globalincident

[globalincident]

Ok

[globalincident]

In this scene, they are in the middle of the woods under a canopy of trees. They show the sky and there is no moon.

The light has absolutely no motivation.

Motivated lighting is a philosophy where all of the light sources on screen have a logical source. The light from a smartphone on someone's face. A lamp next to the couch. Sterile overhead office lights.

Often filmmakers will still use their own custom light sources, but they will simulate these things to give the impression the light has motivation.

Compare this to when all they really had were bright spotlights and insensitive film. An indoor scene just couldn't have this warm and cozy feel. And the light was just blasted in from everywhere.

Black and white helped a lot. You could still get dramatic effect despite things needing to be overlit. Or you could play with contrast ratios and shadow.

All the stuff you need to see was very bright and exposed well onto film and all the stuff you didn't was very dark.

But there was no graduation in between. It was hard to be subtle.

And when television and movies went color, this black and white contrast advantage was lost.

You can see EVERYTHING. And look at those sharp shadows. Everyone is just being blasted in the face with lights.

This sitcom lighting persisted long past when it was necessary. It became part of the sitcom language.

I think M*A*S*H was one of the first shows to subvert the overlit sitcom aesthetic. They began to play with lighting that had more motivation.

But aesthetic standards are hard to kill. And despite the heavy influence of M*A*S*H, sitcoms persisted all the way into the Friends era.

Her lamp isn't even on. Everything is just lit by God.

I don't think you will see a living room or kitchen scene lit like this very much from here on out.

People are getting used to lighting making more logical sense.

With the advent of LED lighting that can be any size, shape, and brightness, as well as cameras that can interpret very dark images, modern shows can now use bright and dark as narrative tools.

I think Severance does this well, and still keeps everything properly motivated.

But this newfound flexibility has created new problems. If you can film dark things, how dark is too dark? And how do you make sure the audience can see all of the important visual information?

The two worst examples of unmotivated lighting are always space helmets and cars.

It's a conceit. You gotta see the faces so these things are usually forgiven.

But the biggest debate in the realm of unmotivated lighting is night scenes. People have lots of opinions on how best to use light in the dark.

This is because following a motivated lighting philosophy can be especially tricky. Particularly if your setting is a secluded area without any artificial light sources.

Many cinematographers will try to give some sense of moonlight. But moonlight is very hard to replicate, so the effect usually ends up looking pretty fake.

This scene during a blackout in Die Hard 4 looks like they took the brightest light they had, mounted it as high as possible and said, "Fuck it, that's moon-ish."

If the DP is hardcore into motivated lighting, they just make the screen really really dark, like the Long Night battle in Game of Thrones.

The really really dark option bugs a lot of people.

Froggie Tangent about Dark Scenes:

I originally thought people needed to adjust their display settings. But then I realized not everyone watches content in a darkened room like a vampire. But if you find a show or movie is too dark, turning off any room lights will help a lot. Watching it in HDR will also help. And watching it on an OLED will help even more.

Scenes this dark are mostly a fad. DPs are experimenting with the possibilities of new technology. But sometimes they forget not everyone has that technology yet. And they forget some people watch stuff on their phones in a room full of sunlight.

Eventually the fad will fade, we will all adopt better screens, and the darkness will land somehwere between "I can't see shit" and "it would never be that bright in real life."

[End of tangent]

In the olden days, since film wasn't sensitive enough to do scenes in the dark, almost everything needed to have unmotivated lighting just to make sure their film wasn't a grainy mess. And as a culture, we sort of got used to that style. They'd mess with the contrast ratios to give the feeling of night, but if you think about where the light is coming from too hard, it won't make any sense. They took a Broadway theater approach to lighting and so a lot of movies felt like they were on a soundstage.

The 1961 West Side Story is a good example.

They've got a spot light hitting them, but not the building behind them. I guess that could be an overhead street light. But street lights are meant to flood the area like an ever expanding donut of light. A spotlight is like a directly projected cone of light. It is perfectly pointed at the side of their face and not coming from above.

She has some magical purple light coming from... somewhere.

And then they are in an area under a bridge, far away from any lights, but they've got soft fill light with a bright rim coming from the right.

Speilberg's version has much more motivated light.

This one is a bit of a cheat, some very bright source off in the distance. But it feels more plausible to the brain and gives a better sense of darkness. It feels like some kind of industrial lighting. Or a security light at a junkyard.

Here he straight up shows you where the light is coming from. And his preference for anamorphic lenses.

And here he uses bright train lights to create silhouettes. This is clever because it allows everything to be very dark but everyone is still legible in the scene.

I'm torn. Because I study light. And so I am very aware of how shows and movies are lighting things. And unmotivated lighting sticks out in my brain. Like when I watch someone miming playing the guitar. Or using a camera improperly. When you know too much about something, inaccurate onscreen depictions just drive you nuts.

There are some techniques being experimented with to make night scenes more legible while maintaining lighting realism. I think the most promising is the infrared day-for-night process used in Nope.

But maybe it doesn't need to be solved. Maybe DPs should just light the night even if it doesn't always make sense. Maybe general audiences just do not care and I am a big nerd who should be ignored.

[globalincident]

Have you seen Victoria?

My casino has new top-of-the-line technology to stop heists: a montage detector. If those bastards want to break in and steal my money, they’re doing it as part of one, long take

[globalincident]

uh... where's the loss?

my bacteria #mybacteria

[globalincident]

There was a young man from Peru

Whose limericks stopped at line two

[globalincident]

You'd need to set specific goals though. I think the best plan would be to describe a perfectly valid study - good efforts to avoid sampling bias, good general methodology, everything - and then pretend you did that study but just make up the results. There have been cases of people doing that and they tend to be very convincing.

i think a really funny project that a statistics professor could have their class do is like. put a bunch of random, patently untrue demographic statements into a hat. "the most popular tv show among white men ages 24-27 is Bluey." "the majority of business majors are middle children." "bisexual women love hot chips." and each student picks one out of the hat and you gotta like. design a whole study and survey a group of people to specifically achieve that result. you have to prove it true. by whatever means necessary. you have to construct the most biased study possible and wrangle in your exact demographic to make that statement a statistical reality. i think people would learn a lot.

[globalincident]

Paper is complicated, but something close to the modern form of paper enters Europe in the 11th century, and that knowledge makes its way across Europe during the next few centuries. Antimony production starts to happen during roughly the same time period. Both technologies are pretty much common knowledge by about 1400. Then about 1440, Gutenberg makes the printing press. So I'd say that's actually a reasonable turnaround.

the printing press is not all that technically complicated, right? that's one of those things which could have been invented a lot earlier. or is the required metallurgy fancy in some way

[globalincident]

One thing that it's easy to miss here: I can say from experience that AI tools are currently really really terrible at making mods. For most coding projects their skill is... mixed... but for mods they are exceptionally bad, because making a mod often requires knowledge about a game that exists literally nowhere on the internet, and so modding requires thorough investigation of and experimentation with a game's files. So AI is only useful in modding when there's also a human involved, you cannot make a mod right now without a lot of human input.

Nexus Mods was acquired by Chosen, a company focused on growth and monetization of gaming startups.

Reddit thread

Dark0ne, creator and ex-owner of Nexus Mods, stepped down today in an update post:

NexusMods post

Users on Resetera were able to found out more about this sudden change of ownership:

Resetera thread

Victor Folmann, CEO of Chosen, published this "Gaming Startup Monetization Cheat Sheet" on his LinkedIn

Link to the post

Users are already sharing their fear of NexusMods allowing more bigoted mods in the future, and taking down inclusive ones to follow the current "anti-woke" trend in the gaming industry

Reseta threada bout their change in moderation concerning bigoted mods following Oblivion Remastered launch

Another User, this time on NexusMods forum, noticed queer and inclusive mods being removed following Dark0ne's post

Link to the forum post

It is also worth mentioning that Chosen and its CEO are seen using AI generated images on their website (including generated images depicting Tracer from Overwatch) hyping up ChatGPT on his Linkedin account, and are including "rewarding gamers with crypto money"

Users speculate that Chosen buying out NexusMods is to potentially train an AI model that generates mods

More about Nvidia's AI "RTX Remix" and future projects

[globalincident]

this one?

Ah these children who always create problems for poor mothers....

[globalincident]

another entry in "tumblr users discover regional accents"

[globalincident]

He's right, reading books by itself isn't enough, you also need to learn about the culture the books were written in

It depends what exactly the exam is trying to determine

Partially

Making contact with an extra-terrestrial civilization

You can't restore what never existed

No

That sounds smart

Depends what you are trying to imply by calling someone indigenous

No

Data, big or otherwise, is important for making effective decisions

Apart from everything else political it does, the European song contest was created with the political goal of bringing nations together, while hiphop and rap are not inherently political

Mainly because of fear

It depends

Decline in religion

A hero

Don't put people like Michael Gove in charge of education

Everything fails eventually

You should probably ask a physicist that question

That depends on the intentions and behaviour of the ruler

No

Yes, it is important to dress for the weather, if that's your question

some of the asks you guys send me make me feel like i'm sitting the all souls exam

[globalincident]

Life expectancy is only a couple of years lower in the US than Europe, there's really not that much of a difference. We can argue about cigarettes and healthcare and COVID and whatever else everyone mentioned in other replies, but none of that will change the fact that people are not particularly living longer in Europe.

“Europeans live longer because they eat FRESH FOOD!!!!” Bitch, they live on cigarettes. They live longer because they have universal healthcare. I’m convinced America is obsessed with inventing things that are killing us so you don’t have to face the actual problems.

[globalincident]

Checking the page history, a different source was added to the page within minutes of Sam Reich's post here, and was changed to the current source just 12 hours later, before Robert Reich even had time to comment.

CITATION NEEDED?!!!

[globalincident]

I would argue that some of the protests were successful at their most important goals, ie the short term goals of blocking specific officers or vehicles from causing harm. The more long term goal of winning the hearts and minds of the median voters is more tricky. In terms of that goal, the problem is that protest is very effective at drawing attention to issues, but only slightly effective at changing your opinion on an issue you are already aware of.

Grimly hilarious at this point how consistently major protest activity is actively negative for a cause, just an own-goal for one's brand and any concrete goals... unless it is bailed out of that fact by the opposition committing completely unforced errors in response to the protest at which points things can equal out. "Seems like the winning move" etc etc

[globalincident]

I guess it's because people define categories as this special thing that isn't a set, in order to allow Set (the category of all sets) to be a category without tying yourself up in a logical paradox. But I think you could also do it the other way round and define a category as a kind of set, if you're happy to have Set not be a category.

it feels odd that categories are the only "popular" algebraic structure that explicitly allow the underlying collection of stuff to be a proper class instead of a set - is there a good reason why thats generally accepted only in the case of categories? (I guess besides the fact that a lot of the big important categories just happen to be categories defined on proper classes and so we define the term "category" to explicitly allow those)

do categories somehow lead to fewer problems than proper class "fields" like the surreal numbers do?

[globalincident]

The problem is that if the tax system in general was done in a straightforward way, it would be more obvious that it's designed to tax rich people more, which is a good thing but also something that rich people don't like. So instead we do this weird song and dance where we pretend to be doing services that are strictly beneficial for everyone, and part of that is nonsense accounting procedures.

The Social Security Trust Fund is more an accounting of how much extra we taxed for social security than it is anything like an investment unit. If it "runs out", that means we either change how much we tax or we change how much we pay out, all of which is a future problem

[globalincident]

Scientists don't really know. They think he was a bullfrog tapdole which are pretty big, but not usually as big as this. They also think he probably had some sort of hormone imbalance, but they don't know exactly what hormones were involved and why. There's some things that science just can't explain.

Next viral tumblr blorbo: giant old as fuck tadpole

“LIKE” to vote for Old As Fuck Tadpole