Snorbla the Obviously-Named Science Fiction Alien Maintainer lifted ximir’s snorp away from today’s chemically-encoded daily news dispatch. It was no time to be doom-sniffing ximir’s feed… today was an Auspicious Day. As the Master of the Large Gravitational Array Transmitter, it was ximir’s duty and privilege to press The Button.
For the last several lifetimes of the Snorbla family, the two main black holes of the array, spinning just on the cusp of where they would go out of control from loss of energy for maximum amplitude, had been spinning in a direction inline with the plane of the communication array’s target.
Pray.
From the "It's Obvious When I Say It, But..." department: I recently figured out to put something into words that has been bothering me for a while: We tend to treat stream resolutions as putting a minimum guarantee of quality on a stream. Thus, a "720P stream" must be lower in quality than a "1080P stream", which must be lower in quality than a "4K stream".
This is backwards. Stream resolution puts a maximum quality on a stream.
While writing comment on another site, I accidentally came up with what I think is a pretty good definition of "gimmick", since the internet tends to throw the term around with wild abandon.
A storyteller that likes getting paid should do things that make the audience want to come back for more. A gimmick is when you do something that win in the short term, but is ultimately burning your audience as they tire of it.
It's abstract to think about how one will someday be old and feeble, but as I was filtering over some spam a moment ago, it occurred to me that someday, my children will have to take away my email because I won't be able to properly process Mr. Al-Amin Dagash's email titled REQUEST FOR A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP.
Now that's a sobering thought.
Around about 1998, I was talking to my electronic music teacher and ethused about the day that would come when we could put, say, everything Mozart ever did on a single cube, holding my fingers up in the air separated by about an inch. "You know, not everything Mozart did was great." "No, I get it, I just mean him as someone who put out a lot of stuff. Everything the Beatles ever did would work, too.
The generation gap just isn't what it used to be.
A couple of weeks ago I watched this video, a weird lip-sync riff on Star Wars. Fine. A moment's amusement, sure, and on I click.
Two days later I went to a birthday party with my kids, and as the older kids were running around I hear one of the 12-year-olds murmuring the lyrics of this song to himself.
In the last few years, there's a really good metric for "movie will be bad" that I've noticed: If Subway gets the license for their kids meals, it's not going to be a very good movie.
I first noticed this when Subway got the Brave movie license. By then Pixar had repeatedly fooled me with trailers that didn't seem all that great, but turned into fantastic movies, so even though the Brave trailers didn't wow me, I was open-minded about it.
It is impossible to deeply understand a solution before you have the problem.
Let me give you an example that probably all my readers can relate to: Mathematics education. Do you remember first seeing the quadratic equation and wondering why you should care? Or even if you were a math nerd like me, can you understand why someone would be asking themselves that at that point?
The problem is that the students have not had the problem.
I thought I'd use Prime Music to explore some classical I hadn't gotten around to yet. You know... Mozart, some stuff by Beethoven I haven't heard yet, Bach, MC Hammer... you know, the classics.