Ok this car is beautiful @andrew_j_hawkins https://www.theverge.com/transportation/975900/mercedes-amgs-new-ev-coupe-lineup-is-already-growing

If you like the Alone TV series, where they send people out into the Arctic to catch fish and starve for weeks or month at a time, then I recommend the Finland version (Suomi).

It's subtitles of course. But it far far superior to the any other versions I've seen. The people are relatable and low drama. They are all from Finland, so in a way being dropped in the Arctic wilderness is kind of like what they do for fun on a weekend anyway.

But they are interesting people. There's a 60 year old lady who doesn't really want to stay but then she caught a bucket of fish and was very disappointed with herself. Now she has to stay. Another gent doesn't actually like the taste of fish, and has realised this might be a problem for the coming weeks and months.

Several people made little boats, but they didn't spend two weeks building a canoe instead they made a large wreath and wrapped a tarp inside to make a simple pontoon. Genius.

All of these people are folks whom I would buy a coffee just to sit and chat with them.

Give it a go.

#AloneTV #AloneSuomi

I dunno why but this miraculous VFX shot from Forbidden Planet (1956) popped into my head earlier.

Obviously this adorable tiger just wanted a snack and didn't deserve to be disintegrated. But that effect in a movie that's 70 years old -- damn.

#vfx #scifi #classicfilm #cinema

LOOK AT THIS IT IS FUCKING GLORIOUS 🦬🦬🦬🦬🦬

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=158132

I’ve been asked to provide a quote to a local business to produce the video and audio for a series of instructional videos. As work goes it’s certainly something I’m capable of but I’ve never done this sort of thing for money before and I’m not really sure how to prepare an accurate estimate. Like, what’s the going rate for this stuff? Any advice, fediverse? #videoproduction

The office yesterday. My second day ever being paid as a videographer!

Did a video shoot for the Balsäk Band yesterday! It's amazing how easy it can be when you have a great subject. These guys are an absolute rolling ball of chaos, but then when it's time to turn it on they know exactly what to do — and it was magic.

I'm now fully convinced I also need a 12mm lens for my camera rig. This is going to be so fucking expensive…

#TheAdventuresOfDirkBalsäk #comedy #music #NowStreaming

2015. Times sure have changed.

Really, you should blame Big Oil. Sky faeries had nothing to do with it.

"Shortly after the tornado formed, a separate surge of high winds spread out south of the tornado, with estimated gusts up to 100 mph, according to the National Weather Service damage survey.

It was this surge of winds that pushed the tornado temporarily to the north...before the tornado was yanked back south toward that same Hazel Crest..."

Link: https://weather.com/2026/07/31/storms/tornado/chicago-area-tornado-hit-same-neighborhood-twice-in-less-than-10-minutes

#Weather #Storm #Tornado #Chicago #Climate

Just watched the two "Sisu" films. Awesomeness.

Loved the cinematography of the first one. Truly beautiful.

I did a ‘shuffle all songs’ with my entire iTunes library and it’s fun to explore some dusty corners of my past.

Like, I totally forgot that Live’s album Throwing Copper which includes songs like Lightning Crashes ends with some random untitled country song. What? 😆

@catsalad

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/117015445538860011

Christ I mean we are so fucked. There will very soon be no such thing as a fact

Reminder: Just as with Age ID and Chat Control legislation justifications, the AI build out, the price gauging of memory, storage (and CPU/GPU/SOCs too), the emerging hardware leasing & subscription models — all this is not just driven by generative AI in the form of chatbots, media generators, automation, job replacements, FOMO stories and other "obvious" reasons repeated ad infinitum by CEOs and in the media...

The only way these industry shifts and largest tech investments ever done make any sense (even in the face of the projected severe negative financial returns) is to consider them part of a larger, class-political project of comprehensively centralizing, monitoring/surveilling, renting out, drip-feeding and otherwise controlling future compute resources and access to them. This includes not only pure computation resources, but equally all communication, data & media produced, processed, stored or consumed via these infrastructures. Personal computing is being pushed out and with it privacy and autonomy over your own compute & media resources are going too...

Governments which have been vapidly talking for decades about "Digitization" (and utterly failing) are jumping on rolling out low quality, "good enough" AI services mostly aimed at the working class, allowing govts to maintain existing austerity programs, whilst claiming to be innovative, cutting costs (by pumping billions into overpriced consultancy contracts) and reducing "red tape" (i.e. mostly regulation which was actually beneficial or protecting the population & environment).

The return on these investments is not financial, but mostly political!

As an aside: I see the biggest threads to the fediverse, as self-owned, self-hosted & self-moderated communication space, are not AI bots, nazis or bigtech-owned platforms, but price explosions of the required (and mostly rented) compute infrastructure. In the near future, these ongoing price increases will force more communities to look for alternatives, which will slowly erode this space[1]... Solidarity and crowdfunding are some ways to combat that, but I fear they will only go that far (i.e. not far enough)...

So even when the current AI bubble bursts, this built-up centralized digital architecture will be a key pillar for any authoritarian government (the general trajectory every country is seemingly on, at current...), run in collaboration with oligarch operators whose purposes are served even more so by said infrastructure. At the very least these data centers will be used for vastly increased state surveillance (machine learning hardware/software is uniquely suited for these use cases), at worst to disenfranchise, prosecute & deny entire demographics...

I'd very much like to stand corrected with this, but there are a no publicly available hints to suggest anything drastically different to happen, not with the current breed of politicians and money in play... At least in the EU, all the talk about Digital Sovereignty already has made it clear that it's mostly about building parallel infrastructure to US big tech, but with the exact same anti-democratic bias, justifications, funding structures and neglect of any climate/social considerations. 30 billion Euro investments to create "AI giga factories" and an "AI continent"[2]. Data centers operated by goody, goody European billionaires rather than evil US based ones... How novel and how sovereign!

[1] Related to that I also see the resource-hungry and extremely chatty nature of the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon itself as primary implementation as large weak points... In order for the fediverse to survive for longer (for the above stated reasons), I think some drastic reconsiderations of existing design decisions are required to achieve a much lower computational footprint & running costs (e.g. storage requirements, consolidation of messages, reducing traffic & worker effort, esp. important for larger accounts or communities etc.)

[2] https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117010071572799616

#AI #Politics #PersonalComputing #DigitalSovereignty #LongRead

@samvarma @lasombra_br @neverbeaten @RyanHyde @eyesquash

(Source: Pew, via @ianbremmer )

A few more from the reject pile. I have no idea what I'm gonna shoot when summer arrives here, not gonna be as much fun as winter light.

#Melbourne #Naarm #Photography https://social.ewenbell.com/notice/B8QEHKYaQR7v9UleM4

Also, YET AGAIN, I have to use a plugin kludge to do something that [checks notes again] Just Works™ in DVR.

I guess I'm just not a professional yet.

#FinalCutPro #DaVinciResolve21 #VideoEditing #VideoProduction

WTAF.

Final Cut which is [checks notes] for professionals, does NOT natively support ACES color space. In the year of our lord 2026.

Fortunately, these guys took care of that for us with a free plugin:

https://kolor.company/colour-space-transform-plugin-for-final-cut-pro/

TIL

Also, I'm kind of amazed that I could follow this. Now to see if FCP supports ACES...

https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/resolve-color-management-vs-aces-which-should-i-use @ewen https://social.ewenbell.com/objects/4e9920ca-e7d8-4b7e-aa2a-b4f53febe57d