Lmao I really wouldn’t mind, and it would maybe give my boss the extra push to enable export to Google calendar where the rest of my life resides, like the business I work for used to use before we switched to this “holistic solution” specific to the industry.
That said, the help desk has been all too kind listening to my unhinged ravings.
You might be interested in Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis in his book Modernity and the Holocaust
From the linked wiki summary:
“Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view obedience to rules as morally good, all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass.”
A sociologist friend broke it down for me a long time ago, and, basically, rationalizing everything into a number helped to dehumanize people and paved the way for Nazi atrocities.
That said, I don’t think “technology” on its own is fascist — technology itself is dependent on how people use it, as others in this thread have pointed to the existence of FOSS as a foil to the use of technology as a method of control by those with power.
It got surprisingly heavy in places, and I didn’t realize I had grown so attached to some of those characters!
Campaign 2 was great—I really loved the guest star and secondary plot, and I’m now on C3. Have been binging the hell out of it for the past 6 months or so
You ever get the feelin’ that sump’n ain’t right at the crick?
In no particular order, I listen to all of them regularly:
Omnibus - general obscure history hosted by indie rocker John Roderick and Jeopardy’s golden boy Ken Jennings
The Dollop - (mostly) American history with a leftist bent. One comedian reads a story the other hasn’t heard before.
Not Another D&D Podcast - apologies for the first episode, but great world- and character-building. Really shows how great cooperative storytelling can be
Last Podcast on the Left - comedy/horror. Conspiracies, cults, UFOs, and other weird shit. Their historical deep dives are awesome.
I listen to these regularly, but there’s a limited series podcast I like to recommend called S-Town. It’s excellent, especially if you’re from the southern US or grew up in a rural area. If you aren’t from the south or a rural area, it’ll probably be an extra-wild ride!
He wasn’t when we lost him, but I’m going to get it done soon.
That said, he’s now a senior and diabetic, so I think he’s gonna be an indoor boy from here.
Folks in Mississippi passed an initiative for a fairly lax medical law in 2020. Some Karen mayor of one of the suburbs around the capital city used judicial chicanery to get it thrown out at the State Supreme Court, along with the ability of the populace to vote on ballot measures going forward.
I doubt that OP was debating you in good faith, but it did happen at least once in the last few years. The Republicans certainly didn’t waste the opportunity to minimize the effects of democracy on their power.
I’m working my way through House of Leaves right now, and the real horror is the grad school flashbacks from trying to follow the footnotes.
My TV is insulting like that. It technically has an EQ, but it makes no perceivable difference no matter what I do in it.
What the hell!
But assuming it worked, wouldn’t doing that strictly with sound frequencies cause issues? Like, okay, most voices are louder because I boosted their frequency, but now that one dude with a super low voice is quieter, plus any music in the show is distorted. Or something like that.
Not necessarily. Regardless of vocal range, around 400hz-2000hz makes up the body of what you hear in human speech, or the notes for instryments carrying a melody. Below that, say, 160-315hz is going to be the “warmth” and “fullness” of the sound, while 2.5khz-8khz is going to be the enunciation and clarity (think ch-sounds, ess-es, tee-s, etc).
Sure, if you start really going hard on an EQ, you could absolutely throw everything out of balance — if you cut out 12db at 250hz, all the warmth will be gone and everything will sound thin. If you scoop a bunch of 400hz-1.6khz, it will sound like a walkie-talkie, and if you make a large boost around 3khz-8khz, then everything will probably sound harsh and scratchy.
This is where, the listening environment becomes important to consider. Do you live near a busy highway or do you have a loud air conditioner? You don’t need to answer these questions in public, but those kinds of ambient sounds can compete with the enunciation frequencies, or add to the buildup of “mud” in the lower part of the spectrum.
The size, shape, material properties etc. of your room and furniture also play a role here. For example, a bunch of bare walls and hard surfaces will cause a lot of the high frequencies to bounce around, potentially causing a buildup of harshness. This is why recording studios and your high school band hall probably have those oddly-shaped, cloth-covered wall “decorations” that serve to neutralize the cavernous sound you’d get in a large, bare room.
Overall, compensating for the environment is where you should probably aim your EQ. That is, even if source material varies wildly, it’s probably best to try to EQ to the room you’re in rather than each, individual program.
The way to do it is to find a song you know by heart, that you know how it sounds in the best way possible (there are a few that, to me, sound great in my car and on my favorite pair of headphones, so I use those), and play that through your TV. Then, fiddle with the EQ until it’s as close to the ideal sound in your head as you can get it.
I would bet there is one mix created in surround sound (7.1 or Dolby Atmos or whatever), and then the end-user hardware does the down-mixing part, i.e. from Atmos with ~20 speakers to a pair of airpods.
In the music world, we usually make stereo mixes. Even though the software that I use has a button to downmix the stereo output to mono, I only print stereo files.
It’s defintely good practice to listen to the mix in mono for technical reasons and also because you just never know who’s going to be listening on what device—the ultimate goal being to make it sound as good as possible in as many listening environments as possible. Ironically, switching the output to mono is a great way to check for balance between instruments (including the vocals) in a stereo mix.
At any rate, I think the problem of dynamics control—and for that matter, equalization—for fine-tuning the listening experience at home is going to vary wildly from place to place and setup to setup. Therefore the hypothetical regulations should help consumers help themselves by requiring compression and eq controls on consumer devices!
Side tip: if your tv or home theater box has an equalizer, try cutting around 200-250hz and bring the overall volume up a tad to reduce the muddiness of vocals/dialogue. You could also try boosting around 2khz, but as a sound engineer primarily dealing with live performances, I tend to cut more often than I boost.
Audio compression is much older than 20 years! Though you’re probably right about it becoming available on consumer A/V devices more recently.
And you’re definitely correct that “pre-applying” compression and generally overdoing it will fuck up the sound for too many people.
The dynamic ranges that are possible (and arguably desirable) to achieve in a movie theater are much greater than what one could (or would even want to) achieve from some crappy TV speakers or cheap ear buds.
From what I understand, mastering for film is going to aim for the greatest dynamic range possible, because it’s always theoretically possible to narrow the range after the fact but not really vice-versa.
I think the direction to go with OP’s suggested regulation would be to require all consumer TV sets and home theater boxes to have a built-in compressor that can be accessed and adjusted by the user. This would probably entail allowing the user to blow their speakers if they set it incorrectly, but in careful hands, it could solve OP’s problem.
That said, my limited experience in this world is exclusive to mixing and mastering music and not film, so grain of salt and all that.
Judging by The Dawn of Everything sitting next to it, I’d guess that book is Debt: The First 5000 years by David Graeber!
I have to back into a parking spot in a shitty, shared driveway. If I don’t throw my (automatic transmission) car into neutral and coast into place, my car will decide I’m too close to the curb and just slam the fuck out of the brakes while still several feet away from where I intend to be. It sounds awful and it scared the absolute shit out of me several times before I internalized the workaround.
Good thing I’m not a fan of the backup camera in general, or this problem would be even more irritating, since the camera turns off when I go from reverse to neutral.
OneDrive decided to kick on after an overnight update and uploaded some projects and vst plugins to the cloud. Apparently, the files weren’t accessible except via the cloud, so I lost a few hours re-downloading my folders before I could do anything. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more furious over technology that I theoretically owned.
I got a PC in order to eventually go back to Linux, where at least I know that when something goes wrong, it’s generally my own fault and somewhat easy to troubleshoot. Unfortunately, the plugins I’ve been using only have Windows and Mac versions. If I had done a bit more research, I probably would have just gone with an apple device.
Sure, but why’s the coke mirror on the floor??
That’s not Shrek, that’s Marshall Applewhite
I’ve had the pleasure of working with this band several times — they are super nice, and I’m glad to see them getting some exposure. Looking forward to hosting them again later this year!
Definitely worth catching a live performance if they’ll be in your area.
I like this one
You’re probably right about fatcats collecting royalties from legacy artist catalogs/tying folks up in lopsided deals, and that probably won’t stop as long as capitalism is the prevailing system — they’ve got the money to buy what they want and set whatever terms they can use to exploit as much as possible.
On the grassroots side, I feel like the democratization of production has definitely lowered the barrier for entry, but just because someone can record their own music at home doesn’t mean they’ll be able to turn it into something viable to sell to an audience. Additionally, this democratization, I think, lends itself to certain genres more than others.
Sure, you can create a lo-fi album with an inexpensive microphone and a computer using (largely) freely-available software and samples, but if you’re producing rock, country, folk, jazz, blues, etc., you’ll likely require access to expensive instruments and even more expensive equipment to record said instruments.
And if someone does manage to produce on a low budget, then they have to get their work in front of an audience to make continuing their project worth their time and effort. Social media is the obvious answer, but now they have to cut through the noise of everyone else doing the same thing in the hope they can convince enough folks to listen, come see live performances, or otherwise buy their stuff. You’re basically, back to square one.
Once you’ve uploaded to a streaming service — while definitely a lower bar to entry than getting an album into national distribution before widespread adoption of the internet — you still find your art next to the big names, same as you would walking into an FYE in 1999. People being people are largely going to seek out the familiar names over the newcomers, sounds they’ve heard over the experimental and novel. Not to mention that the big labels are probably able to thumb the scales so that what they’re selling shows up in the algorithm first (just like paying for an end cap at Sam Goody back in the day).
So, now we have a bunch more folks listening to slicked-up, autotune country music that sounds closer to a pop album from the 2000s than they do to The Highwaymen, rather than seeking out something actually interesting like Dougie Poole’s album Freelancer’s Blues. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Now, what to do about all that? Again, same as it ever was: support your favorite independent artists, especially if they’re local. Attend shows, especially if they’re at your local independent venue, if you’re fortunate enough to have one in your area. Contact your local venues and tell them what artists you want to hear, and encourage like-minded friends to do the same. Buy merch from the bands and buy drinks from the bar, because that’s largely what keeps the bands and venues in the black. I don’t love these answers — they aren’t compatible with Marxism, and they can be at odds with notions of what it means to make art — but they are the reality of the situation, in my opinion.
Maybe in a better future, we’ll see more artist co-ops and other forms of horizontal organizing that sidestep the major labels and the fatcats. Maybe we’re in the middle of that process now, and I just can’t see it from my limited experience and the slow speed at which such industry-wide changes can happen until a cliff is reached. After all, you could go to any mall and find an FYE until you suddenly couldn’t.
Clappell Roan
The Spews
Pogs in a Pile
Grizzly Beer
Waylon Wennings