Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

But yeah, if there's one thing I'm learning from this whole mess it's that I had no idea how long 20 seconds is. No wonder all of the tracks I make end up like 7 minutes long.

 

Taking a break from Coronavirus jokes to talk about Electronic Music again, in particular electronic techniques that appear in non-electronic contexts:

Vocal-chopping, wherein a lyric or a speech sample is chopped up and rearranged so that it's still recognizable as a human voice but is not what the human originally produced. Of course, a human can reproduce a lot of this effect; after all, it draws from the tradition of scatting amongst other things.

Also sidechain compression. Which you can also get acoustic musicians to do! For example,

the horns are fake-sidechained, in the sense they're told to lower the volume on the beat and raise it up between beats. Check out the making-of-video:


Also I suppose that if you get a pair of identical twins you might be able to pull off a flanger/phaser the way that Blondie did.

Anyway, the point is that these things don't really require electronic equipment at all, you just have to plan for them.

 

One of my favorite things about GoT modern AUs is that Hot Pie is there and the authors sometimes feel the need to figure out how someone in the modern age gets referred to as Hot Pie by everyone, but sometimes they don't bother and he's just Hot Pie.

 

I'm realizing that what I really want to make for my math stuff and my music stuff is not a blog, but a wiki. Hmm.

 

Once in a while I wonder if I'm still a weeb, and the answer is that the opening to Madoka Magica still makes me tear up a bit.

 

When you're listening to a cover of a song that was sung in English by someone with an accent from a place that isn't predominantly English-speaking, and the person covering the song also has an accent from a place that isn't predominantly English-speaking, but a different one, so it comes off as even more bizarre than if it were just one or the other despite probably being the same phonological distance, but you're so used to certain accents being unmarked that it seems to be more.

[EDIT]: I think some of the accent might actually be pitch-correction.

 

And now apparently Verizon internet is down for most of the Eastern US, and a good chunk of the rest of it.

 

Internet's back!
Fortunately I'm perfectly capable of wasting several consecutive hours playing 2048.

 

When you see a bunch of gifs of Japanese food and instantly recognize, not the individual images, but rather the fact that they're a collection implies that they're all from the movie Tampopo. Because no movie treats Japanese food the way Tampopo does.

 

Maybe eating all the fruit in my freezer will alleviate some of the dumb food cravings I've been having since quarantining myself.

 

How to tell my uncle that all governments will deliberately lie about anything they think they won't get punished for, and that the only reason that I would trust reports we hear about the US over those coming out of China is that we live in the US and the US governments, both state and federal, are garbage at keeping secrets and maintaining consistent propaganda?

[Edit] Also the sources of non-politically-motivated error in the US reports are more glaringly obvious.

 

Apparently some pipe organs have MIDI input. Some pipe organs have MIDI input!
I'm usually not so hyped about playing MIDI on acoustic instruments because I honestly find most acoustic instruments boring, but pipe organs have enough size and complexity that doing just about anything on them is interesting, and MIDI allows for playing pieces that would be hard or impossible for a human player.

 

Maybe it's because I've grown up as a person, but I honestly think that the Backstreet Boys are more interesting as a group now that they're in their forties. Better? Not significantly, but more interesting as a phenomenon.

 

Welp, I really should learn that when I think to myself "it's too late for me to be playing 2048", it is in fact too late for me to be playing 2048 and I'm going to lose all of my progress.

 

I think my roommates from college have figured out that I'm probably never having kids. We don't talk about it, but when we talk about people in the group having kids, at least in my presence, I'm never mentioned as a possibility.
I just hope they're not thinking that I'm in the closet about it and are trying to be sensitive for my sake.

 

Natural Selection is like Intelligent Design, only it's shaped like Artificial Intelligence.

This is less false than one might think.

There's a lesson to be learned here about nomenclature, but I'm not sure what it is.

 

Fake Dating and Fake Married are very good tropes, but there are other types of relations that you can fake. Like Fake Family, wherein someone needs to get through a Parent-Teacher meeting without letting their actual legal guardians know how they're doing in school. Or Fake Rivals, for bet-rigging and similar fraud. Or Fake Baby Acquisition, which my brain insists is a meaningful string of words although I'm not quite sure what it entails.

 

Me: Why do my fingers hurt?
Also me: *keeps playing with new Transformers toys*

[Edit] As much as I appreciate that Mastermind Creations puts so many locks on their toys, so that hinges and stuff only move if they're supposed to and everything is nice and solid, I kind of wish those locks were better indicated in the instructions; my fingers would probably hurt less and I wouldn't feel like I'm forcing things quite so much.
Upon further inspection, it looks like the instructions are based on a protoype, which might be why the locks aren't indicated, because they didn't exist on that version.

 

I wanna know more about Fake Baby Acquisition!

Hmmmmm maybe young child in precarious situation grabs hapless passerby who can’t very well say “actually I have no fucking clue who this kid is so it’s no concern of mine” and be able to face themselves in the mirror ever again? Kind of a Moses situation, or variations upon. Orrrrrr how about robot realizes childcare is the key to society’s resources, accidentally becomes true emotional support provider for child of disinterested parent(s)?

 

There's a trope called "Accidental Baby Acquisition", in which a hapless passerby ends up with a child not their own who they have to take care of; usually this is passerby either is unequipped for or believed themselves uninterested in raising children, and shenanigans ensue; however much control the baby has over the acquisition is generally not explored.
Usually the baby's actual guardians find them at the end, and said hapless passerby learns a valuable lesson about how much they want actual children; on rare occasions the passerby formally adopts the baby Often used to soften male characters who would otherwise be merely grumpy and violent (e.g. Din from The Mandolorian, Geralt from The Witcher).
If two passersby get stuck with the baby, they also learn that they should go out (since inevitably they're not already a couple, since that would be less awkward and thus hilarious).

Fake Baby Acquisition would then be someone pretending to go through that trope in order to dupe someone or to evade some responsibility/unwanted social engagement/etc. In this case they would need to deliberately acquire a baby, but pretend that the baby was foisted on them by friends/family/fate. Really it's the deliberate baby acquisition part that is probably the source of much of the shenanigans in this case. Also, unlike in the Fake Dating scenario wherein there's also a good source for angst with both parties wanting to actually date but being unable to actually voice said desires, it's unclear to me that anyone would want to actually go through an accidental baby acquisition scenario.