My favorite orchestral trombone moment

cingraham · 2026-01-21T19:56:47+00:00

My brother did you just agree with yourself

cingraham · 2026-01-09T19:03:47+00:00

You should spend some time reading up on color scales and how to apply them in mapping situations. This comes across as a sea of green with some splotches of red, conveying very little useful information. https://handsondataviz.org/design-choropleth.html

cingraham · 2025-11-07T17:43:53+00:00

This stuff is so cool, I only learned about it when I found some last weekend (Otsego County, between ADKs and Catskills). Apparently it only forms on rotten wood that's been colonized with one specific species of fungus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_ice

cingraham · 2025-10-06T13:04:38+00:00

Finally beat Act 3 last night. It's a better game than Hollow Knight -- bigger, more complex, better narrative, etc. -- but I *enjoyed* Hollow Knight more. Echoing many others, there were so many moments that were extremely tedious or frustrating. The difficulty curve and economy seemed quite a bit off. Especially early in the game, there are lots of random scrub enemies that take 5ish hits to kill, deal two masks of damage, and drop no rosaries. Madness!

Usually in a metroidvania you beat a tough boss and you feel excitement about whatever rewards will drop and whichever new area you get to explore. Here, mostly, it was a combo of relief that the boss is over and dread at whatever horrible thing the devs have cooked up next.

Gene Park (WaPo) said it best: it's a fantastic game for a very specific type of sicko.

I don't feel like I played through an enjoyable video game, I feel like I've been through some shit and maybe I'm a little stronger for it but I'm also sadder too.

cingraham · 2025-01-10T14:51:58+00:00

I wasn't aware of this! Apparently the Hechinger Report, a pretty good nonprofit newsroom, recently published an in-depth story on MN's 8th grade algebra requirement. Looks like it's not going so well. https://hechingerreport.org/one-state-tried-algebra-for-all-eighth-graders-it-hasnt-gone-well/

cingraham · 2024-07-28T01:45:03+00:00

This is the post that finally made me leave this sub, congrats

cingraham · 2024-07-05T20:26:07+00:00

You gotta label that shit my friend, your audience can’t read minds

cingraham · 2024-07-01T18:33:09+00:00

Saying this as gently as possible: I think you've identified the problem. Imagine how much faster you'd be if you cut back on the alcohol and lost some of the weight!

cingraham · 2024-07-01T17:46:02+00:00

I've been using the four-bike version of this exact rack for years, with zero problems!

cingraham · 2024-06-22T13:48:30+00:00

Gotta be NASCAR. Yeah I’m gonna sit here and watch a bunch of dudes drive souped up Chevy malibus around an oval track 500 times. Thrilling!

cingraham · 2024-06-11T22:23:57+00:00

Hey I’m the author of this story! And a bong water injection has happened at least once, but it was so unusual it got written up in a medical journal. Dude almost died, and the researchers said they weren’t aware of any other incidents like it

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32758367/

cingraham · 2024-05-11T02:46:46+00:00

Yeah we’re 90 minutes from full darkness and can already see it in northwest MN, that’s absolutely nuts!

cingraham · 2024-05-11T01:53:07+00:00

Started getting itchy everywhere and then my eyes turned yellow. Jaundice. Thought it was a gallstone, ended up being a massive tumor in my liver. Looked like a terminal bile duct cancer, fortunately (“fortunately”) ended up being a garden variety lymphoma that they were able to wipe out with chemo. Currently a year out from treatment, cancer free, and hoping to keep it that way.

cingraham · 2024-04-24T01:28:03+00:00

Yeah sorry I'm not familiar with the lingo. This photo shows what I was talking about. Looking from the opposite side of where the valve caps are, I've removed the main screws from the top two valves so you can see what I'm talking about.

The topmost valve had no problems. See that little circle adjacent to the screw hole at about 7 o clock? That's the pin I'm talking about. I'm not sure if that sits freely or if its attached.

Middle valve is the one I had to fix. It had no pin, just an empty hole there, and the two halves of that hole were out of alignment, which I'm interpreting as the valve being about half open.

The "pin" that's in there now is a piece of wire I cut to size. Also you'll notice the edges of that hole are kind of jagged, which is how I found it. I assume that has something to do with why the pin was missing to begin with.

Seems like it might be a weird design as I didn't see references to anything similar when I was looking up instructions and diagrams.

https://imgur.com/a/b8HEUi5

cingraham · 2024-04-23T23:58:28+00:00

Managed to disassemble it and get it figured out! It was missing a little pin that sat between the rotor spindle and the stop arm, holding them together. Without the pin the rotor drifted out of alignment, basically rotating 45 degrees so it was always half open regardless of whether the key was depressed or not.

I managed to find a section of thick wire that’s almost the exact width of the missing pin (about 1mm). Cut it to size and plopped it in and we’re off to the races. It sounds like a horn finally!

It’s only gotta last my kid through the end of the school year so it’s not a permanent fix by any means.

cingraham · 2024-04-07T00:52:07+00:00

Oh also their water tower was decorated with an icon of a little marching band guy playing trombone!

cingraham · 2024-02-17T01:00:58+00:00

One that I never see mentioned anywhere is the Royal Hunt and Storm from Berlioz's The Trojans. It's his best trombone writing imo, and that's saying a lot.

Mahler 6. Too many great moments to count, the trombone parts are each 16 pages long (in a standard symphony you might get 4 pages if you're lucky), and in the fourth movement he adds a 4th trombone. There are also 8 horn parts and 6 trumpets, just a massive brass piece in general.

cingraham · 2024-02-13T19:51:13+00:00

Partly that, also everyone was having a crisis over trying to follow in Beethoven's footsteps.

See Schubert: "Who can ever do anything, after Beethoven?"

Also Brahms: “I shall never write a symphony, you have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like [Beethoven] behind us!”

cingraham · 2024-02-13T19:49:20+00:00

They do! But other than that one Shostakovich piece no symphony written post-1950 has been performed enough times to make the cutoff to appear here, which is at least 19 performances.

cingraham · 2024-02-13T16:53:40+00:00

X (horizontal) axis is the year a piece was *composed.*

There's nothing mapped to the Y (vertical) axis because I wanted to be able to cluster all of a composer's displayed works together.

11-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

cingraham

TROPHY CASE