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.
The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.
But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.
Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.
I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.
A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun's light by 99.2% and somehow our eyes adjusted to make it seem like a normal sunny day (with weird ass saturated colors).
Additional Observations
So, I woke up about 4 minutes before the eclipse. I was very unprepared to photograph it in the normal quality you'd expect from a photographer. However, I did capture some interesting details that I thought I'd share beyond the lack of polarized light.
First up... the shadows.
The shadows were very sharp. In photography there is this concept of light going from a spectrum of hard to soft. Hard light has very high contrast and sharp shadows. Soft light is more flattering and diffused with softer shadows.
To get hard light and sharp shadows you need a small "point" light source. A point light can either be very small or it can be very far away or a combination thereof.
In the studio you could use a bare bulb flash to get a point source.
Or you can attach a modifier like a softbox to create a large light source. The bigger, the softer.
The sun is massive, but it is also super duper far away. So it ends up being the smallest point light source available. However, the atmosphere can scatter and diffuse that light, essentially "enlarging" the light source.
To get perfect hard light shadows you need to go to... the moon.
But the eclipse blocked out about 99% of the sun and it reduced the amount of scattered light. And it greatly reduced the size of the light source causing some very defined sharp shadows.
But not *all* of the shadow was sharp. My left shoulder is very defined but my right shoulder is a bit fuzzy.
You can see it on my fingers too.
Sharp on one side, soft on the other.
This is essentially because the sun has been split into two different light sources in two different directions.
In one direction you have a larger light source causing softer shadows.
And in the other direction you have a smaller light source causing sharper shadows.
In photography we have these strip softboxes that we usually place behind a subject to create an edge light.
Only a narrow, small band of light is hitting the body. If we were to use a strip box to light a face, it would be a small light source creating sharp shadows.
But one trick we can do is to turn the strip light horizontal.
Now the light source hitting the face is large as it wraps around the head.
So a long and narrow light source is essentially large and small simultaneously. And depending on the direction the light is coming from it is either hard or soft light.
Destin from Smarter Every Day explained this phenomenon briefly in his eclipse video.
I also think this large and small light source phenomenon affected my lens flares when I photographed the sun.
In this photo it literally looks like I'm getting starburst flares from two light sources.
And in this photo the flares have a sharp bright edge as well as a dimmer more diffused area.
Normally these starburst flares (caused by light leaking through the metal aperture blades in the lens) have more homogenous tines without that feathering effect.
And then I noticed a different kind of flare in my photos—with all the colors of the rainbow.
And each band of color matched the crescent shape of my partial eclipse.
Like a camera obscura, these flares were in reverse orientation to the crescent sun. And while I wasn't able to get the sun in sharp focus, the purple section of the flare is very defined. I think that represents approximately how much of the sun was covered by the moon at my location—about 130 miles from totality.
I am a student of light. That is essentially what photography is. And I found this to be a fascinating lesson on how bonkers light can be. I was a little bummed I couldn't road trip to southern Missouri to see totality, but I am grateful to still have a cool eclipse experience.
inkyxward reblogged
Technophobes need to apologise for "just put it in plain English you stupid machine!" because, well for one the decline in accurate error messages in favour of simplicity has contributed to the rise of tech illiteracy, but also because now whenever an "app" has a net connection error it will pop up a box saying something like "oo ooopsie! Your super duper feed went poo poo. We'll try again soon!" which having said to me by a corporation is about 8 million times worse than having to hear the word "network".
To no one's surprise
This website is a self fulfilling prophecy of mild annoyances
inkyxward reblogged
throwback to the time that I tried making an rpg maker game but quickly ran out of ideas
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I became immensely more sympathetic to shonen anime and progression fantasy as genres once I realized that "getting stronger and stronger in evenly spaced intervals and using that strength to defeat harder and harder tasks, Forever" is the basic plot of formal schooling itself, as presented basically from kindergarten through at least undergraduate levels (and arguably a lot of graduate schooling as well) ... I still don't necessarily LIKE all of the genre works but "fantasy where the emotional processes of education make you a cool fantasy hero instead of a depressed, under-employed 20 something" is like, sure, I getcha. also the fantasy that skill itself actually DOES increase in an ongoing, incremental, easy to understand way ... I have a much more emotionally complicated relationship with that as a disabled insane person but it's not like I don't get the appeal
Tbh I consume progression fantasy as like, the closest thing to "Let's Play fiction" without just creating a literal unfiction let's play.
inkyxward reblogged
Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election
I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).
Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.
But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.
To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.
But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.
It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."
It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.
Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:
When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:
But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.
Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:
On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:
They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:
And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:
But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":
inkyxward reblogged
when someone tells a joke so funny you strip naked and pay them
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IT'S HAPPENING
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Watching people call a UFO photo from 1996 "AI", and then someone found a upload of it from 2008 proving it can't be AI & everyone treated that as tantamount to unedited and like
When Photoshop became big we had this wave of people just assuming photos pre-Photoshop had to be real, just forgetting photo editing already existed, and I guess now we have people starting to forget Photoshop exists, and attributing the dawn of fake photos to AI?
Like I was on a few forums devoted to debunking back in the day & a surprising number of people would look up if a photo existed before Photoshop, and post just that saying it's From Before Photoshop, as if it that alone was exonerating and people don't fake photos all the time pre-digital. Or even post-digital, as you could fake photos on computers before Photoshop, as this helpful documentary from 1986 shows
And now, I guess, the halcyon days before fake photos have shifted up to...2022? And people are just assuming it's AI, and when it's proved it can't be moving on like that answers that, the way they used to with Photoshop
inkyxward reblogged
finally went ahead and did that homestuck alchemization bot i always said i'd be doing at some point in my life. you can add him to your discord server here;
thanks
added NOT alchemization on request
inkyxward reblogged
finally went ahead and did that homestuck alchemization bot i always said i'd be doing at some point in my life. you can add him to your discord server here;
thanks
added NOT alchemization on request
inkyxward reblogged
“Umm it will actually be very difficult for universities to divest from israel and arms manufacturers without tuition skyrocketing 🤓☝🏼” why is the financial stability of a college (and the economy at large, especially in the us) so reliant on what amounts to war profiteering to begin with? Why is that an inevitability that we’re supposed to accept?