bumblebee

So the web server has been crashing. I only made one change that I think might have contributed, so I reversed that. Fingers crossed it will go back to being stable.

From the Indianapolis News. This is a great bit of history describing the scarcity of agates after World War I. We know some German agates trickled in over the coming years, as apparently the agates offered by Master Marble at the 1933 World's Fair were hand-faceted and presumably from Germany.

I think that's by design to prevent users from trading massive file attachments in private messages. But I would need to confirm that by asking someone else who isn't a moderator to test.

I have a dark-purple based Navarre that looks like that old soldier, although yours has a more elegant swirl.

Vintage to me would be those items enjoyed by the two or three generation before me, items that I would have no living memory of because they were no longer offered by the time I was around.

Oh, that agate shot I posted as a test? Yes I believe it is a moss agate, although someone else described it as "dendritic agate manganese inclusions under quartz" but I understand that dendritic agate is usually brown or black, if ever green. Never seen another one like it. Hand faceted too. Seems like the mossy part is more easily damaged.

The site is back up but images will be missing from many posts until the external storage is synchronized by late tonight or early tomorrow. Some important changes: All images are now hosted externally on Amazon S3 storage. The direct image links will begin with https://s3mcinvision.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ The server will never again fill up due to images, so that will make hosting and moving it to new hosting much simpler. I've lifted the image size restrictions, so high resolution images will no longer be resized to 1920x1080. My hope is that we won't need restrictions again, but we'll see how the storage costs are in a few months. Thanks for your patience and your support!

I'm not saying it's CAC. There is a massive bubble inside, but still this will require a custom brag box/chest.

Here's a couple of better macro shots.

Yes, the AI struggles mightily with human hands, but considering it was released in July 2022 at version 1, and we're currently at version 5, I expect it to conquer hands by this year.

...these three images were generated simply by me prompting the AI with a few words. So those glowing marbles were its response to me saying "middle-aged man playing marbles with his 10-year-old self".

Huge loss of a gentle man who was both an ambassador and scholar for marbles. Always wished I could have met him.

Our buy/sell forum sees little activity, but there are also some very active FB marble auction groups that have daily posts, sometimes some real killers. I can't outbid today's bidders on those sites, but I do sometimes still snag something on eBay when no one's looking.

Wow, that's neat, but I suppose it makes sense given the material that these would show up once in a while, but that's a new one for me.

Here's another try although the camera sensor choked on all the white on that foreground marble. I salute anyone who takes good, crisp photos of marbles. It's not easy.

Lovely mega agate! Is it faceted? Focus stacking would help if you took a close-up but it looks pretty good to me. You probably had a fairly high f-stop there? Mine were taken at f/5.6.

No, actually the camera does all the focus shifting to take the 20 photos. Many modern DSLRs offer this feature. Most of the work for me is the setup and then a few minutes of processing them through the software. A lot of photographs you see, especially close-ups, are using this technique because of limited depth of field on lenses.

Collected these handsome realers over the last 15 years. Photo is made up of 20 images, each focused at a different point then blended together in Photoshop in order to get everything in focus. The one in the foreground is a tad over 1".

Thank you! It helps practically and also inspires me to get down and dirty battling the technology. I imagine I will give the new server transfer a shot next weekend.

Thanks I appreciate it! Long story short: A year or so ago, I increased the maximum image size significantly, not realizing that the board stores all pasted photos as an uncompressed format known as PNG. So suddenly our storage usage at least doubled, especially with more activity in the past year. My new hosting has limited storage, so we ran out of space today. I reconverted and reuploaded a bunch of these uncompressed PNG files as specially compressed formats, but it's a tedious manual process. I also reduced the maximum image size to reduce future image sizes. Finally, my server doesn't support the latest board versions, so I have to spin up a new one and transfer everything. I figure it's time to get a bigger one, so it'll be $20/m base instead of the current $10/m base. That will buy us more storage and give us another year before I have to look at another option which is to locate all of our images on cheap "cloud" storage.

Kudos to Chad G for playing spammer whack-a-mole. I tried a few things and finally just turned off automatic registration for new users. Now I have to approve new users before they can post.

Nice colorful marbles suitable to a colorful Carnaval !

https://www.galenleather.com/products/wood-pen-display-box-with-wood-lid The pen slots are 0.8" wide so that should accompany shooters, assuming you don't mind them touching. Only thing I don't like is the lid doesn't lock.

I have been putting off a major update because it requires setting up a new server with newer hosting software, otherwise the board updates will no longer install. I'm a professional procrastinator but eventually I'll have no choice!

Wow, that's very fascinating and charming. An active, dynamic community of marble players and makers right under our noses!