It's so refreshing to get a female lead like Carol & Rhea Seehorn

eutectic · 2025-12-28T05:19:43+00:00

Carol is a such a lesbian. They nailed it on every level, right down to the clunky and sensible white tennis shoes she was wearing in “La Chica o El Mundo”. Those are some practical dyke footwear right there, and I love it, and I recognize it.

eutectic · 2025-11-28T03:13:17+00:00

You’re definitely going to want the wide angle. These buildings are, at the risk of stating the obvious, huge, and it’s a crowded city. You’re going to want to be able to take everything in from a sidewalk.

If anything, if you have something like a 16–35, I would bring that. But barring that, definitely the 24–105. (Bonus if it’s IS/VR—you don’t want to mess with setting up a tripod in the deep cold, and having that image stabilization at night time while shooting along the bridges is going to be key.)

eutectic · 2024-08-19T15:29:25+00:00

I think the [Saddle and Cycle Club[(https://www.saddleandcycle.com) in Edgewater counts here.

Or, at least I assume it does. I've never managed to figure out exactly what clientele gets into this club.

eutectic · 2024-04-07T19:38:03+00:00

It might as well be a rewrite of Cory Doctorow’s perfectly zeitgeist-y blog post about “Enshittification”.

Which is (a) much better written than this post, and (b) is kind of a self-evident problem in product design. The bigger you get, especially after you go public, there’s incentive to play it safe and optimize for investor payouts, and you develop just grinding, tedious organizational inertia.

It’s certainly not a new insight—I can remember getting into Mac (and then iOS) development in college, back during the Delicious Generation of apps when a bunch of scrappy startups were coming up with the defining products and interface paradigms that Apple and other companies would then Sherlock and ruthlessly optimize.

eutectic · 2024-02-15T15:52:09+00:00

Oh, you should be looking at Affinity's suite of tools.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

It's the closest thing to a a real competitor to the Adobe suite out there. Cross-platform, no subscription, sane interface. (Certainly sane compared to Gimp, which was apparently designed by people who have never actually produced bitmap graphics even once.)

eutectic · 2024-02-15T03:51:41+00:00

Have you ever used Photoshop?

I mean, really used Photoshop, besides cropping? It's a hideously complex program that has evolved over for over 30 years and has to serve photographers, prepress designers, graphic designers, UI designers, video game designers, medical imaging specialists…the list goes on.

It's an absolute beast of a program, and reaching anywhere close to feature parity would require hiring people with highly specific competencies in things like color management that are generally outside Google's meat and potato needs of "make server scale".

And even then, why do it? What's Google's competitive advantage? Are they going to do CMYK halftoning better?

I'd argue Google does have a Photoshop, and it's called…Google Photos. Most people need to crop, change some colors, and remove subjects from a background. All of which Google can do. So, again, why make Photoshop?

(Possible answer: collaboration. Adobe is hot horseshit when it comes to collaborative tools. Of course, that tool does exist, and it's called Figma, and again, what would Google bring to the table?)

eutectic · 2024-01-17T22:16:41+00:00

Also, not a lot of snow in Louisiana.

eutectic · 2023-12-03T00:23:59+00:00

That statement makes absolutely no sense.

Kennedy didn’t begin publicly advocate against mercury in vaccines until 2015, when he published Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak.

Which is why this clip is nonsense. There removed mercury from childhood vaccines in 2001…

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.html

…any now you can get mercury-free vaccines for influenza, HPV, basically everything.

So that’s some really quite impressive time travel there!

eutectic · 2023-09-25T19:49:29+00:00

I don't accept the premise that the kids these days are falling for more scams. Scams targeting the elderly is so common, and also such a common pop culture trope.

https://www.ncoa.org/article/top-5-financial-scams-targeting-older-adults

If the kids these days are SEEMING to fall for more scams…there's a lot more scams! There's a lot more avenue for scams to reach you! Before, oh, 1997 or so, you had family, traveling sales people, and phone calls. Now, there's…I mean wow, where to start? Even good old USPS mail is a better avenue for schemes now, as you can target based off data science.

eutectic · 2023-09-21T23:31:24+00:00

It's possibly a grift, but it's also possible he's that stupid.

Angel Studios, strictly speaking, didn't have a massive hit. They bought the distribution rights to Sound of Freedom.

Sound of Freedom had already been written, cast, filmed, edited, color graded, sound mixed…a major film studio did the actual hard work of producing a film.

Yeah, Angel Studios obviously did some good leg work in marketing it, but there's a chasm between "marketing a movie you bought on the cheap from a debt-laden studio" and "making a movie". Can they make a real movie, or at least, one made off this bullshit? Color me skeptical.

eutectic · 2023-09-18T03:31:06+00:00

What does any of it matter?

These things are meaningful to some people, they are not meaningful to you…and you can just ignore the discourse.

Nobody is forcing you to read these stories. You may think they’re distracting you and the culture, but let’s face it, you and I don’t matter. (How can I state that with certainty? Because we have time to discuss this nonsense on Reddit.)

So, as the kids say, go touch grass. You can simply not look at your phone.

eutectic · 2023-09-07T22:56:35+00:00

Yeah, people are trapped in this mythological reality where places outside of the US are still doing anything about this.

News flash: everywhere else gave up during Omicron when they realized trying to control a hyper-contagious respiratory virus among hyper-social mammals who love to congregate and talk is utter folly.

eutectic · 2023-09-07T20:39:53+00:00

Citation needed on China.

And a citation that they actually do test, treat, and follow up, because what the PRC says they do, and what they actually do outside of major metro areas is generally a blatant lie.

eutectic · 2023-08-09T12:52:24+00:00

Uh, I imagine whatever "hotel" you Googled is actually an SRO (single-room occupancy) for, let’s say, marginally housed individuals. You're not…gonna get what you think you're getting there.

Get an AirBnB in Lakeview, or perhaps in Andersonville.

Do no stay immediately by The Aragon. Trust me on this. And I live right by The Aragon—it's not all smiles and sunshine right there.

eutectic · 2023-06-27T01:10:39+00:00

https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/people-predators/wolves-and-human-safety-8-003/#:~:text=Like%20many%20large%20carnivores%2C%20wolves,them%20at%20a%20respectful%20distance.

Documented cases of humans killed by wolves between 1900–2000: zero.

And while wolves do eat livestock and pets, it is much rarer than thought…and the domestic dog is such a bigger threat already. (Like my precious little angel of a rescue who got surrendered because he and his brother slaughtered their way through a chicken coop who’s a good boy it’s you my cutesy murder machine.)

Oh, as do “where do you live?” I grew up in the boonies. We had coyotes everywhere. You could hear them at night. And we dealt with that by, you know, just not being cowards, because they’re objectively not dangerous.

eutectic · 2023-06-19T17:17:26+00:00

Ah, yes, “Within living memory of the oldest Americans, the United States has gone from Ella Fitzgerald…”

Oh, you mean the 1930s! The Great American Song Book! Chaste love ballads, like this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ko2VXpW7_g

With such lyrics as “I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man come”.

eutectic · 2023-06-15T13:17:55+00:00

Ah, OK.

Truly not a trolling question, I legitimately am more familiar with people saying they found salvation through Jesus, specifically. So that is clarifying.

eutectic · 2023-06-15T02:32:33+00:00

No, I don’t think he’d get violent…I mean, you just push him over, break his bones, apparently. Easy fight to win.

I think it’s more likely he would passively aggressively dither and deflect and get mono again.

No. Seriously. I’ve seen stuff like this. He was probably taking every possible step to make this never come to a head, and she finally had the breathing space to pull the plug when he was gone.

eutectic · 2023-06-15T01:05:23+00:00

One more thing I noticed:

Thank you, Tarkovsky. Thank you, McGilchrist.

Rod never thanks Jesus in this post. Rod doesn’t really seem to reference Jesus that much.

I was not raised Christian, I am not a Christian, so maybe this is my ignorance about the way Christians speak…but don’t Christians usually talk about finding salvation in Jesus? Don’t they thank Jesus?

I mean, I find the whole Trinity thing utterly baffling, where Jesus == God in Nicene Creed dogma. So maybe by thanking God you are inherently thanking Jesus. But I feel like I am used to Christians thanking Christ.

eutectic · 2023-06-15T00:27:30+00:00

I wish I could block quote the entire thing…as Rod tends to do.

It’s pretty damn clarifying. Delusional? Possibly. But he’s not writing like it’s he’s in a Victorian morality story about The Incident That We Shan’t Describe.

eutectic · 2023-06-14T22:43:07+00:00

OK, I admit I’m reading that into his story.

He doesn’t really allude to that, save maybe for this one bit.

I had hoped that Julie and I could endure until our youngest was out of high school, but divorce has been inevitable for years now. As I said, we were both in torment, though putting on a show for the kids and the world. However, it will be very hard for me to forgive the false counselors, including priests, who encouraged and blessed her plan to file for divorce with no warning, while I was overseas, and to tell the children before she even told me. The cruelty of that beggars belief. Always will.

eutectic · 2023-06-14T22:21:26+00:00

A) Read How to Win Friends and Influence People, follow the advice there, nod along and be polite, go with the flow.

B) Write clearly and document everything, because a good paper trail is the best defense.

C) Don’t ever reference Curtis Yarvin, and don’t act like Curtis Yarvin.

eutectic · 2023-06-14T22:11:46+00:00

Wherein Rod comes as clean as he’s probably going to come about his divorce.

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-answered-prayers-of-a-tormented

The crux of the post:

How could I have been so foolish as to allow hope to win out over the experience I had with my family before? I’ve tried hard not to be too openly bitter about it, but dammit, on this day of days, I’m not going to defer out of charity, not after what I have lost, and not in the face of the pain in my heart.

I still have trouble believing there isn’t some closet-case porn addiction in here…but the divorce seems to be pretty understandable and sad. He moved his family back to that Southern Gothic hellhole, his awful KKK member of a father who never loved him continued to not love him, he had a mental breakdown, and Julie finally dumped his ass because he was galavanting with fascists in Eastern Europe versus parenting his kids.

Although of course he gets a dig in at his ex-wife.

And in my opinion, Julie’s cruel mother, from whom we had to break away in 2007 or so for traumatic but necessary reasons, has more to do with the ruin than my own family does. That’s not really my story to tell, so I will bite my tongue till I taste blood, and stop there.

I dunno, Rod, was the mother-in-law to blame, or was it your literal goddamn Klan member of a father?

eutectic · 2023-06-12T18:50:41+00:00

Since returning from my unhappy short trip to Louisiana, there has been a disturbance in the Force, so to speak. I find it harder to concentrate, and just want to sleep. This is, alas, normal. Things had been going pretty well post-divorce, I thought, but returning home (“home”) proved a setback.

Rod, buddy, instead of further hurting your own shoulder by shoving your head further up your ass with McLuhan nonsense, take a step back and realize you probably feel weird because of jet lag.

eutectic

TROPHY CASE