A better place

The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.

You know what? Maybe keep that kind of comment for the porn communities.

Well, it fully depends on the effect you’re after. In this case there was no background to blur and I wanted her body fully in focus. The flashes are by far powerful enough to work with f/4.5 which makes focusing a lot easier. For other shots I did use the f/1.4.

• Camera: Canon EOS 6D Mark II
• Lens: Canon EF 50mm f/1.4
• ISO: 100
• Shutter speed: 1/80s
• Aperture: f/4.5

Lighting is mainly a soft box on either side, both slightly above head height and set back a bit to create the shadow in the middle of the face. The rest is quite a bit of fiddling around with the RAW. For comparison, here’s what it looked like straight out of the camera:

Same project at least. This one is from day 2. I think you helped on day 5 or 6.

When I updated my lemmy instance, I forgot to update pictrs as well which broke the uploads.

I shut down my pc for the day but I‘ll try to remember to post it tomorrow.

Ah damn… it worked when I posted. Imgur must have broken it again. And for some reason I can’t upload directly to lemmy, I get a weird error.

Okay, I‘m honestly confused why this is collecting downvotes without comments? Do people see the NSFW tag and downvote without looking at the photos, thinking I‘m abusing this community to post porn? I marked it as such because the photos technically contain nudity though I wouldn’t consider them erotic art.

Or are my photos really that bad?

You have been banned from [email protected]

I just made it 62.

The bakery down the road from where I grew up used to hold the Guinness world record for the largest version of a local specialty.

I’d finally finish some of my personal projects.

Over the last few years, I’ve had so many ideas for stuff, both video games and just basic useful software. This is where the curse of being a professional software engineer kicks in. I know that I’m experienced enough to actually make those things but after a full day of work, preparing dinner and getting the apartment in order, there is just not enough time and energy left to get my ass in front of an IDE again. I’d love to have the opportunity, even if just for a year or so to pause my day job and spend my energy on something that is actually mine and has emotional value for me.

On top of that, I have a couple of hobbies that would benefit from having more time. Photography, HEMA (fencing with proper swords), board games, 3d printing and painting miniatures… one thing is for sure, I wouldn’t get bored any time soon.

My first OS was most likely DR DOS 3.41

For my daily driver desktop PCs that was followed by

• MS-DOS 5.0
• Windows 3.11
• Windows 98 SE
• Windows XP
• Windows 7
• Windows 10

On the linux side, I got started with Gentoo, experimented with several lightweight distributions for an old laptop and had a Mint VM for a few years. These days I run Ubuntu on a couple of servers and in WSL. Never got around to using it as my main desktop OS.

For university I had (in order) an iBook G3, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, so you can add most of macOS 10.x to that list.

Learned that the hard way. Within less than a week went from happily living in the house that I had grown up in, that I was renting from my father and that I was planning to eventually buy or inherit to having to look for an apartment because he sold it. The worst thing? That he never gave me a reason or even acknowledged how much he had hurt me. Quite the opposite, he later asked me to help the new owners set up their tv as if it was nothing.

I got hit really hard by 2048. I didn’t even play it that much but my brain started looking for groups of identical things and imagined how they slide into each other to create something new. Plates on the kitchen table, seats on the train to work, identical cars…

I came into this discussion from the technical perspective (of which I’ve done plenty of research, both in university and in my job) that commercial VPNs don’t do what most ads want you to think they do. Your ISP sees a lot less than they want you to think, VPNs use just the same encryption algorithms as everyone else and while public WiFi isn’t great security-wise it’s not as if anyone will read your bank password the second you connect. I still stand by those claims.

Then, the discussion drifted towards who you’d rather trust with the things that aren’t encrypted (mostly DNS and connection metadata. Someone has claimed that many messengers are unencrypted but I think they have confused a lack of user-to-user encryption with user-to-server encryption), your ISP or some VPN provider. That’s the point where we diverged: as I had no need for a VPN myself (because of the reasons mentioned above), I had not researched individual VPN providers and was not aware that Mullvad apparently has a strong track record. For that I apologize. Still, in a thread that started out with someone not knowing if they need a VPN at all and most discussion has been very general, I would not assume that anyone who comments is familiar with a specific provider without them being named explicitly. Also, I’ve stated in at least three places that I was explicitly talking about VPN providers like NordVPN and Surfshark that are prominently (mis-)advertised. Those I still would not trust further than I can throw them.

But I guess that’s online discussions. We’ve talked about two different things and took a while to notice. I’m thankful for the correction and I hope you can understand where I came from.

I checked and there is only a single comment that mentions Mullvad (other than yours that I’m replying to right now) that’s visible on my instance with no specific explanation why it’s better than other offers other than that you can pay with cash. If I’ve missed something, I promise you that it’s not in bad faith, it’s just that this distinction didn’t come through clearly.

I hadn’t heard about Mullvad before today and a quick look at their website made it look not very different from the fear-mongering you see with the others. Only after your comment I noticed the Why Mullvad VPN link at the very bottom that explains what they do differently. I’m still skeptical about some of the claims and especially of audits that they themselves requested but I’m happy to see that there are providers that seem to be more trustworthy than the ones that are constantly shoved down our throats and I’m definitely happy to have learned something new.

May I suggest that you write a top level comment that explains in detail why Mullvad is better than other services so OP (and others who stumble over this thread) has an easier time finding it?

Edit: minor typos and grammar

Oh I most certainly don’t have much faith in my local ISP. But I have even less faith in some VPN startup funded by venture capitalists who may or may not be cutting corners on security to save a few bucks on their ends even if they’re not actively malicious. At least my local ISP has been around for decades and is closely monitored by both a government agency and independent customer protection groups.

And yes, I do live in a place with a very strong regulatory framework. Our ISPs are bound by the EU GDPR and our highest federal court has confirmed multiple times that even saving connection metadata without a case-specific court order is illegal. Sure, they could break those laws but a commercial VPN provider can do just the same with the difference that not as many people would notice.