swivelmaster

Now that’s a cool dad!

They’re into crypto now.

Honestly, I used to focus much more on how objectively interesting music was. I got into Frank Zappa and started down the very deep rabbit hole of his discography, and eventually realized that I really loved some of it and the rest was just... not enjoyable.

Speaking as someone who has been writing music for quite a long time, writing something that is objectively interesting (by being complex or unusual) is much, much easier than writing something that is just plain entertaining.

I think there's always something to be said for pushing boundaries, and I love experiencing any art or entertainment that makes me think "oh shit, I didn't know you could do that." But even then, that doesn't make it good or enjoyable, just interesting or thought-provoking. They're not mutually exclusive, but they also aren't necessarily correlated either.

What you’re describing is an album that’s more fun to think about than it is to listen to!

It definitely has a theme, but unfortunately as executed it’s basically “what if we defied convention by using live instruments and making a shitty album?”

When you bring up psychedelic, experimental post-rock, I want to mention that one of my favorite bands is Battles. They’re a good example of what you can do when you defy convention!

The sound design is certainly interesting from the perspective of psych, garage, post-rock, etc., but the sound design doesn't make up for the songwriting. You need both. Or at least, I do.

"in a way that feels tiresome" is the operative phrase here. I like the throwaway tracks on Homework that are twice as long and half as interesting more than I like most of Human After All. They're fun.

The reason that I dislike Human After All is that, quite simply, it's not fun.

It's dour. It's depressing. And it's repetitive in a way that feels tiresome; You can't dance to most of it or even really tap your foot to it.

What happened was that Daft Punk challenged themselves to make an album in six weeks and ended up with a showcase for a few neat guitar pedals and two fun songs (Robot Rock and Technologic), one of which consists almost entirely of a barely-changed sample (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFwGQAEYqHs).

Electronic music certainly evolved in ways that made it less warm, but that didn't make it less fun. Case in point, Skrillex's early music is weird and playful despite relying on 'cold' synth sounds. Human After All is just cold.

You could always just open a few Chrome tabs…

Viral marketing for the new Oz Perkins movie is getting really out of hand!

I don't think we'll see defections per se, but we will see some "retiring to spend more time with the family" or "looking for new opportunities in the private sector."

Technically this is correct, but in order for this to work you have to

1: Build the entire game first

2: Record agents playing hundreds/thousands/millions of hours of it

3: Be able to run the simulation at far higher resolution than what's in the demo videos here for it to even matter that the hypothetical game is 'very graphically advanced'

This is the most impractical way yet invented to 'play' a game.

By percentage, not absolute.

Oh what a shame that the sub-minimum wage gig economy hadn't been worked out yet, what an absolute tragedy for WebVan.

The dotcom era bubble specifically refers to Webvan-era companies, which were almost universally over-funded and over-valued based on outrageous speculation about the potential of the internet.

Instacart was founded about a decade later, and its margins are pretty slim by tech company standards (net income ~$100m on $2.5bn revenue) so I think it's pretty clear that in the year 2000, there's no possible way that Webvan could have succeeded even if it had done everything right.

Extrapolate this logic to AI, and the parallel is clear: The current generation of AI over-promises and under-delivers at enormous cost, and yet billions are invested under the premise that quality will go up and costs will go down enough in the next few years to build viable businesses.

If those investors are correct and we're just a few years away from useful, cost-effective AI, they'll make their money back. If they're wrong and we're actually a decade away, not a single AI product that hits the market within the next few years will survive.

Yes, that is absolutely something Americans still grapple with. ACA helps in theory, but healthcare is still outrageously expensive.

(Looks like I shouldn't have filled in the URL if I wanted to default to people seeing the text? I may have to do this again in a week with a different format.)

After seven years of on-and-off work, having a kid, the pandemic, and failing to find a publisher to fund it, I'm finally releasing my puzzle-platforming Metroidvania game, Moustachevania, for free along with its source code.

This was built in Unity.

I'm happy to answer any questions about building the game or why I wasn't able to find a publisher and/or finish the game.

Source code: https://github.com/swivelmaster/moustachevania

Postmortem and design notes: https://www.aaronnemoyten.com/moustachevania/

Lots of Americans love it too, but it’s definitely not for everyone. That’s fine, humor is subjective!

(For my part, I’ve seen every Python movie and TV episode.)

It’s well-executed and convenient. That’s worth a lot.

Amid Evil is awesome but I enjoyed DUSK (also published by New Blood) a bit more!

I'm not sure people LIKE flying, it's just the best of a lot of mediocre alternatives depending on the distance you're traveling and the time you're willing to allocate.

I've certainly had a few airline experience that ended in my wishing I had just driven from A to B because delays and the general inconvenience of it all meant that it would have been faster AND cheaper to drive, but of course we didn't know that when we booked the flight.

Oh okay so I guess it must not be true then...?

https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...

"1967 Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California. At this point, the number of patients in state hospitals had fallen to 22,000, and the Reagan administration uses the decline as a reason to make cuts to the Department of Mental Hygiene. They cut 2,600 jobs and 10 percent of the budget despite reports showing that hospitals were already below recommended staffing levels."

"1967 Reagan signs the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act and ends the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will, or for indefinite amounts of time. This law is regarded by some as a “patient’s bill of rights”. Sadly, the care outside state hospitals was inadequate. The year after the law goes into effect, a study shows the number of mentally ill people entering San Mateo's criminal justice system doubles."

"1973 The number of patients in California State mental hospitals falls to 7,000."

So in six years the number of patients in state [mental] hospitals falls from 22,000 to 7,000, and in the FIRST YEAR ALONE after the initial cuts the number of mentally ill patients entering the criminal justice system in just one county doubles.

This was on the first page of the google results.

You’re not going back far enough.

https://calmatters.org/justice/2019/03/hard-truths-about-dei...

It was for me. SA was basically my sole "social media" before Reddit came along. In hindsight, it was probably a much healthier alternative and I kind of wish I'd just stuck with it!

I'm sorry, are you saying that it's UNFORTUNATE that the younger generation won't be apathetic to workers' rights issues? Is that your actual position or did you just double-negative yourself by accident?

I think you may have missed the point of the comment you’re replying to.

Wow. I can say from experience that the difference between 1/4 N and 3x N of melatonin is being slightly more sleepy before bed vs having a night of insane dreams, no deep sleep, and waking up with a headache that Tylenol can’t fix.

The lack of regulation and consistency in the vitamin and supplement business continues to blow my mind.

Check out Tim Henson from Polyphia.

If you're purely talking about the quality of the music at the top of the charts then this is debatable, but there is always plenty of great new music coming out all the time... more than we can possibly process nowadays, in my opinion.

And I say this as someone whose favorite time in popular music IS the mid-90's. Many of my favorite albums are from that time.

Nope! I called and asked!