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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2646 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 25, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This is as good a place to ask for technical support as any I guess:

For the past few months, my pc has been consistently crashing under heavy load, in graphically demanding games like Escape from Tarkov, Warhammer 3 etc. In normal use and less intensive games like Rimworld, no issues.

After about 15-20 min of gameplay, I get a full crash to a black screen with the pc powered off, and it refuses to post for several minutes regardless of what I do, at which point it often restarts on its own. The American Megatrends screen doesn't usually show up unless I cycle power, at which point it doesn't tell me anything useful either.

The crash seems to be so total and abrupt that I can't find any useful logs to figure out wtf is going on.

I've run CPU and GPU stress tests on OCCT and furmark, and they only seem to cause issues unreliably.

It seems thermally related, since the problem is less severe when the AC is running, but unfortunately the AC is currently on the fritz exacerbating the issue, but fixing the AC isnt really a definitive solution is it?

I noticed >85° C temps on my Ryzen 5600x, so I changed the thermal paste, and while temps dropped by 5-10 degrees, the crashing hasn't abated.

GPU temps hover in the 50s-60s range in Tarkov, which seems quite reasonable. It's a 3070 for what that's worth.

The other potential culprit is my geriatric 600w power supply, over 10 years old at this point, but why would it be thermally related?

I'm not running any OCs, and I've maxxed out my fan curves to help, not that it's doing much. My case has two extra blowers, and I even took off the sides to help with airflow.

Anyone have any idea as to how I can figure out what exactly is wrong? I can't really afford to replace my GPU, but I could consider buying a new PSU if need be.

This issue didn't plague me when I first built this current setup with the same components, but it's been several months and I'm losing my mind :(

Watch your voltages and temps in HWInfo64

If the PC just refuses to power up, it must be the PSU. You're probably tripping its internal safeguards.

Hmm, is there any way to know for sure? I'm willing to gamble on it, but it's still a decent chunk of dough!

Multimeter, pull the leads, test

Do you have a friend with a working PC? Ask them if they can part with their PSU for an afternoon.

My brother has a pc next room over, but he certainly won't consent to the rigmarole of disassembling both of ours twice to test.

You make it sound like a chore. Unplugging it from the mobo is the only annoying task and even it isn't that bad.

Swapping out individual components until you determine which is is faulty is the only way to be sure. But to my layman's ears, it sounds a lot like PSU problems I've had before.

I'm no expert, but I would suspect the PSU? A bad PSU can cause all sorts of issues. When the PC is under heavy load it'll draw more power.

What about the reasonably robust association with ambient temperature? Do PSUs degrade like that?

They do degrade over time. Or it might be dirty on the inside like Mollie says. But I just wanted to say it's generally a bad idea to build a new PC without getting a high quality, new-ish PSU with plenty of wattage. The cheap ones give unstable delivery of power, or don't reach anywhere near the promised max watts, which can cause all sorts of weird issues including shutdowns. It's not a component you want to penny-pinch on.

It's grandfathered in, but I can't be too mad if it gives up the ghost after 12 years of being a trooper. If I do replace it, I'll buy a 650 watter.

650W is not enough for modern powerful GPUs (4080, 4090) if you're planning to use those.

I'm aware, but I'm going to sit those out. It's the end of the road for my PSU, I'll build a new pc abroad with a few high value parts preserved.

Most AC-DC power supplies have a bank of filtering capacitors which can degrade with time. The electrolyte in the electrolytic capacitors can also have some temperature sensitivity. More likely the internals of the PSU are just coated with a layer of grime and dust at this point, and the heat sinks on the switching gear can't reject the waste heat from the conversion effectively. There may be a thermal fuse that trips if the PSU overheats. I would generally advise against opening up an PSU, as even unplugged there can be quite a bit of stored energy in the caps if you just go poking around. If you're fairly certain the PSU is the culprit you can always try blasting it with a can of compressed air, it wont make it any more broken. Immobilize the fans before you do so they don't over-speed.

Gotcha, I don't have any compressed air around, but I'll use a blow dryer. Static isn't really a concern where I live, it's far too humid.

Finally, a use for my vast store of white trash computer repair advice! What you want is a balloon and a biro - pull the pen apart so you only have the casing tube, fill the balloon and put the casing in the opening, tapered end out. It won't do as good a job as a can of air of course, but it will probably shift more dust than a hair dryer, hair dryers generally cover too great a surface area. Also it's easier with a second person - one of you directs the stream, while the other maintains the seal and directs the strength.

Finally, a use for my vast store of white trash computer repair advice!

Words I didn't expect to hear today, but I'd be lying if I wasn't interested in more tips of this nature haha. I bet the redneck approach to water cooling would be a hoot!

Thanks for the tip!

The only water cooling system I've seen in the wild was a friend's fanless set up which he ran through his central heating system. That was pretty dumb lol. I mean, it worked alright I guess, but his computer sat on the floor and his ac unit sat at about head height, so there were tubes running out in the open. And they weren't very secure, so he basically couldn't concentrate if anyone stood within 2 metres of the thing.

Sadly a lot of my tips are kind of useless these days, we've gotten too advanced to rely on the "she'll be right mate" attitude. We don't use ide any longer, so no need for aluminium foil, and CPUs don't have actual pins on them these days, so it doesn't help to know you can run over one with a 4wd and as long as you can bend those pins back close enough to jam them in their sockets you can get it to boot. We don't use POST any more, so nobody needs to know you can use the speaker from... Was it a baby born doll? I can't remember. One of those babies that make noises.

Others you've probably heard before - using a pringles can to boost wifi range (poke your antenna through a hole in the bottom of the can, the insides reflect and amplify the signal). Or how you can bypass a locked power button by shorting the power pins with a bread knife.

My favourite bit of white trash computer advice is thermal paste related though actually. It was 2002 and my grandparents had just moved to Australia (my whole family will be here eventually, sorry Australia) and my dad and I were going to build them a new pc - my grandpa loved computers, but his wheelhouse was the 2 to 486 era, so he wired us the money and we would buy the parts and go build it for him. My grandparents are crazy though, so they'd moved to Camooweal - a tiny rest stop of a town in the middle of nowhere in NW Queensland. A two day drive if you stop for sleep, although you can technically make it in a day if you drive non-stop.

The problem with driving non-stop though is that it is down some of the loneliest and least maintained roads in the country. Which is why, on our way to build my granddad's pc, we hit a pothole and bent the axle. At this point we were well into the outback, and we hadn't seen another car for about 6 hours at that point, so we couldn't hitch-hike. We had passed a drive and revive (a little prefab rest stop with toilets and beverages for tired drivers to rest and recuperate) an hour back though, so we walked back there to call for help. When we got back to the DNR though, we saw something you actually don't see anywhere near as much as I had expected - the place had been looted. I mean completely cleaned out - there was usually at the very least chairs, a kettle, big cans of instant coffee and a telephone in these things, but there was nothing at all in this one.

I'll admit, I was starting to panic, which is my tough guy way of saying I was flipping the fuck out about our impending death, but my dad remained cool as a cucumber - he had a plan. We spent most of that day walking back to the car, getting our gear and the box of pc parts, and walking back to the DNR, and when we got there my dad got into the pc parts box and started setting out a build - we might not have a phone, but this pc we were going to build had a 56k modem card in it, we could use that to alert someone!

We got to work putting it together, and argued about whether my grandpa would make us disassemble it again when we actually got to their place so he could micromanage building it (I was a naive youth), but we reached an impasse pretty quickly. See I said my grandparents were crazy, but that's kind of the understatement of the century re my grandpa. He believes lead wasn't the reason for Rome's downfall, but it's success. When bees started dying out he celebrated, because there were too many of them and we'd be screwed if they ever organised. They moved to fucking Camooweal because they bought the property on a handshake deal after the seller ensured there was an NFA cache on the property (no longer there, any cops reading this). And he didn't believe in/trust thermal paste. He had zinc oxide paste, and that's what he'd use, because he knew what was in it - zinc and oxide (I can never tell when he is joking). After all, no opsec can protect you if you put the government between your CPU and motherboard!

There was the stock thermal paste on the CPU, but like everything else in Western Queensland it was dry as dirt and useless. A lack of thermal paste wasn't going to stop my dad though. Into our luggage he went, into his toiletries bag - he grabbed out the toothpaste and applied a dollop to the top of the CPU. I helped by standing and staring at him in stunned silence - I was sure this would end in disaster. But dad explained that it wouldn't last forever, but we could run it for about a day on toothpaste - it's more important to ensure there are no gaps between the CPU and fan plate - so we put on the heatsink, inserted the ram, graphics, sound and modem cards and hooked it up to the PSU. To this day POST beeps make me feel relieved. We didn't have a microphone, never mind software to make phone calls, but we kept the line busy and in the morning a cop pulled up to find out what was going on.

Anyway after that my dad and grandpa refused to talk to each other for about 10 years - grandpa was pissed we didn't build his computer and ruined his CPU, and dad was pissed because grandpa didn't care that we were out thousands of dollars and almost died. Since grandpa wanted all new parts now, dad just sent him back the money and we kept the Pentium 3, which ran for another 8 years without a hiccup! After we replaced the now thoroughly cooked toothpaste with thermal paste of course.

I'll call @self_made_human 's story and a half and raise another three-quarters.

I actually discovered this story because it popped up when I was doing janitor duties. If it got reported for anything other than AAQC, I think that should be grounds for a temp ban...of the reporter!

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I felt there was something good there, hence why I asked, but that's a story and a half! I do hope you share that in other places, it's too good to languish in a corner of the Motte haha.

Static isn't really a concern where I live, it's far too humid.

It's not static electricity, it's a bunch of energy stored in capacitors. It's real as you can see by unplugging the computer, then trying to switch it on -- the fans briefly start up, at least for me. But after that it should be mostly safe, if in doubt poke with a grounded screwdriver or something.

Have you re-pasted the CPU?

Yes, just a couple days ago. It improves temps, but didn't do anything for the crashing.

What’s your CPU, and CPU cooler setup?

It's a Ryzen 5600x with a Wraith (the rgb one) cooler grandfathered in from a Ryzen 1700.

I'm taking my third month long vacation in the past 12 months; given that we are probably seeing the very end of the covid price extravaganza that let me go to japan and london from Socal for a couple hundred bucks; this time filling out my map of Europe with Romania, Bulgaria, and greece (which I somehow managed to avoid up until now.) If I don't go now, I'm probably gonna not go for a long ass time; prices look like they are bouncing wayyyy back up.

I'm really gonna miss covid; that whole situation was so fucking convenient to me. Cheap plane tickets, cheap lodgings, cheap car rentals, incredibly cheap train tickets (including that summer ticket in Germany that was all local and national and some international rail with unlimited rides for like, 12 dollars or something. Shit was wild; I hope they do that again.), and short lines.

I guess It has to end eventually though, or all the places I like will go bust. This is me bidding a fond Farwell to the Coronavirus era, I really hope the people who want me to eat the bugs and live in the pod don't also make me go back to the fucking office.

I'm with @f3zinker. The response to Covid was awful and it basically destroyed the social capital I spent most of my adult life accruing. I hated it and think it was the worst political, social and economic disaster of the last two decades.

The diversity of human experience, right?

It let me stop being a human beast of burden and get on the social capital accruing section of the ladder.

Truly proves meritocracy is a myth: no covid, I work for wages until I'm dead. Yes covid: I get a degree, and now I own a house and have a funded retirement and all sorts of shit; where as you (maybe?) get absolutely fucked by the thing that helped me immensely trough no fault of your own and with no way to stop it (I assume).

What degree did you get? What job did you get with that degree? Where did the money come from?

Like TheDag said, I'm happy for you but I find myself still resentful about the whole pandemic situation. I was considered an essential worker at the time and saw an overall drop in my lifestyle quality. Wages were stagnant with no bonuses, even though supposedly I was too fucking valuable to stay home. No one was hiring in my specific field so I couldn't jump to another employer until right about the time partial re-openings were happening. My commute got a little shorter but all the amenities/services at and near my worksite were shuttered.

I didn't get the benefits of WFH. No binging Netflix, no experimenting with kombucha/sourdough/mead-making. No working on classes during my downtime. (If anything my workload went up.) Vacations I had planned for months got scrapped, including some not-easy-to-get backcountry backpacking permits in a few national parks. All of my social outlets were closed "out of abundance of caution" (which went right out the window when the media decided protestors somehow can't spread covid). I just got dry-railed for 18 months.

And like TheDag said, people definitely got hit worse than I did, some I know personally. Hell, whole nations got wrecked by this. Maybe I should just grin and bear it. But goddamn I am tempted to backhand anyone talking about how cozy and great the pandemic was into next Tuesday.

The pandemic measures very significantly and permanently reduced my quality of life. I won't bore anyone with the telling of the tale, but it's very lop-sidedly net negative for me.

Still, I can't fault anyone for profiting from the whole affair. I'd have done the same in their shoes.

Sure, make hay while the sun shines, but expecting me to give anything more than a token thumbs up to someone profiting off of a situation that reamed me is a long wait for a train that ain't coming.

Interesting, I'm happy for your economic opportunity my friend.

And yeah. Meritocracy is largely a myth - our society rewards a very specific type of person. Whether they have 'merit' or not is largely up to opinion. I tend to think not.

Honestly, Covid wasn't the absolute worst for me. I think a lot of people I know got hit way harder. I just don't like your tone when so many children and other people have their lives ruined and you're lightly bragging about how great it was. Not a great look.

Eh. Pre covid MY life was at least a decade in to getting "ruined" just by society functioning as intended.

I can sympathize with people that got fucked by covid, and I would happily live in a society where people didn't get fucked by covid; but that's not what we got. The majority of everyone is getting fucked every day, and I've finally managed to ascend high enough in the crab bucket that I get to stand on the little people while my bosses stand on me.

It's shit, but it is what it is, right?

Well that's quite a negative view of the world, I'm sorry pre-covid was so shitty for you my friend.

I think your perspective matters quite a bit. Even for people near the bottom of the status hierarchy in the modern West, I don't think 'getting fucked every day' is something that can describe it well, but to each their own.

If you aren't in a wealthy country, then you're justified to rage at the world as far as I'm concerned.

It might be because I came to the US from a semi-subsistence based farming community in central America (we grew most of our own food, but also raised cattle and exotic hardwoods for sale and had some amount of tourism.)

Going from there to Socal and seeing that people actually worked harder and had shittier lives has kinda made me suspicious of the entire neoliberal enterprise: if shit is materially better for people in a town with no electricity, no municipal water, and one phone line just because they aren't participating in the modern capitalist economy; it seems like the whole system fails to justify itself.

Having gone from one to the other, I can say it's not the stuff. The stuff is great! Cellphones and hamburgers and the internet and all that shit is fucking wonderful.

And it also can't be a monoculture. We had black Caribbeans, white expats, and the mestizo locals all living together and speaking different languages/having different religions.

And it can't be all that gay shit, because nobody gave a shit if somebody wanted to have sex with the same sex or trans their damn gender; people just shrugged and moved on like "Well, it makes them happy and we have spend hours at the pilon husking rice by hand so who gives a shit."

So, if people are sadder and have shittier lives, it has to be everything else.

Not to dump my personal political journey on you down thread, but I've been ruminating on why I have the opinion that I have since you posted your first comment.

No I'm actually quite interested in your perspective, I appreciate you laying it out here.

Can you expand on what you think consists of 'everything else?'

IT's hard to say, because it's a lot, right?

But if I had to bet on one thing it would alienation; both in the Marxist sense (from you labor) and in the common sense (from communal living.)

That seems to be the main difference. Two examples: We had really excellent avocado trees on our property, and everybody near us knew that. So, when they wanted good avocados for some reason, they'd come to our house, yell up the path, and bring us some baked goods/coffee/a fish they caught/ some nails/ whatever.

Nobody tracked the value of exchange, everybody just kinda had a feeling of "our ledgers are more in X's favor, better bring them some chicharron from the pig we just slaughtered."

The thing that makes this different from similar structures in the VERY capitalistic USA is that this would happen with people you barely knew or had only met once, because the community was actually a community. You can't get this in any way other than actually living communally I think; no amount of church groups will replicate it.

If you want the benefits of communal living, you have to be a communist in a literal sense type of thing. It isn't enough to attend a reading circle once a week, you have to be willing to put someone's cousin who you've never met up in your house for the weekend because the river flooded and he's stuck on your side.

I feel you. Covid saw my job switch from wasting two hours of my life a day in commute time to fully remote. I suddenly got 8-10 hours of my life a week back. I moved out of state and took advantage of the extremely cheap flights to hop around the country visiting my family, friends, and (at the time long-distance) girlfriend. I could skip town for a week at a time without needing to take time off, since simply bringing my laptop was enough to work uninterrupted.

I’m still remote, but looking for new work and a lot of the places want hybrid employees. It’s hard to give up…

I'm really gonna miss covid; that whole situation was so fucking convenient to me.

Agreed. I thrived during the lockdowns.

Wtf are you on about. I cant bid farewell to covid era fast enough, I get literal dreams of the... 2019 economy! And just about everything else from that world.

Man, I want from being poor as shit to being fully middle class just from school moving to fully online. That was it. Being able to attend remote classes at a four year was all I needed to jump three income brackets.

This on top of avoiding the vast majority of senseless bullshit associated with life: No commutes, no waiting in line for no fucking reason at the Drs, the DMV, the industrial supply, the airgas.

Everything that should never have been in person or queue based since the webpage was invented suddenly wasn't; even when I was still hauling around conduit and cables and pump motors instead of going on the computer and pretending to work everything was so much faster and easier.

Maybe it's just my autism; but I feel like covid really exposed the extent to which human labor and human socialization is mainly involved in a giant game of pretend where everyone works sooooo hard in such important jobs, you can't believe how important this thing I'm doing is; only it turns out that 40% of it can totally stop happening and everything keeps ticking along with barely a hitch.

All the office managers and Jr. cfos and second chair purchasing committee members in the world could die tomorrow and cause less damage than the LA port longshoreman getting laid off without enough consideration, style of thing.

prices look like they are bouncing wayyyy back up.

What are we talking about here exactly?

I could travel to Japan for a month with a budget of 2000$ for all my lodgings and travel and tickets; now the plane ticket on it's own will eat most of that.

The demoscene is absolutely nuts.

http://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

256 bytes to encode 60fps video with sound.

I don't know anything about programming other than that the demoscene is about doing the most with the least. What I admire is the enforced creativity that comes from working under hard limits, whether that's byte limits or haiku or vintage drum machines or whatever. It puts a genuinely unique character into the final product that is missing from high budget productions made with limitless choices. It's not had all the corners smoothed off, or to put it another way it's purposefully made out of corners that can't be smoothed off.

How do you discover new music when not surrounded by people who are into discovering new music?

Pitchfork's Best Albums of the Decade for each decade are decent, diverse lists (though avoid the ones that came out after 2016 or so). After that Spotify playlists are quite good. Just pick a song you like and the radio station based on that song will usually introduce you to similar but less well-known music. That's how I discovered Melvins through a radio station based on Alice in Chains' Them Bones.

Pitchfork was a fantastic source of music news and reviews before it went to Condé Nast. It hasn't been the same since.

Completely agree, their end of the year list from 2013 is very diverse and holds up really well: https://www.albumoftheyear.org/list/255-pitchforks-top-50-albums-of-2013/

One of the last great lists from them.

  1. Discogs to find other works and collaborations by producers, musicians and labels that I like.

  2. Collecting entire discographies has allowed me to find hidden gems and collaborations with artists that I didn't know previously.

  3. Shazam.

  4. Maroofy has assisted me in finding songs that are sonically similar to ones I already like. It's a gem for finding stuff with <100 YouTube views.

  5. The YouTube algo, which is worse than it was in 2015 or 2016 but still delivers gems on occasion. Finding full DJ sets on YouTube also has introduced me to tracks and artists that I'd never would have gotten into otherwise.

I discovered the band that I've listened to the most in the past 10 years by just by hitting the random article link on Wikipedia. Also, I spent a substantial amount of time on /mu/ during the pandemic, and wasn't introduced to a single artist that I liked through the wisdom of that community.

I discovered the band that I've listened to the most in the past 10 years by just by hitting the random article link on Wikipedia

What's the band?

Yellow Magic Orchestra (and the various solo projects of their members).

I listen to most of my music through Youtube. It often shows me interesting new music in my recommended and in the automatically generated playlists.

Also, sometimes random other media will send you down a rabbit hole. I discovered They Might Be Giants when I was younger from them doing a partnered event with an MMO I played. The event’s story featured the band members and their music would play in the relevant zones.

Most of the music, 95% or so, I listen to is new music, and I’m getting close to middle age so that makes me a bit of an outlier.

I use Spotify and pay for premium. It’s one of the best purchases you can ever make. It has a ton of features that help you find new music, and a lot of good personal algorithms.

They have some playlists that are automatically generated for you specifically, which mix in music you have listened to with music you haven’t in a similar style.

One of them is “discover weekly” which is all music that’s new to you based on your listening habits.

Another is “release radar” is new releases from artists you follow. Make a habit of following artists you are interested in and this playlist becomes very useful for finding new music.

Going into artists pages that you know you like and going to the similar artists page and just go to their latest album and give it a listen. I’ve stumbled across a bunch of new artists I enjoy because if that.

You can also go a favorite artists page and they have a “radio” section which is an curated playlist containing music from the artist and similar artists.

Whenever you find something you like, save it into a playlist categorized by style or mood. You can enable a setting called “smart shuffle” which threads in new songs based on your taste.

It even has an AI radio dj which just runs through short personalized playlists for you and can switch it up at will.

They also have concert suggestions for people playing in your area, just go to a concert alone. Going alone is extremely fun and allows you to focus on the music and the atmosphere and maybe make a friend while taking a smoke break or getting a drink or two. I find that often trying to round your friends up to go to a concert of music in a style they are unfamiliar with can be a bit of an ask, and for smaller new artists the time and money commitment isn’t much more than an expensive movie ticket with snacks.

A lot of it is simple discipline, make a habit of constantly looking for new music with all the available tools at your disposal and soon it becomes a self reinforcing feedback loop. It’s exhilarating, it refreshes the soul.

Just like keeping other matters if taste updated and fresh, like food or fashion or cinema, you have to really like it and stay in the loop. But luckily with modern technology it’s easy to do so.

Happy hunting!

I second Spotify: I always at least check out all the music on my discover weekly; but don't let the algorithm decide everything every time. I like to checkout random new releases or curated playlists by other people also.

Can someone clarify what a block does on this site? I can see that someone has blocked me (the red person symbol appears next to their name). Am I just banned from replying to their comments?

You are allowed to reply to their comments.

When you do, you'll get a little banner warning you that you'll be held to a "higher standard." This is because the main effect of a block is that the blocker can't see your comments. But everyone else can, and probably won't know why the other guy isn't responding. So...don't abuse it to make them look bad, and you'll be fine.

It also keeps you from pinging theblocker, and I can only assume it disables direct messaging.

[A musical mystery]

There’s a pair of artists I love that I discovered on Spotify a ways back, and both have entirely opaque un-googleable names.

I have some guesses as to who they actually are, mostly based on their “related artists” but I can’t find anything concrete.

Rather than let it stew I figured I’d ask around at my favorite online hangout for people with “special” brains, so to speak.

Example One

Example Two

Also I’m very interested as to two aspects of these artists;

1.) These songs are very highly streamed, with more than a million streams on their biggest hits. they aren’t exactly obscure, how have they gotten so much attention if you literally can’t search them anywhere?

2.) What compels an artist to produce art under a name so utterly baffling and incomprehensible? There’s at least a dozen more artists that I’ve run into on Spotify that have the same schtick going on, and they seem popular.

The first is a four tet alias.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/6400214-%EA%89%BA%E1%83%9A%E0%AE%87-%EA%89%BA%E1%83%9A

The second is a project called erased tapes.

https://erasedtapes.bandcamp.com/album/erased-tapes-20-0

Thank you! I knew someone here would either know the answer or be able to figure it out quickly.

That also explains why they are fairly popular as well despite not being easily searchable. Four Tet is huge and it seems like Erased Tapes was a big project that got a ton of buzz.

Doesn’t hurt that the music is good.

Not as extreme of an example as these, but perhaps relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/!!!

Seems to be that they are most likely 'fake' artists and songs, created by Spotify to pad out their playlists without having to pay so much in royalties to real musicians.

While that’s very interesting, I find it very improbable with the two examples I’ve listed above

Firstly because these artists have millions of streams but also because the names of the artists are too weird a bespoke, they aren’t even in any English characters let alone any language on earth, one is all weird symbols and the other is clearly Morse code or something akin to it.

That and the music is not genetic enough to fit the hypothesis. The one artist linked with the more code incorporates it into the songs themselves.

If you were faking artists you wouldn’t put this much effort into it.

Definitely not. Fake artists and songs have names that actually seem plausible.

Somebody here recommended The Leftovers to me, a show on HBO Max. It's pretty incredible. Not sure why, but it's a very fascinating look into belief and miracles and how they interact with the modern world.

I enjoyed The Leftovers but also find it to be a bit overrated. Perhaps my view is in part influenced by the foreknowledge that this was a show from Damon Lindelof, writer of Lost, and seeing people claim that the show "fixed the problems present in Lost" and was Lindelof redeeming himself with a well-handled mystery.

Except it wasn't at all. Where Lost struggled mightily to give answers to every little crazy incident, often to no benefit, the approach of The Leftovers was just to abandon the majority of mysteries every season and never mention them again. This meant it avoided lots of trite explanations or dumb exposition, but I wouldn't call it resolving the problems that Lost had by any means.

I suppose the answer to Leftovers' strong reception is in the idea that "it's really about the characters". After the Lost finale, this line was trotted out a lot to defend the show, that it didn't matter that the mystery box was unsatisfying because actually you just wanted to see what happened to the characters. To an extent you did care about the endings for the characters in Lost, but really it was much more about the mystery box. With the Leftovers, you could actually claim that it was really about the characters, and being an HBO show with a fine cast and big budget, its character stuff was really strong.

Nonetheless, I was disappointed to go in expecting a satisfying mystery box and not getting that. (I'm also expecting the exact same thing to happen with new mystery box show Severance)

Except it wasn't at all. Where Lost struggled mightily to give answers to every little crazy incident, often to no benefit, the approach of The Leftovers was just to abandon the majority of mysteries every season and never mention them again.

To me, the abandoning of mysteries was the point, and a large part of what made the show so impressive and deeply meaningful. Most mysteries in life aren't resolved. Normally in fiction it's annoying when they don't get resolved, but the genius of the Leftovers was their ability to relate these mysteries and the accompanying grief and suffering so well to normal life that it stuck.

I think that this works for some aspects of the show but not all of them. The Guilty remnant, for example. didn't need an explanation - you can just assume that they were a weirdo cult capitalizing on a tragedy like plenty of other weirdo cults. But IIRC there were a number of other bizarre occurrences and red herrings thrown out that couldn't just be handwaved away and seemed like audience hooks that never got resolved.

Funny, I remember trying to watch that and just noping out super hard maybe 3 or 4 episodes in? Just couldn't do it. I think it was how heavy the emphasis was on cults breaking up families which squicked me out. Just hit a bit too close to home in ways I perhaps wasn't fully conscious of in the escalating culture war.

First season is the weakest although I still love it. The most common criticism of the show is how hardcore its tone is, but in the second half of the first season it finds a much more harmonious emotional tenor. It’s still very intense.

The second and third seasons are basically flawless as far as I’m concerned. And it ends at the right time, it’s only three seasons long and each season is very distinct.

It was probably me, it continues to be my favorite TV series of all time.

Its exploration of belief and non-belief and the social dynamics they engender, of myth-making, of grief and hopelessness captivated me.

I’m a universal darwinist, a materialist atheist but this work of art produced something very similar to a crisis of faith in me and changed the way I feel about my relationship with Reality because it forced me to contend with Mystery with a capital M.

I’m a better person for engaging with it. More confused, more layered, more fearful, more comfortable being afraid, and more comfortable with ambiguity. I was humbled by the experience.

I'm finally crossing Robert E Howard off my todo list, after finishing H P Lovecraft.

Picked up 3 hardcopy volumes that supposedly have as close to his complete, unadulterated Conan stories as any collection has had, and I must say I'm enjoying them profoundly. While Lovecraft is certainly an acquired taste, Howard just flies off the page at you. I'm already nearly done with the first volume. Highly recommend it. I'll probably grab Solomon Kane, Kull and Bran Mak Morn compilations after this.

There was a user on the old SSC comments who went through and reviewed Howard's entire Conan chronology. It was good fun.

I've been trying to get ahold of Swords Against Death and see what Fafrd and the Grey Mouser are all about, but I haven't found an ancient copy yet.

Not sure if this is the same guy, but comprehensive (spoilers I guess) reviews are here:

https://www.scifiwright.com/2018/12/conan-in-review/

Don’t think so. Wright sounds familiar, and may well have been an SSC contributor, but the ones I’m thinking of were Le Maistre Chat. Here’s one, and it doesn’t look like an exact copy of the Wright review.

Edit: they actually mention him in the comments. Looks like he’s a niche but somewhat well-regarded author?

Regardless,

The city turns out to be a single palace complex, held under one roof, lit by radium gems. No fields nor flocks exist outside the walls: Food is produced out of primal elements by super-science. A golden elixir serves as a panacea, restoring vitality and curing wounds. Neither trade, nor research, nor any other labor is done here. All within are addicts of opiates extracted from black lotuses grown in pits below the city. The dwellers here wake only to eat and drink and orgy before returning to windowless chambers and ecstatic dreams.

Aww yeah. That’s the good stuff.

I'm not keen on fantasy but I like seminal genre fiction so I could be tempted to try out the first Conan book. Looks like The Phoenix on the Sword is the first story published, I'll grab that and see how I get on. Might be a while before I get round to starting it though.

Conan is one of the few golden age Arnold films I've never seen so I'll be reading with no preconceptions beyond having seen the poster/video cover.

Solomon Kane for sure. You’re in for a treat!

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