Use the library. Find stuff you like. In the US, Libby and Hoopla are great digital borrowing options a lot of libraries support. I tend to actually buy fiction when it’s an author/series I want day one. (Mostly audiobooks, some ebooks). For nonfiction, I do the best research I can to determine that it’s evidence backed and well respected by other authors in the field (generally psychology-ish).

In terms of the format, I mostly don’t do physical books. I can’t carry 1000 of those in my pocket. I mostly get a handful of favorites to have on a shelf and maybe talk someone else into reading, but I’ll still read on my ereader or audio. My preference is audiobook because I have a lot of time where I can listen while doing other stuff. I do get a fair number of ebooks as well, but a lot of those are programming books because audio doesn’t work for code and especially because there are a lot of awesome bundles through Humble Bundle for them.

There’s no possible way to apply the law where the Internet Archive is permitted to do their lending program. It very clearly is illegal copyright infringement that does not come anywhere close to fair use.

The judges do not have the authority to completely overrule both the text of the law and the massive body of precedent. The Supreme Court could, except the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the right to regulate IP how they see fit, and the law is super clear that you can’t do anything that resembles what IA is doing in any way.

Maybe he’s just enthusiastic about a game that does something he’s into?

Yeah, I’m not really disagreeing with him, though I do think Elden Ring is one of the least janky games I’ve ever played. It really does feel incredibly consistent to me. Compared to something like the Witcher where even walking doesn’t seem to stop in the same place consistently, it really does work pretty well IMO. I think the older games did feel a lot sloppier, but Elden Ring took a step forward into super smooth control to me.

But I would like a better visual cue.

Why exactly do they need to be targeting photorealism with shit like PBR?

There’s also a lot less owls, that are a lot harder to find than dragonflies.

I have shots I like, but they’re pretty much all reasonably common animals because that’s what I have access to, mostly in my back yard. Or flowers I mostly grew, or whatever. Getting an owl, especially doing cool stuff like that, adds the whole element of actually finding the right spot where they live and play, etc. It’s a whole additional layer of work involved.

I made it a chain of replies with one per post instead so my whole app doesn’t crash every time I open it. One of the others actually is a dragonfly. Huge pain in the ass because of how fast they move, and because they’re too small for my autofocus (that’s also probably too slow). But really satisfying when you get a clean one (though I definitely had to massage that one in post).

I found ~f/10 with as fast a shutter as you can get away with is your best bet to get a clear shot with a decent chunk in focus. More open than that and the plane in focus is just too narrow for me to get anything.

I was listening to a football podcast (they go off topic in the offseason because there isn’t a lot to talk about), and they had a whole rant about how Pam Beasley is a monster.

Because she was friends with Jim while dating Roy. (Yeah him having feelings for her wasn’t exactly a shocker, but it’s different when it’s you. And she shut him down clearly when he actually made a move.)

Because she did the art school thing, I guess?

Because she was sad when Jim was dating Karen. (She did genuinely try to be her friend despite that, and went to cry in a corner alone.)

And because there was tension when Jim did Athlead. (Which if you actually watch, was him biting her head off when she messed up with a video of a recital, and him instigating a couple other times, presumably because of the stress of the situation, while she was being run ragged as almost a single mother at home.)

And because apparently chasing your dreams going to New York to go to art school while in a relationship is the same as doing it when you’re actually married and have kids. But she didn’t bend over backward enough to support him I guess?

It’s just really weird to me, and he’s not the only one with that weird twist on the character. (No she’s not perfect. Sitcoms are all characters who are kind of monsters. But her as the bad guy doesn’t make sense.)

There. Splitting them into posts doesn’t crash I guess.

Another “I want to, but…”. The places to realistically do that are basically sites like instagram that I see as actively malicious. I’ll get to the point of just hosting myself on my own hardware to make visible to people who care, but definitely not promoting or anything. I just have a bad habit of stacking up too many other things to develop simultaneously, then doing none of them to read a book or play video games or do one of the different outdoor things I want to do instead.

But if you’re curious I can throw a couple here. (And this post won’t load for me after because my app can’t parse multiple images in a post lol.

Good video.

I get his point and agree with some of it (I’d rather boss designs not lean on your invincibility), but I just fundamentally feel like dodging against the grain of attacks adds something. It would be cool if, as the engines get better, you got more animations where you slid over, hopped over, etc attacks instead of just rolling and not taking damage.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-secret-power-of-read-it-later-apps

So this article was included with Omnivore, which is suggested elsewhere in this thread, but it does provide a bunch of well structured arguments for the utility of a dedicated app.

I’m not anywhere near that level anyways. It’s definitely a straight hobby for me, that I started with the idea of having shots for photogrammetry and other types of image processing and went down kind of a rabbit hole of just enjoying chasing birds (and bees, and butterflies), for the sake of the mechanical challenge. Getting from seeing something with your eyes to a balanced, focused shot is genuinely hard on its own. It would be cool to play with some of those $5k (or $50k) lenses, but one $500 lens every few years is way more in line with my budget.

But I’m not a huge fan of just being at crowded events drowning in people (again, sports are an exception, because the focus is the game), so the stress of needing to get a lot of really good shots and capture unique, irreplicable moments on top of that would definitely not be fun. And being customer service on top of that, another job I’d hate?

Yeah, I was going to just list the broad strokes of the actual skill/work required, but actually paying the bills while doing it seriously is just too much to easily ignore. There are some genuine ways to do stuff like that as a job or freelance, but not enough to support too many people. I’m guessing a good number need to rely on event photography to pay for their equipment, and I can tell you that’s sure as hell not for me. (Unless I could be on a football sideline. But being a wedding photographer would be a nightmare for me.)

I’m guessing you’d have to be pretty deliberate about preventing corrosion.

For me personally just salt water goes a long way, though. I go to the beach when I can and I’ll spend an hour floating in 2 feet of 60° water and feel amazing for a week.

I think your best bet is probably some kind of kiddy pool/pet bath with sufficient depth. Even most jacuzzi style tubs aren’t actually big enough for an adult to float in.

Would take a lot of salt though.

Digital definitely helps because you can just spam the hell out of the shutter. And I have no doubt that a shot like this has an obscene investment in equipment because I’ve seen the limitations of my own (still expensive for me, and realistically pretty decent) stuff. But the top end is something different.

Then on top of that equipment, you need some decent work into scouting locations where you can get close enough without scaring stuff away, you need to invest a bunch of time actually in those locations, with a reasonably high degree of focus, understand your camera and settings well enough to maximize the shot for the lighting, and react and get shots lined up in seconds a lot of the time.

Plus actually find a way to make a living on it or do it in your spare time between an actual job that pays the bills and for all your expensive gear. It’s seriously impressive and there’s a reason most people can’t do it.

That is an amazing shot.