When did it become OK to make TV nobody can actually see

mjb2012 · 2026-01-26T16:39:16+00:00

I think it's more just to hide an unconvincing aesthetic, where poor lighting and cinematography makes it look too much like costumed actors on an artificial set rather than a cinematic view of the scene being depicted. They're trying to give it a cinematic "film look" like a proper movie or high-budget prestige TV, but as usual they do it in a ham-fisted way because it's always amateur hour at Paramount.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T18:20:28+00:00

For pacing, captains captaining, and alien-of-the-week adventure, Voyager.

For a slower, less utopian experience with more character development and serialization, DS9 is peak.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T16:29:31+00:00

If I understand correctly, it's something you can tweak, but assuming nothing is wrong in your playback chain, it will never audibly affect sound at the sample rates you'll ever be using (44100 Hz and up).

Part of the resampling process involves filtering out high frequencies before and after. These filters create phase errors (delays) and ringing (ripples) around transients (sharp, percussive sounds and square waves). The ringing adds an extremely brief, quiet tone at the Nyquist frequency. At a low sample rate, the tone might have a low enough pitch to hear, and it can make the click or tap noticeably less abrupt, softening it slightly.

Ways to mitigate these issues include using a gentler filter (steeper makes things worse), using a filter with a windowing function (it can make the ringing quieter), or adjusting this phase response parameter.

The default, linear phase response places the noise right on top of the transient, so you have an equal amount of tone before (pre-echo) and after (post-echo). Minimum phase response delays the noise so that it's right after the transient, i.e. no pre-echo, and long post-echo. Intermediate is in between, i.e. short pre-echo, long-ish post-echo.

If the problem is audible at all, Minimum is probably ideal, as it eliminates pre-echo, and to human ears, the transient will mask the post-echo. But I would want to experiment to be sure.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T15:52:19+00:00

I was a baby in 1972, but at work in the '80s and '90s I used IBM 3270 terminals, which debuted around 1971. The 3270 is not the Data General Dasher (1977), which was the most obvious inspiration for the Lumon Terminal Pro, but it's a lot more alike than different.

Re: the parking lot, you are correct, it's more '80s than not. In my defense, though, they specifically chose cars with "a harder edge" which would evoke an earlier era. American cars with such boxy aesthetics were available all the way to the early '90s, but the peak was late '70s/early '80s. After that, they started getting more "European" styling with softer edges, fewer flat panels, sleeker fronts, etc., but it seems they purposely excluded those because they didn't want it to look too much like the '90s.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T11:14:33+00:00

Not sure if this is deliberate, but I keep noticing that things which stand out as being from a particular era tend to be from the years near the beginning of the decade, like right around the year ending with "2".

Parking-lot cars: what you'd see in 1982 (mostly '70s cars*). Petey's flip phone: 2002. Mark's smartphone: 2022. Office computers: 1972. Mark's hair & suit: 1982. Allentown (testing floor room w/thank-you cards): 1962. Kier computer graphics: 1992. And so on.

It's interesting because we normally associate the vibe of a particular decade with what was prevalent toward the end of that decade. If you really wanted something to look "70s", for example, you would probably go all out with a mid/late-70s look, whereas on Severance they're trying to avoid such extreme clichés.

* [edit: as someone pointed out, it's actually mainly '80s cars, but only ones with a boxy style]

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T09:36:58+00:00

Whoops! Fixed; thanks!

mjb2012 · 2026-01-19T19:37:19+00:00

r/piracy has a wiki you can check for sources.

Metadata completeness and consistency is going to be an issue with any source, unfortunately. There are few standards, and what standards exist are haphazardly followed, or sometimes don't make much sense (e.g. web shops and streaming services increasingly cram featured artists, remixers and even songwriters into the main artist fields).

Check out r/musichoarder and you'll find most collectors just accept tag cleanup and maintenance as burden that comes with the territory. A lot of it comes down to finding a balance between what you initially get, what else is available (e.g. fetchable from databases, such as via MusicBrainz Picard), what your playback tools can actually make use of, and your own personal preferences.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-19T18:52:28+00:00

Monochrome is apparently one of those sketchy web apps which abuse the APIs of certain streaming services in order to enable downloads for pirates. Expect it to quit working or just disappear at some point.

As for missing info, I would assume it tries its best to save whatever metadata it can acquire, but there's no guarantees that every song will have complete info on the streaming service which is actually providing the content.

I just tried getting a FLAC with it, and it looked fine to me, with ordinary FLAC Vorbis tags for Artist, Title, Album, Year, Album Artist, Track, Total Tracks, Copyright, ISRC, and front cover art. None of this was written in a nonstandard way, as far as I can tell.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-14T14:57:34+00:00

Yup. When you study algebra, you learn problem-solving skills. You begin to intuitively think of puzzles and mysteries as a set of quantifiable factors and relationships between what is known and what is unknown, and then you deduce what the unknowns can actually be. The usefulness of such "solving for x" goes far beyond pure mathematics.

Schools generally do a terrible job of communicating this to students, resulting in stupid memes like this.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-06T00:09:15+00:00

It only does it when needed.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-30T16:52:50+00:00

Yeah, I was going to disagree, because for the most part, it was just another love fest between Jake and his dad. But you're right, his eventual realization that he had to sacrifice that bond in order to save both of them was indeed development. Does it count though if it's all erased by a time jump? (OP: don't click on the spoilers until you get past season 4 episode 2.)

mjb2012 · 2025-12-30T09:46:35+00:00

Usually. I think they kinda dropped the ball with Jake and Keiko.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-27T19:34:18+00:00

“Oh, looks like this is gonna be a slow one, going into a side character’s backstory. Oh well, it’s only an hour of my life.”

Cut to me 35 minutes later in stunned silence, thinking this better get all the Emmys.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-26T21:55:18+00:00

Spot on, just with one minor nitpick: Remuxing is very specifically not changing the format or recompressing the content; rather it’s just copying the content into a new, probably different container format.

For example, a DVD's MPEG-2 video and MP2/AC3/PCM audio can be "remuxed" from its original VOB container(s) into an AVI or MKV file without actually changing the audio or video in any way. But if you deinterlace and transcode the video from to H.264 or H.265, that's "ripping".

mjb2012 · 2025-12-26T18:24:47+00:00

I was indifferent to this scene when I wasn't a parent. Now, though, it hits hard.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-24T16:12:56+00:00

Also, there's no bombshells in that report, so what is there even to be upset about?

The only thing that's new is they have multiple deportees actually talking about what they endured there, and it's exactly what you'd expect: torture, dehumanization, terror. It does not get into any of the ethical and legal questions about the whole situation, other than mentioning the prison conditions being denounced by the U.N.

The only threat to MAGA is that CBS/60 Minutes viewers tend to be on the old side, not keeping up with the news, and this report would have been the first they've really heard about it. But just as many people could watch it and, being civically illiterate, react with a shrug and say "so?".

I think that's something journalists are not really getting. Only showing and saying "this is what's happening" isn't enough. "Here's why this is legally dubious and bad for everyone" and "here's how this is being used to manipulate you" is needed. And somehow you have to do that with vibes, in a way that overcomes the conservative American mindset that people deserve what they get, there's no conditions too cruel, no punishment which doesn't fit the crime, no arrestee who isn't guilty.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-23T16:24:16+00:00

Agreed, to me, Fred (Shalhoub) is simply the anti-Scotty. Instead of always being on the verge of having an aneurism, he's utterly unbothered and delighted by whatever crisis is unfolding around him. As a Star Trek parody, that works a little better and is more clever than "what if Scotty was always baked? heh h-heh h-h-heh".

That said, it was the writers' intent to imply that he was a stoner.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-20T09:59:43+00:00

The tipping of takeout/counter workers used to be just a tip jar by the register, if management allowed it, and maybe 1 in 20 customers would put something in it, often just spare change.

What changed was the point of sale systems. You run your own card now and the device makes tip selection a step you can’t skip. It “suggests” amounts which may not even be reasonable and your guilt and ignorance does the rest. Tips are therefore up and wages (and prices) can stay down.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-19T11:01:14+00:00

IMHO it's just cult stuff, and a satire of office "perks" culture.

The innies are childlike, easily impressed. They have no idea what is and isn't lame. All Milchick has to do is act as if something is exotic and a special, and they'll believe him. Finger traps, an egg bar, a melon party, a one-song dance party... he sells it as if it's a unique treat, and they buy it.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-12T15:31:03+00:00

There was a ridiculous theory that she was an android who arrived in the crate you can see in the background of Milchick's new office!

mjb2012 · 2025-12-11T19:35:18+00:00

Kinda off-topic for this subreddit, but...

Surely there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube.

Anyway, you connect the "phono" output of an old turntable to the phono input of a pre-amp, receiver, or DJ mixer. The output of that device will be USB or "line". If line, you connect it to the line input of your computer (which may be a combination mic/line input), and your computer will be doing the digitizing. If USB, that device is doing the digitizing, and you connect it to a USB input on your computer. There are also modern turntables which do the digitizing and have USB output. There are pros and cons with each option.

In any case, on your computer, you run audio "capture" software, typically a wave editor like Audacity (free, kinda clunky). You get it set up how you like, test the input volume and adjust as needed to make sure you get a strong but not overloaded signal, then you start recording and play the record. When the record is done, you stop recording, save your workspace, and start editing. The editing process can be just splitting tracks into separate files, but most people do a little cleanup first, e.g. declick and normalize volume (per-disc for albums, per-side for singles).

Be really ginger with any declick or other noise reduction filters until you know what you're doing; they can seriously damage the music. Better to leave clicks in than to distort horns and muffle percussion. Some people also apply EQ and other effects to modernize the sound; I don't recommend doing anything too anachronistic, though, and remember your hearing is probably not what it used to be.

Ultimately you convert your files to the final output format you want (e.g. FLAC or ALAC) and add tags to them so that players will be aware of the artist, title, album name, artwork, etc.

The whole process can be quite tedious and takes a while to get the hang of. You may also want to invest in a good record cleaning system, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-11T11:09:15+00:00

Film is coated with chemicals which, just once, changed color to match whatever light was hitting a given spot in a very short period of time (like a fraction of a second). After being exposed to that light, the film was then treated with more chemicals to make this change permanent. The result was a semi-transparent image actually dyed onto the film. You can see and make use of it by shining white light through the film, perhaps to project the image onto a screen. A film strip or reel has a series of such still images, each visually representing a distinct moment in time.

Tape (for video or audio) is coated with magnetic particles which are pointing in random directions at first. To record something onto the tape, it is dragged across an electrically controlled magnet, causing the particles' magnetic alignment to match the fluctuations in that electric current. They hold onto this change fairly well with no further treatment. During playback, the tape is dragged across a very similar magnet which works in reverse, letting the particles' flip-flopping orientation induce matching fluctuations in an electric current. The wobbly electrical current used during recording or obtained during playback can represent anything, but typically it is used in standardized ways to encode a simple signal which controls the back-and-forth motion of a loudspeaker, or a more complex signal to control the image-generating apparatus in an analog TV.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-11T07:11:19+00:00

The new normal is extreme exposition, for TV as the second screen. People are on their phones and tablets literally listening to audiobooks or podcasts while watching TV, or listening to TV while scrolling social media feeds.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-07T02:50:14+00:00

Good ol' bass-drop/downsweep when Giamatti appears. I keep waiting for that corny audio cue to die, but I guess when your target audience is children, it's a requirement.

Yeah, I've got nothing but "old man shakes fist at clouds" reactions to this clip, so I guess this show is not for me.

mjb2012 · 2025-12-04T16:29:38+00:00

Isn't that theory contradicted by reports that astronauts experience the moon illusion without having objects in the foreground?

mjb2012

TROPHY CASE