Rov_Scam
18hr ago
In a similar spirit, I listened to three Christmas albums front to back while I was cleaning the house yesterday, and I will review them here:
Emmylou Harris—Light of the Stable (1979)
Progressive Country was the 1970s reaction to what was perceived as an increasingly homogenized and commercialized Nashville sound. The most notable expression of it was in the Outlaw Country of Waylon and Willie, but the genre was much broader, and included anyone who emphasized the folk/blues/roots music that country was based on. It was the progenitor of what we would now call Americana. Emmylou Harris was part of this movement (if you could call it a movement), and had one of the most consistent album runs of any country musician I've heard; Boulder to Birmingham may be one of the finest country songs of all time, and everything she released bewteen 1975 and 1981 is worth listening to. Except for this. Granted, there's nothing particularly offensive about it, but it's mostly just unspectacular traditional country versions of Christmas songs. I say mostly because the title track is the exception, and deserves to be part of the contemporary Christmas music canon. Harris may not be a household name, but one would think that the guest vocals by Dolly Parton, Neil Young, and Linda Ronstadt would count for something. Then again, this was actually released as a single back in 1975, and the album recorded four years later mostly as padding, so whether it's even necessary is questionable. 3/5.
Elvis Presley—Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas (1971)
This could also be called Elvis Sings Lame Renditions of Bad Christmas Songs for Money. The program contains 2 sacred Christmas songs, 2 traditional pop Christmas songs, a bunch of conemporary country Christmas songs that are so uninspired that none were good enough to be released as singles, and a decent version of Merry Christmas Baby. I say decent because it doesn't hold a candle to the Charles Brown original. The contemporary material wouldn't be horrible, except it's overly reliant on key changes to keep the forward momentum, and they include a vocal group called The Imperials who sound like they also did the Love Theme from Airplane. 2/5.
Bright Eyes—A Christmas Album (2002)
Bright Eyes is the project of Conor Oberst, a North Carolina singer/songwriter/indie rocker who released a bunch of shitty, half-written, self-indulgent albums before finding his footing circa 2005 and absolutely killing it thereafter. Indie rockers don't often release Christmas albums, but when they do they usually consciously try to do something other than go through the motions, and this album is no exception. Unfortunately, this means that we get what is possibly the only slowcore Christmas album. The 11 cuts are all either sacred or secular classics played in a way seemingly intended to make a festive season outright depressing. To make matters worse, he fumbles the ball by using Frank Sinatra's jollied-up lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" rather than the depressing original ones. It gets bonus points for trying, and there's reason to listen to this, even if you won't want to listen to it again. 2.5/5.
It's striking how often lists of "worst pop songs ever" are really lists of perfectly adequate pop songs with bad (or "offensive") lyrics e.g. perennials like Paul Anka's "You're Having my Baby" or Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" — I don't think anyone would argue that either song is especially obnoxious from a compositional or performance standpoint.
"You're Having My Baby" is terrible from any standpoint, and the lyrics only make it worse. "MacArthur Park" is brilliant and was recognized as such at the time, but it suffered from three huge problems that have made it a Boomer punchline in the years since. The first is the unfortunate lyric about the cake, which is really the only thing that's remarkable about they lyric but nonetheless sounds ridiculous. The second problem is that in the musical world post-Sgt. Pepper there were a lot of attempts to write pop music with the same level of sophistication as classical music, and while MacArthur Park was definitely in this vein it featured an overwrought arrangement behind an actor who couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. The final reason is that a decade later Donna Summer recorded a disco version. While disco's critical reputation has been salvaged in the years since, contemporary observers are generally talking about stuff like Chic that has some degree of R&B grounding, not Giorgio Moroder's Euro-trash arrangements. That song is an object lesson in why people began to hate disco.
But it's otherwise a great song. For years my only exposure to the song was my dad's vinyl copy of Maynard Ferguson's Live at Jimmy's album, and the big band version included on it is a tour de force. Pretty much every high school band director I knew loved that version, and I've played various arrangements of it in community bands and the like over the years. It's a shame that these days it's seen as nothing more than a punchline.
It occurred to me this year that I literally cannot think of any song where, if forced to choose between listening to this song and another song, I would pick "Merry Xmas Everybody": it is just that annoying.
I'd rather listen to this than anything by Frankie Does a Pound of Blow, Bangs a Hooker in the Back of His DeLorean, Then Watches Miami Vice and Drinks New Coke. I don't have a problem with that song, though they probably don't play it on the radio as much over here as they do in the British Isles. In any event, Wizzard is much better, if only because a.) Roy Wood actually wanted to do a Christmas song and wasn't acting at the behest of his manager, and b.) They understood that a glam Christmas song would work best if the 50s nostalgia factor was cranked to 11. Remember, this was the year American Graffiti came out.
The chord progressions and instrumental arrangement still sound fresh and unexpected eighty years later, and the production is warm and intimate.
Interestingly enough, the version that's almost universally played is actually a rerecording. Nat King Cole originally recorded this in 1946 with the King Cole Trio (Cole on piano plus bass and guitar). The first version is jazzier and only features the trio. The original hit version was the first version released and uses the same arrangement as the common version, though Cole's voice wasn't as mature as it would later become and still has bit of an R&B flavor. He recorded it again in 1953 to get a higher fidelity version on magnetic tape. Nelson Riddle, best known for his work with Frank Sinatra, provides an arrangement that is faithful to the original but a bit lusher. The mono recording also has Cole's vocals more forward. The version you are almost certainly familiar with is the stereo version from 1961, by which point Cole's voice had fully matured.
(it's no accident that "who originally sang AIWFCIY" is a common Google search: it does legitimately sound like a song first composed in the 60s and given a fresh arrangement by Carey in the 90s, and I mean that as a compliment)
Soul singer Carla Thomas did record All I Want for Christmas Is You in 1963. But it's an entirely different song so I guess it doesn't count. It's also not very good.
the nostalgic-yet-venomous lyrics make it easily the most bittersweet Christmas song ever composed.
I always felt that this was the song's Achilles Heel; as much as it tries to be cynical, it's really just a love song. If you want unfiltered Christmas cynicism listen to Blue Xmas by Miles Davis. Guest singer Bob Dorough does not sound as if he's capable of experiencing joy. If that's a bit too blunt, there's [I Bought You a Plastic Star for Your Aluminum Tree] by Michael Franks, who balances his cynicism with humor rather than sentimentality. Franks and Dorough both being Jews probably has something to do with this.
Anything by Michael Bublé:
There's a scene in the movie Ray where one of the guys in the booth is irritated that Ray seems to be imitating Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. Buble inhabit the uncanny valley where it isn't clear if he's trying to imitate Frank Sinatra or Mel Torme, all with a healthy dose of auto-tune on top to make things even weirder.
The Cult of Springsteen isn't as hard to understand as the Cult of Dylan (unlike Bob Dylan, Springsteen can carry a tune, and I can't argue with the sheer majesty of "Born to Run"), but the more of his music I'm exposed to the more overrated I find him*, and many of his affectations seem just as contrived as those of, say, Bono.
I once heard someone describe Springsteen's music as sounding like it was taken from a musical about rock and roll, and I have to say I agree. It's not so much that there's anything particularly bad about his music, it's just that it's dripping with so much blue collar earnestness that it verges on parody. To get back to the Wizzard song, one thing Roy Wood understood is that 50s throwbacks have a certain amount of inherent cheesiness and that by embracing that cheese you can toe the line between parody and earnest tribute; hell, Ween made an entire career on toeing that line. But it's a fine line, and on the other side of it is Meatloaf, an artist who actually cut his teeth in rock musicals. The cult of Dylan makes more sense to me because Dylan was instrumental in moving the music beyond where it was in the early 1960s. Springsteen inspired John Mellencamp and Melissa Etheridge but the whole Heartland Rock thing was basically a stylistic dead end.
I have to admit, the Cult of Swift is one of the things I find most baffling and alienating about the modern era. I'll hear people gush about how memorable and timeless her songs are, and then I listen to them and they sound functionally indistinguishable from those of any other teenybopper (by popular consensus her artistic peak was "All Too Well", and to me that sounds like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that they left off the album for not meeting their rigorous quality control standards).
I've felt the same way for a long time. For all of the hype Sift gets there is maybe one song that I'd recognize as hers, and it isn't due to lack of exposure, to be sure. I can't even say that I necessarily dislike her; everything I've heard has been in one ear and out the other. It's like her music is so unmemorable that my memory of it is being erased in real time.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
If 90%+ of the pizza sold in the US were frozen pizza and most people didn't think the difference in quality was salient enough to spend a few extra bucks on pizzeria pizza even occasionally, then I'd agree with you. But almost everyone agrees that frozen pizza is an inferior convenience product in a way they don't for coffee that you don't grind yourself. If I'm visiting friends whose culinary habits I'm unfamiliar with for the weekend and they tell me in advance that we'll be having pizza for dinner Friday night, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if they made frozen pizza, but I wouldn't think "wow, these people must be really into pizza" if they made it themselves or ordered from a shop. I would think they were more into coffee than the average bear if I wake up on Saturday morning and they're grinding coffee beans.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
No, I'm saying that if the only watermelon you like is some special cultivar that's only available in specialty stores, costs 20 dollars and has to be prepared in a very particular way, it's safe to say you don't really like watermelon.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Obviously, this is the Steelers year. While I'm obviously hoping for this outcome as a fan, this is more intriguing because to a certain type of Steelers fan this would be the worst possible scenario. For the past five years, there's been an unending chorus of people talking about how the Steelers suck and Tomlin needs to go, they're running a JV offense from the 90s, hasn't won a playoff game since the 2016 season, etc. I even have friends who think that being 9–8 or 10–7 is the worst possible place you can be because you don't even get a good draft pick. When people talk about firing Tomlin I jokingly tell them that Hue Jackson is available. This never seems to faze them much, largely because 1.) They obviously assume that the Steelers will hire a head coach who is better than 90% of people who have coached in the NFL since Tomlin was hired, and 2.) The correct hire obviously isn't a black guy.
This second point plays into it a lot more than you'd expect. While most Tomlin haters don't really give a shit about race, a not-insignificant percentage of them do, and plenty will openly tell you that the guy was a Rooney Rule hire who isn't qualified to carry Bill Cowher's jock strap. The fact that the man won a Super Bowl plays no part in this, because apparently "that was Cowher's team". Setting aside the fact that assembling the team isn't the job of the head coach, and if it were the Steelers would have selected an O-lineman over Ben Roethlisberger, the fact is that Cowher, in his last year, went 8–8 with a team that was one year removed from a championship, Tomlin only won in his second year, and he managed to go to a Super Bowl in 2010, four years after Cowher left and five after Cowher's last championship.
This argument gets even more idiotic when you consider the full implications of it; if it were true, the upshot would be that the Steelers haven't won a Super Bowl since 2008 because the teams simply weren't good enough to win one. Except the Tomlin haters will also tell you that there's no excuse for not winning when they had Bell and Antonio Brown. Well, which is it guys? Is he bad at assembling a team or a bad game-day coach? It obviously isn't the latter because he managed to win a Super Bowl and play in another one. One guys seriously told me that a team as good as the 2008 team coached itself and didn't need Tomlin. Ok, whatever. The other thing that really irks me about these people is that the argument only applies to Tomlin. The Penguins have won five Stanley Cups, not one of them with a coach beyond his first full season with the team. Bob Johnson is the most beloved coach in team history, but he only coached here for one year, and no one said that he only won because he had Gene Ubriaco's players. Scotty Bowman is a coaching legend and won it for them in Johnson's absence, but the players hated him and he didn't stay long-term. Fast forwarding to the Sid era, and Bylsma won his lone cup in a year where he took over late in the season. Ditto Mike Sullivan, who won two cups in consecutive years, the first after the much-maligned Mike Johnston was fired the previous December. Ed Olczyk was the coach when they drafted Sid and Geno; should he get all the credit despite being patently (and obviously) unqualified?
A Steelers Super Bowl win would mean that these people need to find more excuses to hate Tomlin, and this season gives them plenty of creative avenues to pursue. Steelers fans are historically known for being fickle, going from doomerism to confidence in a Super Bowl victory in the span of a single play. LAtely, though, everyone seems convinced that the team still sucks, regardless of how well they are playing. Aaron Rodgers looks positively elderly on TV, the most expensive defense in the league's play ranges from average to horrible, Patrick Queen is a disappointment (except when he isn't), Jaylen Warren should totally be a bell cow back (ha!), Arthur Smith runs a shitty offensive scheme that won't pass to the middle of the field (along with the rest of the league), they get lucky for getting so many turnovers, the offensive line absolutely sucks (despite advanced stats saying otherwise), the team loses games they should win, wins games they should lose because of "bullshit", and gets dog walked every time they play a good team (except when they manhandled the Colts). There would be nothing more satisfying than this purported disaster winning a championship in the shittiest way possible.
*As an aside, having a white coach would not make the racially based hatred disappear if that coach has anything other than a championship season. When Cowher was here people hated him too (how quickly we forget!) and came up with racial rumors that were just bizarre: Cowher and Kordell Stewart were secret gay lovers, which is why Kordell was still QB; Kordell was still QB because Cowher was having an affair with his sister; and Cowher impregnated a black woman who works for the Steelers. This last one is my favorite because it didn't explain anything. It should also be noted that the first one was an outgrowth of the rumor that Kordell Stewart had been arrested at Schenley Park's notorious "fruit loop", a public running track that's notorious for anonymous gay sex. There is no public record of such an arrest, but Stewart had to make an announcement to the team about how he wasn't gay, and every Pittsburgher's uncle knows the cop who arrested him.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
And you expect them to do what, exactly? The issue here isn't access; the Venezuelans are perfectly willing to sell their oil to the US at favorable prices. Yet Trump made it so Citgo couldn't do what limited business they were doing down there at the time. We're already at an advantage on that front to begin with since US companies are among the few that can actually refine the toothpaste sludge that they call oil down there. And even if the Bolivaran regime absolutely refused to sell us oil or grant US companies concessions, it wouldn't matter that much, since it's a global market. If there is some future where Venezuelan oil is the only game in town, Chevron isn't going to sell it at a favorable price to the American consumer, I can tell you that right now. Whatever impediments there are to our "having" that oil are entirely political.
But even if we assume that the Venezuela won't sell us oil under the current government and won't grant US companies concessions and the only way to get access is to regime change their asses, it still doesn't make sense unless you're hopelessly naive about the way oil concessions actually work. A freindly, Democratic Venezuelan government is not going to grant some magic lease that lets US companies sit on their asses for fifty years. Any oil deal, whether you're talking about a private lease in the US or an international concession, is going to require a certain amount of activity in order to retain the rights. For instance, here if you sign a lease with a company to drill on your farm and it will call for something like a 5 year primary term with a $3,000/acre bonus payment and a 15% royalty. What this means is that the comp[any has to pay you $300,000 up front for the right to drill a well within the next 5 years. If they drill a well and start paying royalties then the lease holds until the well stops producing. If the term expires and they haven't done anything then they're out the $300,000 and you're free to lease it to someone else.
International concessions are a lot more complicated, but the same principles apply. The biggest difference is that up-front bonus payments don't normally apply, but there's usually a commitment to start development within the first year, and the company is contractually obligated to spend millions of dollars on development. Whether you're a private landowner or a sovereign government, there's an expectation that if you give away something of value you expect something of value in return. Governments don't grant concessions so they'll eventually get paid when the grantee feels like doing something; if you're not going to act now they'll grant a concession to someone who will.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Fine, eliminate Starbucks from the equation. That's where the vast majority of whole bean coffee is going, and the typical Starbucks customer certainly isn't grinding their own beans at home. But even at the independent shops I go to it seems like half the menu is sugary concoctions and I often have to clarify that, yes, I just want a black coffee.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Except what OP is describing isn't $thing either. What OP is describing is a 1990s invention that was only possible because of mass-market industrialization and technological advancement. If you go back to the way the Turks were drinking coffee around the time it was introduced in Europe, beans were roasted in a pan over an open fire, ground using a mortar and pestle, boiled in sugar water and drunk unfiltered. The roast was unlikely to be consistent let alone follow the precise roasting curves of today, and I don't know of any try-hard coffee snobs who would approve of the brewing method. Even the seemingly simple pourover wasn't invented until the 20th century, well into the era of industrial coffee production. There isn't some question of authenticity involved here, because historically "authentic" coffee probably tastes like crap.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I guess you and @Muninn just don't like coffee very much. I'm being serious. Most people buy their coffee in giant tubs of Folgers or Maxwell House. Most of the "high end" coffee is sold pre-ground in bags at grocery stores. Most of the premade coffee people buy isn't from dedicated coffee shops but from diners, gas stations, and fast food restaurants. Go to a grocery store and see what percentage off coffee on the shelves is whole bean. Dedicated coffee shops usually do grind their own beans, but that market is dominated by Starbucks. I'm of the opinion that if you discount 90% of the market as undrinkable garbage, you don't actually like coffee. It's like someone who says they "really like pizza" but they'll only eat Neapolitan-style pizza with basil and fresh mozzarella.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I spent a decade in the oil and gas industry and I've always found Republicans' attitudes towards energy policy rather curious. On the one hand, they have a "drill baby drill!" mentality, and they express support for American energy companies. On the other hand, they talk about lowering prices for consumers. These are contradictory positions. When I was working in oil and gas, like most people, my livelihood was tied to how much my company could sell its product for, and the more we could sell it for, the more I got paid. The headiest times in my career were when oil was well over $100/bbl in the summer of 2014 and everyone was making money hand over fist. Of course, gas was $5/gallon adjusted for inflation, and conservatives were blaming Obama for hamstringing the energy industry. By February 2016, the price of oil had crashed, and there were mass layoffs, my office was down to a skeleton crew, and these were obviously also Obama's fault because he was hamstringing the industry. But gas was down to $2.50/gallon.
In other words, they expect good energy policy to mean constant drilling, even though constant drilling just isn't profitable. If oil is cheap they aren't going to spend billions of dollars on well starts. Most of the work I was doing in 2015/2016 was asset assignments from companies looking to unload their holdings to large investors, or smaller operators getting bough out by big companies like Consol and EQT. There was a modest rebound in 2017, which some people attributed to Trump, but the crash at the end of 2019 was worse than anything under Obama because it was clear that it wasn't turning around any time soon. We could muddle through 2016 with a skeleton crew, but 2019 spelled the end of my firm's oil and gas division. The Trump years have been pretty meh overall from an industry perspective, so the idea that Republicans are somehow good for the oil and gas industry is hogwash, since we had bigger highs and shallower lows under both Obama and Biden.
So when he talks about taking Venezuelan oil, I'm not sure how this is supposed to benefit either the oil and gas industry or the American consumer. Oil is currently trading around $55/bbl. Rig counts are dropping and are down about 30% from their Biden-era highs. Producers aren't drilling the oil they already have access to; giving them more isn't going to do much, especially when that oil is expensive to access and in a war zone. It's no surprise then that when Trump reached out to industry leaders earlier this week, reps from companies like Exxon and ConocoPhillips said point blank that they had no interest in resurrecting the Venezuelan oil industry with prices at five year lows. It's almost as if he doesn't understand how the laws of supply and demand work. If he were really concerned with how much American consumers are paying at the pump—which isn't much, historically—he'd strike a deal with Maduro to flood the US market with Venezuelan oil and use whatever money he had planned on spending on the war and use it to subsidize the US oil companies outright. This is a terrible policy for a number of reasons, but it's still better than the idiocy we have now.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
The theory was that Manson was convinced that the US was on the verge of a race war that the blacks would win, but they wouldn't be able to effectively govern afterwards and would look to him as the new leader of America. The murders were a way of initiating the race war because the police would blame them on blacks and racial tension would ensue, both from whites who were outraged and blacks who were falsely accused. That's at least the theory that Bugliosi ran with to get a conviction.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Depends on the building. If it's a large building with a transient population, you can walk in behind someone and act like you live there and they won't question it. But it looks like this was a small building, and if a professor lives there there's a greater chance that it's the kind of place people stay a while. From the pictures it looks like there are maybe four apartments per entrance. In a building like this, it's probable that everyone knows their neighbors, which makes surrepetitiously entering much more difficult.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
The only problem is that most multi-unit buildings require a key, and guests have to be buzzed in. They're also likely to be under video surveillance.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Looking at the actual survey:
This survey was commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com and conducted online by the survey platform Pollfish on November 2, 2022. In total, 1,000 participants in the U.S. were surveyed. All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace.
Pollfish is a site that pays people ridiculously small amounts of money to take commissioned surveys. The way it works is that the kind of people who are induced by exchanging 5 minutes of their time for 25 cents will take the survey and are then asked questions at the end to do the demographic filtering. If they don't meet the demographic criteria they don't get paid, but from what I can tell a lot of these people just take the survey again and answer the demographic questions differently. In other words, what happened here is Resume Builder paid Pollfish to conduct a 1,000 person survey. Rather than polling known hiring managers at random, they put the poll on their website for people to opt into and did no meaningful verification that these were actual hiring managers. When they got 1,000 responses they closed the poll. I wouldn't take the results too seriously.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
And his examples are: TV writing, editorial staff of swanky East Coast publications, and tenure track humanities professors at Ivy League schools (not just tenure track professors at Ivy League schools; tenure track humanities professors). I'm sorry, but if your professional success rides on getting any of these positions, you need to reevaluate how realistic your goals are. These are high-paying positions in competitive fields; there's a good chance that you're not getting the job regardless of what the DEI policies of the employer are. Why doesn't he talk about budget analysts for a regional logistics company, or Civil Engineer II at a national contractor that mostly does electric transmission infrastructure, or purchasing agent for a company that manufactures forklift parts? You know, the kinds of jobs that most people apply for with a realistic chance of getting.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Initial reports from whom? Any reputable media organization? Or people on Reddit? I couldn't find anything about this woman from a reputable source. What I do know is that the police released the 911 call last week as evidence in the suppression hearing and the woman on the call most certainly wasn't an 85-year-old volunteer but someone in management who said she was reluctantly making the call at the behest of customers who insisted she do so. I mean, what's the theory here, that the police already knew who he was and where he was and made up a fictitious person to take credit for the arrest then inexplicably decided to do a U-turn, even though it would have been abundantly clear to law enforcement from the beginning that she may have to testify at trial? Not to mention that there were interviews with McDonald's patrons who were there at the time of the arrest referring to the woman as a manager. I'm not sure what the theory is here.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I think the issue here is that we're finding out now how much of a hash the police in Altoona made of the initial arrest, and the fact that so much of the key evidence stems from this arrest makes the prosecution a little dicier than it seemed initially. When the arrest first occurred it appeared to me, based on the reporting, that Mangione had consented to a search, which makes sense because anyone stupid enough to carry obviously incriminating evidence around with him for several days after committing murder would probably also be stupid enough to consent to a search. Now it looks like the police may have not obtained consent and instead relied on specious reasoning to determine they had probable cause and didn't need a warrant.
Now, whether this was a mistake is theoretical, because it doesn't appear to me that they would have had any justification to either get a search warrant or detain him based on an identification of a McDonald's employee who had never seen him before. The police were under pressure to investigate every lead, no matter how improbable, and I doubt they wanted it to come out later that someone had identified a mystery man whom they had questioned briefly but had eventually gotten away with a backpack that may have had incriminating evidence in it. Anyway, I suspect the judge will find the search justified and allow the case to go to trial because it's obvious that Mangione is guilty and any technicalities are an issue for the appellate court. But it looks like the police may have actually fucked up here.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I think the real answer might just be that the nature of the investigation was such that it was going to take a lot of time no matter what, unless they were extraordinarily lucky. In most criminal investigations you can narrow the suspect pool pretty quickly and get enough information to start looking at individuals more closely. Here, the only chance of being able to do that was if there was an eyewitness who was able to provide a description of the perpetrator, or a credible tip, and it appears that neither was in play in this case. So you're looking at the tedious prospect of having to examine license plate scans, cell phone tower data, and credit card information, which implicates thousands of people, but not to the extent that you can get a search warrant or anything.
And then to make matters worse you have a ton of people in from out of town which means more rental cars than usual, which adds an extra step, but more importantly makes it more likely that the materials weren't sourced locally, so now instead of chasing pipe bought in the DC area you're looking at every hardware store that sold the stuff across the country.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
When you're in the real world looking at things motion will blur as you move your head. When you're watching a movie staring at the screen not moving, this doesn't happen. The upshot is that things that would blur in real life don't blur in the screen, and it looks fake. There are also issues where screen refresh rates are designed to be in multiples of 24 and not 60, which make the frame rate out of sync with the refresh rate and causes a stutter effect.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
The way sample rates work, per the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, is that in order to represent a frequency in a signal we need to sample at twice that frequency. Since humans can hear a maximum of 20k, we would only need 40k to represent that. Accounting for some additional effects that require a bit of headroom, CD samples at 44.1k and DVD at 48k. Those sampling rates weren't chosen arbitrarily, but for the specific purpose of being able to accurately record and reproduce the full spectrum of human hearing. All sampling any higher does is increase the theoretical limit of high frequencies that can be carried on the medium. I say theoretical because microphones aren't designed to record supersonic frequencies and speakers and amplifiers aren't designed to reproduce them. So all 192k recording means is that, assuming you were able to record it, the medium could theoretically encode frequencies up to 96khz, or nearly quintuple the limit of human hearing. Professionals will record at this rate, but that's because when the files are manipulated digitally having headroom prevents certain bad things from happening if they're opened and saved a lot, though I'm not sure of the exact science behind this. Suffice it to say that higher sampling rates offer no benefit to the consumer.
The story is similar with bit depth. CDs are recorded at 16 bit, but modern "Hi Res" formats go up to 24 bit and probably higher if you look for it. All this does is lower the noise floor. There's a certain amount of noise inherent in digital recording due to rounding off the last bit, and it sounds similar to tape hiss. You've probably never heard it because it's at -96db at 16 bit. By comparison, the noise floor in the best analog sources is at -70, and that's only if you're using filters; it's more like -32 db naturally. An unusually dynamic recording is going to have around 20db of dynamic range, a more typical recording will be in the 14db range, and most contemporary loudness war recordings will have less than 10 db. The amount of music that exists that goes between being so quiet you'd struggle to hear anything and as loud as standing next to a freight train is nonexistent, and the technology already allows for that. 24 bit just lowers the noise floor to -144db, which is quieter, but with the noise floor already so low as to be inaudible at normal listening levels, the extra range is completely pointless, although if you needed to record and incredibly quiet sound and a jet engine takeoff on the same recording then hey, go for it.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
My cousin works for Verizon and says no. He says that what's going on is that Facebook is just showing you the same ads as your friends, which could happen if they search for something you were talking about and you don't. There's selection bias here, too; nobody accounts for all the times they talked about something and weren't shown an ad for it.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
I've believed for a long time that conspiracy theories in general are a cope to deal with the fact the people who are in charge of our institutions are just people, like everyone else, and even when competent, they simply aren't capable of being perfect all the time. When there's universal agreement that things like presidential assassinations, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks shouldn't happen, and shouldn't be able to happen, it's oddly reassuring to blame them on the malevolence of a shady cadre of global elites because if this is the case, then the solution—getting rid of the malevolent actors—is simple. If instead such tragic events can happen despite competent, well-meaning, hard-working people doing their jobs, this lack of control makes things much scarier.
I don't want to dwell on dark subjects, so I'll go back to media remastering, which is about as low-stakes as you can get. For the past decade or so, I've made a habit of chasing down the best-sounding versions of audio recordings I want to add to my collection. In a rational world, this would mean simply finding the most recent releases, since one would normally expect that the continuing improvement of technology and best practices would yield increasingly superior results. Of course, you don't have to get too into the weeds to know about the "loudness wars" in CD (and now digital) mastering has hobbled sound quality since the late 90s, leading some to believe that the earlier versions when they didn't do this must be superior, but even then the answer is not always clear cut. And even going back to the original vinyl doesn't solve the problem. With any given release possibly having dozens of unique versions, finding the best one through trial and error would be expensive (especially if you're trying to get your paws on rare or foreign issues), and there are no quick and dirty rules you can follow.
The best resource for researching this is the Steve Hoffman forum, hosted by the namesake mastering engineer known for his high-quality audiophile issues. While Mr. Hoffman's warm, buttery sound is controversial, his forum attracts people from the industry, and there's a lot of inside baseball regarding the way things actually operate, a lot of it coming from Steve's own recollections. While things have changed in the recording world since the introduction of the compact disc and subsequent changeover to all-digital recording, an explanation of how the process worked in the vinyl era is instructive on the pitfalls of trying to remaster older recordings for CD.
Say an album is recorded in 1975. The band recorded that album to multitrack tape. Once the recording was finished, the engineers mixed the album down to a two-tack stereo tape, called the studio master, at which point their role in the process ended. But the tape still had to make it onto a vinyl record. The studio master, or a copy, would be sent to a mastering studio where this conversion was done. The limitations of the format required that bass be cut and treble boosted on the record according to a standardized formula, the end user's equipment reversing this process during playback (this is why a special phono preamp is required to use a record player with a stereo). The mastering engineer would also make other adjustments so that the recording would fit within vinyl's physical limitations and make large scale adjustments to ensure that all the tracks had similar volume, equalization, etc. This resulted in a "production master" which the mastering engineer would use to cut a wax "laquer" (more adjustments were made during this process; the art of cutting vinyl is mostly lost and most modern reissues sound like crap because of it), which was plated with metal and thus became a "mother". The mother was used as a mold to create "stampers", which were sent to pressing plants for the manufacture of the final disc. It should be noted that copies of the studio master would be sent to foreign labels or distribution arms in other countries, and these would create their own production masters and laquers for their domestic releases. Both the mothers and the stampers wore out with use, and popular albums would need to be cut again for reissues.
Fast forward ten years and you're a young mastering engineer who just got a job with Major Label. Both you and your employer are excited about the burgeoning digital revolution and they want you to put together a CD release of the 1975 album, which was very popular. Since compact disc doesn't require the same compromises that vinyl did, you want to use the studio master to ensure the best possible sound and as accurate a representation as possible of what the original engineer intended. You quickly realize, however, that this will be impossible, since the record was a British release and you're working for the American label that owns the rights to it, and with your deadline you don't have time to make inquiries to see if you can get the tape on loan. To make matters worse, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the past decade means that even at home, tapes have been stashed hither and yon and no one seems to have any idea about where everything is or even what anything is, since nothing is clearly marked with anything other than a track listing. Some tapes are nth generation copies that sound terrible, one was split up oddly for an 8-track release, one has interesting mastering choices that make it sound wholly different than any version you've ever heard, several are okay, several are Eq'd for vinyl and will require processing to make usable, and one has "DO NOT USE!" written on the box in magic marker.
Of course, the one with cautionary language was the best sounding by far, and in your time crunch, you don't have time to ask questions so you just ignore the warning and master the album without asking any questions. You find out later that this was indeed the copy that had been sent over from the UK, and it was marked Do Not Use because it wasn't a production copy with RIAA equalization and if it had been used to cut a lacquer it could have ruined an entire pressing. Six years later no-noise is invented and the label wants to release a "better" version that takes advantage of the new technology to eliminate the tiny amount of tape hiss audible on the CD issue you made. But by this time you've moved on and the engineer, in a time crunch, takes the warning literally and uses an inferior copy that requires him to crank the noise reduction up to 11, absolutely killing the recording. Your original remaster was fine, and any benefits of additional noise reduction would have been dubious at best, but this new improved version supersedes the old one and is now the only thing available in the US market. Then ten years after that the British label decides to do a global deluxe edition touting that it was "from the original master tapes", which was true, except by now the loudness wars are in full swing and the whole thing is compresses to shit.
Meanwhile, back in 1986 the British label exec decided that the CDs should sound as close to the original albums as possible, and specified that the production masters should be used. The Dutch couldn't find their own tapes, so they requested the master tapes from the British label, and were given the actual master tapes for their 1989 domestic release, which is clearly superior to every other available release, but they started using the US mastering 2 years later. So now you're looking to buy the CD and you're confronted with a bevy of options. The 2002 global release is available in any store but sounds harsh and overcompressed. It's an ear-bleeder. The 1991 US version is readily available on the used market but sounds even worse. The old British version is easily available and sounds okay but not great. The original US version is kind of hard to find and sounds better than the British version but still has its problems. And the 1989 Dutch version is obviously the best, but it was only in production for 2 years and used copies go for top dollar.
The point of all of this is that no one intended for there to be a whole bevy of crappy releases. Record companies had discovered a gold mine in reselling albums their customers had already bought, and to do so they had to tout some improvement over the previous sound. So they latched on to anything they could find that was technically true, regardless of whether it was the best possible version or even an improvement over the original vinyl. I highly doubt the Mad Men errors were part of a cynical ploy to drum up publicity through a fuck up, because I don't see what they have to gain. The show is from 2007 so it's not like anything is going to require a great deal of restoration. The whole 4k thing is a marketing gimmick because the benefits over 1080p are dubious to begin with on most televisions, and are completely obviated by whatever lossy compression algorithm they're using. As long as it's technically in 4k they haven't lied, and the goal is to get the product out as cheaply and quickly as possible. They probably sent out the wrong files to production, or raw, unedited files, and asked for a conversion into 4k, and didn't bother to verify anything. This isn't a restoration that's done frame by frame but a combination of computer upscaling and rescanning film at higher resolution. They weren't paying anyone to pick over all 100 hours or whatever with a fine-toothed comb.
So there were obvious mistakes, but they'll be fixed in a week, and nobody will care or even remember after that. I certainly don't think a significant number of people are going to subscribe to HBO Max now because they didn't know about the 4k version of Mad Men, at least not enough to doubling production costs.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Ada per video and videos per ad are two entirely different economic propositions.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
The problem with TikTok is that it's hard to monetize. People aren't going to watch a minute worth of ads before a 30 second video. Adam Ragusea talked about this back when he was still doing his podcast. A listener asked if he had ever thought about producing content for the platform, and apparently some group had paid him to create it, but it didn't get very far because they couldn't figure out how to make any money off of it. His content obviously isn't ideal for short videos (at least without being reductive to the point of pissing some people off), but the point remains.
To be pedantic, the original White Christmas was on shellac, not vinyl. The vinyl revolution wouldn't happen until the late 40s.
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