#recording reproduction

[richardvarey]

Virtual home audio: Can I go fully in-the-box?

Inspired by reading of Andrew Scheps’ exploits with a fully plug-in recording and mixing workflow set-up, I’ve been investigating the possibility of running in-the-box effects & audio processor equivalents of my own hardware. As a long-time user of JRiver Media Center, I’ve been looking for suitable VST plug-in equivalents for these components: Behringer Sonic Exciter, Bass Processor, 31-band…

[mangosaurus]

JWCT FANDOM PSA!!! if a transcript and/or images of today's panel come out and you decide to blog about it, please remember to tag your spoilers!! we don't wanna ruin the first episode for people who'd rather wait to watch it themselves!!

[pinehutch]

Possibly the smartest thing I've done in the last few years:

[ID in alt]

Honestly when I'm stuck in a pit of disappointment and frustration and self-loathing and I look at the calendar and there's a probable hormonal cause for it? Relief.

[elkgrovecabendorgrinchsightings]

ELK GROVE CALIFORNIA BEND OREGON GRINCH SIGHTINGS

[crowley1990]

Five years of physics at university level and I still don’t understand electricity, electromagnetism and analog or digital sound recording or amplification

[intelligentchristianlady]

Long article, but if you are able to become pregnant, you probably need to read it.

[transingthoseformers]

Current design information on Silverlight:

So absurdly small by Cybertronian standards, squishy as it's armor is still soft and slightly flexible, curved finials that are still oh so telling but the curve will likely become more pronounced as it ages, plain silver armor with white optics (for now, as I can see Silverlight developing red as a secondary color bc that's Optimus's secondary color and was Megatron's original highlights color before he chose Decepticon purple as the war started. It's optics will most probably eventually darken into a blueish color, as yet again Orion blue and 'Tronus changed his from blue to red. But hey we can never discount whatever recessive genetics the Allspark loves to stash away in forged mecha. Will Silver have clawed servos or fangs? That's to be determined)

[eggbagelz]

revamping the athensfield folk

[howdoesone]

How does one make a family tree when the branches include cryogenic storage?

Creating a family tree is a cherished activity that helps individuals understand their lineage, heritage, and connections. However, when the branches of your family tree involve cryogenic storage and donor conception, the process can become more complex and nuanced. This guide will walk you through the steps to construct a family tree that accurately and respectfully includes these unique…

[monstersflashlight]

Here me out...scientists looking at fem!human lab rat getting fucked by a bunch of different monsters to study the different reactions of both the Monsters and the human 👀

We have serious mental issues guys...

Hi anon! We don't have mental issues, just great imagination.

When you applied for a job at a lab facility, you weren't expecting to be a monster's flashlight. The job application specified absolutely nothing about it apart from saying you needed to be okay working with other species. And well, you were okay with that.

But the first day on the job, you found yourself being asked a bunch of weird questions, some of them very specific in its sexual nature. You didn't know what was happening, but you weren't too worried about it, what could happen? Maybe you should have asked.

When they finally explained to you that you'd be fucked by a bunch of different monsters and then you'd record a short video explaining how it felt and if you'd do it again, it was too late to back down. Not that you wanted to. You'd always been a bit of a freak, and seeing some other monsters at the facility only made you crave a different kind of experimentation. So it was like a match made in heaven. Or so you thought.

At first it was all good, they introduced you to the experiment with some aliens with a ridged dick and nice long fingers that made you come so many times you had to be helped back to your room after, your knees trembling and your pussy sore. The aliens were the same species as the scientists leading the research, and you wondered if he would join. He didn't the first day. They discovered you could be fucked multiple times by multiple dicks and still come.

The second day an orc and a minotaur appeared. Their dicks were pretty similar, and you had a great time riding both of them until you were filled to the brim over and over. That day they discovered that you could experiment what they called "cum inflation", your stomach distended because of the amount of cum shoot inside of you. You had to sit down and let the researcher finger everything out of you. He looked detached to it, but you came against his fingers once again.

The tentacle monster on the third day was fun. His big reproductive dick pushed into your hole as little tentacles played with your body. It was a weird sensation, but a good one. That day they discovered you could be stimulated at multiple points and that would make you come harder.

It continued like that for a few days, some monsters weird, some okay, but overall, it was such a great experience that the next day you were already dripping and hot when the werewolf entered. He stretched you with his claws and long tongue until you were crying out, just to push his fat dick inside of you until you were falling apart around him. Just to push his huge knot inside your dripping hole. You squirted all around him, making him laugh and a worried scientist come check on you.

The scientist could could have stopped everything that was happening, could have told the werewolf it was over... but instead he pinched your nipples as he pushed his alien dick in your mouth until you were gagging around him and his hips were fucking your face. It shouldn't have been as hot as it was. You came again, and again... And by the end of that session you were showered in alien and werewolf cum. You loved it.

They didn't discover anything that day, but you discovered your alien researcher had a bit of a thing for you, and he's like to explore it further.

Reminder that you can commission me (info here) or suscribe to my Patreon (info here). And that my second account is @whiskis

[richardvarey]

A ParSonics lesson

A couple of comments from Alan Parson’s book Art & Science of Sound Recording provide a clarification of what we can reasonably expect from a home audio system for high fidelity reproduction of sound recordings. When you hear a great song today, can you really tell whether it was recorded in a professional studio or on a laptop? The problem for commercial recording studios is that you really…

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

SFX Magazine Issue 372 - Designing Good Omens ❤ 😊

PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL RALPH REVEALS HOW THE SHOW’S CENTREPIECE SET, WHICKBER STREET, WAS GIVEN A DEVILISHLY CLEVER UPGRADE FOR THE SECOND SEASON

WORDS: DAVE GOLDER

Invisible Columns And Thin Walls “The new studio is Pyramid Studios in Bathgate – it used to be a furniture warehouse. And unfortunately – or fortunately, because I accept these things as not challenges but gifts – right down the middle of that studio are a series of upright columns. But you’ll never spot them on screen. I had to build them in and integrate them into the walls and still get the streets between them. And it worked.

“There’s all sorts of cheeky design values to those sets. Normally a set like this is double-skin. In other words, you do an interior wall and an exterior wall, with an airspace in between. But really, the only time a viewer notices that there’s that width is at the doors and the windows. So I cheated all that. I ended up with single walls everywhere. So the exterior wall is the interior wall, just painted. All I did was make the sash windows and entrances wider to give it some depth as you walked in.”

GOOD OMENS HAD A CHANGE of location for its second season, but hopefully you didn’t notice. Because Whickber Street in Soho upped sticks from an airfield in Hertfordshire to a furniture warehouse in Bathgate, Edinburgh. It’s the kind of nonsensical geographical shenanigans that could only make sense in the crazy world of film and TV, and production designer Michael Ralph was the man in charge of rebuilding and expanding the show’s vast central set. “I wish we could have built more in season one than we did,” says Ralph, whose previous work has included Primeval and Dickensian. “We built the ground floor of everything and the facades of all the shops. But we didn’t build anything higher than that, because we were out on an airfield in a very, very difficult terrain and weather conditions, so we really couldn’t go much higher. Visual effects created the upper levels.”

But with season two the set has gone to a whole other level… literally. “What happened was that the rest of the street became integrated into the series’s storyline,” explains Ralph. “So we needed a record shop, we needed a coffee shop that actually had an inside, we needed a magic shop, we needed the pub. To introduce those meant we had to change the street with a layout that works from a storylines point of view. In other words, things like someone standing at the counter in the record shop had to be able to eyeball somebody standing at the counter in the coffee shop. They had to be able to eyeball Aziraphale sitting in his office in the window of the bookshop. But the rest of it was a pleasure to do inside, because we could expand it and I could go up two storeys.”

For most of the set, which is around 80 metres long and 60 metres wide, the two storeys only applied to the shop frontages, but in the case of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it allowed Ralph to build the mezzanine level for real this time. According to Ralph it became one of the cast and crews’ favourite places to hang out during down time.

But while AZ Fell & Co has grown in height, it actually has a slightly smaller footprint because of the logistics of adapting it to the new studio.

“Everybody swore to me that no one would notice,” says Ralph wryly. “I walked onto it and instinctively knew there was a difference immediately, and they hated me for that. I have this innate sense about spatial awareness and an eye like a spirit level.

“It’s not a lot, though – I think we’ve lost maybe two and a half feet on the front wall internally. I think that there’s a couple of other smaller areas, but only I’d notice. So I can be really annoying to my guys, but only on those levels. Not on any other. They actually quite like me…”

Populating The Bookshop “The props in the new bookshop set were a flawless reproduction from the set decorator Bronwyn Franklin [who is also Ralph’s wife]. It was really the worst-case scenario after season one. She works off the concept art that I produce, but what she does is she adds so much more to the character of the set. She doesn’t buy anything she doesn’t love, or doesn’t fit the character.

“But the things she put a lot of work into finding for season one, they were pretty much one-offs. When we burnt the set down in the sixth episode, we lost a lot of props, many of which had been spotted and appreciated by the fans. So Bronwyn had to discover a new set decorating technique: forensic buying.

“She found it all – duplicates and replicas. It took ages. In that respect, the Covid delay was very helpful for Bron. There’s 7,000 books in there and there’s not one fake book. That’s mainly because… it’s a weird thing to say, but we wanted it to smell and feel like a bookshop to everybody that was in it, all the time.

“It affects everybody subliminally; it affects everybody’s performance – actors and crew – it raises the bar 15 to 20%. And the detail, you know… We love a lot of detail.”

(look at the description under this, they called him 'Azi' hehehehe :D <3)

Aziraphale’s Inspirational Correspondence “There’s not one single scrap of paper on Aziraphale’s desk that isn’t written specifically for Aziraphale. Every single piece is not just fodder that’s been shoved there, it has a purpose; it’s a letter of thanks, or an enquiry about a book or something.

“Michael Sheen is so submerged in his character he would get lost sitting at his own desk, reading his own correspondence between takes. I believe wholeheartedly that if you put that much care into every single piece of detail, on that desk and in that room, that everybody feels it, including the crew, and then they give that set the same respect it deserves.

“They also lift their game because they believe that they’re doing something of so much care and value. Really, it’s a domino effect of passion and care for what you’re producing.”

Alternative Music “My daughter Mickey is lead graphic designer [two of Ralph’s sons worked on the series too, one as a concept artist, the other in props]. They’re the ones that produced all of that handwritten work on the desk. She’s the one that took on the record shop and made up 80 band names so that we didn’t have to get copyright clearance from real bands. Then she produced records and sleeves that spanned 50, 60 years of their recordings, and all of the graphics on the walls.

“I remember Michael and Neil [Gaiman] getting lost following one band’s history on the wall, looking at their posters and albums desperately trying to find out whether they survived that emo period.”

It’s A Kind Of Magic One of the new shops in Whickber Street for season two was Will Goldstone’s Magic Shop, which is full of as many Easter eggs as off-the-shelf conjuring tricks, including a Matt Smith Doctor Who-style fez and a toy orang-utan that’s a nod to Discworld’s The Librarian. Ralph says that while the series is full of references to Gaiman, Pratchett and Doctor Who, Michael Sheen never complained about a lack of Masters Of Sex in-jokes. “He’d be the last person to make that sort of comment!”

Ralph also reveals that the magic shop counter was another one of his wife’s purchases, bought at a Glasgow reclamation yard.

The Anansi Boys Connection Ralph reveals that Good Omens season two used the state-of-the-art special effects tech Volume (famous for its use in The Mandalorian to create virtual backdrops) for just one sequence, but he will be using it extensively elsewhere on another Gaiman TV series being made for Prime Video.

“We used Volume on the opening sequence to create the creation of the universe. I was designing Anansi Boys in duality with this project, which seems an outrageously suicidal thing to do. But it was fantastic and Anansi Boys was all on Volume. So I designed for Volume on one show and not Volume on the other. The complexities and the psychology of both is different.”

[communistkenobi]

"Sex" is commonly used to refer to a person's status as a man or woman based on biological factors. Although sex reflects a person's biology, as opposed to gender, which is generally considered to be socially constructed, the biological aspect of the body that determines a person's sex has not been legally or medically resolved. Traditionally, a person's legal sex is established by the sex that the birth attendant places on the birth certificate. Thus, for infants born with unambiguous external genitalia, the external genitalia typically control the sex determination. If the genitalia appear ambiguous, sex is assigned, in part, based on sex-role stereotypes. The presence of an "adequate" penis in an XY infant leads to the label male, while the absence of an "adequate" penis leads to the label female. A genetic (XY) male with an "inadequate" penis (one that physicians believe will be incapable of penetrating a female's vagina when the child reaches adulthood) is "turned into" a female even if it means destroying his reproductive capacity. A genetic (XX) female who may be capable of reproducing, however, is generally assigned the female sex to preserve her reproductive capability, regardless of the appearance of her external genitalia. If her phallus is considered to be too large to meet the guidelines for a typical clitoris, it is surgically reduced, even if it means that her capacity for satisfactory sex may be reduced or destroyed. In other words, men are defined based on their ability to penetrate females, and females are defined based on theis ability to procreate. Sex, therefore, can be viewed as a social construct rather than a biological fact.

— The Road Less Traveled: The Problem with Binary Sex Categories by Julie A Greenberg in Transgender Rights (2006)

interesting to note that 1) the introduction of chromosomal information doesn’t actually provide more “biologically accurate” precision in sex assignment, only a more complex set of administrative and medical instructions on the procedures of assignment, 2) the only concern in sex assignment is maintaining the distinction that “females make babies” and “males penetrate females to induce pregnancy.”

This is why the idea that “sex is biological” or that we can just drill down to find the sex atom of the human body, be that chromosomes or gametes or whatever else, is premised on the notion that sex assignment is simply a record of a self-evident reality, not the construction of the category of sex as the mythological foundation of cis-heterosexual reproduction

[toolusingmammalgirl]

Disconnected Thoughts on Art Reproduction:

Hokusai's Great Wave fascinates me because, unlike almost every other artwork in that bracket of fame, it was never a bespoke piece that was only later reproduced. It was a commercial print right from the start, and while versions of it can be identified as belonging to different print runs, there is no meaningful 'original' aside from the long-since-discarded printing plates.

Even better, this state has been imposed on artworks that were once unique. In 2021, the art collective MSCHF bought an Andy Warhol sketch at auction for $20,000, made 999 meticulous forgeries of it, shuffled them to destroy any record of which was the original, and sold each piece for $250 as Possibly Real Copy of 'Fairies' by Andy Warhol, by MSCHF.

As with many smartass art collectives, MSCHF's projects range from eye-rolling to kinda clever to brilliant, but I think this is their magnum opus. It has exactly the kind of unwieldy literal title I adore. The original work has been arguably destroyed, but in a way that Warhol would applaud. It's the most pointed way to ask art buyers, do you care about the actual artistry of the work or just the bragging rights of owning the original?

---

Artistic domains where reproduction is trivial are often prone to the Superstar Problem: Why would I listen to the world's 50th-best cellist when I can stream all the Yo-Yo Ma I want just as easily? NFTs were pitched as a solution to this, marking the original or master copy of a natively-digital work to let it retain value. But even if the crypto market didn't have its own 2008 every few weeks, I don't want fine-art auction houses to be the future of digital art, especially when there are already plenty of existing ways to mitigate the problem. A fursona, a tabletop-game character, a niche Blorbo, etc. are all bespoke value-adds that enable a much greater range of artists to get commissions. But these require a culture of art fans who don't care about flipping it at Christie's, often overlapping with fannish cultures where plenty of artists operate at all experience levels.

I don't have any tidy conclusions for this, but I just want to say that an earlier version of this process - "paint me a biblical scene, and put me in it to flex my wealth and piety" - culminated in one of the funniest artworks I've ever seen, Francisco de Zurbarán's Christ Crucified (With Donor):

[reasonandempathy]

Walz has served as Minnesota’s governor since 2019 after 12 years in the House of Representatives and now chairs the Democratic Governors Association. He has built a reputation as a folksy politician who can get things done, as Minnesota has adopted a number of progressive laws during his tenure. According to a poll conducted earlier this year, Walz enjoys an approval rating of 55% among Minnesotans. Since Minnesota Democrats achieved a legislative trifecta in the 2022 elections, Walz and his allies have used their power to push a slate of progressive policies. The governor has signed bills protecting abortion access, expanding background checks for prospective gun owners and legalizing recreational marijuana. “Right now, Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital,” Walz said last year. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.” That philosophy has endeared him to progressives, who threw their support behind him as the veepstakes kicked into high gear over the past two weeks. They reshared clips of Walz lovingly mocking his daughter’s vegetarianism and tinkering with his car to paint him as the dad that America needs right now.

This is fucking awesome! Honestly, sincerely good news and a very promising pick for the potential Harris Administration. An aggressive, unabashed, popular, populist left-winger with a track record of enacting real, substantive help for people is capital-G Great.

What has he done, specifically?

Abortion rights

In a 1995 ruling, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld abortion rights in Minnesota. In January 2023, Walz signed the PRO Act (Protect Reproductive Options Act) into law, making abortion a "fundamental right," as well as access to contraception, fertility treatments, sterilization and other reproductive health care.

The law made Minnesota the first state to codify abortion rights in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which nullified Roe. v. Wade after nearly 50 years of precedent. In April 2023, Walz signed the Reproductive Freedom Defense Act into law, shielding women and providers from any legal action originating from the patient's state.

Pro-LGBTQIA+ legislation

In March 2023, Walz signed an executive order to protect the right of residents to have access to gender-affirming health care. Weeks later, he signed the "Trans Refuge" bill, banning the enforcement of arrest warrants, extradition requests and out-of-state subpoenas for those who traveled to Minnesota for care.

"When someone else is given basic rights, others don't lose theirs," Walz said. "We aren't cutting a pie here. We're giving basic rights to every single Minnesotan."

Paid family, medical and sick leave

In May 2023, Walz signed a law creating a state-run program to provide paid family and medical leave for Minnesota workers, funded by a 0.7% payroll tax on employers, by 2026.

Legalization of recreational marijuana

In May 2023, Minnesota became the 23rd state in the nation to legalize recreational cannabis use. Three months later, people 21 and older could start to possess certain amounts of marijuana at home and on their person, in addition to legally growing up to eight plants at a time.

Restoration of voting rights for former felons

In March 2023, Walz signed a bill that restored the right to vote to more than 50,000 convicted felons who had already served their time.

Universal school meals

Amid the increase in food insecurity for many Minnesotans during the pandemic, and the subsequent strain on the state's food shelves that remains to this day, Walz signed a bill in March 2023 that ensures all K-12 students in the state have access to free breakfast and lunch on school days.

Do you know what makes this even better?

Fuck 'Em. I know negative partisanship is important and can help motivate right-wingers to vote, but they're going to vote anyway. And him being afraid of Walz is just a sign that he's a good pick, in policy and politics.

[socialistexan]

If I can put into the simplest terms of my current strategy for 2024 and probably every election going forward, it's this:

I'm voting for the person who I want to oppose and organize against for the next 4 years.

That's it. This might seem cointer-intitive, but it's really not.

Who would you rather advocate for Palestine under? The person that's been open to a ceasefire for months and is snubbing Netenyahu, or the person who said blantently and out loud that he wants Netenyahu to "finish the job" and wants to deport anyone who has been critical of Israel?

Who would I rather fight for LGBTQ rights under? The person who was fighting for marriage equality in 2004 and has a consistent (though imperfect) record on supporting the community, or the guy that wants to make my health care, access to bathrooms, and mere existence illegal?

Who would I rather fight for reproductive rights under? Who would I rather fight for drug legalization and record expungement under? Who would I rather organize mutual aid and community care under? How about civil rights? Voting rights? Immigration? Disability rights? Land back? Climate change? Gun reform?

That's the point of voting, to avoid doing things on extra hard mode. You fight the fascists in every arena, you don't cede a single inch to them anywhere.