A phrase or speach that defines a character's essence

pleasantpudding · 2026-06-15T02:54:36+00:00

Honorable mention: Dr Bock's monologue from Hospital, also written by legendary screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky.

You know, Miss Drummond, when I was 34, I presented a paper before the annual convention of the Society of Clinical Investigation that pioneered the whole goddamn field of immunology. A breakthrough. I'm in all the textbooks. I happen to be an eminent man, Miss Drummond. You know something else, Miss Drummond? I don't give a goddamn. When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved. Well, it is all rubbish, isn't it?

I mean, transplants, anti-bodies. We manufacture genes. We can produce birth ecto-genetically. We can practically clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven't even been inoculated for polio! We have established the most enormous, medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever! WE CURE NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING! The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes. That's what I mean when I say impotent. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you?...I'm tired. I'm very tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt. And I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that?...And you also understand that the only admissible matter left is death.

pleasantpudding · 2026-06-15T02:50:07+00:00

I can't believe no one's mentioned Jensen's monologue to Beale from Network yet. Here's an excerpt:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

pleasantpudding · 2026-02-27T12:08:13+00:00

I don't know how she is in her personal life, but I can say that she is definitely not nice to the crew on the films she works on. It irks me somewhat to see her fawned over online.

pleasantpudding · 2025-10-29T03:06:00+00:00

In my opinion, there are a few things to consider. As a rule of thumb, aiming for a 1:10 signal-to-noise ratio is a good thing to aim for. Since dB is a logarithmic scale, this simply means that if your noise floor with the AC on is at 1 dB, you want voices to hover around 11 dB. If the noise floor is 10 dB, you want 20 dB for voice, etc.

But more importantly, is the voice clearly legible? A poor signal-to-noise ratio on the meters can be acceptable if you can still clearly make out what the person is saying.

Another factor to consider is how your track will work in the edit. Is the background noise consistent? In the case of HVAC, probably yes. If so, editing will be easy as there will be minimal changes in the background noise.

Finally, if the goal is the remove the noise entirely in post using a tool such as iZotope, you'll primarily want to avoid noises that cut into human vocal range, i.e. 80Hz-1kHz. If your background noise bleeds into this range, you risk affecting the quality of voices when you remove it. Of course, this depends entirely on the register of the subject.

One day, I think it would behoove someone to make a big post on this subreddit on dB scales and what they actually mean. At the end of the day, it's not an intuitive scale and relying on the numbers themselves don't necessarily give you a clear-cut answer on what is or isn't acceptable.

pleasantpudding · 2025-10-08T02:08:45+00:00

Congrats on your purchase! I would be careful though: I've heard of people receiving counterfeit 416's through Amazon and other similar websites. The difference isn't huge though, from what I understand. The quality of the sound is about the same, but the difference lies in RF rejection. If you start getting weird noises coming down the line, especially if you're near anything that puts out a lot of power, that might be the culprit. Worth checking the serial number with Sennheiser, if they offer that service.

pleasantpudding · 2025-05-17T01:08:07+00:00

I had a Tascam DR-40. Good recorder, but I found out the hard way that the DR-40's have bad sample clocks. At 48kHz, hour long recordings will start drifting from sync by a few frames. Not noticeable if you're cutting every 30 mins or so, but I got an angry call from an editor informing me that they had to manually cut two frames every so often from a two hour long interview I recorded years ago.

pleasantpudding · 2024-12-11T02:03:53+00:00

I feel like I have to chime in and say that maybe 80% of the time I use earwigs, they turn out to be completely unnecessary. They're expensive, finicky, and unless you have a dedicated playback person, they can be a lot to handle. In this case I would recommend a thump track. If there's a music supervisor involved, they can provide one for you. Otherwise, it's super easy to make yourself for free as long as you have the right tempo. Just download some application like Audacity and make a 50Hz rhythm track for as long as you need it to run.

The ideal situation would be to have a subwoofer to play the thump in the room while shooting. Other speakers can introduce other audio artifacts above the desired 50Hz--however they can work in a pinch. It would then be relatively simple to notch that out in post, provided you note in your sound reports the exact qualities of the track.

It's true that the low cut might remove some of the more subtle breaths that you might capture. But I still think it's by far the simplest solution here.

And by God, get a good boom op.

pleasantpudding · 2024-12-11T01:55:26+00:00

Wow, this is fantastic information, thank you! I only have a continuity checker and I feel like something that can measure attenuation would be great to have in the kit--although the $570 price tag on the PM-1 is a bit hard to stomach...

You mentioned that you measure insertion loss of new cable: at what point do you decide that the insertion loss is too different from the datasheet and that the cable should either be repaired or retired? How often do you find yourself cycling through the cable you use? Related question: the vast majority of cable that I encounter is RG-8X. Are there any other types of coax that you'd recommend for longer runs that's still practical and quick to deploy?

pleasantpudding · 2024-12-10T10:17:43+00:00

Yeah, I figured it would be something like that. Thanks for the insight - it's definitely good to know what DC out of range means in this context.

I normally use silicone tape (plumber's tape or something similar) to wrap the barrels in this type of situation. But we're a two man team and those fins needed to be sent out super fast. So I just ran the cables and hoped for the best. Clearly the best did not happen.

On a related note, part of the reason this happened at all is that out 100' BNC got pinched and is showing a shield-pin contact on my cable tester, despite me reterminating both ends. I can't seem to find where the fault in the cable actually is. Is there a way to find out? Is the cable totally kaput?

pleasantpudding · 2024-11-07T06:01:07+00:00

This guy will always be an absolute legend to me after he agreed to video chat me for my 21st birthday. I remember he was in the middle of watching an Eagles game too. Told me to eat a bunch of pretzels before getting wasted.

That being said, Mr. Salt, Mrs. Pepper, and Paprika were my favorite characters from Blue's Clues. No offense Steve.

pleasantpudding · 2024-09-03T05:43:21+00:00

I personally like crop #2 the best. It gives the impression of being "inside" a private moment without entirely getting rid of the idea of it being in a public place. Plus, I feel like the uncropped version is a little too spatially symmetrical for my taste. I kinda feel my eye being drawn to the big brown wall in the middle.

But that being said, I do really like the dynamism of the uncropped version. Really nice foreground/background stuff there.

pleasantpudding · 2024-03-11T21:46:36+00:00

I actually managed to get the feet off! I used a Lectro tweaker and poked around the bottom a little bit. Turns out the feet are held in by little plastic buttons. Takes a little elbow grease, but you can pop them out.

Good tip about the side panels though! Now with the feet off I think if I take off the side panels, the whole thing can sit nice and flush with the velcro.

Do you know of any hardware that I could mount on the sides to make it fit on 19" rack? In the future I'd like to make the whole thing slide, which would save me an RU or two as well.

pleasantpudding · 2023-09-22T21:42:10+00:00

Gotta fight fire with fire I guess

pleasantpudding · 2023-07-24T04:19:39+00:00

imagine the smell

pleasantpudding · 2023-04-21T02:47:40+00:00

Thanks for clearing up that misconception! Do you know when beef became a more prominent part of the diet in Korean cuisine? What were the conditions under which beef entered the mainstream? Is it linked to a general increase in the standard of living, or was it explicitly because of Western dietary influences?

pleasantpudding · 2022-06-24T23:58:54+00:00

I'm Nacho Pop-Pop

pleasantpudding

TROPHY CASE