I find myself thinking about Sam’s speech a lot. About how in the stories that really matter, people faced overwhelming darkness, and had a lot of chances to stop, but they kept going.
A Reminder About Story Middles
Tag: Expanded on Blog
Gotta squeeze every last drop of “monetization” outta those profiles!
Reply to @dansup’s link to Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
@dansup Gotta squeeze every last drop of “monetization” outta those profiles!
@dansup Seriously, though, I’ve been slowly moving away from Instagram all year. The more control FB exerts on it, the less it feels like a place I want to be.
I’m not at the point of deleting my account yet, but I’m not posting there anymore & I’m seriously considering dropping all the accounts I follow except for people I actually know, and paring down my archive.
Literally confusing hawks and doves.
Usually #iNaturalist’s AI is pretty good at narrowing down to a genus, but sometimes it can get confused. Like this #pigeon sitting on a silk floss tree branch. It was “pretty sure” it was a *hawk*.
Um, nope!
I can sort of see that with the first image, but the second one makes it blindingly obvious!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30408488
@KelsonV I just realized it’s literally confusing hawks and doves.
Fragments of a circumhorizon arc
Fragments of a #CircumhorizonArc seen on my way back from lunch today. I took some shots with my phone, because that's what I had, then remembered that I had the good camera with me and grabbed it from the office. The clouds had shifted, but not far enough to destroy the effect completely.
On PixelFed.Social
Oh, and saturation has been enhanced on both photos to bring out the colors.
—
Just realized: autocorrect turned “cirrus clouds” into “citrus clouds” in the image descriptions. Yes, both of them.
TODO: link Flickr & Pixelfed posts to blog entry
Took the new camera to WonderCon for cosplay photography
Took the new camera to #WonderCon for #cosplay #photography.
1. I finally have a camera that can really handle inside lighting at a convention center!
2. I’ve gotten too used to just capturing costumes, instead of composing interesting shots.
2a. My 8YO took 1 photo all weekend (#InsideOut) & it ended up being the best that day. I took the lesson & improved my shots the next day, including the other 3 here.
#HarryPotter #BeautyAndTheBeast #LittleShopOfHorrors
There was a lot of Harry Potter cosplay at WonderCon…
There was a lot of #HarryPotter #cosplay at #WonderCon this past weekend! Here are some of my photos. There are a lot more that I missed – people dressed as the Malfoys, students of course, other professors and so on.
My full gallery for the convention is on Flickr at
#Voldemort #BellatrixLestrange #Hagrid #ProfessorTrelawney #Dumbledore #ArthurWeasley #RitaSkeeter #ProfessorUmbridge #GilderoyLockhart
I’d rather have a clear 640×480 image than a blurry 1280×960
@david I suppose, but even back then, I’d rather have a clear 640×480 image than a blurry 1280×960. The only reason I even enabled digital zoom on a compact camera was because it made a difference to the auto-focus, exposure, etc. choices the camera would make (vs taking a wider image and manually cropping it on my computer).
@david Oh wait…it’s a marketing thing, isn’t it? Enough people in the target audience *would* be disappointed in not getting that full 1280×960 even if the 640×480 is clearer, because they’re not getting the megapixels they were promised. 🤦♂️
I find it *fascinating* that the phone’s digital zoom function makes it look like it’s made up of brushstrokes
I took this with my phone to use as a reference for a photo I took with another camera. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it, but I find it *fascinating* that the phone’s digital zoom function makes it look like it’s made up of brushstrokes instead of pixels.
(Though personally, I’ve never understood why digital zoom is implemented as a resize instead of just cropping to a lower resolution.)
Back up your accounts!
In the last few months:
– Tumblr purged adult content (and a bunch of stuff it misindentified).
– Flickr purged free storage above a limit of 1000 photos/account.
– Myspace deleted 12 years’ worth of music.
And Google+ only has two weeks left before Google pulls its plug.
Back up your accounts!
And if you can, consider donating to the Internet Archive. https://archive.org
On Wandering.shop
Expanded on K2R: Year of the Social Media Purge
I realize I didn’t make this clear, but I mean back up ALL your social media accounts. Mastodon too.
I’m not trying to say that these four services are doomed and you should bail. I actually have more confidence in Flickr than I did a year ago!
It’s that if you’re not running the site yourself, you can’t be sure they won’t change business models, shut down, have their servers washed away in a flood, or lose everything to massive database corruption.
Request archives from all your accounts.
@kline suggests helping ArchiveTeam crawl sites for those who can’t donate to the Internet Archive
Tonight’s waxing crescent moon. It’s passing in front of the Hyades star cluster right now, …
Tonight’s waxing crescent moon. It’s passing in front of the Hyades star cluster right now, which I’d love to get a photo of, but the moon’s just waaay too bright to capture the background stars!
#photography #moon #night #stargazing
Flickr Hot Take
When Yahoo realized they’d missed the smartphone shift, they tried to make Flickr something it wasn’t suited for (Instagram! Look, filters!) & couldn’t sustain (cloud storage for ALL your photos, just like FB!) Maybe chasing FB kept them alive for a while, but it put them in a bind down the road.
It sucks that SmugMug is deleting pics, but taking it back to basics might make it more viable long-term.
Maybe they can become a 1st-rate Flickr instead of a 3rd-rate Instagram or FB.
Expanded on my blog:
My rule of thumb for notifications:- Will I need to act on it?- How …
My rule of thumb for notifications:
– Will I need to act on it?
– How time-sensitive is it?
– How important?
– Is it actually for me, or is it an ad for the app service?
I turn off what I don’t need, turn off sound on the less urgent ones, and customize sounds for the most important ones.
So I hear when a text or IM comes in, but not email or social media. When I pick up my phone I see emails, mentions & replies, but not favorites or boosts, etc.
It helps me a lot with alert overload. YMMV.
@sohkamyung WOW!My Pixel 2 already takes better low-light photos than I would have expected, …
@sohkamyung WOW!
My Pixel 2 already takes better low-light photos than I would have expected, and this looks incredible!
It’s not clear from the article, but it looks like the updated Camera app is rolling out to the older Pixel phones starting today. It hasn’t shown up in the Play store yet on my phone, though – I guess I’ll have to keep checking.
After listening to the audio version, I re-read Final Crisis…
After listening to the audio version, I re-read Final Crisis, Rogues Revenge & Superman Beyond, plus read some of the tie-ins for the first time.
– Superman Beyond is essential.
– Submit (Black Lightning/Tattooed Man) adds a lot by showing the personal impact of the event, plus fills in plot.
– Resist (Checkmate) broadens the scope but can be skipped. (I do like using the captive villain AIs as a way to get around the ALE’s control of communication channels)
#AmReading #comics #FinalCrisis
Rogues Revenge was in the works before Final Crisis, and it shows. It still works as Rogues: Rebirth, but now I think the FC connections hurt more than they help.
Revelations is a much tighter story that weaves in and out of issues 2 & 3 (if not seamlessly), picking up the Crime Bible & Vandal Savage and showing the early stages of Darkseid’s takeover. I didn’t read it originally, but I’m glad I finally got around to it.
#comics #FinalCrisis #AmReading
I didn’t re-read Requiem. I still haven’t picked up Rage of the Red Lanterns. (I’d forgotten the Alpha Lanterns were involved in Final Crisis.)
I also didn’t re-read Legion of Three Worlds, which IIRC has nothing to do with Final Crisis except Superman passes through it between Superman: Beyond and his return to Final Crisis when Braniac 5 shows him the Miracle Machine. (3 versions of the LSH, none of which were the one that I actually followed).
I do want to re-read Multiversity now, though.
Finished listening to the Graphic Audio adaptation of FInal Crisis. It actually flows better than …
Finished listening to the Graphic Audio adaptation of FInal Crisis. It actually flows better than the comic, especially toward the end, when the comic starts fragmenting the narrative (which is great metatext, but there’s a lot of “what just happened?”). Scenes are fleshed out, and the multi-flashback structure of the last chapter is made linear instead.
#amreading #comics
A lot of that is probably the novelization it was based on (it credits the story only to Greg Cox, with no mention of Grant Morrison or any of the artists, which seems a shame), but I don’t think it would work well as a book.
The voice acting, music and sound make up for a lot of the lost visual punch and visual structure of the story, and it needs more than just the words.
One of the weird things about the Final Crisis audio book is that it incorporates …
One of the weird things about the Final Crisis audio book is that it incorporates *some* of the tie-ins, but excludes the one that sets up Mandrakk. Scenes showing what’s happening to Batman in the Evil Factory are included, and all of the Black Lightning/Tattooed Man story from Submit…but nothing from Superman Beyond. It (or the novelization it’s based on) actually replaces the Monitor who recruits Superman with Braniac 5, sending him off to L3W but not including it!
#comics #amreading
In Final Crisis, the Anti-Life Equation is able to compel the surrender of free will. …
In Final Crisis, the Anti-Life Equation is able to compel the surrender of free will. Those who have submitted spout slogans about how it justifies anything, how it’s so much easier than the struggles of life and love.
It’s insidious, because in some ways it *is* easier to offload tough decisions to a schedule, a policy, a leader, etc. The brain likes taking shortcuts around cognitive load. But people want to be *able* to make choices when they want to.
#amreading #comics #psychology
Another interesting thing about Final Crisis is how much damage Darkseid does just by existing. …
Another interesting thing about Final Crisis is how much damage Darkseid does just by existing. He doesn’t do any traditional super villain things in the entire story. No battles, no plotting. He just sits on his throne, yaking advantage of a battle he already won, imposing his will on an entire planet. He spends most of the story sitting on an underground bunker, but his presence presses down on the whole world.
#amreading #comics
I’m also listening to the audiobook of Final Crisis, which is adapted from the novelization …
I’m also listening to the #audiobook of Final Crisis, which is adapted from the novelization rather than directly from the #comicbook. It fixes a lot of the choppiness and sparseness that made the original hard to follow at times. Narrative fills in which details you need to glean from the artwork.
And of course having it all together avoids the problem of delays between chapters that plagued the original release, though that’s true of the collected edition too.
But wow, I’m really seeing the parallels with Dark Knights: Metal even more strongly than when I was just comparing to memory.
Barbatos, like Darkseid, takes over the world between issues, and we jump to a handful of heroes mounting a desperate resistance. The lynchpin of the multiverse – conveniently the main DC Earth – is in danger of being pulled “downward” into an unending hell.
They’re a lot more alike than any of the Crisis events are to each other or to Metal.
Oh, can’t forget fighting twisted versions of the heroes. Except in Final Crisis, it was the actual heroes having been brainwashed, not expendable alternates.
I’m not big on audiobooks, but I picked up a DC Comics-related Humble Bundle…
I’m not big on audiobooks, but I picked up a DC Comics-related Humble Bundle a few weeks ago and I #amreading The Flash: Stop Motion by Mark Schultz. It’s kind of odd listening to a “Graphic Audio” adaptation of a prose novel based on a character who usually appears in visual media, but the full cast, sound effects, and music help to make up for the lack of actual visuals that I’ve found tends to hamper prose stories about superheroes.
#TheFlash #comics
I read the book when it came out in 2004, and I’ve forgotten enough for it to be more-or-less “new.” It’s set during the Wally West/Keystone City era when the Flash’s identify was still public knowledge and he worked with Chyre & Morillo.
There are a few continuity issues that bugged me at the time (a lot of the story hinges on Iris & Wally being blood relatives, for instance) that don’t anymore, though I still have trouble with the opening scene where he’s treading air to “fly” w/the JLA.
The ideas about the nature of super-speed, the speed force, the metagene, and ties to quantum physics still hold up, and would be fascinating to explore further (though they might overpower the character).
So far the audio adaptation works well, but my car’s sound system doesn’t handle the deliberately confusing battle sequences very well. Headphones might work better. And some of the conversations that work in print go on way too long in audio.