Every day I discover forms of art I could not have concieved of before, and suddenly I am in awe of being alive.

it’s crazy how much diversity there can be in one species…these are all pictures of the same bird species (red-tailed hawk)

what they all have in common:

The look of annoyance and utter disdain at the human exposing their wing pit.

Yes.

UNHAND ME FEATHERLESS BIPED

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 buld 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.

Astrology's weird bc if you've only ever had fun with it and come across someone w seething hatred for it you're understandably like, what the fuck is this person's problem? But also if you've seen someone take it Too Far, any mention of it understandably becomes a red flag

Like imagine if you really liked Pokemon and you're like, "I really don't see why people would hate this unless they're just assholes for no reason?" Like it's a totally normal opinion opinion to have. But also imagine if you took a quiz and learned you were a Bug type and people stopped talking to you because they were like "It's in your nature to be emotionally manipulative." It would also be totally normal to be like "Oh okay fuck Pokemon fans then."

Now you may be like, "But the latter situation doesn't happen!" and that tells me you are fortunate because you have not dealt with the worst that the west coast of America has to offer

All this is to say, I too was once a "Let people have fun" person, and then I met gay people from Portland and now I am not that person

its really cool that we discovered glass which is the material that doesnt have any chemical reactions with anything in the universe very useful for doing chemistry due to being able to put things in it to contain chemical reactions and never having it react with the things that are in it due to it being completely and entirely unreactive to every chemical

Posts from a 17th century chymist who's about to have their bones dissolved by hydrofluoric acid.

HYDROFLUORIC ACID MENTION‼️

DICKS OUT FOR HYDROFLUORIC ACID!!!

NOT A GOOD IDEA!!!!!

Not even Mom can fully compete with the Need for Speed (he's been running major zoomies around the living room for the past 10 minutes)

This is absolutely going to be stuck in my head for the rest of my life

the thing about umineko is that it fundamentally changes the way you read blue/red text

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

🎬 Peter Jackson

+ IMDb trivia

Stage Five: Star Trek

*sighs and resets "days since last tirade about an extremely obscure subject in a group chat because someone was wrong on the internet about a video game" counter to zero*

A sample of other subjects I have held court about as a consequence of people on Gamepress and Wikia being wrong about this one same game:

Also.

(Luckily, because of this last one I reread The Waste Land, which caused me to fall down a rabbit hole of chasing literary references such that I am still 8 tabs deep in Arthuriana instead of making the mistake of looking at Gamepress.)

Almost tempted not to block this pornbot because apparently it empathizes with my pain. Also:

Oops

Got another one, presumably because as of two days ago I also have to add

My suffering is unending.

If anyone was wondering, the best fix she nearly got banned for is that the lyrics for a character theme song have had the word "prostrate" typo'd as "prostate" since 2021.

Update: I have now also been banned because they've decided said friend was a "vandal" because she thought it was stupid that they're captioning random pictures of anime boys with Bible quotes, and they think I am her sockpuppet because I put back two of her corrections with detailed bird identification notes because I spent an hour digging up the correct species, but they are absolutely insistent that this

is a blue jay

Which, to be fair, is exactly what I expected, given the previous posts in this thread.

Anyway, I guess we can now both say we at least tried to fix the fucking thing, and I can go back to pointing and laughing at their wildly incorrect plot summaries.

@birdyaviary it's too late for that, I'm afraid- they reverted that edit and one explaining the "predatory seabirds" thing to them on the basis that "there is a storm happening in the picture, that means it's a storm-petrel." (It's a great skua.)

(The little blue guys are actually Hypothymis puella, the pale-blue monarch, by the way.)

They've been proven wrong on the exact subject my friend got banned for arguing about by the text of the game in the last few weeks, and now I also need to add

and from another reblog branch a while back

GOOD NIGHT

Humans have finally managed to land on Mars, only to find a locked safe buried in the Martian soil. The key is apparently on Earth, but no one knows where.

The galactic council watched on to see how humanity would handle the task, much as they had with several species before. What the test was supposed to show was whether or not a species of violent nature could ever be brought to work together. They finally picked something up, another ship already headed to Mars? Was it possible humans were that clever to have found the key, maybe it was more specialists and equipment to analyze the locked crate to ensure it was safe to open. A few minutes after landing, they got another broadcast from the red planet.

“This is the LockPickingLawyer and today I’ve got something quite special, this locked alien chest. First of all I have to thank everyone who recommended me for the job, I’m honored that you all thought of me. Now let’s get to work”

The council representatives were confused as they started analyzing the translation, before even getting through the name he spoke something haunting

“Normally I don’t say things like this but this lock is quite unique, however with no security pins it will still be quite quick.”

“There we go, a click on 3… “

All the species of the galactic council sat dumbfounded, they spent many galactic cycles refining and perfecting their study and in all their time not a singular race had tried this method. Click after click, even in such an intricate lock the human had only spent around five minutes tampering with it.

“There we go, now while I can’t open this as part of my video I can say that I at least have a clue what the key should look like in case it ever gets locked again. I admire the design choices and the fact that at least it was harder to get open than anything Master Lock has made”

Having anotheg 'gork we have got to get out of bed faster then this' morning

dasfsffadfjdag I meant girl but gork works better

I didn't even question it I was nodding along like I'm literally right there with you gork

some star-shaped iranian tiles i like, created in the thirteenth century. [source: art institute of chicago 1, 2, 3, 4]

had to reread the caption three times before realizing that op is not, in fact, an 800-year-old iranian valley girl ceramics artist