hey here's a website for downloading any video or image from any website.
works w/ youtube, soundcloud, twitch, twitter (gifs and videos), tumblr (video and audio), and most other websites you're probably lookin to download stuff off of.
for anyone wondering about privacy and whatnot, i'm happy to say that the developers are pretty committed to have 0 trackers and 0 data retention. you can read more in their "about" section, but here's the basic important stuff:
"Sys how is your decent into fiber arts hell going"
Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'
This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'
Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.
I FAILED YOU ALL here is the site. You can also buy flax fiber from them. The PROPER shit, not the hot garbage ass tow fiber sold as flax top for handspinners.
'machine combing shortens the flax fibers by several inches'
This right here is part of why modern linen is a pale shadow of historical linen. Legitimately it cannot be properly replicated by machines. It HAS to be made by human hands if you want the best quality.
If you are interested in traditional flax and linen and spinning and weaving it - you might want to check out Berta's Flax - https://www.bertas-flachs.at/en/ The organization started here:
"Bertas Story
Berta was a farmers girl from Austria who married in the 1940ies. As it was common, she got a huge trunk full of unspun flax and one full of linnen fabric as a dowry. Both trunks were treasured by her till her death but she never used any of it.
Her son wanted the unspun flax to go to a good home and gave it to me. It being way to much to spin myself I found women all over the world to spin it as well. So we are spinning and weaving a net to each other." (from the original Facebook group)
Since then they have been saving flax and linen dowries and growing a guild of flax spinners and weavers.
League of knights with similar blades all sheathe their weapons in the mechanisms of a dilapidated castle, their power bringing arcane mechanisms to life and unearthing secrets long buried and lost.
Two selfish combatants duel with these cursed blades, their final mighty clash laying waste to both warriors and their surroundings in an apocalyptic storm of divine fire that sees the land poisoned and cursed by the gods for decades.
We know that Facebook is brainscorching your parents and tiktok is brainscorching your cousins, but some of you refuse to admit that you got your brain scorched here. However unlike those sites there isn't an algorithm here you just make bad choices.
That's all we ever wanted. To arrive at Hell as a result of our own dubious navigation skills instead of as the result of Satan owning all the road sign companies.
With all this Wicked talk reminder that in the Oz books the rightful ruler of Oz was actually a trans girl named Ozma who explicitly named Dorothy a princess of Oz and considered her a "constant companion."
This handout promotes the idea that transitioning singers undergo a voice change that is experientially equivalent to cis male voice change
New addition to the Trans Guy Archive!
As I've been on testosterone for over 6 years now, I've certainly seen changes in my voice. I went from a 'medium' alto to a low tenor. This brief handout is a collection of different case studies of different transmasculine singers and their journeys while taking testosterone.
Have people heard of falling fruit? It's a map that marks off foraging locations that are accessible on public land.
It's global and crowdsourced and points you towards FREE FRUIT. (And herbs and nuts and things.) They have an app too but the app costs $2 and you can still pull up the map on your mobile browser for free.
A massive, collaborative map of the urban harvest uniting the efforts of foragers, freegans, and foresters around the world. Explore and sha
I think I've added around 100-200 spots on here since I heard about it. Even put some of my own trees on it that overhange sidewalks. What's great is not only does it help you identify the plant by telling you what to find where, what's in season, what to spot through wikipedia and usda plant links. But practically any free resource you can think of you can either find on here or put on here like, good dumpsters to scavenge (for food or otherwise), water fountains, community orchards/gardens, fishing spots, little libraries / pantries, even bike pumps.
Millennials and Gen Z? BUY SHIT! OWN THINGS! DO NOT SUBSCRIBE!
When you buy a device that requires proprietary software to run, the money you hand over is an entry fee, nothing more.
Listen to me.
You do not want this future to happen to you I promise you. Because the minute you enter into a subscription existence you allow for a possibility of losing everything. Why?
Well, because when you stop paying then you stop having.
I buy my cars outright for this reason.
I have not thrown away my DVD collection for this reason.
I still have my old-school ipod for this reason.
I buy songs I really like direct from the artist on top of my subscription for this reason.
I back shit up on to my external hard drives rather than depending on a cloud only for this reason (which reminds me that I need to do taht this weekend).
If someone ELSE is holding the physical source of what you’re paying for? YOU DON’T OWN IT. You’re just giving someone your energy and time for permission to access it.
You’re leasing your existence.
Don’t fucking fall for it, do you hear me?
It’s bad enough we have to lease our water, our heat, our internet and our entertainment.
Buy what you want outright WHENEVER YOU CAN. Then do anything you can to maintain it in the face of planned obsolescence. I promise you, there will be a moment when you will be glad you did
Because aside from relationships? Things are literally all the system let us keep in this existence so don’t lease your fucking possessions if at all avoidable because at this stage in capitalism we’re all a few bad days from being unable to pay those leases. And then what? Then you only have what you can keep and it is those comforts and necessities that will keep you going, I promise you. Don’t let there be anything more that can be taken from you than absolutely necessary.
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.
Most of my photos with artificial light added would be considered "unmotivated lighting." I think that is the term you were looking for.
The short explanation is that motivated lighting always has a logical source. Like the sun or a window or a lamp off to the side.
That doesn't mean there are no lighting shenanigans used.
The overhead office-style fluorescent lights depicted in this scene were actually powerful diffused light bars that were much closer to the actors. They replaced the ceiling in post with more traiditioinal looking lights. So the lighting was still very crafted—but it has a logic and realism that doesn't set off alarm bells in your brain saying, "Where is the light coming from?"
Unmotivated lighting is the opposite. It's crafted, artificial light that doesn't need to make sense. It just has to achieve the aesthetic goal of the artist.
All studio lighting is unmotivated. I just re-edited this old photo of my dad.
There is no room in the world where he could have sat down and had perfectly sculpted light hitting his face. I intentionally directed the light to accentuate his features and capture the best, most idealized version of what he looked like.
Coincidentally I just wrote a post about motivated lighting in films.
💬 20 🔁 208 ❤️ 349 · First, thank you to everyone who is nerding out with me about motivated lighting. I love that I can have these convers
Weirdly, I expressed a preference for motivated lighting in movies with a realism-based aesthetic and a lot of people disagreed. They said that the lighting comes from the same place as the music and that you just have to suspend your disbelief.
(Personally I think that is a bad analogy because music is *very* motivated by the emotional vibe. I would say unmotivated lighting in movies comes from the same place as women's apocalypse makeup.)
But I *love* unmotivated lighting in still photography. I love crafting an image and creating it in a fantasy realm where perfect, beautiful, sculpting light can come from anywhere. I want the most idyllic lighting possible.
It's the only way I could make fingernail clippers look beautiful.
And now people are saying unmotivated lighting looks like AI or CGI and isn't authentic. Even though this aesthetic was created before computers were invented and the tools of post-capture manipulation were done in a darkroom.
I'm fairly certain this is because AI does not have a great understanding of motivated lighting. It never thinks about where the light is coming from so it almost always creates images where the lighting comes from a fantasy realm. And now people are heavily associating unmotivated lighting with AI, even if it is a subconscious observation.
I think at this point in time, people are yearning for authenticity. We know so much of our imagery is heavily manipulated for nefarious purposes. Beauty advertising with retouched skin like porcelain dolls and liquified torsos that don't leave space for vital organs. Every fast food ad shows the perfect juicy hamburger because they paid a food stylist $500/hour to perfectly cook and arrange things.
But fast food workers are not food stylists and your burger isn't going to have perfect lettuce and a non-smooshed bun.
(Before you reply with urban legends about food styling, they don't use fake materials. They are required to use the actual ingredients. Those myths came from movie prop masters who needed to maintain the look of food during hours of shooting.)
I think AI just turned our uncomfortable relationship with unrealistic imagery up to 11.
It's a little depressing for me because I love to use light as my artistic medium. I say I am a photographer, but my passion is more focused on lighting.
And I often incorporate my other passion, which is image manipulation. I sometimes add another layer of unreality to my images by artistically editing them.
This is days of work.
I worked very hard for the in-camera image. Dragging a heavy chair and lighting equipment into a field on a hot summer day was not easy for me.
But I also worked very hard on the edit. The RAW file is overexposed, but once I corrected that, the lighting on him and the grass is actually what I captured. I hid a flash in the lampshade and lit him with my big 7 foot umbrella off to the right.
I could have shot this at night, but my area has so much light pollution, I would never have achieved the sky I wanted in my head. So I took the photo knowing I'd replace the sky later.
I like crafting images. I like picturing something in my head and then trying to manifest it in a photo.
I get why people are starting to prefer more natural looking images. I understand why they are currently preferring everything to be captured as it was in the moment. I know why they disparage the amazing work of CG artists and demand that every movie use only practical effects.
When everything is fake, a small dose of reality feels special.
But I see my photography more like a drawing or a painting. Light is my paintbrush and I am just trying to manifest my imagination into an image. I don't claim I don't use artificial light. I never say anything is "straight out of camera." I am very open about my use of Photoshop. If I were able to leave my house and go to more beautiful places, perhaps I would take a more motivated approach.
I mean, I love when the world is just beautiful all on its own and all I have to do is competently pick settings on my camera.
But I enjoy my artistic process and while some of my images may not be realistic, I think my artistry is always authentic.
I don't need every person to like every one of my photos. But when I work hard on a photo and there is clear talent and skill involved, I'm hoping people will still acknowledge that. I hope they will respect the effort and artistry involved.
I didn't enjoy the show Breaking Bad. I disliked all of the characters and the story just depressed me more and more as I watched it. But I still think it is an amazing show created by talented artists. I can acknowledge the monumental artistic achievement even if it wasn't my cup of tea.
That's all I'm asking.
Skin and Bones @bertie-brynn - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
