I want to sink my teeth into everything

Alex: he/him, 30s, your local supply of deaf rage. Kofi: https://ko-fi.com/stupidpoetry My writing blog: stupidpoetrywrites.tumblr.com Header by @toosmallortootall

[nintendo-wheee]

[basilistic]

request

[refrainee]

Sera we need to lock in

[reference]

[toofastandtoofurious]

The level of dogshit that this week has been is astronomical. Apparently that's not enough though cause I can FEEL the flare up kicking in. Aiaiai.

[maruposting]

[startledoctopus]

medicine! despite the obstacles, we continue to advance and treat/cure more diseases than ever before. while i wish advertising for GLP1s would die with fire, they truly revolutionized care for people with Type II diabetes. last year they came out with a treatment for Huntington's disease that slows progression significantly (it was previously untreatable). a drug being tested for Alzheimers might be able to regrow teeth??? more and more surgeries are able to be done laproscopically, reducing recovery time significantly (tubal ligation for example). PCOS has been renamed and redefined to Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome to more accurately reflect the main symptoms (lots of people don't have cysts and thus got dismissed by doctors), and they have a blood test for it now.

frogs! thanks to tumblr's own @markscherz and others, we keep finding new frog species!

treatment for cat kidneys! it's not widely available yet as they complete testing but Japanese researcher Toru Miyazaki has created an injection that can protect cat kidneys, which could let cats that would otherwise die of kidney complications live twice as long. which is a lot of cats, sadly.

[catcrumb]

( hi everyone! it's that time of year again... expect me back sometime in august! in the meantime, consider donating to direct relief for earthquake recovery in venezuala! )

[corrya]

I think about this like once a day

[vaspider]

I have heard a variant on it that I really like: "You cannot hate yourself into someone you can love."

[redstonedust]

nobody numa numas like they used to

[redstonedust]

(wistfully) mai-ia-hee... mai-ia- hoo....

[jojotichakorn]

bro, i desperately need people to learn that romance is an actual, literal genre of fiction. if you do not like a complete focus on romance and only like romantic plotlines incorporated into various other plots - you do not like the romance genre and you are not interested in romance fiction. simple as that. and it's fine if you don't like it, but pretending like the entire genre doesn't exist and is actually all badly written fiction of other genres which is overly focused on romance is asinine. yet somehow continues being a sentiment i see all the time. romance fiction is not lacking in plot or over-concerned with romantic relationships - it's literally doing what it was designed to do: centers mostly or even exclusively around romance.

[viralfrog]

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

If you're comfortable accusing anyone of faking disability, you're not a real ally to disabled people

[teaboot]

One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off

[spicyvampire]

The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it

[gothiccharmschool]

I still believe that the harbingers of the tech decline were MP3 players prioritizing streaming instead of making it easy to upload music to a library, and Apple removing the headphone jack. Those things led directly to the whole idea of not owning the media you bought.

[sirfrogsworth]

When you are just starting out learning about crafting visuals, the "rule of thirds" is given to folks as training wheels. If you don't know what you are doing, it is a good way to force people to think about their framing and avoid obvious snapshot compositions.

The idea is that if you gain experience and get better, you will shed those rule-of-thirds training wheels and start thinking more deeply about composition.

Eventually, you learn that central compositions can be done well and may gravitate back to them. Professionals use central framing all the time and some use it almost exclusively. You can play with focus and symmetry and layered compositions. It's a great way to draw the eye with leading lines. The idea is that you put the subject in a central position and then the secondary subject and the periphal context support the subject.

This movie was not made for TikTok or vertical viewing. That Twitter user overlayed the vertical video lines to demonstrate their point, and it ended up proving them wildly incorrect.

Remember that composition, more than anything else, needs to serve the story.

Let's look at how this falls apart.

How does this composition work without the other kids gossiping about her? This composition was constructed to show she is a school pariah. If it were on TIkTok, she'd just be walking down a hall.

Here we might not even know these are legs.

Here you can't tell she's hiding in a bathroom stall. Never has a roll of toilet paper been so important to a composition.

Have some random fingers, TikTok.

The subject is actually the glowing hands. This is a symmetrical composition, not a central one. Her in the mirror is not actually the subject.

I'm pretty sure that floating mouse needs to be in frame. TikTok gets an eyeball and a thumb to figure out what is going on.

You get one leg to figure this one out. Good luck.

I did find one single scene where the entire context could be shoved into a vertical video format.

That is the only shot that would work on TikTok out of the entire trailer.

What most people call composition is actually just subject framing. Which can be an important part of the composition, but it is only one variable.

I'm going to steal from another post of mine because I don't feel like writing essentially the same thing over. But I detailed how a professional visual author thinks about composition beyond just framing and rule of thirds...

Things that are often considered when designing a shot… background, midground, foreground. Symmetry or asymmetry. Primary and secondary subjects. Visual weight and balance. Visual anchors. Subject separation via depth of field, background/foreground exposure ratio, contrast, or color palette. And most importantly… storytelling.

Let's think through the composition of this shot.

I prefer to think back to front. What do I want the viewer to see?

Background is the sky. Midground is the town. Foreground is Michael B Jordan.

They chose a mostly symmetrical composition, with the gun being asymmetrical to help it stand out. The visual weight of the left is balanced on the right. Symmetry is a powerful and dramatic visual anchor. If you would rather the viewer chew on the environment and absorb the entire frame, you may frame the subject off-center.

The primary subject is his face and the secondary subject is the gun. You can tell this because the gun is out of focus. They want you to visually anchor your attention to his expression. The angle of the gun even has a leading line that goes straight to his eyes.

Subject separation is mostly done with an exposure ratio. He is dark against a bright white sky. There is some background blur as well.

The camera is slightly below his eyeline, so it is looking up at him. This gives him a sense of power and control. He is dangerous and imposing. They are using a strong central framing with a low perspective as storytelling tools.

All of those creative decisions are part of composition. If all you consider is subject framing, your shot is probably going to be weaker for it.

I agree that there is some content being made more friendly for watching on phones. But even with shows and movies, most people still make the effort to turn their phone sideways. So I don't think this central framing thesis holds any water. I think it was just a compositional preference by the filmmakers.

Either that or Wes Anderson was a visionary, creating the most TikTok-able movies before the platform even existed.

[thefrogman]

Armchair internet critics keep trying to diagnose bad movie visuals. They keep trying to isolate individual variables as the cause, rather than a larger systemic issue of risk-averse, efficient filmmaking—where artists have limited creative control and unreasonable resource limitations.

So far, the villains have been soft lighting, background blur (shallow DOF), CGI, digital cameras, and now we can add central compositions to the pile.

But if you look at the best looking movies throughout history, many filmmakers used all of those things, in abundance, to great effect.

It's a matter of ratio, intensity, taste, and effort.

Knowing when to use hard vs soft light.

Knowing how to use soft light while keeping the image dimensional and not flat.

Knowing how much to blur the background to get good subject separation.

Mixing practical with CGI to give the effects grounding and real world lighting reference.

Making sure your central subject framing is well designed and having the taste to know you can't just stick something in the middle and get a good shot without all the other compositional variables considered.

If I could assign bad visuals to one villain, it would be low effort.

If you use soft lighting because it is easier to make look good than hard lighting, that is a low effort issue, not a soft lighting one.

If you blur the background to mush because you didn't want to put in the effort to create an interesting set or go to a beautiful location, that is low effort, not shallow depth of field.

But often, low effort visuals are the only option available. Filmmakers are given a day to shoot and not enough time and money to prepare. They are told to just use a green screen. They are told to light things flat so they can just fix it in post and easily blend the VFX.

The high effort options are not always available to every director. They are just a cog in a capitalist studio machine that demands efficiency over artistry.

So when these critics blame the artists for not knowing their craft rather than blaming the systems they have to work within, it makes me very frustrated.

And if we take away all of these vital tools to create visuals, it will not make things look better. You just get low effort hard light, deep depth of field of boring backgrounds, bad practical effects, all with everything framed on a rule of thirds grid line.

But hey, at least it is shot on film!

Which, by its nature, is a high effort medium that vastly inflates the budget. So corners will have to be cut for every other aspect in order to support that choice, causing even more low-effort compromises.

[noxelementalist]

@coldcrashpictures

[kingfucko]

i dont care if monday sucks... tuesday cost me sixty bucks... wednesday thursday give no fucks. it's friday im a duck

[sandersstudies]

Every time you go in a public place and something ISN’T disgusting it’s because somebody cleaned it. Every time you feel comfortable using a public bathroom or sitting at a restaurant table or setting something on a gas station counter or playing on a playground it’s because somebody cleaned it.

Thank you to everyone who cleans the world, especially those who are underpaid and under appreciated.

[my-life-is-a-sidequest]

I worked in a supermarket for 7 years and I don't think I can understate just how much cleaning you had to do for it to look clean (it very often where not in the places you aren't supposed to see)

[sandersstudies]

True for food service, retail establishments, gyms, outdoor areas, schools, religious buildings, office buildings, etc. People usually only notice when a space is NOT clean, meanwhile every time a space is clean it’s only because of the diligent work of janitors, maintenance staff, custodians, parks workers, or volunteers.

[json-derulo]

Whenever they gave us one of those "read through ALL the instructions before you begin!" trick assignments in school where the steps lead you on an increasingly ridiculous goose chase until the final one tells you to just put your name on the paper and turn it in without doing anything else, I was always like, "Okay, but what's the point? Surely the REAL world won't be anything like this." And then I grew up and discovered that not only is the real world often exactly like that, some people won't even read the first line of the instructions even if they make perfect sense. And these people are called "co-workers"

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

If you accidentally hurt someone or cross their boundaries and they make you aware of this, literally all you have to do is apologize and stop. You don't have to beat yourself up internally for months. You don't have to hate yourself for fucking up. You don't have to feel like a horrible person. No one benefits from any of that - and at worst, such an extreme reaction will make the person in question less likely to speak up around you in the future, cause even if your negative reaction is directed at yourself and not at them, it's still unpleasant for everyone involved.