ze @ze@chaos.social

you ever think, in an alternate timeline just where hemp stayed legal, it might never have let the petrochemical/forestry/etc industries gain such dominance, and would we even be having so many problems?

i feel too clueless to even have a reaction to lots of things a lot of the time, and wonder how anyone else doesn't, except that i see a lot of people reacting to their misunderstandings of things all the time, so i largely suspect that's usually real reason

i like it as my background better if i rotate it 180°, so for convenience:
https://ze.isageek.net/etherique-03_rot.jpg : 6.550MB
https://ze.isageek.net/etherique-03_rot.png : 42.499MB

oh and my favorites are the ones that have enforced padding extending off far beyond their text truncation... you've literally guaranteed that you have THREE TIMES as much space as the longest string, and you still have to fucking obfuscate it?!

how is text truncation everywhere still so stupid? how fucking hard is it to calculate the cutoff so you don't trim ONE SINGLE CHARACTER off just to replace with "..."??
don't even get me started on all the places where they deliberately chose to limit the width to a stupid little box 2% of my screen size for literally no reason.

this took way too long to render just for an effect that kinda barely worked...
https://ze.isageek.net/etherique-03.jpg : 6.548MB
https://ze.isageek.net/etherique-03.png : 42.534MB

actually, while i really wanted to customize the first one, and likewise the rest, that i've ended up with this sorta trinity of holy blades, i should probably just give them demon-slayery names to larp as a rogue warrior monk with, or something...
if i ever get the replacement defective one, it's a blank canvas, though; the han jian's hardware isn't as good as its blade, afaict; and i wanna get into forging too, so eventually i can get as custom as i could possibly want doing that.

actually i think i found the wood on a few occasions, moreso in some bags

sometimes the really cheap coffee has a distinctly oversteeped-tea like flavor... i also found chunks of charred wood in it once, and i wonder how much of it's even actual coffee, or if it's like some kinda blend of roasted wood shavings and tea leaves or something...

so sometimes i'll sit and stare at the interplay of sunlight on a leaf, or a cloud, or the subtle subsurface scattering in almost everything that cgi artists still often neglect for performance, or the complex fluidic flows in smoke, and think of how these utterly tiny effects in space and time, coming and going in a blip, would take my computer hours or days to calculate a fuzzy approximation of.

and my cgi fiddlings over the years really highlighted this sense for me... take a photo of a random person, and it's just this mundane image, but if you render it indistinguishably, from scratch in cgi, it's a dazzling accomplishment. and a big part of that difference is just in how our computers would take the lifetime of the universe to calculate a tiny bit of everything actually going on in that scene to physically render the photograph.

there's this sense i get sometimes that's hard to describe, it's like looking at mundane everyday sorts of stuff, and being struck by the sheer scale and brute-force implementation of it all...
like, sortof in contrast, there's the notion of some quantum stuff looking like calculation shortcuts, but our macro scale and beyond is astronomically larger, and a grain of sand just sitting in some pile is trillions of particles buzzing with all the picosecond activities of merely existing, for eons...

this guy's trying to show how to forge basic blacksmith tongs as a beginner project you could do without already having them, but part way through, the pieces get too hot to handle while workable, so he has to stop and show how to make even more basic tongs to hold the better tong parts with and continue, and i'm like, metatongs!

doesn't matter how fast the computer, or how basic the scene, there are always reasons for me to find that i /need/ it to take tens of hours to render.

got caught trying to weather the storm without my weather permits

@shoofle ah, sure! tbh i even think compromise is slightly overrated in general... there's certainly times for negotiation and sacrifice for the mutual good and all that, but i think those times are fairly circumscribed by good-faith relationships of some sort. matters of truth, important issues, etc, rarely have any room for it.

@shoofle and just, you make a stronger case if you're charitable whenever reasonable at least, rather than, well, signaling bias, which i see just way too much of, doing disservice to too many arguments.

@shoofle also i feel like, this is more the sort of thing of being able to hold contradictory ideas in mind without committing to them... the notion isn't so much as to accept their arguments as to be able to understand and address the worst case scenario, so to speak?

@shoofle hmm, it's tricky, somehow i feel like that's taking it too far, but i'm not sure how to make the right distinction here...