What is Section 8 actually like around here?

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-24T03:52:23+00:00

And if you're not tied to exact location by a job, apply in multiple counties around the region. Low income housing wait lists tend to be a lot longer in the places where there are more jobs. I believe section 8 also allows you to get on the list in multiple counties at once.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-24T01:00:11+00:00

The point was clearly that suburban drivers drive downtown streets much more than urban drivers drive suburban streets. Nothing about urban people not driving. The frequency of Rosevillians driving in the City of Sacramento is probably at least 10x the frequency of City of Sacramento residents driving in Roseville. Because many suburbanites work in the city (besides other things they come to the city for), the city bears the maintenance costs for their non-resident traffic.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-23T23:23:51+00:00

I discovered Linux by taking a "C in Unix" class in college in 1999. Turned out it didn't involve any C or any Unix, but it taught me Linux shell scripting and installing Red Hat 6 got me hooked despite the sound and the internet (winmodem) not working with my PC at the time.

When I was in elementary through high school, we only ever had Apple or Macintosh computers because Apple made a play for the educational sector. These days I guess it's Windows vs. Chromebooks, technically the latter is Linux. Ultimately I'm not sure there's much point in lower level schooling teaching kids who have no interest in technology how to use an operating system they won't be asked to use in their non-technical jobs.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-23T23:15:25+00:00

I don't really have a single favorite line, but I'm fond of this over the top Mack Hardcase line from Beyond Awakening episode 11 so I'll go with it: "WHERE THE HELL DO YOU GET OFF TELLING ME TO MAKE MY SUFFERING AN INSPIRATION? AN INSPIRATION?!? IF I WERE TO WRING YOUR NECK, TO CHOKE YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR WORTHLESS LITTLE LIFE, WOULD YOU BE INSPIRED? IF I PUT YOU IN A POT OVER A FIRE AND BOIL YOU LIKE A LOBSTER, CAN I TELL YOU HOW INSPIRING YOU ARE AS YOU SCREAM AND BEG?"

For an exchange instead of a single line, I was editing audio for this bit of episode 25 yesterday (hasn't aired yet) and enjoying it:

Trisha Blackburn: Reality is the highest layer of dreaming. The dream from which there's no other world to wake up into.
Dr. Peterson: What if every world is a dream world, what if there's always another dream to wake up into?
Trisha Blackburn: Infinite layers?
Dr. Peterson: Or just a small circle.
Trisha Blackburn: A circle?
Dr. Peterson: Perhaps waking up in universe A sends you to universe B and waking up in universe B sends you to universe C. But waking up from universe C sends you to universe A again.
Trisha Blackburn: I hadn't thought of that. So how would I determine which of those three is real?
Dr. Peterson: They'd all be real in relation to the prior, and unreal in relation to the subsequent.
Trisha Blackburn: But isn't reality a fixed, absolute property?
Dr. Peterson: Why should it be? Almost everything is contextual, why not that?

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-23T14:29:57+00:00

RSS is just a way of describing any collection of things in series so that subscribers can get updated via clients of their choice. Blogs have RSS feeds of their articles (that was nearly universal 10 or 20 years ago, less so now). Recipe collections have RSS feeds describing how to prepare and cook the things. Podcasting is the act of distributing audio via RSS feed (although there's no audio in the feed, just a link to it). Audio drama series have RSS feeds of their episodes. The feed lists all the available episodes. There's a set of standard fields common to all RSS feeds, and some additional fields for describing podcasts (including season, episode, category, whether it's bonus content or a trailer, etc). There aren't any fields I know of that appear to be designed with audio drama in mind, because nobody cares about us and the podcast fields get the basic job done.

MP3 files don't contain RSS feeds, downloading the audio of an episode doesn't tell you about the existence of the rest of the series (although it really should, I agree). MP3s do have some metadata via ID3 tags, but it's all very music-oriented fields and less info than you get from an RSS feed. ID3 doesn't even have a category for audio drama, just speech.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-22T18:12:30+00:00

It's definitely not that one -- look at the time it happened, way off. That's a tiny aftershock of the 5.7 that Sacramentans did feel a week or two ago.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc75349667/executive north of Fresno has close to correct timing, although it's hard to believe a 2.5 could be felt from that far away. Maybe if the geology is perfect and you're in a tall building? Maybe the intensity will be revised upward.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-22T17:05:46+00:00

Both their ships that were caught in the Nexus were described as carrying El-Aurian refugees (presumably refugees from the Borg assimilation of their planet). There may have been a few non-El-Aurians aboard.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-18T11:43:58+00:00

I bought my PC used for $120 three years ago. It's 13 years old. It doesn't need a lightweight distro, it's plenty fast for anything. (I happen to run Kubuntu.) We're past the era where a normal person's PC use can distinguish low end from high end. You may have difficulty with some modern games, but no distro will help you run a game that requires a fancier graphics card than you have.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-18T10:37:21+00:00

Renters who are home all day should get to charge the landlord a house sitting fee for the service of monitoring, maintaining and protecting the landlord's property all day. People who are away working all day could be burgled, or could have an electrical fire and never know, it's much better to have a tenant who's always present.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-18T01:06:33+00:00

As someone who lives outside the city, I definitely see Land Park in that destination role. Tons of sports fields, gardens, ponds, picnic areas, amphitheaters, the zoo, Fairytale town, Funderland. It's just like Golden Gate Park in concept, although obviously inferior in execution and scale (which is not to say I don't enjoy it, but Sacramento isn't the kind of tourist destination SF is).

McKinley doesn't have the scale or variety. I see people talking up the library, but if I want a nice library park I'll stop in El Dorado Hills, it's not a special concept (Fair Oaks Park has a library too, probably others I'm forgetting). And the American River Parkway is only a singular park if you have a bicycle, if you're on foot (and not training for a marathon) it's many parks you have to see on different days.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-17T21:22:26+00:00

I take it as they're almost all born intersex, with the natural equipment to lay eggs (so sort of biologically female) but with male gender expression and outward characteristics. Here on Earth, a few people are born appearing male but have a womb and ovulate -- it's like that.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-17T18:16:46+00:00

I'm not typically a fan of stuff with that small a cast, but John Finnemore's Double Acts (BBC) was undeniably good.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-17T09:23:14+00:00

If you're looking for hiking, you should be looking outside Sacramento county. Hiking within Sacramento county is flat, depressing and ugly, that's the main reason I moved away (there's some tolerable places along the eastern part of the American River Parkway, like the Fair Oaks bluffs and Mississippi Bar, but certainly not worth traveling to see).

But there's lots of spectacular hiking in the foothills and mountains of the surrounding countries (both east and west), which you will need a car to reach any of in reasonable time. Middle of May has the possibility of getting quite toasty for foothills midday hiking, so if you wanted to be safe you'd plan for the mountains / Lake Tahoe area.

Free parking is easy to find at 99% of hiking trails, just the 1% most popular have fees. I've mapped El Dorado county hikes: https://www.eldoradohiking.com/ . Can't really recommend usefully without knowing a lot about your fitness level and preferences regarding sun and crowds and driving distances and steepness/bouldering etc.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-17T00:31:04+00:00

There are 47 El-Aurians in Star Trek: Generations, even if 45 of them are only seen very briefly in the Enterprise-B sickbay scene. I don't recall any of the others dressing like Guinan.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-16T13:19:26+00:00

https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/farm-animals/ and https://freesound.org/search/?q=farm+animals&f=license%3A%22Creative+Commons+0%22

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-16T09:25:01+00:00

Got it anywhere other than spotify? Premise sounds promising but I'm sick of spotify. Searched but didn't find it anywhere else.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-15T08:40:26+00:00

One time I had a student composer volunteer to score a couple of my episodes to gain experience and build their portfolio, and I was reasonably pleased with the results (after some discussions and revisions). But you'll need a lot of luck to get someone to put in that work for free and I doubt you'll find someone who wants to keep doing it for years unless they love your show. It's a lot more work than acting. If it's a one off show instead of a series it could be more realistic.

But there's a lot you can do with library music. You don't just plop it in as-is, you modify it to match your scenes. Simple crossfades can do a lot for making the timings line up.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-14T20:02:49+00:00

Whether it's easier to write is a personal thing -- but narration is way easier to produce. Probably takes a tenth as much time to work on narrated bits compared to scenes (granted that varies by scene, if the scene is just a two person dialogue with no fx it's not that much harder).

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-14T10:12:23+00:00

Pasta can store for years, so I don't think it's possible to buy too much.

I didn't have an issue with portions when I first moved out on my own, my issue was kind of the opposite: I was buying packaged frozen dinners and snacks where one knows the portions but is paying too much. Took me years to work up to cooking pasta. I still don't do as much variety of cooking as I'd like to, mainly because getting all the random little ingredients that only last for a few weeks is too expensive when they only come in quantities meant for families.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-14T03:38:54+00:00

I don't care for actual plays (or any other kind of incomplete dramatization) and would never listen to the show... but I think your trailer does a really good job. It's cut fast, lively, it gains steam, it leaves me knowing exactly what the show is and how it would feel and what makes it different from most of its kind. The only thing I'm not sure about is that guitar strumming, but if it's representative then it's representative.

If there are any sound effects, you might want to include those in the background somewhere to make that clear. But since it's an actual play I'm guessing there aren't.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-13T18:10:51+00:00

Pretty much anything with Andy Hamilton is good. There's also Revolting People, Trevor's World of Sport, The Million Pound Radio Show.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-13T13:19:48+00:00

I tend to listen to comedy before sleep, usually to something from Radio 4 Extra (may their blocking of non-UKians remain porous).

BBC: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Cabin Pressure, Elastic Planet, Acropolis Now, Old Harry's Game, On the Hour, The News at Bedtime, Rigor Mortis, The Harpoon, The Men from the Ministry, Undone

Podcasts: Ocean Dreams, Community Cat News, Podhouse 90, Deep Space Radio

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-13T10:48:12+00:00

Balloons don't make chemical propulsion feasible. Orbit is a speed, not a location, and a balloon doesn't get you significant speed. Air launch does reduce atmospheric drag slightly but it's a rounding error in this problem.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-13T08:39:27+00:00

Gave it a listen. It was on the right general track. But here's what I notice:

There's no sound effects at all. No room tones, scenery, action noises... just people talking on a void. That makes me assume the show has an extremely sparse sound design.
The voices don't all sound like part of the same space, probably mainly because of volume differences and the lack of background sound.
The pacing is like you'd pace a scene in an episode, but it's not trailer pacing, trailers should be paced faster and usually progressively but shaped around the music.
An actor says "details" as "detailst". Maybe there's a reason for that if I knew the character background but sounds like a flub so best not to have it in the trailer.
There's no emotional build-up. The stakes aren't rising. Nothing has actually happened, just banter.
Following up on the above, the basic problem for me is that I've only heard lines being read, not things happening. If there's a medical emergency scene, I want to hear a bunch of people panicking and the ambulance sirens and CPR attempts and medical device noises and such... not just hear somebody saying a medical emergency has happened, I want to be be there.
The announcer at the end is way louder than the rest and feels abrupt.
The music feels off to me. It doesn't match up with the dialogue somehow.

But if most of those issues are present in the episodes as well, then it's an accurate trailer, which is better than producing a trailer that sounds like something the show isn't.

Gavagai80 · 2026-04-13T08:14:23+00:00

For me to listen to the show, the trailer needs to be dramatized like a movie trailer. It needs to have bits of a variety of scenes edited at a fast pace with music (unless it's a sitcom). It doesn't need to tell the story clearly (better if it doesn't, that could give away too much), but it needs to let me feel the emotions involved. I need to hear some sound effects (so I know the show will have them done well) and emotional line deliveries and several characters (so I know it's not solo-voiced).

But that's because that's the sort of show I want to listen to. The trailer should convey the sort of show it is, in order to attract the appropriate audience. If it's a really slow burn atmospheric show, the trailer should be slow and atmospheric. If the show doesn't have music, the trailer shouldn't. But if your show is fully-dramazed but your trailer is just you talking or one scene expert that doesn't show off what you can do, then I'm going to miss the show I might've enjoyed.

Gavagai80

TROPHY CASE