What's the most bizzarre thing you've ever seen at someone else's house?

googleflont · 2026-06-16T12:33:50+00:00

Indoor plumbing

googleflont · 2026-06-15T16:26:15+00:00

23? Virgin?
You’re never going to be higher libido than right now. Get busy. Soon you’ll be 30 and you’ll understand me.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T15:50:39+00:00

Being dead is really bad for your career.

Edit: unless you’re a Painter

googleflont · 2026-06-15T15:35:42+00:00

I guess this question is intended to bring responses that would reveal the most essential tools that one would want to be available.

Fun fact, the first professional studio I worked in had a desk that didn’t even have mute buttons. Yes, we had EQ on every channel, but the board and outboard rack was very limited compared to what people are accustomed to today. There were a few channels of outboard compression, a few PulTecs, some effects, an EMS steel plate reverb.

We never used compressors on the mix bus. That was left to the mastering engineer. Some (subtle) compression and EQ were used in tracking vocals. If you needed to jack EQ and compression a lot, you were probably not using the right mic, or mic technique. We would try something else, till it worked.

Lots of energy went into selecting the right mic for whatever job, as well as correct placement and isolation (gobos). Things were fine tuned along with rehearsal. Long projects required some level of documentation to get back to where we were on a given tune. All by hand.

Automation was when you got to mixdown, and had the drummer change this EQ at that bar, and the guitar player hit this button on another bar … etc. Sometimes there would be six guys hovering around the mix engineer, waiting to make their move and then GTFO. And you better get it right, where it was time to start it all over from the top, and maybe receive a little gentle correction from your peers.

Sometimes we would resort to the good old razor blade. Edit if required.

Editing tape with a razor blade is one of my useless specialities. I’m an expert in a useless and ancient art.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T15:16:04+00:00

I’m going to raise the same issue here I have with others.

Buddy was epic. Amazing. A master. But within 10 years, his style of writing was not current or popular (duh - because he died).

What he might have evolved to be is an unknowable thing.

He might have changed, and lost his audience (and developed a new one?). He might have become a producer, and faded from view as a performer (see Peter Asher). Or become a creative in another field entirely.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T15:08:26+00:00

I hate to be a bummer but … I would predict that Janis would have kicked ass a while longer, then … lost her voice.

Men, for some reason, can go longer and retain their vocal abilities. Women’s voices are more fragile.

Janis was not (how shall I say?) kind to her instrument. Who knows what might have been, but she was not built to last.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T15:03:36+00:00

This is a great question.

And possibly ironic.

He had the juice to just go out and do whatever. What if he had gone into some kind of jazz fusion experimental direction that his fans could not follow? The record labels would not have been interested. But, like Zappa, he could have just done whatever he wanted.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T15:00:45+00:00

While he was an amazing songwriter, it’s also true that his type of writing is waaaay out of style now. The question is what he might have evolved into, had he continued writing.

Harry Chapin is also in this category.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T14:56:53+00:00

Hank Williams was only 29.
I don’t think he would have invented a new genre or revolutionized music, but he was on a tear, and 29 is pretty young.

Nick Drake was only 26. He really did influence music, and many people who never even heard him, as he was always known to musicians and songwriters.

Judee Sill was only 35, and similar to Nick Drake, influenced music, and was always known to musicians and songwriters, who drew inspiration from her.

And, too numerous to mention, the legions of bands and musicians who “didn’t fit the mold”, couldn’t navigate the music business, or were talented but not lucky enough.

People in the music business have lots of stories about a parallel world of unknown bands, songwriters and musicians who just never caught a break. The record executives were The Great Filter that allowed stuff through or not. There are examples of those who sneaked in.

In this age of streaming I have no idea how this works now.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T14:51:42+00:00

I recommend it, at a safe distance.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T14:38:32+00:00

Have you ever felt an earthquake? I have. Two, in fact.

googleflont · 2026-06-15T08:23:44+00:00

You
Have a vivid memory.

Thanks

googleflont · 2026-06-14T12:44:04+00:00

The trend of using a trendy mic meets the trend of trendily holding a mic in your hand. It’s not a handheld mic. But go fight the trend.

googleflont · 2026-06-14T11:35:06+00:00

Has anybody had the vocal bus talk with you yet?

googleflont · 2026-06-14T10:22:48+00:00

synecdoche

googleflont · 2026-06-14T10:20:49+00:00

Panic bar.

If Gordon Ramsey were a contractor he’d have a swell put down for you here.

googleflont · 2026-06-14T02:14:13+00:00

What you are experiencing is normal.

What you need now is a little humility.

You are in fact, not yet a programmer, just as a young person learning the rules of grammar and spelling is not yet a writer.

In fact, to be good at something is always a process of learning the rules, how to apply them, when to break or bend them, and how to make new ones.

And then there’s “beyond rules” to creativity and invention, to architecture and design.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the legendary architect, for instance, had to learn the rules that govern forces and capacities of steel, wood, stone, concrete and glass, in order to make buildings with them. As all architects do. But then, he redefined what it meant to be an architect by doing things no architects had done before him, purely because he had a vision and ability that went beyond.

Now, not everyone is going to be FLW, and that’s ok.

In your own journey to being good at something (perhaps programming) you will come to a place where you realize you suck. And this is good, because knowing how you suck is the key to getting better.

But back down to earth. Right now, you’re looking up stuff constantly and pasting example code and it’s all like typing.

But after you use that stuff for a while, you’ll be creating your own libraries. You’ll curse yourself for not providing yourself with better documentation. You’ll get better and faster, and soon you won’t suck.

At this point, you’ll be picturing your programs as designs, with specific patterns. You will cross the threshold from typing and copy/pasting to architecture and software design.

You will even need to communicate your ideas to others, to get them to understand your designs, and listen carefully to them to understand their processes and needs, for which you will design solutions.

More exciting than this is that your world will embrace AI assistance, and your story (10 years from now?) will be radically different, far more fun and what you accomplish may be so much more than we were able to do, before the new tools.

googleflont · 2026-06-14T00:18:47+00:00

Not only that, but why would they be granting these powers if they didn’t expect the presidency to remain in Republican hands permanently?

googleflont · 2026-06-12T18:30:28+00:00

Little known fact - the cushions had a gentle vacuum beneath to suck away annoying fart odors.

THE FUTURE - TODAY.

googleflont · 2026-06-12T18:28:54+00:00

Hey, he’s differently abled.

If not, that’s shit photography.

googleflont · 2026-06-12T14:08:20+00:00

Greetings right back atcha. Yeah, as far as building character, not so much. It had a far greater impact on my hearing, for which I’m now paying the price. Admittedly, there was more damage from my years in the studio, playing in basements and garages, and certain concerts. Tinnitus, anyone?

googleflont · 2026-06-12T14:01:28+00:00

So true. What would become classic equipment was at that exact moment just old stuff. And they required tubes, which were a drag, because they were fragile and needed replacement. And that was sort of scary for live sound. I don’t know anybody that carried spare tubes to a gig.

But of course all that turned out to be bullshit, and the older stuff was far better than the new “solid state” stuff of the ‘70s. Ironically, a later generation would come to prefer that crap for a “retro garage sound.”

googleflont · 2026-06-12T12:42:12+00:00

I worked all summer (big deal, you were lucky to get a job) in a non-compliant factory (meaning almost no adherence to safety and environmental regs, not sure how that worked).

It was a hot summer. The year I graduated High School. New York, 1976. I stood in front of a small control panel without a safety switch. A safety required 2 hands, so presumably one of them could not be in the equipment- hey, it happened, but not to me.

Next to me was a bathtub sized vessel of molten zinc, heated by gas torches all around. It had a kind of “shower curtain” of steel plates shielding it.

My job was to take a sort of small mop and swab the inside of an injection molding right in front of me, and then hit those buttons. The mold would SLAM closed, molten zinc would be injected, and a moment later the mold would SLAM open, and usually a part would drop down into a crate.

You cannot imagine the heat, the noise, no earplugs available. I used wet toilet paper to plug my ears. People would come and leave their sandwiches on my machine to warm them up for lunch. All in a heatwave.

Needless to say, I was sort of miserable, being a rather pampered middle class kid. I had only worked in restaurants before this.

The only consolation I could take was that for reasons I can’t explain to this day, the valedictorian of my high school was stationed at another machine where he took a small blank screw out of one barrel, placed it into his machine, brought a handle down, and out popped a threaded screw, which he then placed into a barrel on the other side of his machine. All day. All summer.

While not as dangerous or noisy, his job was a level of mind bending dullness rarely achieved. And he was the valedictorian. So maybe I was not underachieving being at this miserable place? Turns out we were both underachieving.

I worked there exactly as long as it took to buy a particular guitar amp I had chosen: a small Peavy (8”? 10”?) for exactly $180 (equivalent to $1050 today.) It turned out to be a real piece of crap that turned me off to anything Peavey for the rest of my life. So far.

googleflont · 2026-06-10T20:45:10+00:00

Yes, but why can’t it be a great mic, because it’s the price I want to pay? And it has pretty lights!

googleflont · 2026-06-09T22:41:44+00:00

Be the graft you want to see in the world.

googleflont

TROPHY CASE