michaelwaev

[michaelwaev]

One thing about Van Gogh that people don't talk about is how brilliantly he uses texture in his artwork. The way he uses oil paint is so three dimensional, and he's so aware of it and uses it to his full advantage to add depth and texture. It's not as obvious in photographs or digital versions of his paintings, which is a damn shame because once you see them in person you realize how much it adds to them. There's one in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam called The Sower with a tree cutting through the foreground, and the majority of the trunk is one flat stroke of paint, ending with a knot in the trunk made bulbous by the end of a brush stroke that was never smoothed out. One of his paintings in the Met, Wheat Field With Cypresses, has the brush strokes very choppy on the top of the wheat, but smooth and almost textureless on the stalks. It's one of the things that I think really separates him from the other artists of the period.

[michaelwaev]

[michaelwaev]

everyone has dreams about being lost at school, late to work, cant find bathroom etc but whats yalls most common Uncommon stress dream. ill always have dreams about having various problems with my fish tank

[michaelwaev]

[michaelwaev]

i think what bothers me about a lot of "girl power" narratives is that they function on the implicit idea on the idea that women can become worthy of respect. and i happen to think that really caring about women means believing they already are worthy of respect. that historical seamstresses and soccer moms and forgotten sisters and sweet polite little girls and someone's weird grandma matter just as much as the warriors and politicians, even if they, personally, never accomplish anything "cool."

[michaelwaev]

If god damn mainstream actors are calling it out now. lmao

[michaelwaev]

hm.

[michaelwaev]

One thing you start to realize in adulthood in the U.S. is that most things that are obtuse and complex for a reason.

Taxes are obtuse so you hire a business to help you do them or do them for you. Insurance is obtuse so you pay for more things out of pocket than you need to. Bills and laws are obtuse so politicians can pretend to work for their voters while creating loopholes and giveaways for their donors.

And part of the reason it works is that, as an adult, it's often considered shameful to admit you don't understand something.

[michaelwaev]

we’ve been on that diorite

[michaelwaev]

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

[michaelwaev]

i love this man

[michaelwaev]

[michaelwaev]

[michaelwaev]

[michaelwaev]

Every democrat who went along with anti *insert BLM, Free palestine, occupy wall street, etc* protest rhetoric and labeled them “radical left” or far left extremist help got us here btw. I know dem defenders love to whine about how “well the republicans are in power-“ you need to examine what the fucking democrats did with power to understand how we got here. Biden increased ICE and police funding.

He did not dismantle the aparatus Trump is now using, he fucking Funded and expanded it. Leftists were talking about this for a god damn while and now you should listen.

The democratic party will not save you, in fact it damned you and brought you here.

[michaelwaev]

I looked up pics of Drump’s stupid little parade and most of the news outlets talking about it also focused on the no kings protests. Usually more on the protests. It was also raining and also US army aesthetics kind of look stupid when put in the form of a big dictator structure, turns out.

Also he wore a trucker hat that seemed to be trying to match the color of some of the military berets?

[michaelwaev]

Bonus Post: The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo, a treatise