Ricardus

I've actually wanted to do a documentary on dollar stores, and their proliferation as wages became more stagnant or fell. This idea came to me maybe 8 or 10 years ago. The punch line of the film (although different than this article) would be that they wouldn't be truly helpful until cars and houses became a dollar.

I still don't understand why G+ never caught on. For me FB is wayyyy too busy with panes and club, and groups, and businesses, and news, and election interference, and the bird site at 140, and now at 280 was just not enough. I always found G+ to be the perfect balance between the two. It really does boggle my mind that no one likes it. The only thing I can think, is Google didn't find a way to appeal to peoples' egos enough, since that's what social media seems to be about for most people.

Watch the Anvil doc for a sorta-of real-life Spinal Tap type story.

The Cove was a tough watch, but necessary.

Jesus Camp is another one if you want to be frightened by cultists and religion.

Grizzly Man was a tough watch for me. Treadwell clearly had massive self-esteem and likely mental health issues, which were on display in this film.

Wow. I'm a bog Doc fan. I'll list a few of my favs:

Touch the Sound. For me this was life changing. The story of a deaf percussionist. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424509/

Man on Wire. Also life changing. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155592/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Winnebago Man. Fascinating!You've probably seen his vids on youtube. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1396557/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Anvil: The Story of Anvil. I worked in the music scene in the 80s and heard of these guys, and always wondered what happened. This film answers that question. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1157605/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4

My Architect. A sons journey learning about his dad, through his dad's architecture. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373175/

There are jobs where I would absolutely never disclose being on the spectrum. Typical corporate 9-5 stuff. But my current gig is as a technical director at an art museum, and my aspie super power is technical stuff (as it relates to this) like lighting and sound. I have disclosed being on the spectrum to many people at work, and they didn't bat an eyelid. It's super mellow and SO not corporate. It's great. A perfect fit, really.

A lot of is is me hiding in the booth, so I don't have to interact with people if I don't want to, but pre-show stuff ALWAYS requires me to interact with artists. Thankfully I can fake that part. Usually when I demonstrate competence at the task at hand they don't care about the rest.

This is fascinating to me. What a nice hack. I always enjoy it when people find clever ways to undermine existing systems. I'll be installing this font shortly!

I'm certain a lot of my memories are fake. My dad was a big slideshow guy when I was very little. He used to take a lot of photos and never made prints, he always got slides, so he could put on the slideshow and spin yarns. Any number of my memories I think were planted during these slide shows of various vacations.

If you like stuff like this, follow curiousmarc on youtube. He volunteers there and helps with restorations, and does all kinds of cool restorations at home, too.

This is not just about tough working conditions. It's about the way management treats employees, and encourages employees to crap on other employees for small gains. Google "I was a distribution warehouse wage slave" and read that article. It will get you a better idea of what I am talking about.

I live a few miles from a Walmart distribution warehouse, and had a good friend who worked there. It really started to affect his health. The working conditions are horrible, and the culture promoted is toxic and demeaning. The money was a little above average for the area, but that's about the only thing positive he could say about it. When he left, his migraines went away.

I use and love linux, and have read many things about Linus being abusive and what not. I am on the spectrum and wasn't diagnosed til my 40s. Looking back on my earlier adult years, I was described as abrasive, obnoxious, and many others.

I tend not to suffer fools lightly, but somehow, on my own have learned better self-editing skills. Hopefully Linus will figure this out, because it truly will benefit everyone in the community.

Wow. Seems like weather would have wreaked havoc with that, but I guess it worked.

This would have been a hacker's paradise. Easy access to the phone system that Captain Crunch and Evan Doorbell would have salivated over!

I never fit into "normal" learning styles at all levels of school. I either grasped the subject intuitively and didn't need to be taught, or I didn't get it at all, and had to teach myself. I never quite understood this, but in my 40s a friend who had just read LOOK ME IN THE EYE, by Jon Elder Robison, suggested that I read the book, because I reminded her of him. I read the book and my head exploded. Not long after that I was officially diagnosed. It explained so many things and social failures over the entirety of my life. Knowing has been helpful but navigating social things, works things, and relationships of any and all types is still exceedingly difficult. Thankfully I can always escape into science fiction. :-)

People certainly seem to be unhappy on incredibly large scales these days. I read an interesting piece in what I think was the Atlantic 6-ish months ago, and it basically boiled down to: We're not broken, our culture is.

I wish I could find it again, but I haven't been able to, because it expresses perfectly ideas that I had been meaning to write, for some time.

I've been following curiousmarc's channel for a couple years. I love his videos. This teletype restoration is amazing. The most recent video on his channel is of him and the guys going to a place that sells replacement parts... for teletypes. I mean this guy they visit literally has every part you would need to repair, and probably build teletypes from scratch. They had everything Marc needed to complete his restoration. Amazing!

If my friend wanted to start producing content again, I'd do it in a second. Getting together for a few hours a week to create a ~45 minute podcast was tons of fun, and the conversation was very therapeutic.

I enjoyed the conversation. The back and forth. Many people have suggested I do something on my own, but I have no idea what that would be. And with stories like these, I'm less likely to dive in.

I'm an audio engineer so I enjoy the production end of things, but I enjoy video editing less than straight up audio editing. But people are suggesting I do some sort of youtube channel.

Ah, who knows! :-)

I don't find this surprising. When I started podcasting in 2005, even doing a weekly 'cast with my friend and co-host was a lot of work. We also had day jobs. But the pressure to create content was still there. These full time youtubers must feel in 100x more, particularly if they have Patreon people to keep happy. We derived no income from our show, and in fact it cost us money to produce.

In some ways I wish some of these monetizing platforms existed when we were around. It would have been fun to see if we could have gone anywhere with it. But then we might have succumb to these issues, as well.

I guess it all comes back to "Be careful what you wish for..."

Well DUH.

Two words: TOP GUN.

It was definitely fun to go to the computer lab in high school and play with/program the Commodore PETs. These were the 4K models with the chicklet keyboard.

I will say this though. I disagree with one word in the author's text. He said the machines of the time were "constrained." They weren't constrained at all. They had limitations just like today's machines do. But we weren't aware of the limitations because we weren't time travelers coming from the future with more computing power in our pockets than most corporations had in 1983.

In fact the exact opposite was true. The computer industry was bursting at the seams. It was exploding. It was not constrained at all.

Then they cloned the IBM PC and the rest is history. Every machine you're reading this post on descended from those.

The farther the microphone gets from your ears the harder the problem gets to solve. It's an interesting idea, but I suspect this won't see prime time in any meaningful way.

The MUTE solution sounds interesting, and is certainly worth some research, but I see it having some problems. One obvious one is that the receiver might stay in that guy's window, and you might be in the apartment, say 15 feet away, so within that distance you can overcome the latency issue that was mentioned (because radio waves travel faster than sound waves) but the fact remains you're 15 feet away from the microphone in the receiver, and by the time the sound reaches you, it has changed dramatically. It has reflected off of 1000 surfaces by then and looks a lot less like it did at the receiver. So creating a waveform that's 180 degrees out of phase would be a gigantic challenge. I suppose you could do some work with Impulse Responses to solve this. You could take an IR of the room where the listener is and probably account for a lot of the changes and use some DSP to modify the waveform to make it more correct. But then if you move somewhere else in the room, everything changes and needs to be recalculated. Interesting idea though.