Guy in a Suit

hey quick PSA but “reading before bed to wind down” only works if you’re normal about books btw. if you aren’t you are going to end up awake at 2:52am after finishing the whole book just trust me on this one

i'm not asking for much. i just want a life where i can afford a safe and comfortable home, groceries, healthcare, and be able to buy whatever i want all the time without ever checking my bank account. dressed every single day in bespoke 3 piece suits by a locally beloved tailor. and someone shampoos my hair for me every other day in my at-home spa.

The entire “Noelle hyped for Xmas” saga is complete~ Glad you enjoyed, and Happy Holidays!!

patron saint of gamers

Eraqus runs over Ventus LOST BETA FOOTAGE

one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing I have learned in my life is that nice people can fuck each other up in monstrous ways. people can be bone deep kind and loving and self reflective and still lash out under pressure. people can be earnestly neighbourly and charitable and hospitable and generous and still find themselves in situations where they become selfish. people can be well meaning and easygoing and gregarious and hold deep seated opinions that turn them into vicious little bullies under the right conditions. nobody is just one thing, and nobody stays one way. every person is a kaleidoscope and they will surprise you. you will surprise yourself. it's not a warning and it's not a judgement and it's not an excuse, and it's certainly not a reason to stop trying or to stop trusting. it is just a fact.

everyone please go on this journey with me

oh my god

Ironically, hard light is bad for recording sexy time.

It will highlight every pore, every vein, every wrinkle on your nutsack.

One day I will end this ring light fad. It is my ultimate side quest.

It seems my lighting advice has given people a mistaken impression...

These outtakes where the flash didn't go off are also AI generated.

I like this spooky dutch angle one.

I was just starting to learn flash and I didn't have all the equipment I needed. Since corgis are quite short, I had to put the lighting on the ground. The off camera flash was on a tipped over lightstand with a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse the light.

But I had no wireless triggers. And the only other way to trigger a flash, is with another flash. So I used the on-camera pop up flash to trigger the main flash.

But I had two issues.

First, I did not want that dinky on camera flash affecting my picture.

Second, triggering a flash with a flash is best done indoors. The flash will bounce all around the room and eventually hit the sensor so the main flash triggers. When you are outdoors, there is no bouncing.

SO... I took a little handheld makeup mirror and angled it toward my main flash. This blocked the dinky pop up flash and sent the beam of light towards the main flash to trigger it.

I was lying on the wet morning grass, holding a camera in one hand, a mirror in the other, trying to aim the mirror exactly toward the main flash, making crazy noises to get Otis's attention, and trying to get the focus point on his face so I didn't get a blurry photo. Also, Otis was much more interested in sniffing things than posing for a photo.

Here is an overhead view that might help explain.

I await all of your comments saying my amazing drawring is clearly AI generated.

Only 30% of the time did the flash actually go off. Aiming the mirror was tricky and I was doing like 8 things at once. I wasn't even sure I got the photo I wanted. But when I came back to the computer there was one that stood out and it is one of my favorites I've ever taken.

It was the best combination of monumental effort, great discomfort, perfect foggy sunrise light, and just pure luck.

Unfortunately, people like me who use advanced sculpting light techniques are getting accused of using AI more and more. Not really sure what to do about it—other than show the 30 awful photos it took to get the good one.

My 80s sunglasses photo and spoon photo get called out the most.

But it's just good old fashioned gradient lighting which has been used in product photography since the days of film.

So, no need to be suspicious.

Photography like sirfrogsworth's is what the fucken AIs were TRAINED on.

some people act as though "prescriptivism" is when you say that there are observable & describable patterns in language, whereas "descriptivism" is a practice where describing language in any capacity is like, forbidden

official linguistics post

no nuance. fight about it

fuck it. round 2

halo considering any affix above the head not directly attached

i have a third one

PLEASE REBLOG THE THIRD ONE TOO I NEED TO KNOW

what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this

Whereas the reality is far more like

Was not expecting this many of you to resonate with Millennium Death Plinko

Ok so here's a thing about Tumblr's notification system that bothers me: So if

is you, as in you are the person who makes the very first original post in a thread , then you get all the notes from every reblog sent to your notifications tab.

But if you're

then you only get notifications from these posts in a reblog chain;

You also have the ability to follow a post; which gives you the same notifications as op, but what I want is a way to enable notifications for all of THIS;

Does it bother anyone else that there is no option for this?

Oh you're writing a gay smut fic with a fantasy setting? Don't forget to give one of your characters a

It’s not that mysterious though.

Anyone carrying a bladed weapon carried oil. (More on that in a sec) Oil is what you use to clean and condition steel, especially, since water will rust it.

Many people in the Middle Ages used scented oils for their skin and hair from noblemen to lowly serfs.

Oil was incredibly abundant and quite cheap. The TYPE of oil however does matter in this.

Sheep oil (rendered from their fat) was very common and used for all manner of things from making soap to treating skin conditions. Rendered sheep fat has a very light texture and is a decent carrier oil without too pungent of a scent. Unfortunately it did rancid fast so it was common to add lots of herbs to it to help preserve it, especially rosemary, borage, marjoram and citron peels. This is how it became a common “perfume” oil used to scent hair skin or clothes. Nearly anyone would have had this handy somewhere.

Rendered pork oil was very common too and was most popular as a cooking oil.

Vegetable oil made from walnuts, almonds and flax seed was by far the most common non-animal oil. Nearly anybody had a bottle of almond or walnut oil in their pantry or on their person. These were by far the most popular oils used for conditioning steel, with walnut oil preferred because its tannins also gave armor a patina that kept it better. Only the absurdly wealthy ever wore polished armor. Everyone else blackened it to make it keep better. Walnut oil is good at doing that.

Walnut oil also works well as a lubricant. People back then DID use sexual lube by the way. No prostitute would be caught dead without it. Their favorite types were walnut and olive oil, though almond oil might be used in a pinch. They also used watered down acacia gum in southern Europe, which was sticky but slick and easy to re-wet.

Olive oil though was THE oil in Europe. It was expensive, comparatively, but obviously people considered it well worth its cost because it was found everywhere south of the Seine and frequently seen in even minor lordly houses or knights quarters much farther north. Considering quite a few people of the time thought it had aphrodisiac qualities when applied as certain way (likely because raw olive oil has a warming effect) I think you can imagine the most common reason it was sought after by men in particular.

Olive oil was also used in medicine and just about any church had some floating around somewhere because it’s conveniently good at treating minor infections and is wonderful for toothaches.

So the mysterious vial of oil isn’t at all mysterious and even if he were carrying it around with the sole intention of using it for sex, that wouldn’t actually be that strange either.