I await with interest the first serious accusation that I’m a bot. A very well armed bot, perhaps. I certainly type some strange things, but you guys have probably seen my hands too many times.

Unless my hands are also AI generated. Hmm.

I’ve already garnered the achievement of having several people on one of the Discord servers I hang around on of treating me as if I’m literally a penguin. Nobody’s yet come up with a credible explanation of how I’d be able to type. (Including, surprisingly, the obvious hunt and peck gag that presents itself.)

I have offers turned off on eBay for this reason. The only thing you ever get is low ball offers. Yes, I know you can set a lowerbound limit.

Since I have offers disabled (or if someone wants to try to underbid your setpoint out of optimism and/or stupidity) that prompts the lowballers message instead. Usually with an insulting poorly spelled paragraph attached, or some sob story. Or both. But since they messaged you, that means you now have their user handle and can block them. So, goodbye.

Edit: In fact, speak of the devil. I had to punk exactly such a rando right now. They came at me with a 50% offer on an item I already have listed at roughly 50% below its selling price with their excuse being, “Well, I’m taking a risk trusting you that it works.” Broheim, if it doesn’t work eBay will force me to take it back, no matter what… The beauty of this, by the way, is that this precludes such idiots from interacting with your listings anymore and, I think, even being able to view them. So you’ll never even see them again, unless they go out of their way to create another account. And they lose out on their chance to buy whatever your thing was at any price through their sheer greed and ineptitude.

I’m given to understand a sizable fraction of these dweebs try to make their living lowballing whoever they assume are desperate sellers of crap on eBay, and then turn around and list the same item right back for full price.

In an LEP light? A regular LED, sure. But those lack the novelty of being able to lance somebody in the face with a laser beam.

My attorney has advised me to make no statements whatsoever regarding the applicability of the Lumintop Thor Mini I just bought the other week, which outputs a mere 250 lumens but does so in a narrow cone that’s got, to my reckoning, a divergence of only about four or five degrees.

I’ll have to do some measuring later, but at rear-windshield-to-asshole distance it’ll only throw a spot that’s probably about a foot wide, delivering maximum fuck you with a minimum of collateral damage.

Easy. I did it the just other day because I forgot that my new CRF250L is a Honda, and the position of the turn signal switch and the horn are reversed from every other bike I own, and probably not coincidentally every also other motorcycle brand on the planet. Some guy in the lane next to me got super butthurt because he thought I honked “at” him as I was completing my turn, which was quite hilarious to watch. (He was in the far left lane, I was doing a right on red from the right lane. There is no conceivable reality in which anything I was doing would be related to him, if not for the fact that he had Main Character Disorder.)

some folks just want to feel some kind of power because they feel powerless and they just need a wake-up call.

This is, like, the perfect summation of the human condition. Probably an awful lot of it, anyway.

That works. Also, back when I delivered pizza I kept a rather large LED flashlight in my cupholder all the time, ostensibly for spotting mailboxes and house numbers. (This was back in the day when having a powerful LED flashlight was a big deal, not like nowadays when you can get 3 for $10 on Amazon or whatever.) Pointing it out the back window usually got the point across when asshats felt the need to sit three feet off my back bumper and shine their high beams at me.

Whenever this comes up I’m obligated to mention that the illustration comes from Dougal Dixon’s Man After Man. It is chock-a-block full of these kinds of illustrations from Philip Hood and as soon as you get to the future phase in part 2, all of them are just as batshit as this one. It’s gold.

And I absolutely would not be able to resist labeling these as:

• English, U
• English, No U

Wow, the actual English flag, not the Union Jack?

I imagine that would trip up quite a few people even though there is a cheeky aspect of technical correctness to it.

What an absurd line of reasoning from that bunch.

“Obviously” you should have just posted the raw sensor data and let the viewers figure it out themselves. Sheesh.

It sure does. But America is the center of the world, right…?

People here in the US will say “in the South” and mean, like, Alabama. Not Tierra del Fuego.

Bull. I don’t even get to have a double jump implant installed but I still have to deal with corpofascism. This is all a total rip-off.

I also use a cheap tripod, and also a remote release. Just an inexpensive off-brand wired one. Not having to touch the camera does a lot for vibration induced blur.

My subjects generally have the decency to hold still, so any amount of time spent fiddling with the focus start point or fighting with the camera’s user interface is not an issue.

I do a lot of focus stacking.

Like, a lot. These days basically every one of the, erm, still life objects pictures that I post (okay, okay, knives) are stacked. The closer you get to your subject the shallower your depth of field becomes, and even with a pinhole aperture it’s often impossible to get all of an object into focus in one go.

I will say this about that: I do all of my stacking outboard, not in my camera. That’s because my Canon R10’s inbuilt focus stacking (and bracketing) is profoundly stupid in both the way it produces results and how you have to operate it. I can deal with the clunky bracketing interface because I can set it up once and I leave it on all the time, or at least all the time I’m taking object photos.

But if you don’t perfectly appease the camera’s built in algorithm and ensure that all of your frames have at least something with sharp enough contrast on it for the camera to decide it’s “in focus,” it throws a hissy fit and produces an error message, and deletes the entire stack of photos it already took. You can’t specify the range to bracket through in any real world units, only in arbitrary steps of “less” or “more,” and then you get to guess how many steps the camera should do. You don’t get to try again with the images or a subset of the images it’s already taken. Ye gods forbid you undershoot – not all of your object will be in focus, so do it again, stupid – or overshoot – hissy fit error message, see above. You don’t get to tune which shots are included in the stack and which aren’t, and it makes dumb compositing decisions that tend to result in putting hazy, fuzzy clouds around edges that should otherwise have been in focus and doesn’t deal with reflective objects in any meaningful capacity at all.

The best way I’ve seen it implemented from a UI perspective is how Open Camera on Android does it, which allows you to set a specific focus depth for the start and end of your stack, and then you specify how many photos to take in the middle. It evenly divides the automatic focus adjustments between that range. You get a preview of each focus depth as you mess with the sliders, so you can ensure that the range is actually where you want it without having to guess. This is fast, easy, and intuitive, and you don’t have to dig through any submenus to make it do what you want.

So what I do instead with my R10 is take an absurd number of shots with tiny steps, and deliberately both under- and over-shoot the focus range, typically from an inch or so in front of my subject all the way out to infinity. I use Helicon Focus on my PC which seems to give me the best results with a minimum of having to fight the user interface, and I simply discard the shots that are outside of usable range. Using this method you can also intentionally exclude images that actually were in focus but you’d still like not to be in your final picture, while still maintaining a greater depth of field than any single photograph could have provided. Helicon seems to do a pretty decent job of not making this look natural and not like an uncanny Blender rendering, or something.

The bad news is that Helicon is not cheap. The good news is, you can always fly your Jolly Roger and lay your hands on a copy of it anyway.

I tend to upvote any display of anyone’s creative pursuit if I happen to scroll by it. Even if it’s not something I’m into. The marker-on-photo-paper guy whose name escapes me, people’s photographs in any of the photography related communities, any of the ink doodles, hand made stuff, or comics posted by their original creators.

We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. The average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

I’m calling this now: It’ll be even worse than you think, because “investigating” everyone this way would require a completely unrealistic amount of effort, because you’d have to review possibly decades worth of social media activity right then and there when the prospective entrant is standing at the customs desk. Nobody could possibly do that.

So these idiots will just use AI to do it for them, and as we all know full well the AI will return Earth-shatteringly wrong results pretty much all the time.

There was a specific version of the AOL installer back in the late '90s that would still let you install it and sign on even if you declined the EULA. It’s doubtful that anyone noticed or cared, but a friend of mine noticed it and I’ve pathologically tried clicking “no” on every EULA prompt ever since just to see if whatever piece of software will let me in anyway. Every once in a while I find one that does, but it’s pretty rare.

I imagine in this case somebody fucked up and just copy-pasted the “yes” button on the form without bothering to change its action in addition to its text. Who knows how that would stand up in court, and probably nobody’s ever had the opportunity to find out anyway.

It’s a shame nobody’s heard from Angle Grinder Man in a while.