Adderbox76

Up here during COVID, a lot of grocery stores implemented arrows and traffic directions in their aisles so that no one aisle was two way. They basically became one way streets.

I desperately hoped that they would keep that, but nope. Quickly returned to the old jack-assery.

Can I just copy and paste this as my answer?

You think I have that much time in my life to list all of them!?

The one that pops into my head immediately is:

There is a special place in hell for people who don’t hug the curb when yielding to traffic before making a right hand turn. Instead they take up the half the through lane and half the turning lane, meaning that the person behind them can’t pull forward.

Onions

First choice would be a nordic country. They generally rank high up in metrics like health, happiness, etc…

Close second behind those would be New Zealand.

neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet

I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.

The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.

Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.

Inkscape: Completely capable. I know many people who have used it instead of illustrator professionally for years.

GIMP: Depends on you. As someone who learned GIMP long before ever learning Photoshop, I find Photoshop unintuitive and frankly stupid. So it’s all about what you learned on. But GIMP relies on spending a few minutes setting it up for your own use case. Literally every window can be moved to anywhere. You can have whatever windows you want open all the time, or hidden behind right clicks, etc… Your tabs and tab groups are completely customizable to how you want to work. BUT the rub is that you have to be interested in doing that. GIMP is trashed for having a bad default UI because the expectation is that it doesn’t have a default UI. My GIMP would look entirely different from someone elses because I use different tools that I want front and centre than someone else might. If you’re not interested in that and just want something that you can learn a “default” setup and go with it (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) than you’re better off sticking with Photoshop.

As for Krita, whatever else people are telling you, Krita is NOT a replacement for GIMP if you’re doing design work. What it brings to the table in terms of having built in Vector capabilities it negates by having a very limited and basic suite of selection tools. Something that would take you two seconds in PS or Gimp to band select, paint the foreground, feather the selection, shrink it, etc… takes five extra steps in Krita because Krita is a drawing program not a graphic design program; what few “advanced” selection tools they’ve introduced is tacked on and hidden between three or four extra steps because it just wasn’t designed to have them at first and they were added later.

Just because it looks nicer out of the box than Gimp, doesn’t make it better. I’ve tried replacing Gimp with Krita because i like the KDE suite of apps in general. But I was pulling my hair out trying to do even a basic composition using it’s archaic selection tools.

Literally everything.

Maybe I’m just used to my comfortable parliamentary democracy.

You vote for your representative. Whichever party gets the most representatives gets power. It’s either a majority (meaning that they can do whatever they want because they got more representatives than all the other parties combined) or it’s a minority (meaning that to pursue their agenda they’ll need to cooperate and negotiate with the other parties because they don’t have enough representatives to do it themselves)

The leader of that ruling party becomes Prime Minister. He holds less power than a president because in reality he’s just the Prime Minister (First Minister among many) but he has more authority than the leaders of the other parties who didn’t win.

It just seems so simple compared to the lunacy to my south.

apoplectic

Legitimately one of my favourite words.

I used the phrase “tilting at windmills” when discussing current politics and got looked at like an insane person.

No one reads anymore, apparently.

Josie and the Pussycats was lampooning our current celebrity obsessed, “influencer” obsessed, consumer lifestyle 20 years ago. Yes, there was certainly celebrity worship back then. But the way the movie portrayed it and the consumer greed that seeks to profit from it feels even more relevant today.

Plasma:

“Here’s literally all the things… You sort it out, if you want. If not…whatever.”

I wouldn’t call this “inconsequential”, but not only is Deckard a Replicant, he’s a very specific Replicant.

Gaff (played by Eddie Olmos) was the original officer assigned to hunting down the escaped replicants, before Holden and before Deckard. When the escaped Androids originally tried to storm the Tyrell corporation, one of them got “fried” going through an electric fence. And it was either there, or in another encounter, that Gaff was wounded in the leg, forcing Holden to take over the case, and we know where that ended up…

I posit that the android that got “fried”, didn’t actually get fried. In concert with the Tyrell corporation, they programmed him with Gaff’s memories in order to finish the job, which is why Gaff is chaperoning him, driving him around; to make sure the memory implant holds. It’s why Gaff seems to know what he’s thinking and can make origami to give him hints. It’s why Gaff at the end of the movie says “You’ve done a man’s work”. And it’s why Gaff is such a dick to him. Imagine chaperoning your artificial replacement around that everyone thinks can do just as good a job as you…

I always watch Blade Runner from that perspective. At least until the sequel came out and ruined it for me.

No. It’s called the Paradox of Tolerance. “Discussing” rationally with the intolerant only serves to justify their position in their own eyes and thereby embolden them.

In other words, putting up with them simply gives them more ink

Turning the other cheek only works if the person doing the slapping has a sense of shame. Trump and his ilk have long since proven they have none.

No downvote. I 100% agree.

You are essentially my thesis statement. Lol.

Awww shucks. Thanks. I appreciate the compliment.

I have a couple of 80s Rokkors that I use with a speedbooster on my lumix g9, a 50mm and a 35mm. Despite having to do some math in terms of converting things like focal length, etc… because of the adaptor, It’s WELL worth it.

I made a Bluesky account and I’ll generally try to post to it the same amount as my Mastodon account. But despite the so called “exodus” from Twitter, I don’t find Bluesky to have any of the people I’m interested in following any more than Mastodon does. So it’s a wash.

I’m keeping it around to see if more of my friends show up. But that’s about all.

Oh man…I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I’ll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it’s just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.

The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.

Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.

It’s something that we’ve lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that’s a loss of unimaginable proportions.

Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one…because it’s just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?

If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.