#anyways. i love lr a normal amount

[crimson-nail]

“You will deal with this?” asks Knives, the gravity of a hundred years of failing to rely on another weighing on his voice.

“—Yes. Trust us,” Livio and Razlo reply. There’s fire in those eyes, rising to meet Knives’ intensity without an ounce of hesitation left in that molten gold — like he has waited his entire life to be asked such a question, and to be free to give such an answer to someone. “We’ll clean up these two and get the plant back to the Andron facility. She’ll be fine. We’ll take care of her.”

“...Alright.”

He smiles. It’s returned in kind, toothy and lopsided and less than an inch from his face.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” says Nai, allowing a serene expression to overtake his features, “I’m going to pass out now.”

-

finally finished up a sketch page from the monster of a fic i’ve been working on since april… i am out here being delusional ❤️

[cornyregans]

@mephistempeh said:

Ohh, that was interesting! I never really went too deep into Veronaville’s history/backstory, at least not further than „well several members from both families have died and keeping the game’s mechanics and possibilities in mind along with the context given by Romeo and Juliet and what therefore could be possible and what not…hmmm“ and kinda left it there.(And the amount of missing/inconsistent memories and broken face templates lol) I really haven’t done too much research on Shakespeare either.(I’m German. The only thing we have done so far was Romeo and Juliet - and I am taking advanced classes in English(hard to believe ikr) the basic classes don’t cover anything involving Shakespeare.I did read King Lear(because I wanted to know who Goneril and Regan were based off.. yes, srsly, that’s why..)but that’s about it.) However, I never gave any second thought onto Hero’s cause of death and the fact that there is no tombs stone, so I am glad that I got some insight into that!  I kinda feel bad for neglecting that characteractions.

Adding a read more because my reply got a little long.

Honestly, I really didn’t delve too deep into it myself until last year. I was sort of the same way about the backstory at first, but as I read more and more Shakespeare plays, I found that most of the premades in the neighborhood share a name with one or more Shakespeare characters (as for the ones that don’t, they actually have obvious parallels to some of them anyway). 

As someone who grew up in America, Shakespeare is pretty much required reading in most of the English classes I took (the exception being the American lit class I took in my third year of high school). I ended up reading Romeo & Juliet in my first year of high school, A Midsummer Night’s Dream during my second, and Othello during my fourth. I ended up reading a lot of the others on my own time. I did end up doing a project on Shakespeare for one of my high school classes so I learned a bit about his background (I found it funny that his wife’s name was Anne Hathaway since the actress with the same name was a big deal at the time). Also, I dabbled in some Shakespeare during middle school. My drama teacher at the time really got me invested in it, and I ended up reciting a line from Julius Caesar and performed the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet in the spring theater showcase.

King Lear is one of those Shakespeare plays that I read a lot, and I honestly picked it up for the same reason. The fourth generation of Capps always sort of fascinated me for some reason, so I guess it was only natural.

I also didn’t really give much of a thought to Hero’s cause of death either. That was until I started looking into whether or not I could find any parallels in Shakespeare’s works. In doing that, I tried to see if I could connect anything from Shakespeare into what we knew about the deceased sims in question. I didn’t truly look too far into Hero’s cause of death until I looked into the etymology of her name, and that’s when I remembered where her name came from. For some reason, I always headcanoned that she died by drowning, but connecting it all back to the myth solidified it for me. Perhaps it was subconsciously due to having read the myth in the past? I’m not too sure.

I think that the fact that Hero’s such an enigma might be part of why her characterization is somewhat ignored. To be honest, I was kind of the same in that regard before connecting the neighborhood’s narrative back to Shakespeare, history, mythology, etc. It’s easier with the other five since all of their causes of death are confirmed via their tombstones. In addition, Claudio, Olivia, and Contessa all have personality points and biographies programmed into the game (heck, Claudio even had a job), and by looking at Contessa’s biography, we can learn a little bit about Cordelia too. With Caliban, we know how he died, but there’s not really a lot of evidence out there when it comes to him either except for some photos (which I do plan to analyze at a later date), so the Shakespeare connections really help him out too. With Hero, all we’re really given are Antonio and Benedick’s biographies, with Benedick’s implying that he might be the one to solve the “mystery” of her death, and Antonio’s referring to her as his “one true love.”

I will admit, parts of my personal theory regarding some of the deaths do deviate from the game mechanics (Cordelia and Caliban’s especially). But for the most part, I try to keep it within the confines of what is possible in normal gameplay. In fact, this essay borrowed a lot from a really long essay I was working regarding all six deaths, but I thought Hero needed an entry of her own because of the lack of information the game gives us regarding the cause of it.

As for the memories and face templates, I do plan on going over those in more detail at a later date.

TD;LR: I’m a huge nerd who thinks about Veronaville a lot, and I like to connect it back to things in order to answer whatever questions I might have.

Also, thank you so much for reading this! I’m so glad you found this interesting, and I really hope you’ll enjoy all the other essays I have planned. Some are close to being done, but I’ll probably tweak them a little bit to fit my standards before I submit them. Once again, thank you for reading, it really means a lot to me!~ :D

[pauldeckerus]

Lightroom Sucks: An Open Letter to Adobe

“Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself, could life ever be sane again?” You’d be forgiven for thinking The Smiths were singing about wedding photographers mid-summer running around the streets in a naked hysteria after they’ve just installed the latest Lightroom update.

Adobe, I hope you read this because it seems like for too long now you’ve ignored the issues and released update after update that actually made things worse, NOT better!

This open letter is not a plea for you to up your game — it’s a demand. You owe it to all the subscribers that have shown great loyalty to you for such a long time.

“Ooh look I have 6 weddings in the queue, I’m a little stressed and wedding season is taking its toll, but it’s OK as I have three days solid booked out to make a dent in things. Ok, I’ll just load up Lightroom…” And this is where a whole world of frustration, irritation and wanting to walk into traffic begins. For while we may have time finally to catch up on some editing, Lightroom generally decides to throw a spanner or ten in the works!

Now I want to get one thing very straight here, Lightroom is a wonderful piece of software… when it works properly. It’s revolutionized the way wedding photographers process work, making it easier and more convenient.

Why oh why then does Adobe continue to release updates that seem to make it almost unusable at times? At best these days my experience of using it is sub-par, a whole catalog of issues are present at all times, and of course, I’m not the only one who has this experience. So Adobe for the love of God will you PLEASE sort it out!

I hear time and time again from people involved in their beta testing that Lightroom needs to be rebuilt rather than updated and that Adobe is aware of ‘bugs’ and trying to resolve them. Well, quite frankly, that isn’t good enough! How many hundreds of thousands of wedding photographers use Lightroom and pay their subscription to CC? It’s impossible to know, but MORE than enough to warrant Adobe giving us more back — a hell of a lot more.

There’s also a stark warning here for Adobe: you rest on your laurels and eventually someone else will release something and everyone will jump ship. You only have to see how many people have switched to Sony from Canon or Nikon to understand that brand loyalty doesn’t mean anything if something shinier, better, and more appealing comes along. It will happen one day to you too, Adobe, if you continue to be so complacent and not give us the software we want and deserve.

Minimum System Requirements

I’m going to list some of the issues I face using Adobe Lightroom in a moment and then a load that other photographers have also shared with me. Firstly though I want to examine what the recommended system specifications by Adobe are because it makes for surprising reading!

Source: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/system-requirements.html

So a minimum 4GB RAM and 12GB recommended. Yes, that’s right: a MINIMUM of 4GB RAM. So what Adobe is saying is that you CAN run Lightroom on a machine with as little as 4GB of RAM, really?

12GB is the recommended… how old are these specs? I think that’s one of the things that irks me about Adobe’s approach to their software packages. If they said ‘hey it’s a minimum of 16GB RAM but we’d recommend 32GB’ it would help us make informed decisions when spending $2,500 on our editing machines.

If you use Lightroom as your main memory-intensive application then you could easily be lulled into thinking that a cheaper spec machine with less RAM is fine, when it really wouldn’t be. Adobe do you really think Lightroom CC can run fine on a machine with 4GB of RAM? Erm, no!

I Have Issues

I tried to write down all the issues I face using Lightroom, some will no doubt have slipped my mind, but I think the list in itself is pretty comprehensive and includes the following:

– Flicking between images even with Smart Previews enabled takes too long, there’s a pause while it renders. Ok, this is one everyone pretty much has, but it seems to be getting worse!

– Preset not showing as being applied until I make a change. It just shows the straight-out-of-camera version until I change the exposure or crop/rotate and then BINGO, there’s the preset. This is an intermittent issue, sometimes it’s there, sometimes not… however, when it’s there it affects several hundred photos at a time. It’s a confusing and irritating problem. It seems to occur if I edit for a few hours, like Lightroom is tired and can’t be arsed anymore, keen to get home for its dinner and watch The Walking Dead.

– Trying to crop or rotate anything involves a lag similar to my 3-year-old when I ask him to do pretty much anything. This is a new issue (in LR, not with my 3-year-old — that’s always been there with him), and it’s very annoying, Adobe!

– In full-screen mode the left menu panel used to pop out when you hovered over it, it no longer does this, except last Tuesday when it DID, only to revert back to not doing so by Wednesday morning. Apart from that delightful Tuesday, I have to click to open it and click to close it again.

– Then there’s the curious issue for whenever a new update is available, my current version either suddenly runs super sloooooow or stops working altogether, forcing me to update to the latest one. Now I’m not suggesting Adobe is somehow sending a sneaky patch to break my existing version so I HAVE to update, but if they are it’s REALLY annoying and happens so often it’s hard to not feel a little suspicious about.

– Let’s not forget the issue where you are using a catalog and wish to open a different one, which results in the first catalog successfully closing, but Lightroom just sitting there and not responding until you either force quit (or sometimes actually have to switch off the machine as it won’t force quit), or after several minutes it finally decides to respond again and open the new catalogue.

– Photoshop opens weird about 75% of the time. So if you’re like me and like to add an extra bit of sharpening to portraits or clone out bird poop from the fence where the couple is standing etc, you’ll Command E to open Photoshop. It’s great you can open PS from LR, edit, save and it appears back in LR as a .tiff. Bravo Adobe, that is one nifty function! Except when it opens like this three-quarters of the time.

Apologies for the portrait, clearly not keeping it real at this point of the wedding – this was just the only time I remembered to screen shot the issue

I haven’t cropped anything from the PS window here, that’s how it opens most of the time. To make it usable I have had to click ‘view’ and then ‘full screen with menu bar’ so many times recently that I’m starting to get RSI (and RAGE) from it.

Incidentally, if anyone else is suffering the same issue, I found a quick way to make it display correctly. I stumbled upon by pure accident as I tried to ALT+TAB back to Lightroom. My RSI finger completely unaware of what it should be doing pressed the desk instead of the ALT key by mistake, thus showing me that pressing TAB alone changes the view mode and makes it normal again… hallelujah!

There are other issues too. It’s slow. It lags a lot. If you import images to a new catalog you have to close LR after it’s imported them and reopen again or it runs slower than me in a school sports day father’s 100-meter race. Oh, and don’t forget to close the histogram as having a tiny graph at the top of your screen makes LR wheeze with pain at the pure exertion of displaying it.

While all these things might not seem much, they impact my day to day work, it’s an inconvenience I could do without, and as I’m paying regularly for the use of this software I’d damn well like it to work properly! It costs me time and frustrates the living daylights out of me.

System of a Down(beat Photographer)

I appreciate I don’t have a monster of a machine, but it is actually a higher spec than Adobe recommends. So going on their information, supplied in order for us to make informed purchases, I shouldn’t be having any issues, certainly not from a machine performance point-of-view anyway.

Problems in the Community

I asked the Facebook community that I run (please join us on there if you aren’t already a member) what issues people were facing and what spec machines they were using because as with most things in life, you worry that it’s maybe just you. It turns out I’m not alone!

Rob Georgeson [Intel Core i5 / 16GB RAM / 1GB NVIDIA Graphics Card / 120GB SSD HD]: “My pc definitely seems to be working harder just to do basic editing. It used to be a breeze but now I can hear the fans running at full speed trying to get my computer to chill the f**k out”.

Andrew Bowness & Esther Wild [Windows 10 / Intel i7-6700 @ 3.4ghz / 16GB RAM / SSD / 6GB Nvidia Graphics Card, Mac OS High Sierra (10.13.6) / Intel Core i5 / 8GB RAM / Radeon Pro 2048 Graphics Card] also are having the same issue, Andrew’s being so bad ‘I put music on to drown it out.’ Esther also has issues with it hanging and getting the spinning wheel of doom.

Michael Newington Gray & Paul Marbrook [Mac OS High Sierra / Intel Core i7 / 16GB RAM / AMD Radeon R9 Graphics Card, MAC OS High Sierra / Intel Core i5 / 24GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GT Graphics Card]: When flicking between images in Develop module the images aren’t loading / going sharp until I zoom in and out.

Oli Kelly [Windows 10 / Intel Core i5 / 8GB RAM / GeForce GTX 1050 Graphics Card]: When I’m doing brush work it can lag out so badly and make the mouse skip over the image like it’s buffering. When flicking through images it can pixelate the original raw for sometimes 10 seconds until it remembers what I have done to the image and then shows my edit.

Denver Aubrey [Mac OS High Sierra / Intel Core i5 / 24GB RAM / AMD Radeon R9 Graphics Card]: Everything seems to lag despite massive amounts of ram and a decent spec iMac. Drag a slider, let go, wait for half a second or a whole second and then see the effect. Maybe. Just updated LR CC classic today to the latest version. Now LR opens for about 2 mins and then unexpectedly quits.

Ally Hedayati [Mac OS High Sierra / Intel Core i7 / 20GB RAM / AMD Radeon HD 1024MB Graphics Card]: When I want to do some external editing in PS from LR, PS revets it to SRGB – making a black and white image colour for instance. Even though I have “turn to SRGB” unticked.

Jade Eleanor Evans [Mac OS High Sierra / Macbook Pro 15″ 2017 / Intel Core i7 / 16GB RAM / Radeon Pro 560 4GB Graphics Card]: Too slow, not sure what on earth it’s doing but I have one of the new macs (2017) and it gets so hot it actually leaves red marks on my legs when I have it on my lap. Even when its used on a desk it still gets hot and the fans sound louder than my hair dryer! Also for some unknown reason when I export and choose ‘resize to fit, longe edge’ I type in whatever for the long edge and that ends up being the shorter edge… No-one has any idea why it does this! So if I type in 2048 for the long edge (I mostly shoot landscape), they export at 3072 x 2048 making the shorter edge 2048 (yes I am definitely clicking ‘long edge’ not ‘shorter edge),

Jamie Ousby [Mac OS Sierra / Intel Core i7 / 16GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GT Graphics Card]: Lightroom doesn’t export some exposure changes for around 10 x images when exporting a wedding of 800+ images. Go to the image in question and adjust the exposure slider up and it accepts it. Switch to full screen to take a look and it shows the correct exposure for a split second and then flashes back to the “as shot” exposure. No matter what I do when exporting this image it will not accept the exposure setting.

A bride on her wedding day still traumatised after installing a new Lightroom update the day before. Image by Andrew Billington

What is your current relationship with Lightroom?

The Other Side of the Coin

Not everyone we spoke to experienced issues with Lightroom. In fact, some found it to work perfectly. Their specs were similar to those above with one large exception – their memory ranged between 32GB and 64GB RAM. So is this the solution?

Adobe, we’d love for you to clarify just what is going on here. Is it just you’ve told us incorrect information when stating the software should run perfectly on 12GB RAM (hell, it should still run ok on 4GB according to your minimum specifications)? Or, as I’ve been told many times by your beta testers, is the software inherently broken and does it need rebuilding from the ground up? If that’s the case, is this going to happen, and if so when?

Yours Sincerely

I did consider signing off this open letter with ‘yours faithfully’, but to be completely honest I’m only faithful to you because there aren’t any serious alternatives on the market at the moment. Yes, Capture One can do a similar job, but from what I’ve heard it’s not quite enough to make the leap over.

So I’ll stick with you until something better comes along… or you buck up your ideas enough to actually make this more than a marriage of necessity. Over to you, Adobe!

About the author: Andy Hudson is the co-founder of Photographers Keeping it Real, a website, award, and podcast for documentary wedding photographers. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors. You can find more content by Hudson and connect with him on his website and Facebook group. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header illustration based on photo by Mwangi Gatheca

from Photography News http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PetaPixel/~3/2CnQC6wObGA/

[mrandyzavala]

Zookeeper Pregnancy - Morning Sickness

I swear to god this is not your typical pregnancy/morning sickness blog post.

Morpheus always knows

Not that there is anything wrong with so-called Mommy Blogging. In fact, there are some great ones out there, so I am told.  But the people who write that share at least three of the following qualities:

1) They have kids

2) They use coasters religiously and appropriately

3) They grow all of their own food with one hand (the other hand is usually doing something crafty)

4) They take perfectly artistic photos of everyday goings-on (such as pooping) that make it look like a utopian paradise

5) Their clothes match

I meet precisely one criterion in that list (hint, it is not number 5).  Even though I do have a kid, and I am 31 years older than said child, I feel like I am still in seventh grade.  This is a quality about my mindset that has not changed.  The only reason I have any business being a mom is because I am a professional applied behavior analyst.  But for that, my progeny and I would eat donuts three times a day and wear the same rainbow-themed clothes while binge-watching Sci-Fi and/or Pixar movies.

Um. Exhibit A.

I also didn't really have what you would call a magical experience with being knocked up; if I have an inner fertility goddess, she is currently snoring on a proverbial couch with Cheetos covering her Rubenesque body.

BUT.  I found it a really interesting experience as a marine mammal caregiver.  I spent a lot of time in my 11 year career around pregnant dolphins and their calves.  I never labor and delivery of a human being, but I had seen it over 10 times in bottlenose dolphins.  I have been around way more pregnant dolphins than pregnant humans. 

Like this one! Roxy was pregnant with the love of my life in this photo

Here’s a thing I noticed and eventually became really annoyed by: our quickly-made conclusions about how different Animals Have It than humans.  For example, most of the pregnant dolphins I knew got “morning sickness” (aka The Worst Feeling Ever Other Than Scooping Out Your Eyeballs With A Small Spoon), but that was treated like it was some kind of anomaly.  When the dolphins would sit uncomfortably in front of us, barely eat, and refuse behaviors, our Training Brains couldn’t seem to wrap our minds around this.  Yeah, HUMANS got morning sickness, but these dolphins were ANIMALS.  Animals are tough.  They don’t show their emotions in ways humans are used to.  They don’t write Mommy Blogs and talk about Dolphin-Based Morning Sickness Remedies (THANK GOD).

I'm crying

But the majority of trainers I have worked with always talked about how that made no sense….placental mammal pregnancy involves many of the same principles, including sudden and dramatic changes in ratios of certain hormones.  The first trimester of pregnancy is essentially your body going WTF JUST HAPPENED and scrambling to support this small parasite(s).  The placenta, which eventually takes over most of the life support, doesn’t play that role until  later.  That means the mom’s body needs to support the little blobby blob* with chemicals like gonadotropin and progesterone.  It is likely that one or some of these hormones in their pregnancy-level amounts causes some really unfortunate GI side-effects.

When you have a dolphin who loves to eat no matter what is going on, you know something is up when she suddenly looks squinty-eyed, sluggish, inattentive, and like she would rather swallow bits of glass than eat whatever you have in your bucket.  Of course, the standard course of action is to take blood and gastric samples to ensure something is NOT actually wrong, so once you rule out illness, you got yourself a lady friend with morning sickness. 

HOLD IT IN HOLD IT IN

In my experience, six weeks into carrying Blessed Life (while I was on a solo vaca to Central California to geek out on whale-watching for 10 days), I felt the most nauseous I have ever been.  Ever.  Like, even when I had an intestinal parasite for two weeks and could not eat and wound up in the hospital.  It was seriously terrible.  The only thing I could eat was sushi and fried or grilled squid.

Guys and gals (especially those of you who have never been pregnant), I would not wish the all-consuming, intense nausea I experienced on anyone (some world dictators are exempt from this statement).  Nothing I did could take my mind off of how sick I felt.  The advice I got was the wise but totally ineffective long-view kind, where people tell you how it’ll all be worth it (okay, it was) or how you should just think of this tiny little life growing inside of you (hint: photos of embryos are not great remedies for wanting to puke your guts out), but all you want to do is spend the rest of your life in the fetal position (ha ha, see what I did there).

 I need to re-do this vacation. Better yet, I need to move out there!

I spent most of my vacation in bed, miserable.  When I got back to work, I had to tell my boss that a) I was pregnant and b) there was no way in hell I could go on a sea lion transport because I would basically just vom the entire time.  Then I had to work.  Like normal.  I was on my feet for most of the day, in the heat, around the saltwater, around dead fish, penguin and otter poop, and I had my supervisory duties.  And I had to pretend nothing was going on.  I have no idea how well I pulled this off, I just know that there were many times I walked into our medical lab when no one was in there and flopped over the counters, hoping no one would come in.

I AM FINE

It was there, on the cold countertops, that I really felt bad for my previous interactions with newly pregnant dolphins.  We had two dolphins who were preggo at the same time as me, but they were well past their sickness stage.  Even though I figured they experienced some kind of nausea/fatigue early on, and tried to be sensitive, I still fell into trainer-mode, where if they refused a well-established exercise behavior I would ask again after an LRS because….that is what we do.

But as I drooled on my uniform, my stomach turning in knots, I realized what a butthead I had been.  If THIS is what those lady dolphins experienced, I deserved to be kicked in the face.  If someone came into that lab and said, “Hey Cat, go do your normal workout right now” or “Hey Cat, walk five steps”, I would be like OVER MY DEAD BODY. 

Now, luckily, any misguided decisions I made regarding which behaviors I asked pregnant dolphins to do was usually met with refusal or avoidance.  That is, the girls would say OVER MY DEAD BODY in their own dolphin way.  That is how true positive reinforcement training SHOULD work, with the animals feeling perfectly comfortable saying no without any fear of deprivation of what they need to be happy and healthy.

Plus, you wind up with a cute baby

But still, I felt like a butthead.

And, I'm just gonna say it, but dudes don’t get it.  Especially in our field, where a) most of us are chicks but b) most of our bosses are male.  You are expected to work 99.9% of the time (you better be filling out records while you’re pooping on company time) because there is so much to do and the animals depend on you, it is a big deal to suddenly lose a trainer at ANY level (because seriously guys, we are all passionate and therefore very valuable no matter what level we are).  I think women are more empathetic to this thing, even if they haven't been pregnant…because periods**.  Female reproductive systems do really weird and usually uncomfortable things, even when they are perfectly normal.

No.

But dudes? If you think we are just whining about morning sickness, I have a fun and educational activity for you to try.

Drink Dran-O, just enough to prevent massive organ failure.  And just when you think you are going to die, go to work and pretend like nothing is wrong.  (Side note: this also works for our “monthly visitor” experience, except you can just slice a relatively high-pressure, non-vital artery in your pelvic region).

...

Anyways, my lesson?  Even though I thought I was giving the animals the benefit of the doubt without sacrificing predictable training principles, it took me actually going through the experience to really understand.  That was just MY experience, it is probably different for most of you out there. 

And you know what? If I'm wrong, if dolphins really do NOT experience morning sickness and just have a secret Sisterhood pact to all refuse behaviors and pick at their food in the first four months of their pregnancy, then I would rather bring them extra comfort than try to make their situation more uncomfortable.  After all, our main job is to put the animals and their wellness first.  The show, interaction, or session takes second priority to the well-being of our animals. Tell me your experience, keepers with human babies!

_______

* Actual developmental term

** Need I say more, ladies?

from The Middle Flipper http://ift.tt/2sT8H6E