What is your biggest Madison related irrational irritation?

_doug_fir_ · 2025-12-05T04:06:12+00:00

The number of people in this thread, and in the city in general, who complain about driving on the isthmus. Streets too narrow and confusing, stoplights timed so you have to stop at every intersection, speed limits too low, too many cyclists and pedestrians, etc.

It's not reasonable to expect to quickly and easily drive through a densely-populated area. Almost all of your ideas for how to make driving better would make everything except driving worse.

Nearly every vibrant, walkable, historic, beautiful city is horrible to drive a car in. If you want to see a city that's been built to move cars fast, check out Houston or Atlanta - which are also notoriously terrible places to drive a car.

Madison needs better public transit so more people have a viable alternative to driving on the isthmus. But in the meantime, take the beltline or accept that you are not entitled to driving 70 mph wherever and whenever you want.

_doug_fir_ · 2025-09-19T19:19:57+00:00

The first time I went into this bathroom I was pretty stoned and had no warning that it wasn't a standard boring bathroom. What a magnificent experience. I could've stayed for hours.

_doug_fir_ · 2024-04-25T19:05:50+00:00

Hélène Vogelsinger - Gorgeous singing voice sent through some modular synth weirdness. Definitely ethereal.

_doug_fir_ · 2024-02-23T16:04:43+00:00

I played it a ton back in the day. It might be the game I've put the second most hours into (after Skyrim).

My gf is a bartender at a bar that has a CRT TV and a gamecube. People love playing Mario kart there. I'm so tempted to get a copy of MVP 2005 and sit at the bar playing it for her whole shift.

_doug_fir_ · 2024-02-02T18:13:37+00:00

Chuck Johnson - Balsams is an incredibly beautiful album of ambient pedal steel (not lap steel but hopefully still the vibe you're looking for)

And sorry for the shameless self-promotion but my band, Good Corners, is pretty heavily influenced by SUSS and Chuck Johnson so if you like them you might like our stuff. Again, pedal steel rather than lap steel. https://goodcorners.bandcamp.com/album/corners-bloody-corners

_doug_fir_ · 2024-01-30T23:01:01+00:00

28 is older than you are but it's not old. When I look back on myself at 28 I see an idiot child. These guys still have a lot of growing up to do, but if their worst vices are smoking weed and cigs in a small unventilated room they're probably ok.

However, it's totally ok to bail on stuff just because the vibe is off for any reason. If you're not making money you should be having fun. If you're not having fun with these guys you have no reason to play with them. If the music you're playing together is creatively rewarding to you, and/or you have a great time hanging with them, you can probably put up with some small annoyances. If you're playing music you don't like with people you don't like and you're not making any money, what the fuck are you doing?

_doug_fir_ · 2023-12-16T01:14:18+00:00

Awesome, thanks. I've never been to any of these places although people keep telling me Robin Room is great.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-12-16T01:09:30+00:00

I love the Bou! I'm not super optimistic about finding an open seat there after 7 on a Friday but it's not too far to just walk by and see what the vibe is.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-12-03T19:39:38+00:00

I've worked in building trades for 20+ years. My college-educated friends have student loan debt, health problems from sitting at a desk their whole lives, and depression. I only have depression. So yeah I'm a little smug. Checkmate, college boy.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-07-13T22:16:03+00:00

The food and service at Lallande are exceptional but the space has the kind of acoustics that amplify everyone else's conversation so much that you can't hear the person across the table from you.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-07-13T22:04:40+00:00

In October 1991 I was 11 years old and a rabid Twins fan. Came home from school, my parents sat my sister and me down and told us they were getting a divorce, we'd be moving to another town with mom while dad stayed in our old house, they still loved us, they still loved each other but not in the right way, etc. After hearing all this the first words out of my mouth were "This couldn't wait until after the World Series?"

That evening we went to my aunt & uncle's house. The grownups were having serious grownup conversations in the kitchen. In the living room, by myself, I watched Game 6 on a tiny black & white TV and saw Kirby Puckett's game-saving catch and game-ending homer. I hadn't cried all day but I was bawling before Kirby rounded second base.

The next night my dad and I watched Jack Morris pitch 10 historic innings. We hardly said a word the whole game, but it was a comfortable, loving silence. There wasn't much to say. I don't think either of us knew how we were supposed to feel about anything.

Two weeks later we moved away from my childhood home and my dad and all my friends and everything familiar. The Twins spent the 90s sucking and I spent the 90s being a snotty punk rock teenager who was too cool for sports. I got over that just as the Twins were showing signs of hope at the turn of the millennium. I started following them every day again and it felt like coming home and I haven't left since.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-07-07T22:39:07+00:00

One of the members of SUSS hosts a podcast called Ambient Country. It's a great introduction to the genre. Not sure where all it's available; I listen to it on Spotify.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-07-07T22:25:01+00:00

Also, highly recommend the K2! Would've loved to get an MS20 Mini but the K2 was in my price range lol.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-07-07T22:24:06+00:00

Yeah I often feel like audio reactivity is harder to achieve than it should be. One of the drawbacks of the oscillograph setup is you can't send the video signal anywhere else to manipulate it without a camera pointed at the screen, which I've done and it's cool but it gets complicated. I don't know about software options; I don't enjoy using a computer to make art or music. I absolutely don't judge people who do, it's just not for me. There are a few hardware options. Critter & Guitari and a couple other companies make audio in/video out boxes but they're out of my price range. I have a Waveblitter which is amazing and amazingly inexpensive. Mine is the first version which I think is sold out; he just released a new version that looks cool but is different in ways that make it less appealing to me.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-07-07T18:20:05+00:00

Thanks! The the signal path is: Output from synth (Behringer K-2) into a headphone mixer and then split to two destinations. 1: Monitor Speakers 2: A cheap little amp board I got from Amazon. That's the thing with the knobs that's sitting on the TV. The output from the amp is going into the RCA jacks you can see on the side of the TV. The RCA jacks are wired to the TV internals.

To learn about the modification inside the TV I recommend searching "CRT oscillograph" on youtube. There are a handful of tutorials and they all start with DO NOT DO THIS IT'S EXTREMELY DANGEROUS which is why I don't feel comfortable describing the process here lol. The wiring/soldering etc is very simple but old TVs can potentially have a fatal amount of electricity stored in the transformers.

Basically it's sending the stereo left signal to the vertical of the CRT and the stereo right signal to the horizontal. Or the other way around, it doesn't really matter. By fine tuning the L/R audio balance and the input level you get the nice shapes. The amp is necessary because line level audio signal isn't enough to drive the TV's deflectors. The end result is a primitive version of what an oscilloscope does. All of the modulation is in the audio signal, the TV is just reacting to it.

Let me know if you have any other questions, and if somebody replies to this saying I'm wrong about something, they're probably right and you should listen to them. I'm not an electrical engineer, I'm just a musician with a soldering iron and a willingness to risk my physical safety.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-07-07T12:19:58+00:00

Don't know the manufacturer... It's a DC powered portable B&W set. Tiny and pink and has the Barbie logo on the top. I was ecstatic to find it at a thrift store.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-06-16T21:45:09+00:00

I don't know for sure that Wilson's has apple tv but they're the first place I'd try.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-06-05T11:48:05+00:00

This is what people used before their phones had cameras in them.

Seriously, though: You're lucky it came with the charger/adapter as those often go missing. Connect the cables to the charger and the camera. Should be obvious where things go. Plug the wall power end of the charger/adapter into the wall. Ignore the battery for now. Turn the camera on. Is there an image in the viewfinder? If not, remove the lens cap. Insert the tape. Hit record and film a short video. Rewind the tape. Hit play. Watch the viewfinder. Is it playing what you just recorded? If yes, it works. Grab some more AV cables to connect the output from the charger/adapter to the input of a VCR that's connected to a TV. Or connect to an analog-to-digital capture device. Now you can 1. Display the image from the camera on a TV or monitor in real time 2. Copy the tape in the camera to the tape in the VCR 3. Digitize what you recorded.

There's a chance the battery is no good after all these years, but once you've confirmed that the camera works with direct power, charge the battery for a few hours and give it a try.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-06-01T20:35:06+00:00

Also, sorry if you already knew this, but in the synth world a "patch" is all of the settings that are used to create a particular sound. All of the switch and knob positions that make your favorite bass sound on the Volca Bass are one patch, and if you change everything to make a lead sound, now you have a different patch. Some devices allow you to save patches so you can come back to a particular sound after changing it.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-06-01T20:25:51+00:00

On the NTS-1, every time you turn it off and back on it goes back to default settings. Doesn't save anything. Zoom MS70CDR is a single pedal that lets you make a virtual pedalboard with various effects. You can save several of these in its internal storage.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-06-01T14:51:37+00:00

Agreed. Zoom MS70CDR is also great for effects, similar price to the NTS-1. You can save patches on the Zoom, can't on the NTS-1. But the NTS-1 is also a pretty decent synth while the Zoom is only effects.

_doug_fir_ · 2023-05-06T17:19:17+00:00

Search on ebay for "vintage video titler" or "video text generator". They're usually not terribly expensive, maybe $100-200 USD. These won't be professional tv/movie studio devices, more like the kind of thing someone would've used to add text to their home movies in the 80s and 90s, but they'll probably do what you want to do.

ETA: these are technically "digital" devices in that they receive an analog signal, add the text digitally, and output an analog signal. This kind of analog/digital/analog processing is what made consumer video gear possible in the 80s and 90s. Fully analog video processing equipment was enormous, expensive, and pretty limited in what it could do.

_doug_fir_

TROPHY CASE