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Thinking about various church experiences…

March 9, 2024, 8:30 AM

Recently, I found myself discussing the Vacation Bible School that my sister and I attended in the mid nineties while I was in middle school.  It came from a post on /r/exchristian on Reddit, asking, “What do you still have memorized?”  My first reaction was to cite the offertory song that this program had us sing while they passed the plate around.  In thinking about it, I was struck by how misplaced the priorities were when it came to what this offering was to be used for (more on that later).  But then it also led to my recalling various other church experiences that I had while growing up, and how much of a mixed bag these things were.  Some experiences were quite good, while some them were not exactly all rainbows and sunshine.

For some background, I attended church from 1989 to 2003.  I was never that much of a “religious” person to begin with, having spent the first eight years of my life without it.  My father grew up Jewish, and has practiced no religion of any kind for most of his adult life, i.e. he is ethnically Jewish, but does not follow the religion.  Meanwhile, Mom grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and attended church regularly until she began college, and then did not attend church at all from 1969 to 1989.  Thus my early formative years contained no significant religious indoctrination, short of attending a Baptist preschool during our first year in Rogers, and the religious side of things in that program was super light.  I don’t remember doing much religious stuff there short of a few trips to the sanctuary and the “God is great, God is good” prayer before our daily snack.  Outside of this, Mom would occasionally discuss religious subjects with me, though nothing too deep, but even then, I was kind of a skeptic.  When Mom would try to explain this “God” person, the way that he was described defied everything that I had observed in the world, and so I was like, okay, sure, and not really buying it, even at a very young age.  Likewise, I saw no purpose to the prayer that Mom and I did each night before going to bed for some time, because I never really thought that we were speaking to anyone other than ourselves.

Then in 1989, Mom finally found a church that she liked.  As I understand it, when we first moved to Arkansas in 1985, Mom had First Presbyterian Church in Rogers pegged as somewhere that she had wanted to go from the outset, but she was unimpressed with the minister that was there at that time.  By 1989, that guy had left and a new person had taken his place, and Mom liked the new guy a lot more.  We typically went to church on Sundays, we did the after school program that they did on Wednesday afternoons, and then we also did the Vacation Bible School week during the summer.

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When your photo of Giant becomes popular, and you don’t quite understand why…

February 6, 2024, 9:54 AM

Recently, when skimming around the Internet, I found a large number of YouTube videos using this image:

Giant Food in Burtonsville, Maryland

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If you want me to take you seriously, do your research, and don’t play the victim card…

November 17, 2023, 2:10 PM

Recently, while I was checking for copyright violations, I turned up a tweet by Twitter user @alx.  The tweet, from this past September, showed my photo from 2004 of a Simplex fire alarm at Taylor Hall with the caption, “Any idea what this does?”  I assumed, based on the date, that it was supposed to be commentary on the recent incident where Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building.  Yes, Bowman is an idiot for doing that, but that’s beside the point.  Looking the tweet over, I did not see the attribution that is required per the terms of the Creative Commons license under which that particular image is offered, so, per my usual practice, I submitted a DMCA takedown request to have that unauthorized usage removed.  Then the folks who process these things at Twitter removed the image about twelve hours later.  That speed is typical for Twitter, since they’re usually really good about processing DMCA notices, even following Elon Musk‘s acquisition of the platform.  In other words, for as much of a cesspool as the Twitter has become these days, if there’s one thing that they still do right, it’s copyright enforcement.  So as far as I was concerned, our transaction was complete.  The image was removed, and we all went on with things.

Then the next day, I got an email from the folks at Twitter, telling me that Alexander Joseph Lorusso of Worcester, Massachusetts had submitted a DMCA counter-notice against the tweet that I had reported earlier, and that, as per the usual process, they would restore the content in ten business days unless they receive notice that I’ve filed an action seeking a court order on it.  Here is what Lorusso said in his counter-notice when prompted for a reason:

This picture is a picture of a fire alarm and is on WikiCommons stating it is free “to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work”

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simplex_pull_station.jpg#mw-jump-to-license

This person is weaponizing DMCA against me

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Playing with the AI image generator…

October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM

Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base.  I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me.  My first idea was to have it generate me.  The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.

The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:

"Ben Schumin in Washington, DC" (1)  "Ben Schumin in Washington, DC" (2)

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Two stories about Woomy…

September 8, 2023, 11:33 PM

Recently, while we were driving home from shopping, Elyse asked ChatGPT to tell her a story about everyone’s favorite orange curmudgeon: Woomy.  I don’t know what the exact parameters that she gave it were, but it came up with decent enough material to come up with something at least somewhat heartwarming.  Check these out:

In the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, there lived a curmudgeonly orange octopus named Woomy.  Every day, rain or shine, Woomy would climb aboard the DASH bus, his tentacles a tangle of frustration.  He’d grumble and grouse about the noise, the crowds, and the whole human world around him.

Passengers would stare, amused by this unexpected commuter.  Woomy’s sour expression became a familiar sight, and people began sharing stories of his antics.  But despite the attention, Woomy remained steadfast in his curmudgeonly ways.

One winter’s day, as snow painted the city white, a young child with curious eyes got on the bus.  Ignoring the stares, the child approached Woomy, offering a small, hand-knit scarf.  Woomy’s eyes widened, his expression softening just a bit.  He accepted the scarf with a tentative tentacle.

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No, my mother is not selling concert tickets…

August 22, 2023, 9:30 AM

I don’t understand what makes people send money to random people on the Internet, but I’ve seen it happen, and have recently been put in the unenviable position of being the unwilling spokesperson regarding one of those people, advising people not to give their money to someone who is acting under false pretenses.  I’ve seen it happen with people who are desperate for love, getting scammed under the mistaken idea that it will help them get laid.  Apparently, people looking for concert tickets are also quite vulnerable to being scammed, as I’ve come to find out firsthand when my mother’s Facebook became compromised, and a new person started using the account to scam people who were seeking to buy concert tickets.  What happened was that Mom clicked on something that she had absolutely no business clicking on, and that allowed an attacker to seize control of her account.  They quickly changed the login credentials in order to lock Mom out of it, and then started putting the account to use for more nefarious purposes.  I found out about it by people who saw my name on Mom’s Facebook account, then, seeing that I had a verified account, came to me to find out if I knew who the seller was, and wanted to know when their concert tickets would arrive.  I did some research, and turned up several examples of what was going on:

"I have 8 Savannah banana tickets on 26th August at Des Moines principal park in Iowa for sale, message me if interested."  "Hello 👋, I've 4 Nickelback tickets for sale at cheaper price, send a dm if you're interested thanks"  "Hello 👋, I've 4 tickets to Jelly Roll Concert in Clarkston, MI tonight. PM me if you're interested."

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Categories: Family, Social media

I feel compelled to weigh in…

June 15, 2023, 10:10 PM

Recently, Reddit has been embroiled in a controversy over the site management’s plan to charge for access to their application programming interface, or API, which would affect the operation of various third-party apps, which previously had free access to the API.

First of all, this is how I browse Reddit.  I have a Reddit Premium subscription, which means that I get an ad-free experience using a web browser or the official Reddit app, along with a few other perks.  When I’m on my phone, I will typically use BaconReader, a third-party app, to access Reddit.  I started using BaconReader before Reddit had an official Android app, and I’ve gotten used to it and have seen no reason to change.  More specifically, I use the paid version of BaconReader, which provides me an ad-free experience on the app.  The free version of the app runs its own ads in an effort by the developers to make some money that Reddit sees no part of, regardless of Reddit Premium subscription status.  So before we get into things too deeply, that’s my situation, i.e. I have a premium subscription to the site, and I use an ad-free third-party app on my phone.

As far as the issue at hand goes, I feel that charging a fee for API access is reasonable enough.  To me, it only seems fair.  Third-party apps depend on Reddit for their content, and so if Reddit were to die, the third-party apps die right along with it.  You profit from Reddit’s content, selling subscriptions, app licenses, and running ads against it, so you need to pay your content provider.  Especially when one considers that Reddit is, in fact, a for-profit company and not a charity.  Just because one has never turned a profit doesn’t make one a not-for-profit entity.  It just means that you’re a for-profit company that has never managed to make a profit.  Consuming server resources through your app but not compensating the operator of said server just makes you a parasite, since you’re not paying for the resources that you consume.  It’s nice that Reddit has offered it that way for a while, but it sounds like the free ride is about to end.  It’s a perfectly valid business decision.  I will say that when it comes to how much to charge for API access, I do not know what the proper amount is.  I am not an app developer, nor do I know how much it costs to operate Reddit.  All I know is that paying some amount for API access seems fair.  And you don’t get to complain when someone who was offering a service for free stops offering it for free, because you weren’t paying for it, and, as my mother likes to put it, “You’ve got to pay to say.”

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Categories: Reddit

It both impresses me and amuses me…

March 10, 2023, 4:21 PM

You all have probably heard about the artificial intelligence tools that can write articles and such that have been taking the Internet by storm lately.  One such service is ChatGPT, which is a chatbot by a company called OpenAI, which can answer your questions about various subjects.  I asked the service about myself and about Schumin Web, because (A) my name is unique, and (B) Schumin Web is also unique, and (C) I’ve been around on the Internet long enough that I figure that it should know who I am.  Additionally, giving it inquiries about myself and my website, I was able to do a good check of accuracy because I know me really well, and I know my own website really well.

So on March 1, I ran the inquiry five times for each, and collected five different responses for each.  In evaluating what it spewed out for each one, I found that the accuracy was a bit questionable, and varied quite a bit.  It got some things right, and it got some things very wrong to the point of being comical.  In its discussion about Schumin Web, it was actually quite insightful, making points that even I hadn’t thought much about, doing way more than I would have otherwise expected from an AI chatbot.  I was also a bit flattered, because in running other people who I feel should be far more notable than me, it didn’t know who they were, even with some additional prodding, while it knew who I was right out of the gate without any additional clarification or questioning, and it knew what Schumin Web was without even blinking.

In judging the accuracy of each output, I scored them by factual claims.  A claim that was accurate got a point.  A claim that was inaccurate got no points.  A claim that was a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information got half a point.  Divide by total number of claims to get an accuracy percentage, which would be the final score.  I don’t know if experts in this sort of thing would score it this way, but it’s the best that I could come up with, and for purposes of this discussion, we’ll go with it. Continue reading...Continue reading…

Educating people about copyright…

February 27, 2023, 1:24 PM

Sometimes it’s interesting what happens when you discuss copyright infringement amongst your friends.  I recently made a post on Facebook about a company that routinely uses my photos in their work, that I have not had any success in pursuing.  It led to very positive discussion, and I think that I helped a few folks learn something new about intellectual property that they may not have known before.

Unlike most occasions when I will go online and grouse about unauthorized usages of my photography, this one turned up some new discussion besides the standard responses like, “You should sue them,” and the like.  For the record, while taking someone to court over copyright infringement is definitely a possible remedy, it is by no means the only remedy, nor is it something that one takes lightly.  This is not a case of, “When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.”  A lawsuit is really only a viable option in a small subset of usage cases, and while there have been lawsuits filed on my behalf regarding unauthorized usages, they are exceedingly rare.  Also, note “filed on my behalf” in that last sentence.  I do not file lawsuits myself.  People that I have designated as my agents who know more about these things than I do are the ones who file the suits.  I know my own limits.  Also, people forget that the instances of copyright infringement that I grouse about online are just the ones that really irk me, and also are ones that got away.  Most of my copyright infringement cases are resolved amicably, and you never hear about those.

A few points came up in this discussion that are worth mentioning here.  First was a suggestion that I watermark my images.  This is a perennial suggestion, and, truth be told, it’s something that I’ve tested and implemented in the past, and later had to undo.  Back in the early 2000s, I started some early forays into photo licensing, under a brand called “StratoSearch”.  When I was getting ready to implement that, I started putting watermarks on my photos on Schumin Web in order to prevent clean copies of the larger photos from going out willy-nilly, i.e. reserve the clean versions for paying clients.  With that, I put Schumin Web’s logo in the corner of the full-size images, i.e. the ones that you click through to see.  That was a bit of extra work on my part, but I did it, using a template to apply the logo.  I eventually dropped the licensing effort there after a rebranding and redesign in 2003 failed to drum up any business.  I now understand that my work back then was not to the level of quality that I thought it was, and that my marketing efforts were terrible.  But nonetheless, the watermarks remained.  If you want to see what the watermark looked like in practice, go look on College Life, where the watermark has been retained, and where there are no plans to remove it for historical reasons.

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You made your bed, and now you have to lie in it…

December 9, 2022, 12:56 PM

Lately, a lot of the DMCA takedown notices that I’ve filed have been for “nostalgia” pages on Facebook.  In other words, those pages where people find photos around the Internet of stuff from a given period and then repost them with no permission, no attribution, or anything else.  I don’t typically frequent these types of pages myself, but others who are familiar with my work will usually let me know when they spot one of my photos being used in an unauthorized manner.  When I’m notified, I will go in and locate it, and then I’ll get all of my ducks in a row before I complete the DMCA form and submit it.  And then, unsurprisingly, the people who get nailed get a little salty about it, while never considering for a moment that they may have had a lapse in judgment somewhere.

Two recent instances of this stand out in my mind.  The first was for a nostalgia group that focused on the 2000s.  In that case, I found a number of photos from my Journal entry about the 2005 remodel of the Walmart in Lexington, Virginia.  For that, I had to submit multiple takedown notices in order to cover the various photos that were included, but I got it done.  Two days later, I received confirmation from Facebook that the photos were removed.  A few hours later, I heard back from the infringer, a woman named Darla Griffin, who was clearly unhappy about the situation that they now found themselves in.  Like many infringers, they wrote me to complain, while attempting to verbally lick their own wounds after they got caught.

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A question about what is okay to critique…

September 19, 2022, 12:04 PM

This is something that happened back in November of last year, and it’s something that I still question because it leaves something unsettled that I had previously considered to not be a question at all.  My understanding was, when it comes to a person’s appearance, the only things that are okay to to critique are hair and clothing, because those are choices that the person made, and that they can readily change.  That comes with a lot of caveats, though.  You don’t critique things about hair if it’s something that they can’t change, like baldness, though anything that they can still change is fair game.  Likewise, with clothing, you wouldn’t criticize the fashion choices of someone who clearly can’t afford anything else.

So, with that said, here’s why I ask.  Last year, I was off on Black Friday, and Elyse had planned an adventure for us on that day.  She planned a shopping adventure that day, and she wanted to go out and check out the “doorbuster” events.  Me, having spent four Christmases working in retail, I wanted nothing to do with any of it and would have preferred to just sleep in and work on the website or Flickr, but I wouldn’t have gotten a moment of peace if I stayed home – so out I went.  We chose to go to Annapolis so that I would have something to do, with the idea of my going out to Sandy Point State Park to fly the drone over the water while Elyse shopped.  Unfortunately, however, when I got to the park, I judged the wind to be far too strong to fly, so the drone never even came out of its carrier.  After sitting in the car for a while feeling annoyed about the circumstances, having driven out to the bay for nothing, I headed back to the mall, feeling somewhat defeated, and met back up with Elyse and joined her on her shopping adventure, because nothing was going up into the sky other than my frustration.

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A little awareness goes a long way…

April 11, 2022, 9:53 AM

Sometimes, it surprises me about how much some people lack awareness about their situation when they get caught in a copyright infringement case.  In this case, I sent a takedown notice for a photo of the old Giant Food store on O Street NW in Washington, DC, i.e. this photo:

Old Giant Food store on O Street NW

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When moderators become the thought police…

February 7, 2022, 10:00 AM

A few weeks ago, imagine my surprise one morning to find this in my Reddit inbox:

Reddit ban notice for /r/PoliticalHumor

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Categories: COVID-19, Reddit

What is the point where elected officials have killed their credibility?

November 18, 2021, 11:41 AM

Starting Saturday, November 20, Montgomery County, Maryland implements mask mandate number three.  This is based on rules that the Montgomery County council, sitting as the Board of Health, determined in August and October, where seven consecutive days of “substantial” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (50-100 cases per 100,000 people), based on raw case counts, automatically triggers an indoor mask mandate, and seven consecutive days of “moderate” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 people), again based on raw case counts, automatically rescinds an indoor mask mandate.  This continues until 85% of the county’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19.  The result of this auto-on, auto-off policy has been a yo-yo effect, where it’s masks one week and no masks the next.

For some history on this, the Montgomery County government first implemented a mask mandate in April 2020, not long before the governor issued a statewide mask mandate.  That mandate was rescinded in May 2021 when everyone else did after the CDC said that fully vaccinated people didn’t need to wear masks anymore.  When the county had reached a 50% vaccination rate, they abandoned their own COVID rules and began following the state’s guidance instead, which included no more masks and a full reopening of everything.  Then in August, after the CDC revised its guidance again, and the county council watched as case numbers went up, Montgomery County started implementing its own rules again separate from the state, and brought back the mask mandate.  The idea was that the mask mandate would last until there were seven consecutive days of “moderate” transmission, after which time it would automatically be rescinded.  This happened in late October, and the mask mandate was rescinded effective Thursday, October 28.

Right after this is where they started to shoot their credibility, and it demonstrates what is wrong with looking at raw case numbers as a metric for determining public policy.  On October 30, two days after the mandate was rescinded, they were already talking about reinstating the mask mandate, as they soon returned to “substantial” transmission territory, and announced a return to masks less than a week after they were rescinded, to be effective on Wednesday, November 3 (i.e. six days from rescission to reimplementation).

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Regretting the shot not taken…

October 14, 2021, 10:04 PM

Some of you may remember that a month or so ago, there was a large protest on Reddit about COVID misinformation, targeting a subreddit called /r/NoNewNormal.  The idea of the protest was that a number of subreddits “went private”, i.e. stopped accepting submissions, and vowed to stay that way until Reddit management did something about this subreddit, after Reddit management had previously stated that they were not going to intervene.  Ultimately, /r/NoNewNormal was banned, and as such, the subreddit and all of its contents were removed from the Internet, as if they had never existed.  I have mixed feelings about the whole affair, and I feel like I have a unique perspective on it, because I used to moderate the subreddit, and probably did the most in building it, and then once it caught on, it slowly morphed into something that it should never have been.

First of all, my own stance on the whole pandemic is no secret.  I wrote a very long Journal entry about it back in May.  In short, I said that vaccination is the only way out of this, and that we should have never fooled around with much of the fabric of society like we did.  We should have never mandated masks, lockdowns, closures, plastic shields, social distancing, or any other weird new rules and restrictions.  And then when the vaccine became available, get it without delay.  That has been my stance more or less from the outset.  The entirety of “your part” in this is getting vaccinated.  Aside from that, nothing else matters, so leave me alone.  I took an exceptionally dim view of people who tried to justify all of these changes as a “new normal” like they expected this to remain a thing for the foreseeable future, as well as playing the “wE’rE iN a PaNdEmIc!1!1!” card as an excuse to be exceptionally rude and/or judgmental with other people who disagree with them.

At the same time, it initially felt like those of us who opposed all of these new rules, ostensibly to curb the spread of COVID-19, were fairly alone in our opinions.  The sense that I got was that most people were all in agreement on these measures, and that I was the odd man out.  Then I discovered the /r/LockdownSkepticism and /r/EndtheLockdowns subreddits.  These were people who thought more like me on these matters, i.e. that the lockdowns and related measures were security theater.  I later found /r/NoNewNormal, which was started a little bit after the other two, and I tended to participate in that subreddit most, as it had the post quality of /r/LockdownSkepticism, but unlike /r/LockdownSkepticism, it did not have a “gatekeeper” for posts.  I tend not to post in communities that have gatekeepers, because I don’t want to waste my time posting somewhere when there’s a chance that no one will ever see my post based on the whims of some anonymous approver.  If I go to the trouble of posting something, I want a guarantee that it gets seen.  In any case, /r/NoNewNormal fit that bill, with decent, open discussion and no gatekeeper.  It was described in its sidebar as, “The phrase ‘new normal’ is pretty creepy. Let’s talk about concerns with it, and what can be done to resist it.”  It was sort of a way to criticize the measures being taken, and also a place to get emotional support for what we were all going through from a sympathetic group of people.  In other words, it was built with good intentions.

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Categories: COVID-19, Reddit