GnomeToys

The people in Europe would apparently win if comprehensible English was involved in any way.

Almost forgot the giant fungus:

This picture sums up a day of walking a few weeks ago:

I was horridly sick for almost a month thanks to getting swine flu, strep, and some random bronchitis at the same time as a broken rib... so tons of reading. Lost Boys, Ender's Game and all the sequels by Orson Scott Card Several of the discworld novels by Terry Pratchett, until the point where he starts really heavily reusing jokes. Various novels and short stories by Robert Heinlein The Deus Machine The trilogy of the first icewind dale novels, found at a used book store, which I would describe as a bad ripoff of Lord of the Rings without the good writing, plot, characters, or point.

[20:47] bags: nah that niggas not gay he just liked dick [20:48] guest-29041 changed nickname to husk [20:48] testicat: oh that's cool then [20:48] bags: common misconception [20:48] husk: cool kewl kawuuul [20:48] bags: definitly not a reason to curl up in front of the fire place with him [20:48] bags: im sure hed like that [20:48] husk: ok im leaving

Last old set:

Group #2: Mid-Upper August Vomit art: Picture 18000: Got an Epson 1400, this looks great at 13x19...

Randoms

Used the eraser tool on the softest setting in photoshop to blend the edges of overlapping layers in the right places, shot them all with a manual lens and the same exposure on each so the color would be the same. Had to scale and rotate a few but I basically walked along the tracks at the same distance and shot with a lens which has very low distortion. Other than that about 30 minutes of photoshop work. I think the original is a 30,000x3200 file. Now I wish I had a large format printer that took roll paper so I could make a 12.5' x 1.25' print of it.

And now for the other ones from today:

Watch as I fuck up the formatting of the page with this pano of bizarre train equipment... sorry about the bad stitch, photoshop couldn't seem to figure out how to put these images together for some reason so I had to do it the old fashioned way.

Big cluster of images from the past week and weekend:

I find the rich kid thing funny... I've never made more than 10,000 a year and my parents never gave me shit until this past few months when it got so desperate trying to find a job that it was either homelessness or moving back in with my dad for a while. I bought my first Digi for $200 with money from work. The next one was a Sony F707 that I bought for $400 under retail through a price match scam that people were running on sears through a dodgy NY website. Then my first DSLR was a $1500 Sigma SD9 that I got for free thanks to a bug I found in Paypal back in the day: If you had a zero balance on the linked credit card, and a zero balance bank account linked, Paypal would not check the balance of either before allowing you to make up to $2000 in purchases. It would credit the seller, so they got all their money fine, then start bouncing back and forth trying to charge the bank then the credit card. By the time it stopped going through I already had the camera, and since Paypal was not a lending institution at the time and there was no agreement to pay money which they had essentially given to me, I never even received a bill from them. It was nice, one of my friends tried it recently and it doesn't work anymore. Finally my current camera, bought with Pell Grant money (then I ate ramen for 2 months) and the whole host of <$30 lenses from the 60s and 70s. Yeah, we ballin up in heeeya.

Some from the past week or so...

Aluminum does bad things for your lungs, but then again if you're smoking meth it probably doesn't matter. Also, this:

Re: ANIMATED GIF HALL OF FAME SUPERTHREAD

destruction league, calling for destruction league in TinyChat isle 5, destruction league

There are some employers like that, but you give them too much credit in general. At the same time, I think that the higher your education level, the more you can get away with in terms of appearance. Someone with millions of piercings and a PhD in Neurobiology will be given slack and labeled eccentric, where a high school graduate trying to get a decent paying white collar job of some sort will be given shit endlessly. There are too many high school graduates aiming for the positions available to them and not quite as many PhDs to go around.

Which is fine until the trend dies down and the "industry" loses all the customers who were just doing it to piss off society / their parents / god / whatever and find something new to piss them off with. To me it seems vaguely equivalent to going back to 1983 and forcing yourself into the singular profession of making tight, ripped up, acid washed jean jackets. I'm sure there was plenty of money in that back then too.

At least he's taking good care of himself.