a heaven that only clowns can go to

They/them. I like serpentine and serpentine-adapted plants, PNW ecology, and Susie Deltarune. Blog title from Paranatural.

[serpentinize]

Can't make a text post about titties but we WILL show you ads specifically for how an AI app can put an image of a woman into a bikini 🙃

[serpentinize]

random internet user: hey this car seat no longer works for me. How do I go about getting different seats that are wider?

reddit: you dumb idiot moron. Why did you buy it if it wasn't comfortable? Did you even test drive the car. you can't reasonably do that on modern cars. You just threw your money away. Die

$2000 seat manufacturer: you need our seats 😇

[serpentinize]

What happened to my good friends the Boolean Operators :-(

[y3llowring0]

I’m loving all the interactions with these 2 fandoms

[serpentinize]

I don't want to post too much or too transparently about my job but I feel a good shorthand for my crew makeup is the fact that there is a guy on it who is occasionally referred to as "Mr. Four HR Violations" and my nonbinary coworker told me that people are too sensitive to being misgendered.

[serpentinize]

unfortunately I fear that my competence at one role I occasionally fill will prevent me from getting a better role because they don't have a replacement for me and my crew has not had the same lead for more than a year (usually 3-6 months) in at least five years. so I may become lead by default. this unfortunately sucks hard

[supahbeefcakes]

with marcille’s necromancy and noelle’s ice magic, they could finally create tumblr’s greatest nemesis: the strong as fuck ice mummy

[super-metroid]

a friend said that this post felt like suselle and i was inspired

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

hearing anything about the nolan odyssey is so funny. it's like "they cut the extremely important and infamous nobody scene" "the cyclops is a giant puppet that they put in an actual historical cave + gave circe animatronics for her pig transformation instead of cgi" "they dumped plastic skeletons in an environmentally protected location they were not supposed to be in" "they recreated ancient greek instruments in order to have an accurate score" "all of odysseus's agency is basically gone" "anne hathaway actually learned how to weave ancient looms" "the women in this movie are treated like shit" "they actually buried actors alive to get those underworld shots" "did you see what the fuck zendaya was fucking wearing holy shit you can't DO THAT, MA'AM" "what do you mean there was a legitimate epic the musical reference" "NOT A SINGLE FUCKING GREEK WAS CAST IN THIS MOVIE"

like did nolan have two guys standing at his side at all times whispering ideas in his ear and one told the truth and the other told lies and they didnt tell him which was which until they wrapped production cause

[serpentinize]

People get so mad at video game bosses being nerfed. This is Deltarune. You are not superior for saying that an option to nerf a secret boss is handholding for idiot babies

[leshermes]

Jasmine Vine, lead programmer of Hollow Knight & Silksong just transitioned!! I'm so happy for her!❤️🏳️‍⚧️

[c-rowlesdraws]

her bluesky header & icon are so cute too 🥰

[charl0ttan]

[clowniconography]

this is one of the more creative hate comments i've seen and i felt the need to immortalize it

[serpentinize]

Genuinely so cool how either 1. Flowery's desire to be human extends to his talksprites being black and white (like the Lightners) but he still has colored eyes (like Darkners) despite his machinations OR 2. that's just a thing with Light World organisms given new sentience and forms by the Dark World

[icaseybaybee]

[xenosagaepisodeone]

I feel as if studio ghibli films being reduced to their 'cozyness' would be tragic if not for the fact that it is a deliberate branding thing for them. from the ghibli museum to the revolving door of hot topic collabs, miyazaki and/or the people he puts in charge of these things are aware of how desirable the worlds within ghibli films are. even at that, how meaningful is the politics of howl's moving castle being motivated by miyazaki's outrage at the 2003 iraq invasion when you examine it alongside the actual text of the wind rises? what does the environmentalism of ponyo mean when faced with the massive amounts of waste generated by ghibli merch you can get at wal mart? i'm straying from the point here but

this was an officially licensed product that was released to promote grave of fireflies

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

My garden, with the innumerable herbs and alliums I let flower instead of pulling out, has suddenly acquired a myriad of wasps. They’re mostly solitary species and fairly chill so of course I had to stick a camera in their faces.

So far I’m really happy with these!

These will eventually make their way to the @animalphotorefs repository, once I sort the uh…. Six thousand and seven hundred something bug photos I just took.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Oh man I am so pleased with today’s attempt.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

#jfc 4000 iso...#<- im a beginner. i've never seen iso that high#or shutter speed that fast prev tags from @time-teller

What you'll find - for prev but also anyone interested - is that the faster the moving animal you're trying to photograph the higher the shutter speed gets. I normally shoot birds at 2000-3000 frames per second in order to get sharp feathers in flight, and after a bunch of trial and error anything under about 8000 was just not enough for these little wasps while in flight if I wanted to see detail. They're so fast that even getting these shots required setting my focus distance when they were sitting on the flower, shooting burst, and hoping they took off during the burst.

The reason the ISO is so high is because that lets me use a higher aperture (how wide open the lens is). The narrower the aperture - the higher the F number on the screen - the less light gets in, but the deeper the depth of field is. If you have a shallow depth of field, you get photos like a lot of my early macro attempts... where the nose of an animal facing the camera is in focus but the eyes and ears are not! When you're shooting with a high ISO your images can get really noisy, especially in low light, but I was working in really strong direct sunlight so I had room to mess around with settings. (You can push this too far. I accidentally took a bunch of baby elephant pool wrestling photos on 12000 ISO because I was exhausted and forgot to reset after messing with settings in a really dark reptile house. There's a reason those aren't online.)

I also just want to point out that I am also fairly new at photography overall - I've only really been doing animal photography seriously for the last three years - and that a lot of what will help you get better is trial and error. I have two photography mentors who are both super technical guys and they repeatedly tried to explain the exposure triangle theory to me (the relationship between ISO, aperture, and shutter speed). It never stuck. Y'know what did? Taking a truly astounding number of photos and just messing around with my settings until it started making sense. I shoot with all my settings on manual now, but I absolutely did not start there.

So even as a beginner you too can learn to use ridiculous settings! Find a thing you want to photograph, put the settings where you think they need to be to get what you want. Get enough photos to make you happy, and then change one setting a little bit and try again. I suggest using auto settings where you only have to pick a value for one setting manually and then the camera automatically adjusts the other two for the best photo. Play with a couple adjustments to the same setting on the same subject so you can compare the photos. Over time, it really will start to make sense and come more naturally. And then you can join me in the "your shutter speed was what?" club!

[hawkpartys]

If you want to take higher aperture macro photos without hitting ISO numbers like that, I cannot recommend enough using a flash unit. Even(and honestly especially!) in sunlight. The flash even gives you room to knock the shutterspeed down-- I've gotten beautiful "freeze-frame" shots working at 250.

(ISO 100, F11, 1/250)

(ISO 100, F11, 1/250) (dont be fooled, this guy was not actually sitting still)

(okay this ones mainly just here because its funny) (ISO 200, F13(ish, manual aperture ring so some fudgy inbetween value), 1/250)

I only say this because high ISO plus a high aperture is a surefire recipe for fuzzed out photos-- As you raise your aperture value, once you hit the diffraction point, your resolution begins to go down, which when combined with the noise can be a huge pain.

(Though that also depends on your lens. I could get up to F32 on my nikkor without the resolution getting too bad, but F16 and above on my laowa are a pain. Such is life)

The increased clarity of lower ISO can be worth it in my opinion cause you can get stuff like this

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

See, this is a person who knows more than I do about macro photography!

I had not thought about trying flash - you can’t use them at zoos so it hadn’t crossed my mind for wildlife.

They are really right about the combination of high aperture and ISO making things grainy. I was able to push to F10 there because of the lens I was using, but I couldn’t go much further and smaller glass wouldn’t work at those settings at all.

Lovely photos and thank you for chiming in!