This guy's illusions are great
Unfortunately, I think this might be AI. While I was willing to think it was just clever editing, on a rewatch I that noticed his leg clips through the jail cell’s toilet.
It's a CGI/editing failure, not AI. That's a human mistake. This guy has been doing this since 2008.
in charcuterie city, you'll always be cheesed to meet your friends
I hate charcuterie city I want to go somewhere else
this is all that's left.
this is all that's left.
this thing is made up and fictitious i dont believe it to be a real thing
cant stop thinking about this video
For context this was in response to someone saying their cybertruck was heavy duty
oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.
"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.
To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.
And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...
(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)
...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...
...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...
...only for the ropes to snap...
...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.
(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)
Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.
Or at least the wrecking ball.
But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.
Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)
Wait NO-
Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.
Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...
...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...
...and be fueled up.
"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.
Look at that thing, you say.
Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.
And again, you are right.
The battery was disconnected.
Sorted that, tho
"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!
I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.
The Toyota Hilux is absolutely the small god of endurance and defiance (and possibly masochism).
yes I'm reposting about a small god truck are you kidding me
you show me your boobs and I react with this
ok i'm sorry im sorry but like. who are you to decide who does and does not experience oppression? who made you the arbiter of who is or isn't oppressed? who gave you the authority to decide whether or not someone experiences a type of oppression? that's one of my biggest issues with the whole TME/TMA thing. we can't know. we can't know! is that person "tme" or are they a closeted trans woman who isn't able to come out? is that person "tme" or do they just not meet your standards for passing? is that person "tma" or are you just racist? is that person "tme" or are you just racist? is that person "tme" or are you j
like you're trying to make a hard line about something where the general consensus 5 years ago was that there were no hard lines! is someone who's genderfluid tme one day and tme the next?
outside of all this it's just useless. who's affected by transmisogyny? well.. a lot of people, really, but who do these people insist are the only ones affected by trans misogyny? transfems. and who isn't? literally everyone else. so who are you talking about when you say "tma"? only transfems. who does that help? what does it do? congrats, you can identify transfems now! because there was no way of doing it before i guess! ?
i've got more to say but i'm sure people are tired of seeing it. i won't get into the whole intersex part of it because a. i'm not eloquent enough to word it well (as im sure you've learned from my rambling here) b. many intersex people have put it much better before me c. i'm tired of typing.
Misionero Comido Por Tigre, 1907, Noé León
Kinda sad that the Thieves Guild is my favorite faction to join TES games and Morrowind is my favorite TES game but playing as a Thief in it kinda sucks because there's an unfixable problem with how the game handles stolen items
Basically, unlike later Elder Scrolls games where you can only can only sell stolen items to special merchants that serve as fences, in Morrowind you can sell stolen shit to anyone. But if you try to sell it back to the same person you stole it from, they will recognize the item and report you for stealing it.
Except that, due to the way the game handles items, if you steal an item from someone, they will recognize *every* instance of the same item as being stolen from them
So for example if you complete the first thieves guild quest by stealing the diamond from Nalcarya, then for the rest of the game you can *never* try to sell a diamond from Nalcarya again because she will "recognize" any diamond you try to sell her as being the one you stole from her, even if it's a completely different diamond.
And this literally can't be patched out or fixed through modding because it's an engine-level problem that would require completely rewriting the way the game handles there being multiple instances of the same item.
And even the way it was fixed in OpenMW which is a complete rewrite of the game's engine from the ground up is kind of a band-aid workaround. In OpenMW the game keeps a counter of how many of each item have been stolen from each person, and once you've had that same amount of that item confiscated by the guards, it will stop treating the item as stolen.
Which is much better and kinda makes sense, but still sucks because, e.g., if you steal three diamonds from Nalcarya, she will still "recognize" any instance of a diamond as being stolen from her until you've had three diamonds confiscated by the guard, so you still can't try to sell her that type of item until that happens.
Also some items have faction ownership instead of individual ownsership. Which means that e.g. if you steal a lesser soul gem that's marked as owned by the Mages Guild, you can never sell a lesser soul gem to *any* merchant from the mages guild ever again.
there are insane levels of suicide particles radiating off of this video
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.
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.
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.
fo4 writers literally said "i love how blade runner gives replicants a built-in tragedy in the form of a 5-year maximum lifespan, we should do something like that with gen 3 synths" and then did the exact opposite. checks notes what if uhhhhhh. our versions never age or get sick or anything. would thjat be sad
there IS horror and tragedy to be had in the thought that synth shaun was created to BE a child in the cruelest, most basic sense. he's trapped there forever. he can never age. his body will remain in a perpetual state of arrested development even as his mind will change and expand with time. he'll outlive the sole survivor and the world will still see him as less-than-human by virtue of his synth identity AND his child identity. but the game doesn't talk about any of that
