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Interests in the Moment

@martel-thread-spinner

The random things I come across and happen to enjoy or feel strongly about. 20+ years old/ace+queer/she-her and they-them
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weaver-z

Obsessed with Eartha Kitt’s absolute power move of risking her entire career to drag Lyndon B. Johnson’s bitch ass so hard that his wife started crying

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god destroying the tower of babel

there really is nothing more charming or telling about humanity than the amount of time and effort we’ll put into something just to see how cool it will look when we make it fall down 

me: that’s a lot of….oh…OH

So this video is 40 seconds long. And it has 190,000 notes. Rounded up to 200K because I’m lazy. So if everyone who enjoyed it interacted with this post once, and they enjoyed all 40 seconds of the video(both of those are questionable, but bear with me), that’s 8,000,000 seconds of entertainment on this site alone. 133,333 minutes. 2,222 hours. Yes, it was a lot of work for a few seconds of chaotic pleasure. But that’s a lot of chaotic pleasure for a little bit of work. 

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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).

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thefrogman

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.

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i think a big reason that I get frustrated with the "liberals have never made anybody's lives better" is that in the US it used to be legal for insurance companies to charge you more if you were sick or even just straight up deny you the ability to sign up for them if you already had a "pre-existing condition", and this was only stopped by the passage of the ACA during Obama's term. but a lot of people who talk about politics on here are too young to really be affected by that since they would have been on their parents insurance (which the ACA required insurers extend until you're 26). and this was all done via politicking and not blowing up insurance CEOs mansions or whatever.

I'm not saying that the ACA fixed insurance forever, god no. but "you can't deny someone insurance for being sick" is a massive change and people don't realize it!

Most adults want the law’s prohibition on insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions to stay. Two thirds (67%) of the public say that it is “very important” that this provision remain in place, including most Republicans (54%) However, only about 4 in 10 people (39%) are aware that that provision is part of the ACA.

You are underselling the change. Let us recall "rescission," where as soon as it turned out that someone had an expensive medical condition, the insurance company would start coming through their medical history looking for ways to invent a preexisting condition and revoke their coverage.

It really frightens me if kids don't know about how bad the US insurance system used to be.

My dad didn't have any health insurance in his 40s, because he was a freelancer and his (Frankly not bad at all) existing health issues allowed insurunace to fully deny him.

When his girlfriend was dying of cancer they had to have a long discussion about what they'd do when she hit her insurance's lifetime coverage limit and they would no longer cover her cancer care.

People should understand that it was Obama and the Democrats who stopped that kind of thing.

Yeah the way to avoid that shit was to get a group plan through your employer, without that insurance was unaffordable/worthless

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katsdom

And even those group plans were not reliable unless they were huge. I know someone who worked for a smallish company. About 100 people. One of their workers had a child with hemophilia. Required VERY expensive regular infusions to treat. When renewal time came around, the insurance company gave the company management a choice: They could either exclude hemophilia from the plan or double their premium. They got the (Democratic) state insurance commissioner and their (Democratic) state legislator involved and the insurers eventually backed down. But it could have gone the other way. The real solution is a single insurance pool that includes everyone.

Also: medical transition or a gender dysphoria diagnosis could be a preexisting condition.

I was denied insurance outright for having a high BMI and a thyroid condition, despite being in excellent health at the time. Them not being able to do this anymore is huge, actually.

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I can’t believe how accurate this is. I’ve had a rock collection since I was a kid, and I’m still collecting them to this day.

Do any of you relate to this? If so, what do you like to collect? It can be plushies, toys, whatever. :)

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Adults: Following rules is good, not following rules is bad

Little me: Okay :] *follows a rule*

Adults: Oh my god look at this loser. He doesn't know that this rule is Secretly Okay To Not Follow. Dumbass. Let's all laugh at him

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vexwerewolf

Being autistic is weird because I think I'd be entirely entirely immune to the maddening effects of witnessing an Elder God but learning that barnacles are arthropods rather than molluscs nearly gave me an existential crisis

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trying to download a tumblr backup and wondering how many gigabytes this tumblr will end up being. can we make it to a terabyte.

all the other backup methods I can find don't work on a mac, so I have to use this sites actual backup, hook it to my external harddrive, and pray

i guess if worse comes to worse I can buy a wordpress domain and back it up there...shelling out an absurd amount of money for that...yeah. hopefully this works so I don't have to do that.

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