Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 37

"I Sell Onions on the Internet"

https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/

I have a lot of respect for people whose tuba playing gets them laid.

*makes elephant tooting noise*

"Oh baby, I love the way you play that thing!"

I have a lot of respect for people whose tuba playing gets them laid.

*makes elephant fart noise*

"Oh baby, I love the way you play that thing!"

@blaha They didn't use it on the whole recording, though. They're always careful to be selective.

@blaha Right, for artistic reasons, it can have its place, I suppose.

@blaha When I hear a classic hit, I often wish they had better equipment, so I could hear what it would've sounded like live. I love it when they come across stuff like surprisingly high-quality audio or film from the 1940s. It feels like time travel. Listening to a lo-fi recording from 1936 places a distance between you and the performers, much like black-and-white film with scratchy sound does between you and the people in the film.

@blaha Back when analogue was still hot, hardly anyone could afford the gear we now idolise. At best, you could afford a Tascam Portastudio, and it wouldn't sound great. My recollection of analogue is that most of the gear your average person could afford had a high noise floor and low fidelity. I played around with simulated white noise, wow, flutter and vinyl clicks for a while, but in retrospect, I regret applying those effects to my recordings. It just reduced the quality.

- I'm not letting you enter the backstage area.

- Why not? Here's my press card. Let me in!

- Not with that equipment, you aren't.

- What do you mean?

- An iPhone and a Bluetooth mic? Come ooon...

- Look, this microphone has a better frequency response and SNR than a Neumann U87. Let me in!

- Let me see that Bode plot. *squints at paper and turns it*

- Well?

- All right, it checks out. I'll let you in, but next time, mount it on something heavy.

@blaha Apparently, integrated circuits aren't "rock'n'roll" enough.

@blaha But you get silly stuff like musicians who refuse to play in a venue with a digital mixer and have a clause against it in their riders. There's this whole "let's resist new technology" thing, especially with rock musicians.

@blaha Ah, yes, that photo. At least the musicians know what's going on there.

@jlelse People hate change, and if you're a bike repairman, you probably don't like the fact that everything contains electronics now, much like I didn't like that games were turning 3D in the late 1990s, because my 2D game coding skills were suddenly outdated, and I didn't know any linear algebra at the time, and thus couldn't participate, so I nurtured an opposition to them. As I learned more about 3D programming, that opposition vanished.

@jlelse It looks like a way of compensating for a lack of ability or knowledge to me. A lot of geeks want to build their own retro computer, for example, but why not just buy one? I wanted to build one for a while, but the real reason that wasn't an interest in retro computers - it was because a retro computer seemed easier to build for a hobbyist than something more up-to-date.

If you think audiophiles are a strange breed, let me introduce you to professional musicians. Like the audiophile, the professional musician is convinced that particular pieces of old gear are imbued with magic that somehow can't be measured by an engineer or replicated by digital filters.

When they buy equipment, it's an emotional decision. They want a particular look and feel. You could put digital chips in a big and heavy box with knobs on it and they'd be none the wiser.

Someone who used to work for my company runs a repair shop for old guitar pedals and synthesizers.

They have a fervent hatred for anything with chips or SMT components in it, and explicitly refuse to repair equipment from Behringer or similar brands.

They also make a big deal out of their love for and mastery of equipment that uses valves.

It reminds me quite a bit of the various churches and notions of superiority that you find in IT and software development.

@dick_turpin You could say she's quite up-front about things.

There's a female engineer at work that I haven't met before. She apparently works at our Trondheim branch. She's wearing a T-shirt with a photo of a pair of boobs on it. Subtle.

@Gargron Further, social progress has no clear definition. We just decide that some particular state of affairs is superior to our current state of affairs, and define that as progress. It has momentum and thus direction, but who decides what's backward and forward? It's easy to define progress in STEM fields, not so easy in social science.