incomprehensible thing, forget it.

Ironically, hard light is bad for recording sexy time.

It will highlight every pore, every vein, every wrinkle on your nutsack.

These outtakes where the flash didn't go off are also AI generated.

I like this spooky dutch angle one.

I was just starting to learn flash and I didn't have all the equipment I needed. Since corgis are quite short, I had to put the lighting on the ground. The off camera flash was on a tipped over lightstand with a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse the light.

But I had no wireless triggers. And the only other way to trigger a flash, is with another flash. So I used the on-camera pop up flash to trigger the main flash.

But I had two issues.

First, I did not want that dinky on camera flash affecting my picture.

Second, triggering a flash with a flash is best done indoors. The flash will bounce all around the room and eventually hit the sensor so the main flash triggers. When you are outdoors, there is no bouncing.

SO... I took a little handheld makeup mirror and angled it toward my main flash. This blocked the dinky pop up flash and sent the beam of light towards the main flash to trigger it.

I was lying on the wet morning grass, holding a camera in one hand, a mirror in the other, trying to aim the mirror exactly toward the main flash, making crazy noises to get Otis's attention, and trying to get the focus point on his face so I didn't get a blurry photo. Also, Otis was much more interested in sniffing things than posing for a photo.

Here is an overhead view that might help explain.

I await all of your comments saying my amazing drawring is clearly AI generated.

Only 30% of the time did the flash actually go off. Aiming the mirror was tricky and I was doing like 8 things at once. I wasn't even sure I got the photo I wanted. But when I came back to the computer there was one that stood out and it is one of my favorites I've ever taken.

It was the best combination of monumental effort, great discomfort, perfect foggy sunrise light, and just pure luck.

Unfortunately, people like me who use advanced sculpting light techniques are getting accused of using AI more and more. Not really sure what to do about it—other than show the 30 awful photos it took to get the good one.

My 80s sunglasses photo and spoon photo get called out the most.

But it's just good old fashioned gradient lighting which has been used in product photography since the days of film.

with that being said, having grown up in a conservative christian community its all very familiar to me and all I have to say is, I am fully just exhausted with the christian obsession with doing sex correctly

like, conservative christian subculture is consumed with how having sex in a Wrong way will make your soul grow gross fungus and destroy you psychologically and emotionally and defile God's holy design for humanity etc etc etc

and it goes on and on and on. Only monogamy for Forever is allowed, can't be gay, can't touch yourself if your partner isn't in the room, can't read smutty books, can't have fantasies, can't look at pictures of butts or weeners, can't have a threesome, you have to be married, can't put anything up your butt, etc. and different people disagree on where the line is, but there is always a high level of anxiety and fixation over doing sex The Right Way

usually with a flimsy justification that doing sex wrong causes harm and doing sex right leads to good relationships.

It would be fine to say that if it was true, but it's not true. Following the sex rules doesn't lead to good sex, happiness in your relationship, good self-esteem, valuing and respecting other people, intimacy with your partner, or protection from abuse.

The very people who promote the sex rules will tell you. It is common in these communities (for women particularly) to talk about how sex is boring and miserable and they hate doing it, they are so ashamed of their body and feel terrible guilt and shame, and they are unhappy with their life and marriage and always fighting. Not only do they talk about it, they joke about it and assume everybody else in the audience feels the same way, which would be culturally perceived as shocking in most parts of the broader culture the sex-rule-followers set themselves apart from.

Meanwhile, completely atheistic heathens who break all or most of the sex rules don't appear to be, as a cohort of people, doing worse. People of all stripes have troubles with relationships and sex, but at least some people verifiably have happy, non-abusive relationships with mutually pleasurable sex without following any of the sex rules.

Not only do the sex rules not cause any of the listed "good things" in a sexual relationship to definitely happen, it's not even clear that there's a correlation at all, or if the correlation is even positive.

Therefore, I'm over it.

On top of that, because of the high level of fixation and emotional turmoil over the sex rules, and the amount of time spent arguing about them and internally "struggling" over them, the sex rules take up a significant proportion of some Christians' energy investment into their faith and their life in general. The influencers I saw yesterday would speak about how their inability to follow all the sex rules made them feel worthless and like God did not love them, and returning to this thought repeatedly. They were unable to remain confident in the most fundamental foundation of their faith- the fact that God loves them.

They think it's okay because they don't feel worthless always, sometimes they remember that God loves them, but I don't feel worthless ever and I'm agnostic.

That's the problem-- they seem to think feelings of worthlessness, misery, and despair are the baseline state of existence and God is what liberates them from it because they feel better when talking to God sometimes. But actually, it seems like talking to God occasionally helps them reach a baseline, normal state of happiness, and otherwise they just have something terrible going on that isn't part of average human experience.

The fundamental commands of Christianity- love your neighbor, give away what you have to the poor, welcome the outcasts, bless your enemies et cetera- are not trivial. But from my observations, conservative Christians nowadays are teaching and discussing much less about all of the other important things than they do about the sex rules.

Conservative Christians especially young people often get stuck in horrible distress about a perceived "sin" they are committing, but the sin is something completely focused on themselves, like masturbation, or lust, or jealousy, or saying cuss words, or liking movies that have shirtless buff dudes in them, or liking their hobby more than God, or something like that. From their posts and videos, they sink into awful depths of self-loathing over these things, and their spiritual life becomes singularly fixated on "fighting" the "sin."

Though I am perhaps a godless heathen for it, I happen to think that morality has to do with how you treat other people, and that "sin" if it exists would have to do with the effects you had upon others and not having every thought in your head perfectly arranged with tweezers like colored grains of sand. Obsessing so much about your own thoughts in your own head seems extremely self-centered. The shame and guilt are more masturbatory than actual masturbation.

So from my perspective, it seems like the sex rules do nothing but distract from everything important and waste people's time.

Even relatively liberal/open-minded christians who reject most of the sex rules are still hung up on Monogamy Forever, and I'm over that as well. Perhaps "something bad" happens when somebody has sex with more than one person, but monogamy completely fails to prevent some of the most horrible things that can happen between two people, such as physical abuse and rape. Monogamy also completely fails to secure a non-abusive and supportive environment for a child to grow up in. In fact, the difficulty and social stigma of separating or getting divorced from a partner can make abuse happen for longer and progress to a worse state.

I don't think there are any "bad" outcomes or negative things that only happen outside of committed, monogamous relationships. Arguably, committed, monogamous relationships have much higher levels of potential harm than a hookup or one-night stand, because of the social and legal forces binding the two people together and the exclusive access they have to one another.

@jubileebloom @fionacle

theres a really, really, REALLY long historical explanation for the anti-sex sentiment in christianity but some of it comes from the huge influence that St. Augustine had on the early church. the guy couldn't control his dick and where it went, and as a result was pretty negative towards sex and women

there is also the influence of Gnostic philosophy which basically holds that the physical, material world is bad and we are supposed to try to transcend our physical bodies and focus on the spiritual. a lot of mystical traditions focused a lot on transcending the flesh

some of that of course is influenced by the apostle Paul who talks about the desires of the flesh as bad. Paul was potentially what we would now call asexual (he was celibate but refers to it as a "gift" given to him by god rather than a choice he made) and he actually thought that being single for life was the ideal for a christian but also said 'it is better to marry than to burn with passion.'

the Bible itself doesn't actually lay out a lot of specific guidelines about sex, most of it is just following along with cultural norms are supposed to be followed.

A couple points are horrid and misogynistic, like there is an expectation that a woman is supposed to bleed her first time having sex to ensure she is a virgin, except that does not actually indicate virginity, so that instruction basically means "make sure the bride experiences pain and injury when she has sex."

but like, there is no actual command or rule laid out that "people should only have sex when they're married" because that was culturally expected, which is basically for economic and social reasons? if people were having sex with more than one person, it would be unclear which kids came from which father, so nobody could figure out where the inheritance was supposed to go. And if a woman who wasn't married had a kid, she couldn't support the kid financially.

The STI thing is probably also true. before modern antibiotics and antivirals, a lot of STIs were incurable, and oftentimes women are more vulnerable to them and they can also be passed down to children.

Also, before modern medicine, there wasn't a form of birth control that really reliably worked, and abortion was dangerous and could kill you, and childbirth also had a high chance of killing you, so I think sex negativity made a lot more sense in ancient times. For a long time in christianity the ideal for a woman was to be celibate forever, and that was probably a relatively liberating option.

Christianity did contradict a lot of the social hierarchies it arose within, and a lot of the core teachings of Jesus were all about the inversion of hierarchy. Many women in the early church were considered deacons and apostles, and had positions of teaching and leadership, and the role of women was actually erased by later translators of the Bible. But Christianity didn't tear down or undo social hierarchies completely, it still allowed for them and in many ways used hierarchical metaphors and language to explain or describe God, like father or king or head of household or master. I think it might be impossible for a religion that DID contradict all hierarchy to continue existing, but a religion that allows for hierarchy will eventually be turned into a weapon used to enforce that hierarchy.

it's bad if this was intentional and a company can just decide to brick your car remotely whenever they like. it's bad if this was accidental and your car needs a constant connection to a satellite or it stops functioning.

it's bad even though it's Porsche because if they can do it to rich people with luxury cars they can do it to anyone. it's bad even though it's Russia because a) not every Russian is responsible for the acts of the Russian government and b) if they can do it in Russia they can do it anywhere.

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.

However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.

The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.

The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.

Individual people liking cutesy fluff? Not a problem. Thousands of people insisting that fluff is the only acceptable option and if you dare make them think and consider, you're the problem?

That's a Problem.

It's the shifting of norms in culture, and fandom is not an isolated bubble--it's a representative of larger trends. And the trend right now in our larger culture, especially in America, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism that has gone past "creeping" and is now "prancing", "dancing", "galloping", or dare I say goosestepping. Of course that's going to have an impact on the cultural scenes, including fandom!

And there's a correlation in societies that want saccharine fluff and their own authoritarianism. I can point to numerous examples--Victorian England with the censored stories for children. The USSR with an entire kitschy style of stories and art. The USA before the rise of Trump with Thomas Kinkaid's art. And that's just scratching the surface.

Obviously, the presence is easier to spot—you can actually see something that is present, but you can’t directly see something that’s absent—so it makes sense that this is the first piece of evidence in building this critique, but the critical thing that makes this an issue is the absence of engagement with challenging works, not actually the engagement with unchallenging ones.

Me before I came out, when I did pageants and modeling.

This was me the day of my junior prom. The dress weighed around 20 lbs, was the first one I tried on, and my makeup was done by someone who still thought brown lip liner looked good on white people. I spent the entire day being photographed and generally hating how I looked and wishing I could figure out why, when everything was technically perfect.

Came out in 2016, here's nine years of transformation (in reverse order, sorry)

Turns out I'm neither a Normal Guy nor a woman, but a much weirder type of faggy masc thing.

me in my late 20s after i cut all of my hair off realized i was transmasc and stopped having suicidal thoughts completely, have not had a psychiatric episode for the 5 years straight, and was finally able to go back to school:

went from purple prom queen to whatever the heck this is

to gay pirate

and then, finally pupating into Vsauce Michael

I actually had a great time at that event even though I was. pretty uncomfortable and mostly thinking about How To Look Like A Person. And tbh the facade was already breaking, you can't really see it in the photo, but I braided my hair in a half up style based on Legolas.

vs. now: