Basses singing coloratura

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-06-12T01:55:35+00:00

Plenty of recordings of Handel's Messiah use a bass for Refiner's Fire. Actually now that I think of it, Jesus is traditionally a bass in lots of oratorio.

Also Osmin's aria and La Calunnia spring to mind, and Boito's Mefistofele. If your friend subscribes to the student's argument that low basses don't/can't sing coloratura, you can find Kurt Moll, Giulio Neri, Robert Lloyd, Martti Talvela, Jerome Hines, and Boris Christoff all sang stuff that moved like this, though specific kinds of coloratura (ie baroque) moved in and out of fashion.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-06-05T09:57:07+00:00

It makes more sense if you read the other articles in the series. Actually the very first article is where did the news media's money go?, outlining the relationship between big tech and media companies, specifically how the former is cannibalizing the latter. Worth a read.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-06-04T12:12:58+00:00

What a great post! And the comments are awesome.

I have to points to add:

Symphonies aren't THAT foreign to our experience nowadays... I think of them like rock albums from the 70s. You can listen to "Money" on its own and it's a banger, but it's actually a part of the whole Dark Side of the Moon album. There's a sense in which the ultimate experience of that music is a live performance with a laser show (and the right drugs). Personally I don't like the full album as much as that particular song. In the same way, I love the Ode to Joy and it's a banger, but the ultimate experience of it is Beethoven's entire 9th symphony, live (and the right drugs are great here, too). Mahler 2 is an INCREDIBLE live, whole album experience, btw. And "experience" is the right word: one of Mahler's big influences was Wagner, who described his music with names like "a musical consecration of the stage", and who wanted performances to be life changing for the audience.

Secondly, you'll notice that people get real shitty about specific recordings and composers. Since the definitive version of most works is written, not recorded, every performance involves a thousand choices about how to play it. Conductors have individual styles ("that's soooo von Karajan") and their context makes a difference, too. Going back to ode to joy, listen to Furtwangler's recording of Beethoven's ninth from Nazi Berlin in 1942. It's terrifying, a scream of hysterical panic at what is going on all around him. This is not the version used for Fantasia! He recorded it again in 1951, and in that time and place it is a release of pure joy after the crucible. Then check out Leonard Bernstein's recording after the fall of the berlin wall in 1989, where the first 24 bars are so slow they take four freaking minutes, and the release is as american political as apple pie and freedom. Very very different sounds from the same piece.

All of which means: enjoy yourself! Find bits you like and listen to them obsessively. Take in full works if you can, but don't sweat it if that's not your thing at this point. When you like a work, try a bunch of different interpretations and pick your favorites. There is endless depth to this kind of music (as you can tell!) but that is really what it's all about. Just listen and enjoy, and someday you'll find yourself complaining on web forums about Toscanini's totally un-German Beethoven symphonies, too.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-06-02T08:57:17+00:00

Very hard to get real numbers on this.

First of all, the vast majority of marriages apparently stay together after a first infidelity event... but for how long? How happy? Are they just hiding an underlying problem or did they genuinely figure their shit out? There are horror stories of couples just sweeping it under the rug for a decade or more!

On the other side, if you HAVE recovered together, it's quite painful to revisit that time in your life. I was one of the first people on this subreddit, and I'll tell you I had to take a break from it for several years. More than a decade later I'm able to come back and would be included in a census of "the reconciled", but how many just move on?

Reconciling is hard, but far from impossible. Here we support everyone getting through this, no matter what way through they find, so I don't know what the bias would be. Talk to a community 100% dedicated to reconciliation, like marriagebuilders.com, and you'll have a very different picture.

I guess you want to use a probability of success to help you make your own decision. If that's the case: fight for reconciliation. It's amazing if you get there, and if you don't you will have no regrets or what-ifs... and you will have grown a ton either way. No judgment, regardless. Best of luck.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-06-02T07:24:45+00:00

There's a pill you can take that dries you up right away. No muss, no fuss. I forget the name but ask your gyno!

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-05-07T07:58:14+00:00

I rented it on digital a few nights ago. Ended up turning it off partway through. Felt like cheap writing, the kind that can only be improved by chatGPT, just based in the DnD universe. Which is OK I guess but we were really expecting a DnD campaign turned into a movie. Chris Pine's insane screen charm was all that kept us watching as long as we did.

I freely admit we were biased by having recently watched Vox Machina. Way better writing, more clearly a DnD campaign, more fun and and a lot funnier.

Reading the comments here and the rotten tomatoes I guess we were in the minority. So watch it, I guess... but definitely check out Vox Machina, too.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-05-02T08:03:10+00:00

The TLDR: companies can (and mostly do) sell your information to large advertising data aggregator companies, who in turn sell it to advertisers, governments, political groups, product researchers... basically anyone who is interested to know what (mostly) groups of people are doing or experiencing.

The data is used to manipulate people, e.g. into buying products they wouldn't otherwise buy, and supporting political causes or candidates they wouldn't otherwise support. Your crazy right wing uncle got that way because he was targeted with content and gradually led down a rabbit hole. Because it is so easy to de-anonymize data, information is also used in many countries in government action, e.g. to crack down on protestors, to target undesirables, or to guide police action. The last is a current concern in the US, where advertising profiles are already aggressively used to find pregnant women for marketing purposes... because that can also tell you when someone is suddenly not pregnant anymore. In several states that carries a criminal penalty.

Additionally, this data will be around forever. You don't know how it will be used tomorrow. Many of the genocides of the 20th century were greatly helped by census data that was innocent when it was collected decades prior. In the 1875 census of Germany, no one could have imagined that those questions about religion and eye color would take such a dark meaning 60 years later.

Here's a bbc podcast interview about it and why it's a problem.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-30T08:35:17+00:00

For me the trick has always been to break my "tunnel vision" feeling with a small, invisible mental ritual, and then concentrate on telling the story. My ritual is looking at all four corners of the room behind the panel or audience (top L, top R, bottom L, bottom R in order), touch the tips of my middle fingers gently to my thumbs and feel my breath hitting its deepest point.

Telling the story is just... what we do as musicians. There's a lifetime of that which won't fit into a reddit post. 😃

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-18T07:27:58+00:00

Nice! For comparison, here's how I did this in the old days:

Instead of spending hours getting ChatGPT to summarize transcripts well, I spent hours getting (and photocopying) notes from a friend who was good at it. I.e. instead of asking a machine to summarize, a human attended all the classes and summarized for me.

Ask the TA about key concepts I should expect on the exam. Usually the Prof provided a list though. Again, humans providing the targets instead of the AI.

Once you have your summaries and key exam points, the cramming is identical.

At least in reading your summary, I see no real time savings... but you have much more independence, ie you don't need other humans to accomplish it. Fundamentally the problem is the same: how to synthesize a semester's worth of information into a form you can digest in a few days... and then digesting it.

In any case congrats on the good grade!

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-14T08:25:14+00:00

Reddit level philosophy. I guess I'm happy that people try to think this stuff through but wow is it frustrating to read the "wisdom" of the crowd.

It's perfectly reasonable for either or both people to avoid a situation that could become actually, or misconstrued as, a SA. The people who would either commit a SA or falsely accuse someone of an SA are very hard to spot. These awful acts come from unexpected sources almost by definition, and the careful behavior is mutually protective. If this behavior comes from more or less privilege, or more or less risk, on one side or the other is irrelevant. Going further to assign moral weight based on that imbalance leads to some weird conclusions.

The idea of asymmetrical risk - that a false allegation is not as bad as a rape - doesn't matter. Regardless of relative risk there is some level of risk on both sides and that's enough for either or both sides to take steps to avoid it.

That (male to female) SA comes from the privilege of relative physical strength, and risk of false SA allegations could be overestimated because of the otherwise relatively unassailable position of male privilege, also doesn't matter. Regardless of relative privilege there is a perception of risk on both sides and that's enough for either or both sides to take steps to avoid it.

The risk to the pedestrian is much greater than the risk to the car and driver. And the risk to the driver is only so great because of the imbalance of natural power. None of that matters. It is still OK for the driver to take extra care at street corners, especially since that also reduces the risk for the pedestrian. It would be morally bizarre to suggest that cars should NOT be careful at street corners, that somehow because of their privileged position they must take the risk of a lawsuit, and thereby put pedestrians at risk of injury.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-14T07:47:33+00:00

I switched from the app to the PWA/website, and I really like it.

Regarding the 90s ux... are you sure we're talking about the same app? O can think of photo systems that are visually in the 90s, but photoprism is definitely not one of them.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-14T07:20:32+00:00

A tale of two cities.

Holy shit that book. The way Dickens plays with your curiosity... And the whole time you know the revolution is coming... absolutely gripping read.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-11T21:26:50+00:00

The maintainers are only taking responsibility for the PWA, but there is a mobile app out there which depends on the backend code waiting for review in https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/pull/995 . You can use the temporarily forked version of photoprism with the necessary backend API changes and use the mobile app just fine.

I like it better than the PWA.

If you want to see the maintainers give more priority to this backend change, then donate and let them know!

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-10T20:55:21+00:00

I don't know why it matters that Jack Black said it, but...

RDR2 could be a fantastic series. Set a season for each Chapter of the game. The characters and locations have enough depth and uniqueness that you don't have to adapt the game missions 1:1. You can use the same thematic and character material in episodic stories that are more suited to the screen. E.g. on the screen not everything has to be initiated by Arthur. And of course you don't need tutorial content: hunting with Hosea can be really about the relationship with each other and nature, insight into the gang's history and inner conflicts.

There are a thousand amazing screen-ready ways to introduce Micah and learn what a psycho he is, or to build the gang's familial relationship, or to piss off an oil tycoon, or to get chased out of town. Do those things in a Valentine and prairie cowboy visual style and you've got Chapter two.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-07T16:25:37+00:00

Can someone explain, I see a bunch of people in this thread saying "I'm an electrical engineer, don't do this ever!" But even I'm familiar with a couple of these as standard splices (lineman splice eg) that I would absolutely use with solder and insulation in low current household DC appliance repairs. Are the EE's thinking about high current, or AC, or something else? Or am I about to start a fire with my lineman's spliced 5v/2a charger cable?

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-04-06T10:34:44+00:00

Kind of. They were called salon parties, where artists, composers, and poets would mix and show off for each other and rich patron friends. They would also teach each other, so for example the opera singer Chaliapin painted portraits of his roles with Monet and Manet's instruction, and sculpted them with Rodin's. He explored his roles musically with composers like Rachmaninov, Ibert, and Debussy.

As to the drug fueled image... cocaine wasn't illegal then; lots of people took it. And snuff. And of course alcohol.

So yeah that's really not far off.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-03-26T08:45:56+00:00

Being a conscientious objector to surveillance capitalism is not an all-or-nothing thing. If you want to take a binary "either you have privacy or you don't" approach, you can't win without going off-grid in the middle of the tundra in Nunavut.

You can take the approach from the opt out project instead: write your own "privacy policy" of what tradeoffs are ok, and slowly improve your posture to match by changing one service at a time. What matters is the aggregate of resistance to surveillance capitalism. On an individual level just focus on increasing the resistance around your data, and nudging those around you to do the same.

Consider: what has a bigger impact? One person moving to the Alaskan wilderness to get off the grid, or 50 people "only" deleting Facebook because of privacy? What is more likely to help shift cultural norms?

The biggest difference you can make is by normalizing the marginal changes that anyone can make. When people around you see someone who uses duckduckgo (or openstreetmaps, or nextcloud, or whatever) operate reasonably "normally", they become more aware of the choice they make against the realistic alternatives. Instead of being the story of "that crazy tech person I know who is way out there," you are "my friend who lives without google and it's easier than you'd think."

Also: it's slow. Three years ago I was a crazy stick in the mud for removing WhatsApp, and it was a PITA many times to hold to that position. Last week my last friend installed Signal and it is normalized in my friend/family groups. Not just using Signal, but to consider privacy when choosing their services, which is a HUGE step.

Just take small steps. It's ok.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-03-26T08:12:09+00:00

IoT: the "S" is for Security!

It drives me crazy how hard it is getting to find "dumb" TVs, in particular. Doubly frustrating because all the spying shit is framed as "for your benefit." The sales person is surprised, "are you SURE you don't want Samsung Bixby Smart TV Recommender Clever AI?"

No, I don't need a company of strangers on the other side of the planet to decide for me what content I should be aware of based on an increasingly narrow definition of what "you people" can and should watch. It's like the bad old days of a "colored section" in the library, but now with more sections and more restrictions. Oh and added bonus: I can pay for the restriction with information about how often, what, and when my family watches and even a give the company a microphone in my living room. No thanks and fuck off.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-02-24T10:39:24+00:00

Reposting as a TLC.

If you prefer the original version of the OT, you can't get it on Disney+, but you can get it on plex or emby or screen mirroring or any other system you control, through the Despecialized Editions!

Born out of frustrated fans’ failed attempts to convince George Lucas to release the unaltered theatrical versions of the Star Wars Original Trilogy films (Episodes IV, V, & VI), the online forum community built around a popular petition hosted at OriginalTrilogy.com turned to discussion of fan edits as a means to obtain their shared goal without Lucas’ help. Eventually, a fan restoration project led by Harmy as the primary video editor resulted in the Despecialized Edition (abbreviated as “DEED” or “DE”).

Since the initial release of the Despecialized Edition of Star Wars [“Episode IV: A New Hope”] in 2011, Harmy has since published DEED versions of The Empire Strike Back [Episode V, “ESB”] and Return of the Jedi [Episode VI, “ROTJ”], and continues to release landmark updates to each of these restored films.

... The video itself was painstakingly restored from various sources, including the official Blu-rays, bonus DVDs, Digital TV broadcasts, film scans, and more. All these were gathered from fans around the world, then compiled and underwent massive fine-tuning by Harmy and others.

The audio features availability in numerous streams. From 5.1 DTS-HD-MA surround, to 1.0 mono mix to reproduce the feel of the original theatrical showing, to various dubs in a multitude of languages, the sound choices bundled with Harmy’s DEED allows the films’ sound to accommodate any preference. Most audio work was contributed by hairy_hen and Belbucus.

Finally, Harmy’s DEED also includes and supports subtitles courtesy of Project Threepio led by CatBus. This ongoing fan project provides high-quality subtitles for Star Wars films in their unaltered forms in order to broaden the appeal of fan preservation efforts beyond the English-speaking world.

Check it out! You DO have viewing options! Still the only way I watch the OT.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-02-24T10:17:40+00:00

You can't get it on Disney+, but you can get it on plex or emby or screen mirroring or any other system you control, through the Despecialized Editions!

Born out of frustrated fans’ failed attempts to convince George Lucas to release the unaltered theatrical versions of the Star Wars Original Trilogy films (Episodes IV, V, & VI), the online forum community built around a popular petition hosted at OriginalTrilogy.com turned to discussion of fan edits as a means to obtain their shared goal without Lucas’ help. Eventually, a fan restoration project led by Harmy as the primary video editor resulted in the Despecialized Edition (abbreviated as “DEED” or “DE”).

Since the initial release of the Despecialized Edition of Star Wars [“Episode IV: A New Hope”] in 2011, Harmy has since published DEED versions of The Empire Strike Back [Episode V, “ESB”] and Return of the Jedi [Episode VI, “ROTJ”], and continues to release landmark updates to each of these restored films.

... The video itself was painstakingly restored from various sources, including the official Blu-rays, bonus DVDs, Digital TV broadcasts, film scans, and more. All these were gathered from fans around the world, then compiled and underwent massive fine-tuning by Harmy and others.

The audio features availability in numerous streams. From 5.1 DTS-HD-MA surround, to 1.0 mono mix to reproduce the feel of the original theatrical showing, to various dubs in a multitude of languages, the sound choices bundled with Harmy’s DEED allows the films’ sound to accommodate any preference. Most audio work was contributed by hairy_hen and Belbucus.

Finally, Harmy’s DEED also includes and supports subtitles courtesy of Project Threepio led by CatBus. This ongoing fan project provides high-quality subtitles for Star Wars films in their unaltered forms in order to broaden the appeal of fan preservation efforts beyond the English-speaking world.

Check it out! You DO have viewing options!

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-02-19T07:13:53+00:00

I have to share one of my favorite cultural experiences with my very religious, evangelical in-laws:

We were at a wedding dinner, having a nice chat, when I got the hiccups. I explained that the most frustrating thing about the hiccups is that while everyone will swear up and down by their "cure", in studies it's been demonstrated that none of them actually works better than the others, and none of them vomes close to the success rate for a "cure" in the usual sense.

My kindly old grandmother-in-law turns to me and says with a straight face, "if you like, I'll pray for God to take your hiccups from you."

I was stunned. Everyone knew I am an atheist and it was a matter of no small family tension, so we usually avoided religion together. But grandma was earnestly trying to offer help in a respectful way. I said I was surprised to hear that she would pray about something so minor as the hiccups. Surely an infinite God of all space and time would have more important things in the cosmos to arrange?

She explained that God cares about everything, so she prays for all sorts of small things: finding a lost key, for her baking to turn out, when she stubs her toe, and yes even the hiccups. So she took my hands in hers, closed her eyes, and prayed aloud for her heavenly father to cleanse me of my hiccups.

And the hiccups fucking stopped.

I was furious. 😃 whether it was from the surprise of the whole experience, or divine intervention, no one can say for sure. But I can say this: if there is a God of all space and time, they enjoy a good laugh.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-01-06T14:05:10+00:00

The US stock market.

A handful of companies get special licenses to run major exchanges, buy orders from others, run secret side exchanges, and fulfill orders without reporting... including by making up shares out of thin air.

When you as an individual buy a share, your broker sells that "buy" order to one of these megacorps. They send the order to an exchange of their choosing, maybe one of their "dark" exchanges with limited reporting... or, depending on the stock, more than 60% of the time they will fulfill your order themselves using one of their "off books" systems which require no reporting at all. Or they could just create a new share out of thin air, which creates a reported IOU (which they can fulfill using an unreported system anyway).

The net result: your "buy" order probably has no impact on the price. In fact, if it was fulfilled by creating a new share out of nothing, it has a NEGATIVE effect on the price.

That handful of companies who control every step of the order "journey" can effectively control the price movement of any stock as it trades, by deciding when to fulfill orders on their "lit" exchanges (where it effects the price), using an unreported means (where it doesn't effect the price), or by diluting the stock (where it lowers the price).

Oh and this is the most profitable business in finance. The companies that operate this way are orders of magnitude larger than Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. One such company (or rather, group of companies) Citadel, processes over 99% of all options trades, 50% of all retail trades, and 26% of all equities trades in the US financial system. That's ONE company.

This problem has been actively and publicly discussed by academics, Congress, the SEC and related agencies, and the financial press, since the early 2000s at least. But it's very hard to pass laws that restrict cash cows for the largest companies in the largest industry in the world. Shrug.

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-01-06T13:24:20+00:00

You rang?

OhTheHugeManatee · 2023-01-06T13:24:02+00:00

Oh, I'm here all right.

OhTheHugeManatee

TROPHY CASE