How many? nicklutsko.com
Photographer, photojournalist, amateur (wannabe) media historian. I take photos of old places and dig up old photos and media. Formerly @cityeyes. My website: cityeyesphoto.com
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How many? nicklutsko.com
This is beginning momentarily!
GOING LIVE ON TWITCH www.twitch.tv/nicklutsko
I'm going to make a little sign to put next to my monitor that reads "Do it for Dan". You're now my motivation. Sorry if that's a lot of pressure.
It's very much worth a drive if you're out there again, but yeah, good to be prepared for the cold. We've only been twice, but never so early. There were like 10ft high snow drifts still when we went, and my foot sunk a few feet into some deep snow when we walked to an overlook.
In these increasingly messed-up times, I'm very fortunate to be able to hang out with my best friend on a daily basis. I might've gone crazy by now otherwise. Here's Elise, my wife, on top of Pike's Peak during our trip in May of this year.
I've very much been repeating this the entire time. Conservatives I know will intensely help and care for people in their tiny bubble, often no-strings attached, but there is a *huge* disconnect in empathy once you're outside of that bubble and they would be okay with it if you literally died.
I've been slacking on posting my photos again. Not sure why, just tough to get motivated to share with everything going on. This particular shot was on our way away from the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado as storms rolled in during a trip in May.
I have had a lot of fun making ENDS focused versions of commercials that constantly live in my brain. Reminds me of better times. Hopefully they remind you to back this kickstarter at nicklutsko.com (And yes, I am going to post every one as they hit his YouTube Shorts so, uh, sorry maybe.)
Shrick is at least ten times better than his father, if not more.
“The information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts pales in comparison to the Epstein investigation information and materials in the hand of the Department of Justice,” the judge wrote Sounds like a legit reason not to release, and the Trump admin likely knew this would happen.
Your favorite green dude, Shrick, is live promoting Nick Lutsko's vinyl campaign right now. Very much worth a watch. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ohp...
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu: “Silence in the face of oppression is not an option. The U.S. Attorney General asked for a response by today. So here it is…Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration's failures.”
We are outraged and deeply distressed that armed federal agents came onto our campus—making arrests on the very ground where, in 1942, Japanese American families were forced to board buses bound for concentration camps. It was a deliberate act of provocation and intimidation.
Considering Putin was still buttering him up during the conference, I'm pretty confident he got *some* sort of concession from Trump out of this. Trump loves sucking up to dictators.
I don't know why, but they look like two marionettes being operated by children in this clip.
Honored to be credited for the absolutely miniscule part I had in this masterpiece, just providing a photo of Desmond. Carl and Dan made the vast majority of the magic in the VA (Dan) and animation/everything (Carl). It's incredible!
I've taken photos of surfers on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, although it pretty much only happens when the wind is coming fiercely from the North. Interesting, though, the juxtaposition between the lake and the surrounding mills.
Musician @nicklutsko.bsky.social is doing a marathon livestream right now to promote his album - live music from ALL of his albums including Songs on the Computer, Q+A, lots of fun. Worth checking out, and if you haven't backed him, do it. Ends is a incredible! www.youtube.com/watch?v=DThy...
There is no universe in which Hank Hill would put up with Trump's nonsense. He'd hate him for a passion over his own perception that he "wrecked Reagan's party". Of note, he met and really liked Jimmy Carter.
this is a disgrace and a national shame
Of many things to grieve, this is also worth grieving (with rage at what is being taken from us for no reason other than unchecked greed).
Genuinely the dumbest fucking shit is that the low-flow toilet issues are *gone*. The newest line of them can flush a fucking pound of bean paste or whatever you toss down it on the first flush with no issues at all. I've got fewer problems with my modern toilets than the old ones they replace.
Shit, they'd have t-shirts with photos of it printed on the front being sold officially for campaign funds.
If I weren't so wildly against the expansion of coal, I'd love to see a new one adjacent to a Trump property. See how awful it is being downwind of that, breathing the best air instead of a few arguably very pretty windmills, idiot.
This is Bimbo, a clown we met at a Penny Arcade, and it's now our life mission to get one for our home.
Guarantee you a huge subset of the people dim enough to fall for the pro raw milk and antivax stuff are also going to lose their minds when the gel in their pop tarts starts looking brownish.
Assplay is the *bare minimum* that deserves to be on the jumbotron at a Mountain Goats show, as far as I'm concerned.
I mispronounced that word pretty much the same way for a large chunk of my early life. Has to be a common one.
The curse of people who read a lot as kids mispronouncing stuff like albeit, or debris, or, uh, epitome.
We will get a slightly delayed SMS after a full shutdown, but the fluctuations are often so short that they often only impact my PS5. My main PC UPS will click over to even it out, and another PC that is not connected to the UPS can get through it. Not sure what makes the PS5 so sensitive.
Downside of living in a very woodsy neighborhood with above-ground power. Fluctuations are probably a bi-monthly affair, and short outages are pretty common as well. I could technically get a UPS like I have for my computer, but it'd be a waste on just my PS5.
Yeah, I get the need to make people aware that you can't just be cutting power to a device, but the fact that my PS5 has to rebuild databases for a solid three minutes every single time the power fluctuates in my house tells me that system should be reworked if possible.
I have had to explain to my dad a dozen times the basic fact that having a car directly driven by electricity is more efficient than using that electricity to split hydrogen from water. Some people will squish facts into whatever little box they need to be squished to fit their worldview.
I agree. A very clear-cut case of good boy self defense.
Big fan of the "goo" variants, if only because I'm not exactly sure what they are and because weregoo is a really funny name.
To be fair, back in that day, you also had to pay for like five subscriptions on top of your basic cable subscription to see *everything*. I think it was like $30 a month for basic cable plus $5 or $10 per month for each premium network. Disney, HBO, etc. Current splintered system sucks, though.
Maybe Artillery Duel? I don't think I played that one, but it preceded Scorched Earth by a few years even!
I had a kid I didn't know that well threaten me with a (plastic) baseball bat because I beat him so badly. I was a huge fan of the ninja rope, so I'd very regularly kill my friends' worms in annoying ways.
Not sure what drew me to these trajectory/power games, but I feel like I've played them my entire life. Gorillas, Scorched Earth, Worms, and a dozen more that slip my mind. Huge fan of the genre.
You can find a sound clip of Trump taking pretty much any position, and people like Rogan pick and choose which ones they want to believe. He's the perfect candidate for low-info idiots.
They want something to lord over immigrants to force them into worse situations than they're already in. You're more likely to overlook a boss treating you like you're less-than-human when they have a hotline to ICE to initiate your deportation at any moment.
Kinda wild they're like "Well as long as you're not a specific demographic or on the fringe of society, you'll be *fine*!" I don't give a fuck if I'll be marginally better off if millions suffer as a result. And this is just "for now". Not even addressing what they'll cut to address the deficit.
Maybe we should assign one person who died as a result of losing their health care to every Trump-supporting high-bracket taxpayer in this country. Like a reverse "sponsor-a-kid". Tell them about their life, those they left behind, how they could have been helped.
I think a lot of people overdid them for SEO and the "look" of a list of them has been kind of mentally associated with the promotion of low-quality content. Makes it tough to get eyes on smaller accounts, though. I bounce between using them and not.
Yeah, I agree, it's silly. If it counts for anything, I'll do mosquito dunks during breeding season. I don't mind preventing their eggs from hatching, I just feel weird about the act of smashing an alive thing that's so weak and has no real way to fight back.
I was thinking the same thing. There is also an Android alternative called Fire App that I'm reluctant to use even with a VPN because I don't want to just *trust* that they're taking the security measures they say they are. I wonder if someone will eventually make an open source alternative.
I don't understand why people continue caving to this man. He has shown that the second that you capitulate, he will continue taking until there's nothing left. There is no negotiating.
Yeah, I was mostly referring to American places because so many places here top out at "barely a tingle". I can usually hold my own and I'd certainly *give it a shot*, but I'm not gonna make my meal unenjoyable over it.
They should clear out an area right outside it for carnival rides so all the soulless fucks can view the poor families trapped inside the cages as they reach the peak of the big Ferris wheel. What the fuck is wrong with people? This is sick.
Cool artpiece in a once-town, then ghost town, then artist colony, now in limbo - Cisco, Utah. There's a general store nearby that *is* active - the owner was nice, and had a lot of cool stuff for purchase, including uranium glassware. #ghosttowns #photography #travelphotography
I wasn't trying to show anyone up! I genuinely enjoy the spice, honest! Anyway, I was talking about how I order in the US. "Hot" here is a sliding scale depending on some weird equation I haven't figured out yet.
I was talking about how I order in *America* - I don't have the hubris to try that in places that actually eat spicy. "Make me hurt" can land anywhere between "jalapeno" to "actual pain", but it generally skews hotter than "mild as milk", which you will get in some towns even if you request spicy.
I swear to God he's redder every time I see this image.
I don't want to minimize your stance, because I respect it considering so many people take the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" stance in the copyright war, but this is the craziest single like I've ever seen on a post on Bluesky.
It's not a lifestyle or anything, but I still try not to kill mosquitoes if I can help it. I realize it's stupid, but the idea of intentionally ending something's life, however simple, freaks me out. Extra stupid because I eat meat, but I never said I was entirely logical.
That's the worst thing you can do to a spicy boy. Just let us die trying to pretend it isn't burning our insides up like a hot coal and then again on the toilet the next day. It's the humane thing to do.
I will never, ever understand people who do that shit. I can have a few disagreements with people I usually agree with and not turn into a fuck. Many things are non-negotiable. I'm not going to stop advocating for the right for people to exist because someone yells at me.
There's a really tiny Korok somewhere with a missing mask.
Some people work their way up! When I first met my wife, pepper was almost too spicy for her, but after years of being together she's a proud hot sauce user. Not quite as crazy as I am, but she can do some spicy!
Endorphins! I like spicy as long as I'm not regretting it the next day. Also, "make me hurt" coming from a white guy falls somewhere on a sliding scale between medium and actually hot depending on how far I am from the nearest metropolitan area.
I'm a universal "make me hurt" and I'll adjust it down from there next time I go if it destroys me the next morning.
Elise meets a shop cat in Colorado. I kind of regret not visiting the next day to give it a few pets. #cat #shopcat #photography
The tools are an equalizer. There isn't some magic model that they have access to that I don't. They're likely using the same tools that we all have access to.
Regardless of what you believe, just read what I said as "five seconds of maxed out computer work", that could be gaming, video transcoding, whatever you want. The photo exporting bit is entirely immaterial.
I don't use them for my personal work (ever - I don't even use Photoshop), and I only use them incredibly rarely - mostly experimentation. A tuned Flux Schnell can generate something that's often better than anything you can get out of a cloud model. It's a large model, but it generates quickly.
Tell yourself whatever you'd like, but I've transcribed a number of Japanese shows for personal use that'll never be officially translated using Whisper, so I'm aware of how much power it uses. The translation isn't great, but it's usable for my purposes.
Exporting a batch of 50mb RAW photo to JPEG or DNG from Lightroom absolutely maxes out my computer in the same way that generating an image does. I've been taking photos for literally two decades, professionally, I should know.
They absolutely can, though. Transcription can run locally, easily with whisper. It's not great, no replacement for a human, but it's "good enough" for temporary use. Local Whisper can burn through like an hour of video in like five minutes, then a human can check it over for accuracy.
I can run a model locally that can generate an image in a few seconds that maxes out at like 500w. That's 500w for 5 seconds. The same computer maxes out gaming, so technically one image generation is "five seconds of gaming" or "five seconds of photo exporting" of power.
Man I'm so envious! We hiked to the top with all of our gear and a thunderstorm rolled in. I know the basic rule is "Get the hell off of the dune in a storm", so we did, but at least we made it to the peak. It was so windy on the way up - we got blasted with sand. Next time we'll make it!
Are there really non-billionaire people out there who look at the right and get angry about it? I genuinely cannot fathom it.
Appreciate the update, Alan.
This is all so messed up. Like, it's become pretty apparent that what happened in Germany could absolutely happen here, but I never thought people would be *proud* enough about it to wear shirts promoting it.
Think of it this way - everyone here who has used a phone camera in the past decade has used an AI trained on millions of images and continues to do so on a daily basis. It's the only reason phones have gotten so good at photography. Many uses for this tech aren't shitty or obvious.
Well, yeah, of course they say that now, but two things - the rage will inevitably die down, and we aren't really still at the "dude has six fingers" stage of AI. It'll be used somewhere in their workflow, I guarantee you, it just won't be obvious.
Stupidly getting into arguments with people on the internet and getting bummed about it, so here's a photo cleanse from my recent trip out West. This one is of my wife/favorite person as we hiked to the peak of the Great Sand Dunes. We planned to camp, but a thunderstorm chased us down.
You've been misinformed. I'm sorry. Most models use the equivalent to like a few seconds of gaming on a standard PC per gen. The are some extremely lightweight models that do much less. Where the damage comes from is in *how many* prompts are being generated, and I agree, that is wasteful.
Yeah, sorry I'm human and have a visceral response to another person whom I agree with on nearly every other subject being awful to me and making judgements about me as a person. I'm a real piece of shit. I know "stop being so weak" is an option, but I can't turn off the way I personally feel.
Well, yeah, absolutely. That's why I said they get an expert to *finish it off* if it's critical. I've used them myself to localize stuff personally that will never be localized and I know how bad they can be, but I'll take "not great" over nothing.
Not gonna say they deserve 100% absolution, but this fierce, one-sided, black-and-white mentality where people who I *overwhelmingly agree with* will call me a useless piece of shit for being like "Maybe we shouldn't attack indie artists for using AI as a tool and strengthen copyright" is untenable.
I don't disagree, but it's also very easy to make a mistake like this. Hundreds of people work on games, and AI tools are everywhere - many people use them daily without even knowing. Hell, anyone who has ever taken a photo on a phone in the last like ten years has.
Yes, I love nothing more than to expose myself to toxic, awful, people like yourself, who will make judgments about people on the internet and bully people who overwhelmingly agree with them because their opinion isn't pure enough. It's what I do for fun.
Using AI *in the capacity we are now* is destructive to life. It shouldn't be in every damn thing. It's stupid. Using AI to help localize a game or generate a useless asset would literally use less power than doing so traditionally. It literally amounts to a few minutes of gaming.
I know this sounds like conspiracy, but often it feels like the messaging around the Anti-AI movement is formulated to push the outcome that will be best for the rich. Like it's wild to me that these people are pleading for a world where only Google, Disney, Apple, and Adobe have access to AI.
Right? People who would otherwise consider themselves socialist now have some of the most capitalist takes on copyright.
Like where have we even gotten in this whole anti-AI crusade where people will punish an artist for using it in their own work on a game, or where they'd rather a game just *not be localized* or made accessible instead of a translator or alt-texter using an ML-assist before going over it themselves?
Crazy the number of people here who will look at an indie game developer paying a ton of artists and *wish for their destruction* over the use of an AI tool. Way out of hand, and playing into the hands of the billionaire companies who will keep using AI and not give a fuck about what they think.
The web is worldwide, though, and there are plenty sites out there that the state of Indiana, for example, don't have any legal pull in. These blocks will be used to justify state-side firewalls when they realize how ineffective they are, and will be used to block other content. I'd bet it.
If you are not alarmed at the type of thing these people now feel 100% comfortable saying out loud that they would have been scared to type into a group chat 10 years ago for fear that anyone might ever see it, I don't know what to tell you.
Been playing this in VR for quite some time and it's very enjoyable. I'm happy they keep updating/adding supported titles. It works surprisingly well, being able to move your viewpoint *through* the playfield, or looking at it from different angles entirely.
As someone who grew up in an evangelical church (escaped in my teens), it's wild how many things this administration is doing that line up with the antichrist bullshit the church hammered into our skulls. Apparently it's an unspoken rule that the antichrist has to be a democrat or something.
Thank you
I think the fact that the weather shifted to stiflingly hot so quickly impacts a lot of people as well. A kid and an older gentleman both passed out from the heat at a job I shot yesterday. That heat index is no joke. Stay cool, stay hydrated!
Good luck!
I agree. I don't want to minimize the impact that "AI" may have on creativity, but some people act like it's the death knell for human-created art. I've got a more positive outlook. People who like creating will continue to create, and people who value creation will continue enjoying our work.
People who are more offended by the idea of Juneteenth being deserving enough to be a holiday than they are the idea of working any particular day. Specifically, the virulently racist.
Thanks so much, I'm sure I'll figure it out. Appreciate it!
As a photojournalist who covers protests occasionally - what's my best bet to protect myself from this happening? I've got some safety glasses - I'm not sure if that's enough. Ballistic goggles? This is an absolute nightmare. I hope they make a full recovery.
