lovingempress

[lovingempress]

"I laugh when I look at this shot - one in a million chance of capturing the precise moment when these birds are locked in eye to eye!

Out in my boat fishing one morning, I noticed that an eagle was being harassed by a blue jay on the shoreline next to my cabin. The blue jay’s relentless attacks were only mildly irritating to the eagle. The big bird’s facial expression was one of pure disdain. Jays are fiercely territorial - the eagle had perched near the jay’s nest and the jay was determined to protect its young.

My boat floated closer and closer to the skirmish and I knew that I might be able to capture a special moment if I just kept shooting. I love the image for so many reasons. The eagle is protecting its most valuable secret weapon - its eyes - by sliding a thin membrane over its eye just as the jay flies by. The jay is executing a ninja move as it makes its escape. And I love the way the image illustrates the sheer contrast in size between the enormity of the eagle’s body and the small silhouette of the blue jay.

I’ll always be thankful that I was in the right spot at the right time."

📸Ken Wiele

[lovingempress]

nobuddy feels like they have a sharp attention span these days, right? and we all just click “agree on terms of service” because its hard to love yourself sometimes, well

enter Terms of Service, Didn’t Read: a website and a browser addon that streamlines the terms of service of many popular web services to be read by the tech sunday drivers.

It’s graded from A (great) to E (awful) and if you have the addon you have access to the info about the website on your bar

[lovingempress]

Duck Amuck | Director: Chuck Jones | Studio: Warner Bros. | USA, 1953

[lovingempress]

it is once again... binturong appreciation hour

[lovingempress]

If a worker who isn't the owner says ANYTHING similar to "I'm not really supposed to do this but-" and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.

[lovingempress]

Putting this as its own post because it deserves to be its own post.

If you want to be good at any kind of art you have to take the part of your brain that tells you “everything must be a wholly original idea formed in a perfect clean room environment” and you have to rip that synapse out of your skull, put it through a shredder, stomp on it, light it on fire, then pour it into acid, because it’s a liar and will never ever help you.

[lovingempress]

Thinking of the larger context of LOTR and like, the fellowship swapping old war stories and shit and Sam just says “Yeah I killed a huge spider…Shelob, I think?”

And Gandalf just blinks and is like, “You what now?”

“Yeah, killed it. Had to save Frodo”

Gandalf elects not to tell Sam that he killed the spawn of a primordial demon.

[lovingempress]

wei wuxian 🤝 brienne of tarth = suffering because you actually have the values that most people in your society are only paying lip service to

[lovingempress]

It occurs to me, looking through a bunch of DNI lists and carrds (although it has surely been observed before by others), is that what the people who make these want is not unreasonable per se. Rather, what they are asking for is unreasonable, because what they want is to not be using social media. They want to be using forums, or group chats, or instant messenger, or blogs; they want online communication spaces that are moderated, that are topic-specific, that are limited to existing/vetted members. And these this desire is not unreasonable, but it does not match modern social media.

And because so many of the people who make these seem so very young, I wonder how many of them even realize that spaces that do what they want can (and used to, and still somewhat do) exist, realize that social media can't do what they want it to, but that social media is not the only way for the internet to be.

[lovingempress]

yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad

[lovingempress]

This is more punk than the whole of punk history.

[lovingempress]

it's so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn't a good way to learn, because it's not really "artificial intelligence" so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don't want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn't work. it wouldn't synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn't know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.

[lovingempress]

The tumblr experience is having politics that make the most left leaning progressive you know irl blush and then logging on here and getting called a bootlicker fascist because you said that you dont think we should make the reign of terror happen again

[lovingempress]

absolutely losing my mind that a bunch of nimby assholes spent $500k to build a sandcastle that was promptly wiped away

[lovingempress]

[lovingempress]

This machine kills AI

[lovingempress]

ursula k le guin was right