(Source)

Important addition

I swear the way that some people talk about AI on this site sounds like those hysterical posts about programming being satanic with screenshots of programs telling people to "kill child"

I worked at a community museum run out of a historic freight house, next to the train tracks and historic station and engines and other cars. We hosted model train enthusiasts to set up a display every month. Pretty sure the only NT visitors were the confused people trying to buy train tickets.

Some lady brought her teen semi verbal son in all the time. He'd flap and vocalize and jump up and down. He'd run to the door and watch from the railing rocking back and forth so incredibly excited when we told him the train was on its way (you could hear the whistle as it passed the crossing before ours). He was in fucking love.

Some lady from out of town had the nerve to try and ask me to kick the kid and mom out bc he was disrupting her visit. The look on the mom's face like "oh no, not from here, not from here too" made me so fucking mad. I agreed that someone was disrupting other visitors, and asked the karen to leave. She threw a fit. I was like "You're harassing a regular visitor on the basis of disability. Please leave the premises."

Karen left. I started writing an email explaining to my boss ahead of the inevitable complaint. The mom came up and was like "thank you for making this a place my kid can be happy and himself" and I'm like "ma'am this is a train musuem. If we didn't have autistic visitors we wouldn't have visitors."

Made a little something on slur reclamation.

And there it is, yeah.

ilove when someone posts about an issue that's supposedly plaguing society and it's painfully obvious that said issue is not a thing that matters if youre not on tiktok

reminds me of this reddit comment I have saved

Remember this joke?

Well, I am going to do something similar only with photography. This is a photo someone took for an Amazon review of their Clinique products.

Honestly, it is not a terrible photo. They did some staging. They have an interesting background. All of the labels are legible. It is properly exposed. This would be a perfectly acceptable product photo for an Etsy page.

I've been taking these advanced photography courses in preparation for whenever I am able to create a new studio in the house. And my teacher is a photography badass. I just watched a 6 hour class on how to recreate a professional Clinique ad. And at first glance it looks deceptively simple. It's just some skin care products being splashed with a little water.

Which is why I wanted you to see an average person for reference.

This is what Karl Taylor came up with.

And I don't think I've learned so much about photography in one tutorial before.

Product photography is just loads and loads of problem solving. You have to light the chrome caps with a gradient. Which requires giant diffusion scrims.

Those big white panels are literally only there for the two chrome caps.

You need a pure white background, but you can't let light spill all over the studio, so you put up giant black light blockers.

And you have to add another light just for the orange bottle on the right.

Oh, and if you want the bottles to glow, well, you have to hide a silver reflector behind them.

But you still want the edges of the bottles to be darker so they have some contrast. So you add some black tape to the sides.

And in order for the reflective labels to have bold black lettering, you have to reflect black cards into them.

Ack! Karl's beautiful bald head is showing up in the chrome caps! He must put on the naughty blanket.

And once you get every aspect of every bottle perfectly lit, you finally get to yeet some water at it all.

I don't love product photography because I have a weird obsession to help greedy corporations make their wares look more beautiful. I love it because it is a complicated and challenging new puzzle every time. Every product is a different shape and requires a different technique to make it look its best.

I don't know if I will be able to live up to Karl's standards.

This is about the level I was at in 2017 before I quit photography.

I have so much more knowledge in my brain now. I'm really hoping I can surpass that.

) <- super parenthesis. reblog to close all parentheticals you opened and forgot to close in your life and return to equilibrium

This post has 1 closing super parenthesis. Legend speaks of its evil counterpart...

me.

To give more context: The reviewer was Jean Lorrain, who also was gay. Both showed up to the duel and both missed on purpose.

gay people can never just ask each other out

You know AI guys are living in another reality bc the amount of terror I would feel if a computer sent me, unprompted, an image of a blank-expression copy of myself trapped in a endless hallway of mirrors is frankly indescribable

Eight-year-old Max Alexander holds the world record as the youngest runway fashion designer. He began designing at the age of four.

These dresses are honestly fire

Ya, he's actually got the skills here. it's kinda nuts when you look at it

good dad

but the good news is:

Now that IS good news

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Day 32

It's official, the goat did not burn in 2024.

If she survived 2024, I can survive 2025.

In addition to removing fact checkers, Meta also added some new language to their Hateful Conduct policy:

yes this is real. as a reminder, Meta runs Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Threads. not that Meta has ever been an ally, but blatantly writing this in your website’s conduct policy is certainly a choice

for those in the notes hoping this was a typo:

they also made the following changes:

The CNN headline adds some more

do not go gentle into that good night

be a bit of a bitch about it