Italian Ninja

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

I'm a member of an advanced photography training community. My mentor creates challenges to help demonstrate certain concepts.

This one required shooting a pop-art-style egg photo to show how specular highlights change with hard and soft light.

This was the example image I was to emulate.

A specular highlight is just a direct reflection of the light source.

With hard light, specular highlights are perceived as brighter. To get hard light, the light source must be smaller (or more distant). So the reflection is smaller, but also more concentrated in intensity.

With soft light, the light source is much larger (or closer). So the intensity of the reflection is spread out over a larger area. So it is perceived as dimmer.

Think about looking directly at a flashlight versus shining it against the wall. The same number of photons are involved, but your experience of them is vastly different.

If you are shooting someone with glasses and the light is reflecting brightly, you can move your light much closer to reduce its apparent intensity.

I worked for 10 minutes at a time over a period of 4 days. I got some fake eggs so I wouldn't have to spend energy cooking. Frustratingly, they arrived with a matte finish. They would not take on a specular highlight at all. So I ordered some automotive clear coat and sprayed the fake eggs on my deck.

You may have noticed my context-less egg art on my deck railing in another post. It was drying in the sun.

The clear coat worked well, so I proceeded to glue the egg to some colored construction paper and tape it to the wall in my kitchen.

I don't have a top-down rig to shoot things from above, so I felt this was a creative and low-energy solution.

A bonus aspect of the challenge was to create a Photoshop composite in which I retain the shadows from the hard light example and the gradient specular highlight on the egg yolk. I can't decide if I like that or the soft light version better.

It feels nice to have accomplished something creative. I am struggling so much with boredom as I recover. And doing anything productive is physically challenging. But I've got my birds and now my egg.

Doctors are to black women what police officers are to black men. That may seem controversial but I believe it to be true and I speak from personal experience.

If you've seen this TikTok you know that a 2016 study showed that 50% of medical students and residents thought that black people couldn't feel pain the same as white people.

And we learned from this video that because of a 1999 study, to this day, there's a black correction factor for the creatinin levels in black people's kidneys, meaning we're less likely to recieve a kidney transplant if needed.

So if you go to a doctor, feel you aren't getting proper treatment or they refuse the treatment you've requested, say to them the following:

If you weren’t already going to spread this advice because black women are at risk, then spread it because it’s applicable to everyone else as well, including you reading this.

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

What to do if you find a baby bunny.

This was prompted by me and my boyfriend discussing handedness and being able to tell apart left and right. And me, being ambidextrous, was baffled by how do people with an obligate dominant hand mix up which side is the one with their Writing Hand and which one isn't?? And my boyfriend pointed out that I go "turn left - no I mean right" so much when giving directions that I have lost my navigator privileges.

I argued that mixing up the words isn't the same thing as mixing up the directions. Like if your mom accidentally called you the dog's name doesn't mean that she literally can't tell you apart from the dog. And he looked at me like this

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.

in 2019 the FDA approved a drug called trikafta (which is really three drugs in one) for cystic fibrosis treatment. what it essentially does is patch up the malfunctioning proteins that cause the extra sticky mucus. trikafta is effective on about 90% of cystic fibrosis patients.

people who had spent their entire lives in and out of hospitals, on and off of ventilators, suffering from pneumonia and sometimes treated through painful procedures like intubation took this drug, got out of bed, coughed up an entire lifetimes worth of mucus out of their lungs over the course of a few hours, breathed clearly for perhaps the first time in their lives, and now go on to live well into their seventies.

My ward is the respiratory ward - CF is one of the things we specialize in.

Since this med came out we haven't had a SINGLE CF admission to the ward

There used to always be a CF patient spending a couple of months with us at a time

There's a man who is 23 years old who I was sure would not survive his next admission (aim saturations 85% is end stage lung disease)

There's a set of the local frequent flyers that we all know so well

Except

No we don't

On the CF specialist ward (with reasonable staff turnover)

Half the staff have probably never even seen a CF patient

Additionally, it should be noted that metrics like life expectancy are in no way a guarantee of... Anything. There are significant outlier CF patients who are at an advanced age now despite the odds due to a variety of different factors, having lived the majority of their lives before the development of modulators.

That is per month with the most common coupon people are likely to use.

But don't worry, there's grants and patient assistance programs you can apply for. 🤞🫠 Most people in high income countries like the USA can get it "covered" through insurance for fewer thousands of dollars. Or even less if your insurance is good or the manufacturer likes how poor and/or on Medicaid you are! A good social worker will help you with the process, and make sure your yearly reapplications and PAs are done a little early so they have time to think about it before you run out. Jesus Christ.