I was round a friend’s house, early afternoon, plenty of natural sunlight, and he walks in and switches on the ceiling light. It was like looking at a permanent nuclear blast.
Had to get him to turn it off immediately. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want it on.
I asked: “What are you trying to simulate, a hospital corridor, a police interrogation room?”
I’ve seen other people use 100 watt bare bulbs as their main light (and no curtains/blinds). For Christ-sake, at least get an up-lighting shade.
A big bright exposed light source and they watch tv. With the bulb reflected in the middle of the screen.
How do people live like this? Do they all have cataracts?
Did that friend come from the outside?
Because our eyes adapt to our surrounding.
If you always stay in the dark, never putting on the light. Any light will burn your eyes.
But if you are outside and it is sunny, going inside will always be dark.
It’s not even good light, either. It’s really narrow band light that isn’t natural, and so is really bad for fast object recognition and is blinding and glare.
Like using a laser pointer to illuminate stuff, it’s just gonna blind you and not really make it easier to see.
And it fucks up your ability to see outside of that light source, like having a really bright monitor in a dark room that you ALSO need to see.
There’s a good video explanation somewhere…
I think this was the one https://youtu.be/Uq7pfrognGM
But it also doesn’t even take into account all the other stupid design issues.
Also https://youtu.be/-Lh2wPGKnAM
And
It’s basically just dumbass advertising and dumbass ignorant people buying into it. Like computer monitor tech when “hd” became a thing or refresh rate on lcds and companies playing fuckfuck number games advertising the biggest number they can. Or speaker companies advertising cheap garbage by how loud it can technically get but it actually sounds like absolute garbage and pisses everybody off when you blast your cheap piss everywhere. I fucking hate these shitty headlights so goddamn much.
Like if would be one thing if it was perfect light and was just bad for ecosystems at night. But no, it’s like the loudest, screechiest bullshit screaming light that blinds everybody for no fucking reason AND DOESN’T EVEN MAKE IT EASIER TO SEE FOR THE USER because now you have to also have (you don’t have to have) these shields that bar off the top edges of the lights to not blind other people, but now you have this massive contrast edge between shitty blinding light where your object recognition is ass, and DEAD BLACK UNLIT AREA which… To make matters fucking worse, encourages the user TO TURN ON THEIR HIGH BEAMS FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK!!!
related:
surely using harsh blue/white super bright LEDs for vehicle headlights is a good idea! how else will the driver be able to see after we’ve installed a 42" TV with undimmable backlighting directly in their field of view!
Sorry to be random but the last video has an unusually high number of comments starting with the text ‘xyz here.’ Like more than you’d expect to see that exact formulation used. I wonder what’s going on there. Scroll and you’ll see it
What do I find when I’ve scrolled?
Lol you’re not wrong, it’s not like every top comment is like this but enough to make you question it indeed.
Nice warm cave
Someone gave us one of those salt lamps (bottom middle) when I lived in Florida. I thought my spouse put a glass of cold water on the table it was on and forgot about it till the next day and cleaned up the table forgetting the sweat. So I cleaned it up. Next day the same thing. I picked the salt up and realized it was slowly melting. The humidity was just so high the salt would absorb as much water as it could, then when it couldn’t hold anymore apparently just leak it on the table. Ended up putting a towel under it, then just throwing it away and buying a dehumidifier.
Do Americans call it “the big light” too? Because that’s always seemed like a very British thing to me
Some even go outside unprotected and just sit under the giant light. Batshit insane I know
Me, but with these new car headlights that are ridiculously bright and blue.
I get it that you want bright beams, but do you understand how many people are out there driving with night blindness? Old people with cataracts, or just people with nearsightedness or astigmatism, or vitamin a deficiency (alcoholics * cough *), do you really want to risk your life?
As someone who has to drive to work before sunrise, FUCK THESE HEADLIGHTS. I’ve even seen people with the old style incandescent headlights just having their high beams on as default. People stopped caring about others on the road long ago, but it really accelerated post-COVID.
The combination of this topic and your display name reminds me of the Professor using his high beams to search for Pazuzu.
Pazuzu you ungrateful gargoyle! I put you through college and this is how you repay me?!
I’ve been wondering if it was just me aging but there does seem to be sharp rise in selfishness after covid. Probably both I guess.
What’s “the big light”?
I think it’s the interior decorator philosophy of how lighting a residential room works.
For example, a single, central ceiling light is “the big light” , but having multiple lamps and/or wall lights that use warmer, diffuse light are not “the big light”.
It’s generally seen as cheap, lazy, and bad vibes to use “the big light”. Boomer or unaware millennial behavior.
Imagine entering a chill, groovy, warmly lit room, decorated by hippies and feels cozy or not hostile, and comfortable and welcoming and relaxing. That’s the opposite of “the big light”.
Or I could just be fucking wrong and thinking of something totally different /shrug
So what do you do when you leave the room or go to bed? You just wander around turning 8 lamps off? And what do you do when you come back in at night and you have to fumble around looking for the switch on each one?
You have to make little bypass wires and tie them all together to a master switch
Exactly right, and also why I’ve ended up with a collection of about 8 lamps
Ah, a fellow Lamp Household Liver. We have an army of bulbless lamps in our laundry room at our house, and a couple working lamps with bulbs we use throughout the house.
I’ve ended up adopting a number of lamps from friends and finding great ones at car boot sales, ranging from lava lamps to wicker woven ones, sounds like you have a (wonderful but) more coherent collection than mine!
Oh my… I don’t think I’d classify my merry band of misfit lamps as “coherent” hahaha. There’s two or three nice lamps! …then a bunch I can’t throw away because it would make them feel bad, and by proxy, me be sad.
…I feel like someone those lamps would also set the house ablaze if plugged in and run overnight. Alas, squatter’s rights; I can’t just kick them out at this point, they’ve been here for over a decade.
My latest craze is using an RGB ring light (that I got for WFH video chats “so people cold see me better”, which DEFINITELY ever was used for that purpose and not IMMEDIATELY relegated to “Pokémon plushie collection light enhancer”) pointed upward on the opposite end of my room, turned down to medium-dim, and turned either one a cool bluegreen color, rainbow, or a warm white light which bounces off the ceiling. I love you, Ring Light of Many Colors!
Whoa I didn’t realise how wrong I was hahaha, sounds like you have an incredible setup! Especially envious of your plushies having their own personal lighting system, that’s definitely not going to motivate me to find one for my own collection…
The big light tends to get a colour changing bulb swapped into them so the many colours (and extremely useful dimming settings) I completely understand!
Our only The Big Light lives in our kitchen and I got a nice bright white bulb to put in it after years of it being empty. My reasoning: Now I can see the dirty parts better to clean it betterer!
In actuality: I’d rather clean in the dark and leave the place dirty than awaken The Big Light, too horrifyingly bright and omnipresent!
Colour changing bulb would very much help with that—I’ve been meaning to get HomeAssistant set up, so I should look into ordering some colour-changing bulbs that work with HA, thank you for the idea!
The plushies all actually get their own full-sized couch, hanging out in the living room with our cats while we’re working! I bring the lights out for photo sessions sometimes. My partner and I met ages ago and instantly bonded over our love for Pokémon since 1996-1997 (knew we loved it before it was even released in the US!) so we’ve got a kinda horrifying collection of hundreds to maybe a thousand? built up over the years. >w< My only regret so far was passing up on a life sized lucario, I saw it in a shop and set a limit for 400 or so, but it was nearly twice that… oh, and we don’t have the snorlax love sac. Our friend does and it’s incredible.
You’re a vampire?
I suffer from scintillating scotoma and bright light is a trigger. I think I understand what Springsteen was singing about in that song about douches.
The big light is my mortal enemy.
This includes the sun; the biggest light.
Even though I use “the big light” as a phrase i still think this means the sun every time i see it.
spoiler
“I am so violently opposed to big lights” would make more sense
I thought it meant the sun because I absolutely hate the sun. Source of all problems.
When you say “I hate the big light” you mean the central ceiling light.
When I say “I hate the big light” I mean the sun because why is it so goddamn bright outside all the time even when it’s cloudy?!
We are not the same.
My plants need it, go back in your cave.
God my partner likes them and I can’t stand them
My “partner” has been with me nearly 20 years and still tries to insist on using the most lights possible at all times and acts obtuse when I ask them not to… some people just refused to be influenced in anyway
Strong light is the enemy. If the ceiling light is in it’s hard to do anything other than trying to actively look away from it at all times.
Ah the absolute irony of struggling to read this in the dark, using dark mode, with the text background shining so brightly lit.
I have epilepsy and the big lights kill my eyes and head. I work with mostly natural light in my house and have all my electronics set to be hella dim with max blue light filtering
I’m violently in favor of Big Light™. Really wakes you up, especially the flashbang when you turn it on. 🙃
