Spyke

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movies

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Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)

TL;DR:

Modern actors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles with no theatre training whatsoever who mumble their words because they think it sounds cooler.

Directors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles who believe unintelligible dialogue is more realistic, but also that drowning it in way too loud music makes the film more emotional, that sound recording equipment gets in the way of filming and should be kept as far away as possible from the action, and that if they know what the script says (because they've read it a thousand times) so will the audience.

Producers (and the aforementioned actors and directors) are cheap lazy incompetent self entitled imbeciles who'll refuse to film another take claiming the useless shit they just filmed can be fixed in post (it can't, it's shit).

Theatres fired all competent projectionists and are now manned by lazy incompetent untrained teenagers who have no idea how to properly operate and set up the sound systems and will more often than not play the films at the wrong volume.

Streaming sites overcompress and overprocess (and overprice) the audio into an even more unintelligible noisy mess.

“Smart” TVs overprocess it even more on top of that, making it even worse. And you're probably using the wrong settings anyway.

In short: the audio is intentionally crap, becomes even crappier in every step between filming and your ears (except, according to people working in sound processing, the sound processing step, but there's only so much you can do to fix crappy digital audio).

movies

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Frank Herbert always thought Star Wars was a Dune ripoff

Sir Terry Pratchett said, regarding fantasy:

“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”

I think pretty much the same can be said for Herbert (and before him Asimov) when it comes to science-fiction...

(Reading the article, though, it seems Herbert might have been a bit more of an arse about other authors being influenced by him than Tolkien or Asimov ever were...)

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the banthram

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Obligatory warning that although this particular one isn't, most of the stripes in Oglaf, while still as funny and smart as this one if not more, tend to also be somewhat raunchy and not safe for work, so if you're in an environment where cartoon genitals might offend you might want to wait until you're elsewhere before you partake.

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Why was file search much faster in Windows XP than in subsequent versions?

Just get Everything Search and you'll be able to search just as fast as you could in XP, and with no Bing spam messing up the results.

Funny¹ thing is that Everything (and similar programs like WizTree) can be that be that fast because Microsoft's own NTFS file system has a built in file index, which is what Windows Search used back in XP; the search programs practically don't have to do any work, NTFS has already done it for them.

Of course, though, that'll give you the results you want, not the results Microsoft wants, which explains the change in later further enshittified versions of Windows.

1.– And by funny I mean not funny at all. Sad, in fact. Tragic, even, maybe.

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Police: Vandal spray paints ‘F--- Elon’ on 34 Tesla Cybertrucks in Fort Lauderdale

Amateurs. You don't spray paint them, they'll just clean it off.

What you do, is place a stencil with “fuck Elon” on them, spray rust protective clear lacquer over the general area, and remove the stencil.

They won't notice until the next time it rains, when the words will show up in bright rust orange, much more harder to remove than any spray paint, and much harder to trace to you.