shit were all the same in the end

Corksniffing losers have to sully an awesome new space photo just to erroneously claim film is inherently superior.

I think this version is the original color processed version, which is still not as saturated or contrasty.

That's still an amazing result just from darkroom processing, but the deep blue version in the tweet definitely needed some help from Photoshop. And, personally, I think they overdid it.

The new photo was actually taken in darkness. It is a moonlit photo taken at extremely high gain (ISO 52,000). They did a long exposure to make it appear as if it were as bright as day. But without significant editing, that is going to make the colors less saturated and reduce the contrast.

The same thing would happen with film.

This is another version they did with a more accurate-to-eyeballs exposure.

Film is great.

Digital is great.

But it was not a great medium for space.

Most astronauts are fighter pilots. And there are only a few who are genuine photographers. You can train a fighter pilot to competently use a camera, but becoming a good photographer during the days of film usually took years of practice.

During the Apollo days they would send them up there with the best camera available. Usually a 70mm Hasselblad medium format. But the astronauts proved that the only way to get amazing photos without being a photographer was mostly down to luck.

We see the best photos they took, but those only amount to a handful. And as you saw above, NASA often had to do a lot of darkroom magic to make them aesthetically pleasing.

If you look at the Apollo archives, you can find hundreds of photos like this.

I'm fond of this one.

There was no instant feedback. They didn't have any instincts for settings or focus or composition. Most of the time they were just collecting visual data.

But every once in a while the stars aligned and they took absolute bangers.

That flag one is amazingly composed. But it took them a few tries.

Digital cameras give you a better baseline of quality. They can focus for you. They can meter for you. And they have high ISO gain that film could never touch.

They are... fighter pilot friendly.

With digital, they can look at the back screen and see if they bungled the exposure.

If they take a photo like this...

They get instant feedback and can be like, "Houston, where is exposure compensation?"

There is an undeniable ineffable quality that film sometimes delivers. But the medium is far less important than the skill of the person taking the photo.

Don Pettit is my favorite astronaut photographer. A true artist.

He really makes you forget about whether film is better than digital. He makes one remember that the person taking the photo is the paramount variable.

There is a great interview from Smarter Every Day where Don talks about how he captures amazing photos from space.

You are pressed to find a soul alive today that can testify to the experience of several hundred horses charging at your direction and you know they intend to charge past, over, and through you. The realization is alone enough to shake your will.

Hobelars were mounted on small gaited native pony-horses called hobbies; carrying no gear and wearing no armour and riding practically bareback, a feat made possible by the fast smooth pace of the hobby (whose gait would presumably resemble the Icelandic pony’s tölt or the Mongolian war pony’s joroo.) the Irish Hobby is now extinct, but the name is where we get the word “hobby” from - an activity done for pleasure. This sounds made-up, doesn’t it? You can read a long post by myself and contributors here, which includes this poem from someone describing their fighting style and how annoying it was:

And one amang, an lyrysch man, Uppone his hoby swyftly ran; Hyt was a sportfulle sygthe, How hys darttes he did schak ; And when him lyst to leve or tak, They had fulle gret dispite.

There are a few reasons why you haven’t heard of hobelars (god forbid people have hobbies). It is important to the imperial construction of the myths of the British Isles (and the French) that Celtic people be negligible and subjugated in any narrative of medieval warfare. They did not correspond to a social class outside of warfare: you can spin so MANY sexy aristocracy-reinforcing tales of chivalry around knights that we’re still doing so today. Sexy tormented superhero with his ARMOUR and his SWORD and his big HORSE - let’s roleplay this 5 million times, and for political comfort, rather than trampling the peasants he now rules, we shall enshrine and repeat the safe metaphorical image of the “dragon” for him to fight as well…

Guy Who Just Caught A Wild Hobby From A Bog And Doesn’t Wear Armour (and runs around bareback, throwing stuff and being incredibly fast and annoying, and vanishing when you tried to kill them back) is just… less sexy. They literally weren’t superheroes. There is discomfort as well - if we kept their imagery, we couldn’t give them fictions to fight; hobelars were not romantic, they had no fixed honour; they were always a scrambling skirmishing fighting unit for killing people. As an academic puts it:

The hobelar is very much the poor relation in the study of the English armies of the fourteenth century, eclipsed by both the man-at-arms and the archer. Our understanding of his origins and role has been wholly based on only two major studies of this troop type: J. E. Morris’ ‘Mounted Infantry Warfare’ in 1914 and J. Lydon's ‘The Hobelar: An Irish Contribution to Medieval Warfare’ in 1954. The lack of interest might be considered surprising, given that Morris saw him as the precursor to the mounted longbowman, while Lydon called him ‘the most effective fighting man of the age’, referring to the hobelar as ‘an entirely different type of mounted soldier’. Yet other historians have been happy to accept the conclusions of Morris and Lydon, considering the hobelar only in passing. Perhaps the reason that so little work has been done on him is that he is always considered in comparison to the man-at-arms – the elite warrior, in his shining harness, doyen of chivalry and a core element of the medieval political and social elite – and the longbowman – the almost super-heroic, Hundred Years’ War-winning, nationalistic symbol of medieval English, and Welsh, martial prowess. By contrast, there is little if any mention of the hobelar in the battle narratives of the middle ages; they have no great role to play in the successes of the English over the French. They do not form a political and social class within medieval society and there is no way, therefore, to discuss their impact outside of the military sphere. It is also almost certain that their Irish origins have counted against them too. Medieval Ireland has been considered militarily backwards by most historians of warfare, who seem to have inherited something of the dismissive tone of their English sources…

Right. 

You’ve read the posts above. You have dutifully pictured the mental image of being a pikeman, Just Some Guy with a big pointy stick, while thousands of pounds of steel-armoured horseflesh ridden by braying Tories comes at you. You have understood that this is inherently alarming, even if you understand the military theories involved, and are prepared to make horse-kebabs.

Now picture being that pikeman when hobelars turn up. First off, the hobbies are WEIRD. They’re fast and tiny, and they move Wrong:

Rather than lining up to be kebabs, as you expect, they feint - dance up to you like weirdos and turn away. They show off how - unencumbered and in good control of their hobbies - they can pretend to do the scary charge thing, breaking your will, but not get kebabed. They are not wearing armour; they’re not using saddles or stirrups, but some of them appear to be archers (?!) sometimes the hobelars get off and wind you up a bit and then jump back on their stupid hobbies. Psychologically they seem more like YOU, but then there’s the horses. They throw spears, or arrow-spears called “darts.” They laugh at you. They have amazing control of their hobbies, who turn away from pikeheads on a dime. The sight of hobbies skirmishing was described (above) as “a sportful sight” - presumably if they weren’t doing it at you, when it would be SO annoying.

There is zero expectation that Celtic mounted skirmishers will break a wall of pikemen. The hobelars have been sent to annoy you. What if this is part of their function, a natural activity in their wheelhouse, and they have perfected it. What if it’s working. What if, by the time the big shiny horses with their big shiny nobles come, you’re already a bit shaken…

Not saying this scene ever happened in history, but you can see from this a bit of how these histories are constructed: here is a unit that was effective and influential in its time and gave its name to “hobbies.” Here are the places where it would seem logical to use them. We have lost much of what would have been known about how they fought at all. The primary source for the quote of the “iyrysch man upon his hoby” is preserved in one single corrupted document in a corner of the internet that took me a morning to find. We will never forget knights, but with a strategically placed EMP, we would probably lose our ability to remember and connect over hobelars (why would anyone care.)

I follow this lady on instagram who rescues cats, and i have been thinking about this video for literal months. behold the transformation of this wretched little beast

Great get online and go to a job board. Indeed, Linkedin whatever. Now you're gonna search for a role that's in your city, fits your qualifications, and doesn't seem like a bad time.

See that easy apply button? Don't hit it they just throw those in the trash. Now you're gonna want to go to the company's website and check their careers page.

Oh? That job doesn't exist anymore. Cool go back to the job board and find another one.

Great you found another job, you're on the company's career page and the job exists!! So you're going to need to make an account on the career page website. They're using Workday, the same site as the last job you applied for? Who cares? You need to make another account for THIS job's workday page.

Now you're going to upload your resume. That'll autopopulate about 15 boxes with everything on your resume, except formatted wrong and with tons of errors. So just go through and painstakingly check the dates on all of that and rewrite everything you already laid out in an aesthetically pleasing format on your resume.

Ok time for the cover letter, explain why this specific job and company are deeply important to you. You love their mission statement and wouldn't even laugh if their ceo was gunned down in the street. You'll really want to reiterate the things you just spent the last 20 minutes filling out on the resume section

(Remember to include language from the job description, people who work in HR are lower than dogs and they need patterns or they get confused.) Write about a page, but hey don't sound too desperate or robotic this is where they judge your character!

Maybe add your portfolio site at the end here, who knows if that helps no one has ever clicked mine haha.

Anywayyy time to hit apply! Congrats! You'll see that confirmation email come in and you should be getting the rejection letter in about 2 weeks. Unfortunately your resume didn't have the right buzzwords and the AI auto rejected you :(

Listen very closely

The above is exactly why half of my friends come to me, and cry they're suffering, and I get to bestow my job hunting knowledge on them. I love this shit, it's a game.

For credentials my fastest job hunting time has been 1 week. I searched for 1 week, got an interview, and was hired within a week. My slowest was 1 month, while out of work, while telling ALL my interviewers that I quit my work without notice (I was testing my interviewers to see how shocked they'd get when I'd tell them why, anyone who wasn't shocked I would tell them at the end that I will keep them in mind (not)). My entire average is 2-3 weeks.

Firstly, what you're gunna do is pick a job sector. You're gunna pick a few of these by the end, but for now pick one. Maybe you wanna do bookkeeping, maybe you wanna do something in doggy daycare. Maybe you're a sous chef. Idk! Figure out what abouts you want first. Do not apply to anything yet. You're gunna look at the job description, I've picked out a few for bookkeepers below.

Now what you're gunna do is you're gunna look for "buzz words", or rather words that are gunna appear commonly and indicate the tone for that job. I've highlighted some, but not all in my examples below

Just look at that snout at how similar those descriptions are!

Now that you've got your buzzwords, you're gunna slap those babies into your resume! You see, since your resume is usually read by a computer first, you're gunna trick the computer into giving it to a person. Really what the computer is scanning for is how similar your resume is to the job description. Remember your bullet points, and to keep it short, try to only have 3 to 5 bullet points per job:

- Processed over 500 invoices a day in an efficient and accurate manner

- Curated reports for management review by utilizing available data

- Monitored and recorded over 100 submissions each day increasing accuracy by 50%

These are some great, made up examples I pulled from those buzz words. You might notice I added some numbers into there. That's something you'll wanna try and note for yourself, how much of something you can do, how accurate, how much efficiency you increased, these look GREAT when your resume gets past the computer and is moved in front of a real person.

Now you have your sector-based resume with lots of buzzwords. This is great! Now for the easy part. You're gunna channel your inner "IDGAF" And you're gunna send that to every listing you like on indeed. Filter for "Apply on Indeed" and spam that shit. Sometimes you gotta answer a few extra questions, but if they give me more than 5 quick questions I trash the submission and move on.

Don't waste your time jumping through hoops, streamline it for yourself and use the same methods companies are using. Push MASSIVE amounts of average quality resumes out. The more opportunities taken = the greater the chance of success. For every opportunity taken you've now pitched a chance of success, for every resume you cannot submit because you're piddling around on their stupid website or answering 50 interview questions online, you send out a 0% chance of success.

So go, try this, and see how it works for you.

Some additional things to consider:

- Add random shit in your resume, I added my "Board Game Club" (BDSM group) into my resume for hobbies and discussed how I got my start using sparklines there

- Never underestimate the flair of a little Clipart fleur-de-lis or something on your resume. Never put colored Clipart, but a little floral or swirl design located somewhere nice makes it stand out

- if you don't have a degree that doesn't mean they won't pick you, twice now I've come to a job without a bachelors and being honest that I was only getting an associates before I think of my next steps

- Embellish, do not lie. Jargoning your job description to make it sound cool and professional is GREAT. Do not give me a resume saying you can use CNC machinery when you've only used a 3D printer. Just tell me you know how to program and manage a 3d printer and want to learn CNC machinery.

- Keep. Your. Resume. To. Two. Or. Less. Pages. You don't need EVERY job, only the relevant ones, if your interviewer asks about the gap, tell them what job you had during that time (or if you wanna lie say you were taking college courses and were on a break, you dont need a degree to say you took courses) and that you only wanted to showcase the most relevant ones

Look at the job description.

Identify what they want examples of like "ability to multitask" or "can work across teams to achieve success" or "can work on a budget".

Pick three.

Write this:

IF YOU CAN FIND THE NAME OF A HIRING PERSON: Dear [Name]

IF YOU CAN'T FIND THE NAME OF A HIRING PERSON: Fuck the usual salutation and just roll directly into "I was very excited when I saw this job application. I feel I am a great fit for this role."

Now, look at the three things you chose from their list of what they want. Write a paragraph like this.

I am an adept multitakser who routinely handles several projects/deadlines/needs (whatever). In my current position I [multitask example]. In my previous work, I [second example].

SECOND PARAGRAPH SAME AS THE FIRST DIFFERENT THING THEY WANT BUT NOT ANY WORSE:

In my current position, I work with multiple teams daily, including [name any team you have waved hello to in the hall] and through my work we have [list an accomplishment that required multiple teams].

THIRD PARAGRAPH HERE WE GO AGAIN:

Staying in budget is something I am very familiar with. When I worked on [team], my contributions [list] not only brought the project in on time but under budget by [number]. I have also brought in other projects under budget [examples].

AND NOW THE FINALE:

Thank you for your time in reviewing my cover letter and resume. I look forward to discussing my qualifications and interest in the role with you at length. I can reached at [phone number] and [email].

Sincerely,

[NAME]

And remember, any question that is looking for a negative story ("Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a co-worker") should ALWAYS be presented by you as "I do have a story for that, and I'm pleased with how I handled it." and then you focus on the all the positives in that situation. So, state what the problem was, and then how you fixed it, and then how fixing it improved your working experience. For example:

"Well, I worked with a man named Bob, and he never answered any emails he got after 3:00 PM, so if I had a question after 3, I'd start a draft email and just add to it if i had further questions. And then I'd schedule it to send at the top of his workday. He started earlier than me, and I'd usually come in to a reply from him with the answers I needed when I first sat down for the day. I actually had another co-worker who was having trouble getting Bob to answer questions, and I said, "Oh, are you sending them after 3?" and when she said yes, I shared my own process so it was easier for her to get information, too."