Random Thread

[malloc]

It really boggles my mind that scraping my hand on the sidewalk once counted as a major catastrophe. Today that probably wouldn't even register as anything more than a minor inconvenience. There really was a time when my life was genuinely fine, not great but certainly tolerable, and I never really stopped to appreciate it.

[Man in Space]

I have one week of vacation time. I am trying to record the drum tracks for the album. I get that this is a rental studio and there are other tenants entitled to use the rooms…but social gatherings where music loud enough to be heard several rooms down are negatively impacting my ability to record during the limited window I have. I’ve been here two and a half hours and have done very little in those regards because someone is playing the same song over and over again talking about finding someone “naked in [his] kitchen”.

I’d be much less upset if it was an actual band rehearsing.

[Man in Space]

There were three or four rooms (mine included) on the third floor yesterday that were occupied at some point. I think we all just kind of collectively intuited a sort of “turn order”, and I was able to get considerable progress made. I’m to go back later today and I hope to knock out two or three more recordings.

On Sunday we had some prospective members come to audition. It did not end up panning out. I’ve been back in the studio each day since, and after taking stock of the assets we had versus those we needed, I’ve been working on getting them tracked. I think this is the fifth time I’m doing the drums for it, because we have had such poor experiences with getting a mic setup that actually works well.

Case in point: had a mic that simply would not report with sufficient volume. Tried multiple positions, settings permutations…I’m at my wit’s end. Ben (who was absent at the time, but with whom I’m intermittently IMing with progress reports and questions) then suggests changing the cable. He was right. I wasted like two hours because I would never even have thought it could’ve been a cable problem. It was outside my theoretical observable universe. (Now I’m having the opposite problem with it!) More generally, I’ve gotten to know Reaper¹ quite a bit more. It has been quite frustrating at times, particularly when I kept blowing takes on (conceptually) simple tracks. Nonetheless I am quite pleased with how everything is going overall.

I purchased a souvenir Victory Fridge² on eBay as my birthday gift to myself. Yesterday I was refunded with the reason “lost/damaged”. Kind of a bummer. What I was able to do was obtain some elements for the cover shoot. For the longest time I was putting it off because I needed to learn how to operate a Cricut machine to cut a decal needed for one of the shoot elements; I was advised that local libraries sometimes have them, and one nearby (in Avon) does. On Sunday, though, I realized that I didn’t need to have a decal—superimposition with some editing would achieve a suitable effect, and a Cricut might struggle with some of the finer details of the design, to say nothing of how I’d have to print areas of color with little tolerance as to bleed space or margins.

- - - -

1. Our DAW⁴ of choice.
2. After the Browns went 0–16, Budweiser installed a number of chained coolers at locations around Cleveland. When they won their first game, the locks would be opened. Naturally, the Browns had their best season opening in years: 0–0–1. It was another few weeks before they won and Budweiser sold minifridges to commemorate the occasion. I wasn’t able to obtain one at the time.
3. The context for this was edited out but I typed it up and it’s an amusing anecdote. There’s one section of a piece where, when creating it, I literally asked Ben for a quarter, flipped it ten times, changed one result because otherwise I had five heads in a row and that was boring, and then came up with a five pairs of time signatures that would comprise the ten-measure phrases, one corresponding to heads and one to tails. Worked out to five changes per phrase, including the first measure. The only time signature of the ten that was an odd number over 16 was 11/16; everything else was /4 or /8, so naturally I (sub)counted per eighth (which equals a pair of sixteenths)…except one line went 3x11/16 - 2x7/8 - 11/16 - 2x7/8 - 2x11/16. That was near the end of the song.
4. Digital Audio Workstation.

[malloc]

Whatever happened to free samples in grocery stores? I remember seeing them all the time as a child but can't remember the last time I have seen them since then.

[Travis B.]

Whatever happened to free samples in grocery stores? I remember seeing them all the time as a child but can't remember the last time I have seen them since then.

Enshittification.

[tlacamazatl]

Warframe Scripts Review

https://youtu.be/wHISWmTCOWE

[lëtzeshark]

Enshittification.

I do see them on occasion in the grocery stores in Mettwurschtland Luxembourg (even sometimes samples of free wine!) and in the Nether Regions Netherlands, but they indeed aren't common and more often at the bigger grocery stores/hypermarkets on weekends. I remember the days when going to Sam's Club in the US could also mean eating a lot of free samples, but that wasn't the case the last time I was in one.

Random: I booked tickets to go back to the US for Christmas. As excited as I am to see my mother and my cats, I still don't like flying and am always a bit apprehensive about visits to the US. It'll also be interesting to see how the airport and navigating that stuff is different now that I have Luxembourgishness in addition to my US passport. (I already had "interesting" things as I was putting my passport details into the airline website, because they allowed me to enter the details for one passport, but not both...)

[Raphael]

Random: I booked tickets to go back to the US for Christmas. As excited as I am to see my mother and my cats, I still don't like flying and am always a bit apprehensive about visits to the US. It'll also be interesting to see how the airport and navigating that stuff is different now that I have Luxembourgishness in addition to my US passport. (I already had "interesting" things as I was putting my passport details into the airline website, because they allowed me to enter the details for one passport, but not both...)

Good luck!