By removing data you either tell the others “look, this data was not relevant” or “look, this data was super relevant and I’m being sarcastic” or “you know what, stop being lazy asses and use your own brains to fill in the blanks”. That makes it fancy in that the watchers must guess which one it is you meant.
…I don’t understand art either, I am a linguist.
Psychie
I think there are some images that legitimately look better in greyscale, from an aesthetic perspective, but I never understood how anything other than aesthetic appeal matters in static visual art. Like, a literary work or a performance art can make me think or evoke feelings, but static visual arts, like photographs and paintings, fall into the categories of “that’s pretty”, “meh”, and “yuck”. I really dislike art museums because of this, as I get everything I need or want out of a picture within a couple seconds of viewing it and then want to move on, but everyone else seems to want to spend several minutes staring at every single piece.
I really need some kind of narrative to get anything out of art.
@APW thinking of grayscale photograph as having “data removed” is not helpful. as a linguist, maybe think of the choice of grayscale as semantic. Grayscale does not have one single set “meaning” though, because there isn’t a single universal photographic language. It conveys different things in different contexts.
Daibhid C
I used to feel that way — in fact, honestly, I still feel that way, mostly.
But I’ve recently got really into the BBC radio show Moving Pictures (after I got over my disappointment that it wasn’t another Discworld adaptation) in which every episode spends half an hour examing a single artwork (which is also available in a super-zoomable format on their website) pointing out all kinds of intricate details I would never have noticed and how they fit together to convey what the artist is trying to say.
It turns out there is a narrative in static art, I just needed someone to tell me how to see it.
No, you understand art. Deleting color is bullshit. One famous photographer, Ansel Adams, shot almost exclusively in black and white, which means black and white must be great art. It isn’t, and Adams took boring pictures.
Mark
I think that Adams needed to remove color as a distraction because he was more interested in controlling contrast. Rather like modern art more generally seems to be about how much you can leave out and still be able to convey meaning.
Anyway he’s regarded as a Great Photographer, so one at least gets to drop his name and seem arty by association.
Yeah it’s really interesting how lately now that cameras and images are ubiquitous and making high quality pictures has never been so cheap and low-effort, there’s an esthetic of purposefully degraded images. I feel like the whole lo-fi/8-bit/polaroid/glitchy/analog constellation of esthetic directons, while each movement has its own characteristics, points to an engagement with the medium itself that was maybe less mainstream in earlier technological eras. [Personal views][citation needed]
I believe I read something about this some time ago (so unfortunately I can’t dig up a citation, only my paraphrasing). It was referring to black and white movies, but the principle is the same, IMO:
Basically, the light and shadows of greyscale images can be drastically different and change the whole look of a scene, beyond the obvious lack of colour. It’s not inherently better or worse, but it does force both the person doing the composing and the eventual audience to consider things from a different perspective. For instance, the way the edges of objects blend into or contrast with each other can be quite different depending on the colour situation.
And I suppose, the mark of effective art is not whether it’s inherently “good”, but rather if it provokes some sort of reaction from its audience – The asking of “With our modern technology, why would someone deliberately shoot/publish this image/scene in greyscale?” is certainly a reaction – Even if a rhetorical question.
Would the same image draw your attention in the same way if it were in colour?
I majored photography, in college, (early 70s) and love taking the B/W class. It helped you concentrate on composition, contrast, lighting, shadows, etc. It helped make my color stuff better, later. Got a ribbon at the L.A. County Fair, for one of my B/W pieces, too (larger than most STATE fairs!)
A was going to say that Booster only drinks the finest artisanal moonshine, but that’s actually a thing. My brother took me to a place that sells it.
They do samples. I tried one and made a discovery: I do not drink moonshine.
Thag Simmons
Artisinal moonshine seems like it’s missing the point
Yumi
Maybe it’s trying to miss the point so hard that it creates a new point.
not someone else
Many things labeled “artisanal” are.
Wizard
Never tried any myself, but I imagine that different distilling techniques and variations in the mash bill might lead to some very subtle differences in taste. Compared to the much greater variation in flavor and character among properly aged whiskeys, I still don’t quite see the point, though.
Mano308gts
By (old-fashioned) definition… If it’s legal, it’s not moonshine, it’s just a rural whiskey….
Mano308gts
(This also matches the definition for Poitin (“potcheen”), which is in essence just Irish potato whiskey)
BarerMender
But for it to be legal, the moonshiner must get a license and pay outrageous taxes. So it’s almost certainly moonshine.
BarerMender
Old joke ahoy:
When I was six, back in the ’50s, a revenue agent came up to me and said,”Son, do you know where I can find a still?” I said, “Yeah, my uncle has a still.” Revenuer: “I’ll give you ten dollars if you show me.” In those days, when a candy bar was a nickle and a comic book a dime, $10 was a fortune to a kid. I being Irish, sold my uncle out in a second. “OK!” Rev: “Let’s go.” Me: “Where’s my ten dollars?” Rev: “I’ll give you the ten when we get back.” Me: “Oh, you ain’t comin’ back.”
brionl
Flingin’ Flangin’ BevMo sells moonshine in fancy-ass mason jars.
I actually really dig taking photos on my phone. Just. . random bits of building, neighborhood, animals, bits of sky, or nature that strikes me at the moment.
It’s a harmless hobby, and I rarely ever go back and look at the photos myself again later, but I enjoy sharing what I do manage to nab. Just to share a bit of that captured beauty.
There used to be a blind photographer, in New York City if I remember. He’d walk down the street until he heard something loud, such as a crash, an argument, laughter, and would point his camera and shoot. Shot a lot of garbage. Also shot a lot of fine photography.
Sometimes I take pictures of places I go to because
1. I wanna use them as reference for a comic that I REALLY want set in atlanta but unfortunately don’t spend a lot of time in Atlanta
and
2. Because I don’t spend much time in Atlanta it’s really special to me when I go and I wanna take pictures of how neat that place is.
I take tons of pictures too. It’s actually a great art cheat when you make the references yourself. No one can call you out for copy and pasting or tracing your own photos.
FUN FACT: Inio Asano, artist of such manga as “Goodnight Punpun” and “Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction” has gone on record saying he does not, in fact, draw his backgrounds from scratch. What he does is goes on walks and takes pictures. He then scans those pictures into the computer and then turns them greyscale. He then draws over bits and pieces of the background to give it a more natural hand drawn look so it blends with his art better.
When I found out I was blown away. I always thought his backgrounds were awesome and here he is, not only revealing “hey, I basically just cheat” but being VERY open about the fact that he’s cheating. It is then that I realized “It doesn’t actually MATTER that he’s cheating. They’re HIS pictures taken with HIS camera that he sketches over with his art program. And the end result are some stunning backgrounds that draw me in. Cheating is just…part of art. He never claimed to be great at drawing backgrounds, he didn’t lie to us. He just did what he needed to to make this aspect of making a serialized manga more bearable.
Oooh, very fun fact! Love that sort of glimpse at the actual nuts and bolts of creation. Cause art is a craft like any other in most respects
davidbreslin101
Back before modern cameras, some artists used to trace over projected images in a “camera obscura”. I’ve heard Leonardo da Vinci sometimes used them….
Mark
I wouldn’t call it “cheating” to look at the world and draw what you see in it, whether directly or through captured images. The art is in the selection and the making.
In the example Yoto gives, this is not what happens. Inio Asano apparently includes the photographs themselves, albeit somewhat modified, in his art.
Maybe “cheating” is not the word you’d prefer but i’m sure you can appreciate what Yoto is saying here
Yotomoe
I moreso mean cheating in the fact that he’s mostly just tracing actual greyscale photographs, but I should add on “cheating” isn’t a dirty word to me in art. Art, in and of itself, is a deception. The entire concept is to leave some scratches of graphite/pigment on a surface and convince everyone “That’s a person!” It’s not. It’s just markings on a wall.
Animation, in the dictionary, is cited as an optical illusion. Which is APT because it is TRICKING you into thinking that the characters on screen are moving, expressing, thinking, feeling people. They’re not. They’re just markings on a wall. But we can make them blink, we can make them walk, we can make them talk even! We can impart SUCH a sense of personhood into these etchings on the wall that we can make people cry or make them angry or filled with glee.
And a part of this is “cheating”. One of the things I learned about 3D animation is, if you’re not making it for a game (or moreso even if you are if the game has a fixed camera angle) you are allowed to constantly cheat and break the models. Swapping out head shapes to match a style, detatching and reattaching limbs, Growing/shrinking parts of the body for forced perspective. The only thing that matters is if the final product looks good. You can bend the character in so many impossible ways but if the final result looks good nobody will care or even notice.
Finding out Inio Asano “cheated” his backgrounds wasn’t a realization of fraud. It was a realization of brilliance. Like “Holy shit! He makes this sound so SIMPLE” and the end result looks beautiful. It minimizes the workload on him to such a degree that he’s able to do a lot of the work a usual mangaka usually pushes onto his assistants himself, which is what probably allows him to compose such interesting shots and consistently phenomenal character art.
OBBWG
“Good artist copy, great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso
Yoto,
I’m gonna tell you this because this is something you yourself have brought up unprompted (it’s just i would never say this if you didn’t make a point of mentioning it) the fact that you haven’t had a girlfriend and don’t know how that would ever happen.
Like i said before, i love the way you express yourself.
but especially when you talk about art, you just sound so passionate. look, i’m not any kind of PUA, i have no idea how to “get people to date you” beyond the simple advice that self-confidence, at least in some areas, matters. and to that end hopefully, let me just point this out, when you talk like that you seem to light up and the things you say are so thoughtful and deep.
Now i don’t know that much about you, but i just hope you realise that you have so much to offer that’s rare and precious and, you know, attractive. that’s all. (and it doesn’t end with your thoughts about art as far as i’m concerned, but this is what is motivating me to write this rn)
Yotomoe
Well shucks, that means a lot. I don’t have a lot of relateable interests that are good at breaking the ice. Most of my fascinations are art or animation related. I love talking about cartoons and comics and video games. But I can’t dance, I’m behind on music, I don’t know slang, I work at a Wendy’s. All the stuff I like is stuff your average person doesn’t care about so it’s hard to have these really fun enjoyable conversations with people honestly.
I can’t stand the feeling of getting carried away with my passions only to be greeted with a stone faced and uninterested person. It makes me feel foolish.
My favorite pictures to take are the view from the window of wherever I’m staying when I go out of town. Often the views aren’t, like, “notable” or whatever, because I don’t have “place with an iconic view” money, but I like the little feeling of “this is what the world looks like from here.”
I also think it’s funny how sometimes doing this at home means I have far more pictures of my neighbors’ houses than I do of my own. Which I guess might be common? I mean, how often do people photograph their own house? …Now I want to go take a picture of my house.
I take pictures of graffiti and other types of street art constantly. Not just the impressive flashy spraypaints but also the awkward scratched signatures, the tiny stickers, the silly sharpie jokes, anything that stands out to me as interesting, funny, cute, powerful, pretty, bizarre…
It’s sharpened my attention towards my urban surroundings, and appreciation for the many small ways city people reclaim and utilize public space. It’s this endearing outpouring of gratuitous, illegal, cheeky creativity, it doesn’t let the city be the nice and bland ikea fantasy politicians and boring middle class office-goers would like it to be. It’s an alternative conception of the public sphere to that of the liberal philosophy of privately-owned, publicly-regulated spaces: instead of “respecting private property” like this freaky cult of a capitalist culture we live in assures us we must, it says “fuck that, i live here, i get to write on this wall.”
Yeah I went back and looked at a few images of last semester Ethan and dude is looking at least a shade lighter now. I can’t really back that up with proof, but he’s had better days.
Oh, shit! Hang in there, yeah? That’s some shit-ass luck, I genuinely hope you’re gonna be okay. Sending whatever form of psychic well-wishing is most helpful? Unless you don’t want those, in which case uh, make sure you do everything you can to stick around.
Sending you all my well-wishes for your full and smooth recovery!
Try to get yourself some PAXLOVID as soon as you can. You meet multiple criteria for it. Plus an asthma inhaler if you can get one. They help a lot. And/or hot black tea with honey snd lemon — the theophylline will expand your bronchioles, the lemon will cut the phlegm, and the honey will coat your throat to soothe a cough.
But for real, yo’ — trouble breathing, you just call for medical assistance right away. Hands down. That sh**’s no joke.
Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids, staying warm, avoiding most caffeine and alcohol, getting a little fresh air and sunshine through the window when you can… all good things to do.
Discussion (159) - “Hobbyist”
Nova
Greyscale is fancy. No further questions.
Yotomoe
Does that make my drawings, of which I do not color out of laziness, Fancy? If so, Bully for me!
Taffy
Does that further make my occasional color edits of those drawings a stain on your art’s fanciness?
Yotomoe
Or does it somehow increase the value of the original because it draws attention to how greyscale the original is?
TerribleTransit
It’s only fancy if you grayscale the colored image.
Yotomoe
Brilliant!
Reltzik
So if you make it simpler from the original image by removing the color data, it becomes fancier?
… I do not understand art at all.
APW
By removing data you either tell the others “look, this data was not relevant” or “look, this data was super relevant and I’m being sarcastic” or “you know what, stop being lazy asses and use your own brains to fill in the blanks”. That makes it fancy in that the watchers must guess which one it is you meant.
…I don’t understand art either, I am a linguist.
Psychie
I think there are some images that legitimately look better in greyscale, from an aesthetic perspective, but I never understood how anything other than aesthetic appeal matters in static visual art. Like, a literary work or a performance art can make me think or evoke feelings, but static visual arts, like photographs and paintings, fall into the categories of “that’s pretty”, “meh”, and “yuck”. I really dislike art museums because of this, as I get everything I need or want out of a picture within a couple seconds of viewing it and then want to move on, but everyone else seems to want to spend several minutes staring at every single piece.
I really need some kind of narrative to get anything out of art.
milu
@APW thinking of grayscale photograph as having “data removed” is not helpful. as a linguist, maybe think of the choice of grayscale as semantic. Grayscale does not have one single set “meaning” though, because there isn’t a single universal photographic language. It conveys different things in different contexts.
Daibhid C
I used to feel that way — in fact, honestly, I still feel that way, mostly.
But I’ve recently got really into the BBC radio show Moving Pictures (after I got over my disappointment that it wasn’t another Discworld adaptation) in which every episode spends half an hour examing a single artwork (which is also available in a super-zoomable format on their website) pointing out all kinds of intricate details I would never have noticed and how they fit together to convey what the artist is trying to say.
It turns out there is a narrative in static art, I just needed someone to tell me how to see it.
BarerMender
No, you understand art. Deleting color is bullshit. One famous photographer, Ansel Adams, shot almost exclusively in black and white, which means black and white must be great art. It isn’t, and Adams took boring pictures.
Mark
I think that Adams needed to remove color as a distraction because he was more interested in controlling contrast. Rather like modern art more generally seems to be about how much you can leave out and still be able to convey meaning.
Anyway he’s regarded as a Great Photographer, so one at least gets to drop his name and seem arty by association.
milu
Yeah it’s really interesting how lately now that cameras and images are ubiquitous and making high quality pictures has never been so cheap and low-effort, there’s an esthetic of purposefully degraded images. I feel like the whole lo-fi/8-bit/polaroid/glitchy/analog constellation of esthetic directons, while each movement has its own characteristics, points to an engagement with the medium itself that was maybe less mainstream in earlier technological eras. [Personal views][citation needed]
Nazmazh
I believe I read something about this some time ago (so unfortunately I can’t dig up a citation, only my paraphrasing). It was referring to black and white movies, but the principle is the same, IMO:
Basically, the light and shadows of greyscale images can be drastically different and change the whole look of a scene, beyond the obvious lack of colour. It’s not inherently better or worse, but it does force both the person doing the composing and the eventual audience to consider things from a different perspective. For instance, the way the edges of objects blend into or contrast with each other can be quite different depending on the colour situation.
And I suppose, the mark of effective art is not whether it’s inherently “good”, but rather if it provokes some sort of reaction from its audience – The asking of “With our modern technology, why would someone deliberately shoot/publish this image/scene in greyscale?” is certainly a reaction – Even if a rhetorical question.
Would the same image draw your attention in the same way if it were in colour?
merbrat
I majored photography, in college, (early 70s) and love taking the B/W class. It helped you concentrate on composition, contrast, lighting, shadows, etc. It helped make my color stuff better, later. Got a ribbon at the L.A. County Fair, for one of my B/W pieces, too (larger than most STATE fairs!)
Sporky
this is your brain on STEM, folks
Clif
Booster is not alone in this regard.I suspect that it’s a surprisingly common strategy.
Stephen Bierce
Kodachro~o~ome…
woobie
gimme the greeeens of summers
Slartibeast Button, BIA
There was a bunch of stuff back around 2010 when the final Kodachrome developing place shut down their last machine.
Mikey
Since some people in the comments always seem to forget, here’s your reminder in advance: Booster is a “they” and not a “he.
Yumi
Yes, feed me that Booster backstory.
Sirksome
Honestly I think any hobby would be pretentious if Booster was doing it. They just give off that vibe. They could make pig wrestling seem pretentious.
Yotomoe
There goes Booster, Drag racing through mudhole gulch again. What a SNOB!
Doctor_Who
A was going to say that Booster only drinks the finest artisanal moonshine, but that’s actually a thing. My brother took me to a place that sells it.
They do samples. I tried one and made a discovery: I do not drink moonshine.
Thag Simmons
Artisinal moonshine seems like it’s missing the point
Yumi
Maybe it’s trying to miss the point so hard that it creates a new point.
not someone else
Many things labeled “artisanal” are.
Wizard
Never tried any myself, but I imagine that different distilling techniques and variations in the mash bill might lead to some very subtle differences in taste. Compared to the much greater variation in flavor and character among properly aged whiskeys, I still don’t quite see the point, though.
Mano308gts
By (old-fashioned) definition… If it’s legal, it’s not moonshine, it’s just a rural whiskey….
Mano308gts
(This also matches the definition for Poitin (“potcheen”), which is in essence just Irish potato whiskey)
BarerMender
But for it to be legal, the moonshiner must get a license and pay outrageous taxes. So it’s almost certainly moonshine.
BarerMender
Old joke ahoy:
When I was six, back in the ’50s, a revenue agent came up to me and said,”Son, do you know where I can find a still?” I said, “Yeah, my uncle has a still.” Revenuer: “I’ll give you ten dollars if you show me.” In those days, when a candy bar was a nickle and a comic book a dime, $10 was a fortune to a kid. I being Irish, sold my uncle out in a second. “OK!” Rev: “Let’s go.” Me: “Where’s my ten dollars?” Rev: “I’ll give you the ten when we get back.” Me: “Oh, you ain’t comin’ back.”
brionl
Flingin’ Flangin’ BevMo sells moonshine in fancy-ass mason jars.
Reltzik
Please! The couth terminology is Porcine Graeco-Roman!
anon
well photography has a lot of filters but at least it’s a proper camera and they’re not like doing some kinda ‘influencer’ lifestyle lol
William Leonard Reese Jr.
I actually really dig taking photos on my phone. Just. . random bits of building, neighborhood, animals, bits of sky, or nature that strikes me at the moment.
It’s a harmless hobby, and I rarely ever go back and look at the photos myself again later, but I enjoy sharing what I do manage to nab. Just to share a bit of that captured beauty.
True Survivor
That’s really cool.
BarerMender
There used to be a blind photographer, in New York City if I remember. He’d walk down the street until he heard something loud, such as a crash, an argument, laughter, and would point his camera and shoot. Shot a lot of garbage. Also shot a lot of fine photography.
Mark
There is taking photos and there is making photos. Sounds like you enjoy the making.
BBCC
This is nice. I’m enjoying this friendship. I think both of them need it, especially Ethan these days.
Axel
I like this. They’re actually talking.
davidbreslin101
Yes, this feels like the first time we’ve ever seem them relaxed and we just didn’t know it.
Yotomoe
Sometimes I take pictures of places I go to because
1. I wanna use them as reference for a comic that I REALLY want set in atlanta but unfortunately don’t spend a lot of time in Atlanta
and
2. Because I don’t spend much time in Atlanta it’s really special to me when I go and I wanna take pictures of how neat that place is.
Sirksome
I take tons of pictures too. It’s actually a great art cheat when you make the references yourself. No one can call you out for copy and pasting or tracing your own photos.
Yotomoe
FUN FACT: Inio Asano, artist of such manga as “Goodnight Punpun” and “Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction” has gone on record saying he does not, in fact, draw his backgrounds from scratch. What he does is goes on walks and takes pictures. He then scans those pictures into the computer and then turns them greyscale. He then draws over bits and pieces of the background to give it a more natural hand drawn look so it blends with his art better.
When I found out I was blown away. I always thought his backgrounds were awesome and here he is, not only revealing “hey, I basically just cheat” but being VERY open about the fact that he’s cheating. It is then that I realized “It doesn’t actually MATTER that he’s cheating. They’re HIS pictures taken with HIS camera that he sketches over with his art program. And the end result are some stunning backgrounds that draw me in. Cheating is just…part of art. He never claimed to be great at drawing backgrounds, he didn’t lie to us. He just did what he needed to to make this aspect of making a serialized manga more bearable.
milu
Oooh, very fun fact! Love that sort of glimpse at the actual nuts and bolts of creation. Cause art is a craft like any other in most respects
davidbreslin101
Back before modern cameras, some artists used to trace over projected images in a “camera obscura”. I’ve heard Leonardo da Vinci sometimes used them….
Mark
I wouldn’t call it “cheating” to look at the world and draw what you see in it, whether directly or through captured images. The art is in the selection and the making.
milu
In the example Yoto gives, this is not what happens. Inio Asano apparently includes the photographs themselves, albeit somewhat modified, in his art.
Maybe “cheating” is not the word you’d prefer but i’m sure you can appreciate what Yoto is saying here
Yotomoe
I moreso mean cheating in the fact that he’s mostly just tracing actual greyscale photographs, but I should add on “cheating” isn’t a dirty word to me in art. Art, in and of itself, is a deception. The entire concept is to leave some scratches of graphite/pigment on a surface and convince everyone “That’s a person!” It’s not. It’s just markings on a wall.
Animation, in the dictionary, is cited as an optical illusion. Which is APT because it is TRICKING you into thinking that the characters on screen are moving, expressing, thinking, feeling people. They’re not. They’re just markings on a wall. But we can make them blink, we can make them walk, we can make them talk even! We can impart SUCH a sense of personhood into these etchings on the wall that we can make people cry or make them angry or filled with glee.
And a part of this is “cheating”. One of the things I learned about 3D animation is, if you’re not making it for a game (or moreso even if you are if the game has a fixed camera angle) you are allowed to constantly cheat and break the models. Swapping out head shapes to match a style, detatching and reattaching limbs, Growing/shrinking parts of the body for forced perspective. The only thing that matters is if the final product looks good. You can bend the character in so many impossible ways but if the final result looks good nobody will care or even notice.
Finding out Inio Asano “cheated” his backgrounds wasn’t a realization of fraud. It was a realization of brilliance. Like “Holy shit! He makes this sound so SIMPLE” and the end result looks beautiful. It minimizes the workload on him to such a degree that he’s able to do a lot of the work a usual mangaka usually pushes onto his assistants himself, which is what probably allows him to compose such interesting shots and consistently phenomenal character art.
OBBWG
“Good artist copy, great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso
milu
Yoto,
I’m gonna tell you this because this is something you yourself have brought up unprompted (it’s just i would never say this if you didn’t make a point of mentioning it) the fact that you haven’t had a girlfriend and don’t know how that would ever happen.
Like i said before, i love the way you express yourself.
but especially when you talk about art, you just sound so passionate. look, i’m not any kind of PUA, i have no idea how to “get people to date you” beyond the simple advice that self-confidence, at least in some areas, matters. and to that end hopefully, let me just point this out, when you talk like that you seem to light up and the things you say are so thoughtful and deep.
Now i don’t know that much about you, but i just hope you realise that you have so much to offer that’s rare and precious and, you know, attractive. that’s all. (and it doesn’t end with your thoughts about art as far as i’m concerned, but this is what is motivating me to write this rn)
Yotomoe
Well shucks, that means a lot. I don’t have a lot of relateable interests that are good at breaking the ice. Most of my fascinations are art or animation related. I love talking about cartoons and comics and video games. But I can’t dance, I’m behind on music, I don’t know slang, I work at a Wendy’s. All the stuff I like is stuff your average person doesn’t care about so it’s hard to have these really fun enjoyable conversations with people honestly.
I can’t stand the feeling of getting carried away with my passions only to be greeted with a stone faced and uninterested person. It makes me feel foolish.
Yumi
My favorite pictures to take are the view from the window of wherever I’m staying when I go out of town. Often the views aren’t, like, “notable” or whatever, because I don’t have “place with an iconic view” money, but I like the little feeling of “this is what the world looks like from here.”
I also think it’s funny how sometimes doing this at home means I have far more pictures of my neighbors’ houses than I do of my own. Which I guess might be common? I mean, how often do people photograph their own house? …Now I want to go take a picture of my house.
milu
I take pictures of graffiti and other types of street art constantly. Not just the impressive flashy spraypaints but also the awkward scratched signatures, the tiny stickers, the silly sharpie jokes, anything that stands out to me as interesting, funny, cute, powerful, pretty, bizarre…
It’s sharpened my attention towards my urban surroundings, and appreciation for the many small ways city people reclaim and utilize public space. It’s this endearing outpouring of gratuitous, illegal, cheeky creativity, it doesn’t let the city be the nice and bland ikea fantasy politicians and boring middle class office-goers would like it to be. It’s an alternative conception of the public sphere to that of the liberal philosophy of privately-owned, publicly-regulated spaces: instead of “respecting private property” like this freaky cult of a capitalist culture we live in assures us we must, it says “fuck that, i live here, i get to write on this wall.”
Laura
Lovely.
When I was a youth, I traveled everywhere with a black Sharpie marker. Wall billboard advertisements needed subverting.
Yotomoe
God seeing Ethan walking out in daylight makes me realize how washed out his skin has become. Dude is looking ROUGH.
Sirksome
Yeah I went back and looked at a few images of last semester Ethan and dude is looking at least a shade lighter now. I can’t really back that up with proof, but he’s had better days.
C.T. Phipps
Vampirism will do that.
Yes, at last, SUPERNATURAL elements!
Clif
YAY?
The Wellerman
Well that’s interesting.
Probably not gonna comment for a while, I just got COVID-19.
Almost suffocated yesterday, I’m so scared. ?
Yotomoe
Hang in there! We’re all hoping you get better! Keep us updated if ya can.
Taffy
Oh, shit! Hang in there, yeah? That’s some shit-ass luck, I genuinely hope you’re gonna be okay. Sending whatever form of psychic well-wishing is most helpful? Unless you don’t want those, in which case uh, make sure you do everything you can to stick around.
RassilonTDavros
I hope you came through it okay, and have a safe and speedy recovery. Hang in there.
BarerMender
Really hoping you get better.
True Survivor
I am so sorry. I really hope you get better soon.
Laura
Sending you all my well-wishes for your full and smooth recovery!
Try to get yourself some PAXLOVID as soon as you can. You meet multiple criteria for it. Plus an asthma inhaler if you can get one. They help a lot. And/or hot black tea with honey snd lemon — the theophylline will expand your bronchioles, the lemon will cut the phlegm, and the honey will coat your throat to soothe a cough.
But for real, yo’ — trouble breathing, you just call for medical assistance right away. Hands down. That sh**’s no joke.
Here’s hoping for you!
Laura
Here is where you can get the latest available treatment, for free:
https://aspr.hhs.gov/TestToTreat/Pages/default.aspx
Info here on the available treatments:
https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/covid-19-treatments-therapeutics/index.html
Laura
Here is the CDC’s advice for how to care for yourself at home:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/isolation.html
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/if-you-are-sick/index.html
Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids, staying warm, avoiding most caffeine and alcohol, getting a little fresh air and sunshine through the window when you can… all good things to do.
Laura
The USPS is mailing out free rapid tests:
https://www.covid.gov/tests
Kaiser’s page:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/coronavirus-information
Info on ‘at-risk’ groups that qualify for Paxlovid:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html
Best wishes for your full recovery!
Laura
A few more resources for help to stay home safely:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/social-health/resource-directory/resource-directory
https://www.benefits.gov/help/faq/Coronavirus-resources