#source: alamy

[omg-hellgirl]

23 December 1966, at Trattoria Terrazza Italian restaurant in Soho, Mick Jagger declared his romance with Chrissie Shrimpton was over. He is quoted to have said, "I don't dig the marriage bit at the moment."

[vo11pe]

[zeroaddzero]

Born in the USA tour, 1984.

[fatestitcherr]

blair witchproject and carmington tré

[bombateazer]

I think we all need to take a moment to appreciate the fact that Samantha Barks looked like this at NINE MONTHS PREGNANT

[identifying-f1-in-posts]

[1] 11th May 2013 Spanish Grand Prix Post-qualifying Top 3 Photo

[2] 2nd March 2024 Bahrain Grand Prix

[3] 21st May 2022 Spanish Grand Prix Pre-qualifying

[4] 7th April 2022 Austrian Grand Prix Saturday

[5] 23rd October 2010 Korean Grand Prix Post-qualifying Top 3 Photo

[6] 26th August 2021 Belgian Grand Prix Thursday Track Walk

[7] 7th November 1993 Australian Grand Prix Podium

[8] 21st December 2021 “The 2021 Drivers’ Studio Outtakes!” FORMULA 1 on Youtube

[9] 9th July 2022 Austrian Grand Prix Post-practice

[10] 21st February Preseason Testing Barcelona

[11] 2020/2021 Renault Contract Announcement*

*My best guess

f1 + txt posts = true 9.0

[feraltwinkseb]

March 21, 2024 - Melbourne, Australia Source: James Moy / Alamy Stock Photo

[ablogtocheck]

I am probably the only one, haha, but I miss these two. I had missed the first few photos...so took that as an excuse to post this selection.

Sources: Getty, Imago, Alamy and Pinterest (I think)

[vo11pe]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A year in illustration (2024), Part one

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/art-adjacent

As I go into my fifth year of writing Pluralistic (!), I find myself increasingly reflecting on the unexpected pleasures of creating the collages that head each post. I am by no means a visual artist – my drawing skills are sub-stick-figure, and my spatial sense overall is remarkable terrible. I can't solve jigsaws, I get lost in hotel corridors, and I can't find things that are right under my nose.

But addressing the challenge of illustrating extremely abstract ideas related to tech policy, corruption, monopoly and other hard-to-visualize ideas has awakened some kind of latent, heretofore unsuspected interest in visual communications in me. Relying exclusively on Creative Commons, public domain, and extremely solid fair use claims in selecting my source materials adds a spicy challenge that makes the whole thing even more engrossing.

I've written about my process in finding and preparing these sources before. Here's 2023's notes and highlights:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/#ki-bosch

And here's 2022:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/

This year saw some new, exciting discovering and challenges. First and foremost is my switch to kagi.com as my preferred search-engine, which is like having access to a time machine that's connected to pre-enshittificated Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Kagi's image search is amazing, far better than Google's, and it has great copyright-based filters. When combined with tineye.com (for finding high-rez versions of images that might not be correctly tagged for rights status), it's even better. Even so, often Kagi will surface thumbnails of images Tineye can only find as high-rez on proprietary stock art sites like Alamy, covered in gross watermarks. These images are still in the public domain, watermarks or no, but erasing the watermarks is a lot of work. However, Alamy is a pretty good source of bibliographic information about the original sources of these images, for example, which issue of a 19th century boxing magazine they came out of, and then Kagi can find me high-rez scans of these sources, at the Internet Archive and/or the Library of Congress. I snag those PDFs and import them into the GIMP (which I use for editing) and pull, clean and crop a new high-rez version of those images for my own use. This year, I got much better at saving and organizing all that work on my laptop, but next year I'm hoping to get into a rhythm of uploading my high-rezzes to Wikimedia Commons so everyone can use 'em.

Getting better at collaging isn't merely getting better at using search tools, of course. Knowing what to search for is even more important, especially given the constraints of only using public domain/CC sources. The Library of Congress is a wellspring of visual material, but its own search tool is sadly lacking; however, Kagi's image search comes to the rescue again, thanks to the "site:loc.gov" flag, which restricts results to the LoC.

It was through these searches that I realized how many of the source images I was pulling down were the work of Joseph Keppler (1872-1956), an American political cartoonist who worked extensively for Punch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Keppler

Keppler was called upon to illustrate many, many political issues that have parallels with the modern competition, corruption and geopolitical stories. A scant few of these remain in the periphery of the public's imagination today, most notably "The Bosses of the Senate," quite possibly the most significant antitrust cartoon of all time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bosses_of_the_Senate

But Keppler is a wellspring of great public domain images, and I've been drawing on them heavily. It gives me great pleasure to do so, not just because they're so well-suited to the stories I write, but also because his posterity deserves it. He should be in the American illustrator pantheon alongside the likes of Norman Rockwell!

Besides my search engine and my sources, 2024 saw one other gigantic change in my collage-making: I had cataracts removed from both my eyes in September, and my ophthalmologist implanted lenses that corrected my severe astigmatism and permanently focused one of my eyes at 23" and the other at 25' (this is called monovision). My new eyeballs are still bedding in, and there are days when my vision is severely subpar, but I'm experiencing continuous improvement, and I think this will be a game-changer for 2025.

2025 will also see the long-awaited Version 3.0 release of The GIMP, the free/open image editor I exclusively use. GIMP (Generic Image Manipulation Program) was first released a quarter-century ago, and it's been in version 2.x for twenty years, so this is a big milestone. I can't wait!

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/998793/6c8d00bd1b2a7948/

Well, enough forematter. Let's get into this year's best illustrations. If you want high-rezzes of these (or any of my other collages), you can get them at full rez from my Flickr gallery of Pluralistic collages:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

Someday, we'll all take comfort in the internet's "dark corners"

This one combines three sources: a public domain image of the Las Vegas sign, a CC 0 image of a western ghost-town, and a fair use gank of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. I spent a lot of time hand-cropping the blades of grass around the sign's footing to create the illusion that it was planted in the ground. I'm also pretty happy with the dirt effect I managed on the sign.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

Vice surrenders

I got these cover images from a gallery of old Dutch government workplace safety poster; they're delightfully gory in a way that rests comfortably in the cannon of Dutch bluntness. I did a lot of futzing with the Perspective tool to get the alignments right, atop the actual magazine covers (I believe they were Italian fashion magazines).

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

How America's oligarchs lull us with the be-your-own-boss fairy tale

Man, I wish this one had a higher-rez original. The 19th century painting of a kid being read a bedtime story by her kindly granny was perfect, except it was only 804 pixels wide! The grinning Uncle Sam is from Keppler (Keppler's Uncle Sams are many, varied, and great). The grinning kid is from a 19th century collection of photos of child laborers, and I love his expression (he's a newsie). I think I did a really good job blending the US $100 (works of federal authorship are all public domain) with the bed curtains. I was disappointed with how the gold brick that granny's foot rests upon game out. I even followed my friend Alistair Milne's tip of cropping the brick, desaturating it, and putting it atop the gold texture in overlay mode and tweaking the curves. It just wouldn't pop the way it did in my mind's eye.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#sell-job

How I got scammed

This one uses some public domains stock art of a hacker in a hoodie, an online make-a-custom-credit-card generator, and two of my favorite visual tropes. The first is the 'code waterfall' effect from the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies, which I use whenever I'm trying to illustrate something with a nexus with the digital world. I have a folder full of these, generated with this code waterfall generator:

https://github.com/Rezmason/matrix

The other element, of course, is the eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'; there's an SVG of this on Wikimedia Commons by a user called 'Cryteria,' licensed CC BY 3.0, which I use whenever I want to illustrate a harm caused by computers:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

I often write about scammers and hucksters, casting about for good visual representation. It wasn't until late January 2024 that I thought to look for an image of a carny barker and turned up this picture of WC Fields in full flight. He makes a lot of appearance after this point!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here

(Image: Future Atlas/http://www.futureatlas.com/blog, CC BY 2.0; J Doll, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story

I was really determined to get the right aircraft for this story about Boeing 737s, but that meant cropping out the plane from Vitaly Druchenok's photo and then painstakingly recreating the Spirit Airlines livery. In the original version of the image, the airplane was sticking out of the roof of the Supreme Court, but my wife (wisely) vetoed that as suggesting a terrorist attack on the court (I wanted to imply that the court had caused the airline to crash).

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/22/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever/#will-eventually-stop

(Image: Vitaly Druchenok, CC BY-SA 4.0; Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)

Tech workers and gig workers need each other

I cropped out these two women strikers from an early 20th century photo of a picket line and superimposed them on a photo of a massive union rally from the same era at (I think?) Madison Square Gardens. I am really chuffed with how nicely the (public domain) hacker/hoodie stock image and livery of a gig bike-delivery rider (fair use, ganked from a gig company's promo materials) blended with the strikers.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

This one is in the running to be my favorite illo of the year. I knew it was going to slay the minute I found the image of the U Illinois campus secret society (spears! fezzes!). There's a really good public domain SVG recreation of the "Think Different" wordmark on Wikimedia Commons that I used here, spending some time getting the overlays and textures right:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_logo_Think_Different_vectorized.svg

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

End of the line for corporate sovereignty

I use this ogrish rich-guy-in-a-top-hat image all the time to represent the thuggish application of wealth; he comes from a delightful Soviet editorial cartoon called "Capital Controls the Government":

https://craphound.com/images/ussr-capital.jpg

Putting him behind the podium in a UN plenary room with a UN crest in his hand worked really well, though in hindsight, the cropped version I used for the post's hero image is even better:

https://craphound.com/images/27Mar2024.jpg

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/27/korporate-kangaroo-kourts/#corporate-sovereignty

(Image: ChrisErbach, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis

Another "thing at the front of a big room" image; this one works better that the UN one, I think.

Both of the sources for this have weird CC characteristics. The hearing room image comes from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a federal agency, and I am 99% certain that makes it public domain; however, whoever managed the NRC's Flickr account in 2014 applied a CC BY license to it, so I did the whole attribution for it, even though I think it wasn't needed.

The crumbled cardboard box image comes from a British company that sells cardboard boxes; they upload product shots to Flickr under CC BY 2.0 and require that the attribution string include their store's URL (not necessarily the URL of the image), presumably to get SEO backlinks. This is fine, but the CC BY 2.0 licenses have a serious defect in that a failure to correctly attribute them can give rise to serious ($150K!) copyright liability, something that a group of "copyleft trolls" have brutally exploited:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

Which makes this kind of funky attribution a minefield. I try to touch all the bases by attributing to both the store's URL and the URL of the image. The real solution to this is for Flickr to finally update its CC licensing to push all its images up to CC 4.0 and push a notice to all users with CC images telling them they either have to consent to upgrading to the latest licenses, or have the licensing on their images reverted to "All Rights Reserved" (maybe with an asterisk explaining that they still have irrevocable but dangerous CC 2.0 licenses attached to them).

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

(Image: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, https://meanwell-packaging.co.uk, CC BY 2.0)

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I had so much fun with this one! Check out all those gracenotes! Munch's (public domain) "Scream" reflected in the mirrors, the windscreen, and the dashboard. The 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' parody reflected in the blade of the giant knife sticking out of the steering wheel!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Wellness surveillance makes workers unwell

I love how this one turned out. The labcoated figure is actually a dentist from a gallery of images from the National Museum of Health and Medicine. The little flying guy in the back kills me.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Amazon's financial shell game let it create an "impossible" monopoly

I love this one. First of all, Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjurer' is a great visual representation of a slickster pulling a fast one on gawping yokels. But once I added Doc Searls' great shot of Jeff Bezos in mid-crazy-laugh to it (from a 2010 Techonomy Summit) it became perfectly trenchant. This was part of a short series of images that I added extra fingers and pupils to after someone scolded me online because they (incorrectly) believed I'd generated a collage with an AI image generator. Thankfully, that kind of absurd witch-hunting seems to have waned in popularity. What a ridiculous waste of everyone's time!

(Image: Doc Searls, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Part two

Part three

Part four

[ineffable-xenanigans]

Sorry babes, but that’s not David Tennant’s hand

It’s Peter Capaldi’s!!!

Source: alamy.com/stock-photo-doctor-who-world-tour-107796336.html

FAQs

Why do you care?

That image is being passed around in the Good Omens fandom as David Tennant’s hand. I just wanted to find out the source (it’s my love language). I was actually surprised to find out that it was not David’s 😅

How did you figure it out then?

Here’s a summary of the steps I took:

1) Reverse image searched the closeup in question

2) The earliest source I could find was this pin from 2019: pinterest.com/pin/303500462387342910

3) The pin in question was filed under PCap.my12thDoctor > Just Peter: pinterest.com/mccolley2/pcapmy12thdoctor/just-peter

4) The pin in question seemed to be a screenshot that this particular user took of someone elses’s post on Facebook and then uploaded to Pinterest (based on other pins featuring the same smartphone UI)

5) I spent some time looking for the original post on Facebook, but alas, no luck

6) Ended up finding the image on a stock photo site after many, many dead ends!!

Why did people think that was David’s hand?

Ah, that’s the weird part. When you look at the pin that started it all on the Pinterest app, there’s no mention of David Tennant (well, only by people in the comments).

However, if you look at the pin on a web browser, guess what…

Also, when you paste the link on Tumblr and keep the card preview…

“David tennant, Peter capaldi, Pose reference” Ahem. Which is it, babe? Make up your mind. 🤣

In other words, the HTML metadata on this pin seems to be utter balderdash 🤪

[identifying-f1-in-posts]

[1.1] 13th November 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Qualifying Top 3 Photo

[1.2] 6th December 2015 Italian Grand Prix Standing to National Anthem

[1.3] 16th April 2017 Bahrain Grand Prix Qualifying Top 3 Photo

[2.1] 18th February 2009 Formula Kart Stars event

[2.2] 3rd July 2022 British Grand Prix Podium Champagne Celebration

[2.3] 9th April 2017 Chinese Grand Prix Post-race Parc Ferme

[3.1] 6th April 2014 Bahrain Grand Prix Podium Champagne Celebration

[3.2] 29th November 2014 Mercedes' annual Stars and Cars event in Stuttgart Germany

[3.3] 2023 Belgian Grand Prix*

[4.1] 29th November 2014 Mercedes' annual Stars and Cars event in Stuttgart Germany

[4.2] 11th October 2019 Japanese Grand Prix Post-Friday Practice Session

[4.3] 14th March 2019 Australian Grand Prix Thursday Press Conference

[5.1] 25th October 2020 Portuguese Grand Prix Pre-race

[5.2] 4th October 2009 Japanese Grand Prix Podium Champagne Celebration

[5.3] 1st January 2000*

[6.1] 12th March 2021 Bahrain Testing Day 1 Grid Photoshoot

[6.2] 9th September 2012 Italian Grand Prix Podium Champagne Celebration

[6.3] 1st November 2020 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix Podium Champagne Celebration

[7.1] 11th October 2015 Russian Grand Prix Post-race Behind the Scenes Selfie

[7.2] 19th June 2022 Canadian Grand Prix Post-race Parc Ferme

[7.3] 1st July 2022 British Grand Prix Friday Free Practice

*Dates I am uncertain about.

Lewis & others headers

like or reblog if save/use

give me the credits if you repost

[northgazaupdates]

i thought al-jazeera was a reliable news source, outside of tumblr blogs now is there any other reliable way to be updated?

Al-Jazeera is still relatively reliable for most news out of Gaza, despite the recent misattribution. Other decent outlets include Al-Mayadeen, Al-Alamy, Al-Araby, Al-Quds, Resistance News Network (although some people will object to this one), Middle East Eye, and Middle East Monitor (the latter two focus more on analysis than breaking news, but not always). No news outlet is perfect and all of them have their issues, but we have to make do with what we have.

Further suggestions from our followers that I may be forgetting or not aware of are welcome.

[il-predestinato]

random but do you have a better source for this image (2016 austria gp podium) https://imgresizer.eurosport.com/unsafe/1200x0/filters:format(jpeg)/origin-imgresizer.eurosport.com/2019/07/01/2629537-54413430-2560-1440.jpg I can't find one that's not watermarked but their poses are SO GOOD

It's not exactly the best quality, but I tried my best to edit out the watermarks:

Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen on the podium at the 2019 Austrian Grand Prix. 📸: Octane/Alamy

[yasirmukhtar]

Cobaan

Satu tahun ke belakang, saya lagi dapet banyak cobaan yang lebih nonjok dari yang pernah dialami sebelumnya.

Secara default, saya memikirkan betapa banyak kerugian materiel yang saya alami.

Teorinya saya ngerti. Dunia itu di tangan, jangan di hati. Tapi tetep aja saya ngerasa rugi ketika inget opportunity loss yang terjadi.

Saya punya banyak impian dan wishlist. Pengen bayarin istri ikut ini itu, pengen beli barang-barang tertentu yang udah lama ditahan-tahan, atau minimal pengen investasi ke suatu hal. Semua itu saya pertimbangkan dengan hati-hati supaya setiap materi yang dialokasikan tepat guna dan bermanfaat.

Tiba-tiba saya harus kehilangan kesempatan-kesempatan itu begitu aja, poofff, karena cobaan-cobaan ini.

Nyesek banget. Saya butuh waktu lama untuk memproses semua ini. Tapi ini jadi momen buat saya untuk restart dan refresh lagi hubungan saya dengan materi.

Saya memaknainya seperti Allah sedang "mengambil" perhatian saya supaya saya inget lagi tentang apa yang esensial dalam hidup.

Selain itu, saya juga jadi introspeksi, mungkin saya secara ga sadar udah menumpuk dosa yang sangat banyak.

Maka, meski ga mudah, saya berusaha ikhlas atas takdir yang saya jalani dengan meresapi empat gagasan ini:

I've been so lucky, so comfortable, in a very long time compared to many people. Saya cuma baru sekarang aja dapet cobaannya. Banyak orang lain yang dapet cobaan yang berat lebih dulu. It's just a matter of time. Semua orang akan dapet giliran untuk dapet cobaan karena dunia ini emang tempatnya kepahitan dan kesusahan.

Saya tidak kehilangan apa-apa karena pada dasarnya saya ngga punya apa-apa. Semua yang saya miliki hanya dilewatkan oleh Allah kepada saya, bukan untuk disimpan selamanya. Nanti ada tempatnya saya diberi hal-hal yang bisa saya simpan selamanya, tapi bukan di sini.

Saya ga jadi bahagia dengan menolak tadir saya. Yang ada saya malah tambah miserable. Sementara takdirnya tidak bisa saya hindari juga. Jadi yang lebih baik adalah terima dengan ikhlas lalu move on.

Ada beberapa hadits yang intisarinya menyebutkan bahwa jika Allah menghendaki kebaikan bagi seorang hamba, maka hamba itu Allah beri musibah sebagai hukuman yang disegerakan di dunia (supaya di akhirat dosa-dosanya lebih ringan atau sudah bersih). Maka saya ikhlas dengan ujian dunia yang tidak seberapa kalau dibandingkan dengan hukuman di akhirat. (Source)

Wallahu'alam.

[identifying-f1-in-posts]

[1] 26th November 2023 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

[2] 6th October 2023 Qatar Grand Prix Post-qualifying

[3] 20th October 2022 United States Grand Prix

[4] 6th May 2022 Miami Grand Prix Friday Practice

[5] 25th May 2024 Monaco Grand Prix Qualifying

[6] 4th April 2010 Malaysian Grand Prix Podium

[7] 2023 Singapore Grand Prix*

[8] 2003 at a Sponsored Week Holiday for Ferrari

[9] 1st December 2023 Contract Extension Announcement

[10] 23rd February 2024 Bahrain Testing

*My best guess

FORMULA SKIPPY

skippys list x f1

(part I) (part II)