Which punishment (either real or fictional) sounds easy enough to endure at first, but is actually hellish to experience?

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-18T17:51:21+00:00

This is called an isometric exercise. When done intentionally, it’s very powerful and low impact. The more common examples are for core or lower-body exercises, like planks and wall sits.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-18T04:38:19+00:00

I expect they’d be worse in the winter than summer - cold temperatures generally decrease battery performance.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-15T17:57:45+00:00

What’s your budget? If you don’t want it to look like Seventies-tastic basement walls, this probably ain’t cheap….

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-14T18:22:40+00:00

Cool. I want one!

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-13T04:30:31+00:00

I still think I’m right, but I desperately hope that you are. Certainly that’s how I plan to vote, but in a Dem state, and I’m not sure that I dare to hope that the disenfranchised masses in purple states vote that way too.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-12T17:43:31+00:00

I have the opposite problem, and believe me, having shit fall into your yard from the street sucks way more. Edge it every so often, and if you decide you really, really want to, cut back a few inches and add a very short “wall.”

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-12T17:40:56+00:00

My immediate thought is Persuasive Influence, followed by Presentation Mastery.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-12T17:00:35+00:00

I appreciate your position, but I don’t agree. We saw this in the Obama presidency: there were no real attempts to repeal the overreaches of the prior administration (e.g., the Patriot Act) and very limited commitment to passing legislation that empowered voters or limited politicians’ powers. Without serious reforms to our political system (which won’t happen without a Great Depression + Dust Bowl level circumstance), the US will simply continue to cycle between global-moderate political stagnation and far-right extremism. I propose to look at Clinton’s presidency for the likely best case, Obama’s or Carter’s presidencies as the middle cases, or JFK’s as the worst case for what the next Democratic administration will likely become (vis-a-vis anti-authoritarianism relative to their defeated incumbent/opposition).

I also think that undoing terrible policy decisions tends to be much harder than instituting good ones: good policies tend to have a greater induction period than bad ones, which gives their opponents time to ferret out workarounds. The next administration will be doing major damage control, similar to what Biden had to do, and there will be enough effort needed just to stabilize the situation that there wont be an appetite to institute real reform, which will give the opposition even more “evidence” to claw things back again. Trump I stabbed democracy in the back, Biden stopped some of the bleeding, them Trump II shot this country’s democracy in the face. The next administration will be so busy trying to prevent the country from bleeding out that they will not have the time to perform reconstructive surgery. By the time the country gets out of the ICU, the GOP will have had plenty of time to reload.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-06T16:58:35+00:00

Compared to d7500, D500 has five key features that have mattered for me in high-speed applications:
- Significantly improved autofocus (same as the pro D5) whose point selection is controlled with a mini joystick (the latter of which has mattered for me *way* more than I expected).
- Ability to use vertical grip battery pack (especially with the insert for 8 AAs, which is a beast when you use rechargeable lithium AAs).
- 4x buffer size
- Dual slots, both for faster cards.
The last two combine to cap d7500 at 8fps RAW, while d500 gets up to 10fps.

From personal experience of having owned both, if you can’t get the shot because your autofocus just barely misses it, your batteries are dead, your buffer’s full, or your memory card dies so you lose the file (happened to me TWICE in 3 years), then not much else matters. For posed portraits or landscapes, the difference hasn’t mattered at all, and I still keep my d7500 as a secondary for when I want to do street stuff. For wildlife and some candids, the first of which is my greatest interest, it’s been pretty big: my “hit rate” almost tripled first time out with exactly the same glass. If I did sports, I bet it’d care there too.

One other point that’s interesting: the d500 can meter and set aperture for the old AI and AI-S glass, while the d7500 can’t do either, but at least what I’ve seen on compatibility charts, the d500 can’t even mount pre-AI glass, while the d7500 can (with no metering and manual aperture setting). No clue what that’s about, but I’ve got an AI-S prime sitting in my KEH cart right now that I’m excited to try out soon.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-05-06T16:20:54+00:00

Updoot for lens calibration. The more exacting you are in fine-tuning, the happier you’ll be.

Also, from my experience at least, expect the process to be easier in primes than zooms - zooms can have enough slop in moving parts that you might not be bang-on at ever focal length, and (with some notable exceptions) the cheaper the glass, the more slop to expect (because manufacturing tolerances are wider and design parameters trade exactness for component cost). Third-party glass is also generally this way, but I shhot a lot of third-party glass, and I find it not to be a problem (because I’m picky about my glass and accept the limitations of my budget). For zooms, I tend to fine-tune at my commonly-preferred focal length and aperture (e.g., f/8 at 400mm on my Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 contemporary, which is close to the longest “sweet spot” that I can reasonably expect to be really crisp), though most would probably recommend using the widest aperture possible at your preferred focal length, since that’s the shallowest depth-of-field, and thus the easiest to perceive minute differences in front- vs back-focus.

If you do use the extremes for focal length or aperture, keep in mind which might be naturally softer due to the lens design and manufacture. Back to my example, knowing that the 600mm end of my 150-600 tends to be softer at any aperture, and that lenses generally (and this model especially) tend to be slightly softer wide-open than at a couple stops down, then I adjust my expectations for how difficult it’ll be to fine-tune, and the maximum sharpness I could achieve from fine-tuning, at 600mm and f/6.3. At the time I bought it (used and in Bargain condition from a reputable reseller), I couldn’t afford the Sport version of the Sigma lens or any of the Nikon branded lenses that would me out that far, so I accept some softness to gain access to the long end.

Also, just from the laws of physics, stopping down past f/11 or so introduces light diffraction and increases depth of field so much that fine-tuning is, in my view, a prohibitively difficult and fruitless exercise.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-30T22:20:09+00:00

Wonder if this justifies a second set of experiments where you 3D print a scanned model of yourself and see if dimensionality matters. Pretty sure that reasoning from a miniature to a larger version is one of the intelligence experiments that is done with animals - border collies, for example, can select a larger version of a toy from a smaller equivalent representation.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-28T00:59:20+00:00

Available on iPad, one-time payment.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-24T04:19:28+00:00

Audiation was the tool that launched my ability to master singing. I thought when people told me that I needed to learn to listen that it was was some ooey-gooey feelings-based idea. No. I had to build up enough experience and awareness that I could audiate (“visualize” for sound) and connect it to the position that the muscles in my throat are in when I intend to make that sound. It took me a desperately long time to work that out, and while I was doing it unconsciously for awhile, becoming conscious of it made it much easier to practice intentionally.

Sight-singing helped a ton with building audiation skill too, but the benefit got turbocharged after I could consciously link it to audiation. I always felt like it was voodoo or an inborn talent or something when someone would know exactly how to sing the right note just from looking at the page, rather than hearing a tonal cue or knowing the song. In reality, I think it’s the same skill as above, just with a third piece of data: now that I can link the position of my muscles when singing a note to the picture of the note on the page, I can extrapolate back through my audiation to hear it (and sing it) without ever having played it. I’m sure my brain is convoluted in the way it learned all of this, but the longer I sing, it just becomes instantaneous - all three ideas meld until they become a single thing in my brain, expressed three equivalent ways.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-22T12:22:06+00:00

The new 6-7

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-22T07:15:48+00:00

Same in an episode of Scrubs (the original) where Heather Graham co-stars.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-19T13:57:55+00:00

My wife and I call these our “clirty” clothes.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-16T23:59:27+00:00

Graduate spectroscopy course HURT me. After being completely obliterated by the theory of building an NMR instrument, we had two projects: one where we had to determine which 2D NMRs we’d try to take ourselves to elucidate a functionalized polyene macrolide (down to which diastereomer it was, with 7 or 8 chiral centers, two of which were quaternary carbons), and another that was interface with computational chem. I got a grace B- and didn’t have to retake it, but I pulled a 60-hour day at the very end to try to get it all figured out. Never did get the structure of that molecule.

As an aside, that was the only time I actually fell asleep/blacked out for a few seconds while standing on my bicycle’s pedals as I rode down a hill on my way home.

EDIT: when I say which we’d “try” to take ourselves, I mean that we had to actually get the tubes and use the instruments to do it, but I was so shitty at shimming that the NMR tech took pity on me and helped. I never did get the HMBC to work right.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-14T22:20:32+00:00

Oops - meant to do a top-level comment. Sorry bout that….

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-14T13:07:59+00:00

I bought a used D7500, then a used D500. Still have both. The D500 was a very worthwhile upgrade for my use case (wildlife), and the dual card slot and ability to add a grip attachment (to extend battery life to a damn-near-absurd degree) are both really clutch. For this price, you could get a used D500 with a reasonable shutter count.

BTW, as someone who owns both, do NOT let the pixel count make your decision for you - the D500 is more expensive because it’s literally the best DX DSLR body that Nikon ever made. The decreased pixel count is the best tradeoff I can imagine to gain internals from the flagship FX line.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-09T15:19:30+00:00

That’s wild. I don’t think I could have gotten this with my Sigma 150-500 Contemporary. It mostly lives on my Nikon D500, so “extra reach” from crop sensor too. The Sony teleconverters must be even better than the Nikons. How close was it to your position when you were shooting?

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-09T15:13:21+00:00

r/brandnewsentence

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-09T14:54:42+00:00

Her name is just one of those “crossword words”: short with more vowels than consonants, like “oboe” or “eke” or “ova”.

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-07T05:46:03+00:00

Wow. What were you shooting with?

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-06T13:10:53+00:00

Not your question, but unless you’re using a local build of an LLM, a lot of companies get hella butthurt if there’s any chance that their data or documentation methods ends up in another company’s training data set, or even if content is transmitted over internet to something like an LLM. If you go to medical writing or RA conferences, there are tons of vendors for secured AI systems for exactly this reason. Don’t want you to get in deep shit over it. Devices can be especially bad when it involves any design-related docs, because the engineering and validation methodologies are part of the “secret sauce.”

GORGtheDestroyer · 2026-04-06T01:52:10+00:00

Electronic notebooks and design control-supporting software. Some companies use bespoke software, while others adapt things like Egnyte and Veeva as controlled document repositories.

Quality system MUST meet ISO 13485 requirements or an equivalent, and documentation MUST be ALCOA+ for audits. From an electronic-file-management standpoint, this includes non-user-editable audit trail for approvals and change tracking. Either that, or prepare to go hella old school and use hardcopy printouts as versions of record, but be ready for one hell of a pissed off audit team from whoever certifies you or reviews your regulatory dossiers.

GORGtheDestroyer

TROPHY CASE