Peter Hosey @boredzo@mastodon.social

I do hope that Mysterio’s handiwork in the upcoming Spider-Man movie is appropriately mindfucky. Not just “Spider-Man wanders around in a green mist for two minutes” but, like, give us some dancing hippos and shit.

The new Carpenters orchestral album is good. (And $7 on iTunes!)

Spreadshirt apparently sells poster prints now. Inconveniently, they don't do 20×20", so it wouldn't fit my existing frame (unless I padded it and cut it down myself).

So maybe I'll do this one through Printworks, and figure out some other photo that I can do at one of Spreadshirt's formats, at least for a trial run.

I did the reshoot a day later, and finally resumed the editing work today. I finished unifying the adjustments across exposures, retouching stitching errors, and setting up slices.

For square format, I can export an 18000×18000 crop. At 20×20", this is 900 dpi.

I can also scale that down to 2524 for iPad or 1392 for iPhone (5/SE) and it works as a perspective wallpaper.

I'm extremely proud of this one. My best one yet.

At some point I should figure out where/how to make these available.

TFW there's a column of photos you didn't capture

Also, with regard to that example, I would probably take the one without the Curves adjustment if it wasn't part of a larger superphoto.

That's why I'm doing the compression step: Some areas (like trees) are super dark and need to be pulled up, whereas others (like white buildings facing the sun) are super bright and need to be pulled down.

And the adjustments need to be uniform across every exposure in the “panorama”.

You can still have clipping, though! It depends on how much dynamic range is in the original shot.

This photo, after exposure adjustment, has both really deep shadows *and* really bright highlights. Curves can reduce them but some values are still out of range.

You can see in the Levels histogram that there's still some clipping (peaks at x=0 and x=1). It's unavoidable in this shot.

It's just a matter of how much contrast you want to keep, and how close to the uncanny valley you dare get.

The Curves tool is pretty straightforward: For every input value x, substitute output value y.

Each point on the curve changes values at that exact x by y = x + Δ. A point above the diagonal has positive Δ; below the diagonal is negative.

You can do this with the white and black points, too. If you move the black point up and the white point down, you compress dynamic range.

RAW photography means you can have values outside the 0–1 range. Compression can pull them out of clip and into range.

Speaking of which, white balance is another thing I should lock in place for the duration of such a shoot. Might be the sort of situation in which I actually want a custom white balance.

Had a sudden realization a few minutes ago:

In the “Watchmen” comic, a character gets a phone call and mishears Rorschach's name as “raw shark”. This led me to gripe about the movie using the pronunciation “roar shack”.

What just dawned on me is: It's entirely possible that different characters in the movie use different pronunciations, just as in real life. For that matter, the caller might have switched pronunciations to conceal their identity.

Only took me ten years to realize this.

I also should run screaming from the… dubious hub I'm using (already had one problem where a drive started rapidly mounting and unmounting, like it couldn't get enough power) to either my other hub, or a new hub with a honkin' power brick.

The latter option means making a run to Fry's (or Central Computer, but their selection is not vast). I don't think I've been to Fry's in Palo Alto yet, so that might be a treat.

I may have to do that, actually: Split the videos drive to free up enough space for the massive quantities of television I'm downloading from iTunes.

Or, alternatively, appoint the new drive as exclusively an iTunes TV shows (or maybe all iTunes video purchases) drive.

Will have to think about it. A season is about 28 GB in HD (estimated from “Burn Notice”: ~200 GB ÷ 7) so I can download about 23 more full seasons before the music drive fills up again.

Update: Now the music drive has 1.36 TB free, and the videos drive is down to 651.04 GB.

Wonder if I'm gonna end up at Costco to buy more 5 TB hand drives. (I do have one spare already, but if I put that into service then I should have a new spare to replace it.)

This is the simultaneous upside and downside of digital products: The space taken up by physical products (including discs and their cases) is a firm limit on how much stuff you can have at once. At some point, you must get rid of stuff or get more space. Inversely, a decrease in space can necessitate getting rid of stuff.

Digital products' space footprint approaches zero (some more than others), so you can buy a lot of stuff before you run out of capacity. Moreso in the cloud-library world.

Have since caught up on Gumroad purchases and iTunes movies.

I started downloading iTunes TV shows, but the music drive ran out of space.

Currently moving all of my iTunes movies to the videos drive. They total 1.36 TB, so the videos drive will end up with less than a TB left.

(Each of these drives is 5 TB.)

Oh, I need to move some game soundtracks to the music drive as well. Mustn't forget that step.

Definitely make Stella Star the protagonist. And also a character with a backstory and reasons for her choices.

Akton… maybe keepable, but mainly as navigator. Relying too much on his ass-pull powers would be boring.

Elle (the robot): Maybe, although I don't think the comic-relief personality works here.

Thor (the cop): Well, this gets into when the comic is set. Before the movie means Thor and Elle are still pursuing Star and Akton across the galaxy together. Which is probably best.

Just watched the “Starcrash” episode of MST3K.

It's a good episode because this movie is securely in their wheelhouse, but at the same time, I feel like you could salvage some parts of the movie and make a pretty good pulp sci-fi comic book series.

Less than two minutes in and this is already extremely my shit.

I still haven't watched the “emotion picture” that goes with it: https://vimeo.com/268498567

I should do that some evening.

Finally listened to “Dirty Computer”. That was good.

(Motivation: It’s currently $7 on iTunes.)