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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I have to tell you, I know many intelligent people that have succumbed to propaganda, and outrage porn addiction. I see it continue to happen on all sides of the political isle. (This isn’t a both sides kind of statement, simply acknowledgement that the same tactics work on our brain, indifferent of political ideology.)

    Whether they are hooked on the dopamine rush of rage baiting up votes, likes or comments; or only seeing everything in the world through a myopic lens of negativity, it has captured many of my friends and family, including myself for a time.

    For some their drug is Fox News, others it’s Reddit, Facebook or TikTok, the results are often the same.

    I have yet to figure out a manner in which to communicate with individuals who spend considerable amounts of time in echo chambers, constantly having their personal beliefs reinforced. Evasion of cognitive dissonance and social conflict are very powerful psychological motivations. I wish I knew the solution.


  • I have a friend who has come to reflect this exact behavior to an extraordinary degree of accuracy.

    It’s interesting because the near puritanical nature of their responses to nearly anything has become more extreme than even the most devoutly religions individuals. Obviously the focus of their evangelizing is very different, but it has become difficult to even have a conversation.

    I’ll give you an example: I saw a new game called Pal World, which looked absurd, mentioned and was instantly met with the fact that the game was unacceptable because it supports forced labor.

    Additionally, there seems to be an immense amount of hypocrisy in regards to what is good and what is bad, largely driven by what best I can refer to as their “leftist Zeitgeist.” As bad as I can tell now, according to them, I am a liberal, and apparently liberals are bad, and the only true salvation is being a leftist?

    Of course, I have a much more varied and complex set of moral and political values that likely don’t fall under a singular label… But what do I know about anything.



  • Now that we have a six week abortion ban, with abortion on the ballot as a state constitutional amendment, and one for legalized recreational marijuana, there is a very significant chance for Florida to be in play.

    Many people here are very upset with the state of insurance, especially homeowners. The Biden campaign just came out and said they will be targeting Florida to flip it.

    Every vote will count, remember a few thousand votes gave us Rick Scott, we have a chance to remove him as well. There’s a lot at stake this year.



  • Given the reality that Linux simply isn’t viable for some people (including myself), I highly recommend using this tool.

    https://christitus.com/windows-tool/

    Between this, and manually uninstalling a lot of bloat (or using a specific type of windows install) and a few other tweaks, windows becomes significantly more usable.

    Disabling garbage in the task bar, removing Cortana and indexing services, etc etc, it can also add a fairly decent uplift in performance.

    I’m sure there is still telemetry being collected but significantly less and less impact on my user experience and day to day performance.

    Oh and make sure you turn off auto/feature updates!



  • It greatly depends on the traffic pattern here! I also mentioned this to another reply, but our county has IMO very poorly designed traffic patterns for road crossing. It will generally turn white with a walk sign for a few seconds, and then quickly shift to a flashing red hand indicator with a count down, which means you have X number of seconds remaining to walk until the full red hand (don’t walk) shows up. Flashing red hand symbol IMO is not the best indicator for “you can still walk.”

    The times I’ve had this happen are at very large intersections that have 3 lanes each way on one side and 2 lanes per side on the cross road. With lead greens, and various traffic patterns the walk signs do follow a specific pattern, but there are also opportunities for right on red without the pedestrian having right of way. This mostly occurs during the transitional periods, and during lead greens, which can be a significant amount of time in intersections of this size.

    Yes of course it’s the motorists job to avoid running over pedestrians, I don’t think that was ever a question.





  • I think the mixing being different is likely dependent upon how good the engineer and mastering engineers are/were. I’d wager a fair number of bands releasing their albums to vinyl these days simply send over a very similar final master (maybe slightly less loud if you are lucky) to the vinyl cutting without much thought, because it’s the hip thing to do.

    You are accurate, that they should ensure that low frequencies are mono compatible, but it is likely less of an issue for the style of music most associated with vinyl releases (indi etc), as stylistically they don’t tend to use stereo widening on low frequency instruments. Generally they have kick and bass down the center channel, or I suppose going mono style out of L/R if they are trying to be really old school, but that would likely take a completely different mix adding to production budget as I can’t imagine if would work to well on phones etc, which a lof of music is mix for unfortunately.

    None of the artists I produce or mix for have requested it yet, but if they did I would send them to Fuller Sound Mastering as Michael has been around for ages and knows how to handle masters for vinyl.

    Vinyl cutting also has an EQ curve offset that is printed into the vinyl itself, cutting the bass and boosting the high frequency, which is then re-applied by the players preamp circuitry, I believe it’s referred to as pre and de-emphasis. Funny enough my mastering DAC actually has this feature for some kind of old early CD technology for some lower resolution digital formats that had issues with noise and filtering and used a similar technology, I had never heard of this until I purchased this particular unit haha.