Psychoacoustics

Psychoacoustics

Comments 0 Comment

Binaural beats, tritone paradox, pitch and tempo circularity, wason effect and ways other of faking supposed high performance audio, biological audio effects, missing fundamentals for playback on phones and low-quality devices? Casey Connor demonstrates some fascinating audio effects and illusions in his multi-part series of audio illusions and effects. Some of them are used to simulate high performance playback on cheap devices like phones. Good headphones are required for some of them.

Here’s the first video go get you started:

So much truth

So much truth

Comments 0 Comment

Wow – I can’t tell you how familiar this sounded. I didn’t work for Amazon, but what she is describing here is almost exactly what my experience was at a different top 25 high tech company during COVID.

  • Mass hiring during COVID that was not justified for the work present nor profitability
  • Senior leadership now using ‘investing in AI’ and return-to-office mandates as ways to trim headcount and give air cover to their bad over-hiring. (Using AI every day for work now is a real thing – but not as justification for the kinds of layoffs we’re seeing).
  • Culture rot from an innovation driven environment to political one.
  • Engineers that spend the majority of your day not doing technical work but stuck in meetings/roadmaps/ planning/spinning stories to get real work done. Meanwhile not one thing is shipped on time.
  • Feeling hollow and empty realizing you’re spending 60-80% of the average day doing planning, paper shuffling, org alignment, and meetings instead of real work.
Bare Metal Gaming!

Bare Metal Gaming!

Comments 0 Comment

Inkbox decides everything in computing since sending man to the moon was a bad idea. Even operating systems and programming languages. So, he sets out to write a complete clone of Zaxxon in assembly language with no operating system. He handles display, keyboard and mouse input, and booting the system himself – and walks us through it all.

How does it go? Awesome! Open Source Project on GitHub: https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/spacegamex64/

False protagonists

False protagonists

Comments 0 Comment

The movie Sicario starts out and seems to indicate Kate is the movie’s protagonist. We see the story start through her eyes. But we experience people, operations, and goals that are confusing and often very violent – what is going on? As Film Thought Project points out – it’s because she is NOT the protagonist. This storytelling method is meant to draw us into a familiar story in a very different way. Instead of the classic Hollywood narrative that makes the protagonist the center of the attention, we find out she is brought in almost as a piece of necessary but meaningless equipment so that others can do the things they want. The plan was started long before she was involved. The movie isn’t even sympathetic to our, or her, confusion as the real story unfolds.

This method of following someone who is in the dark to only to later figure out they are minor/unimportant to the real, much bigger story is something I first saw in 90’s era Japanese anime. I remember how many times it unsettled and confused me. American movies almost always follow the plucky young protagonist’s adventure as they grow through the challenges in the story. I think that’s why many people find 80’s and 90’s era Japanese anime so confusing. What’s going on seems arbitrary and things change and twist with no seeming reason.

I remember thinking that besides the bigger story arc it tells, this kind of storytelling mechanism shows you the experience of being a person who is a cog. I think this mirrors the average person’s experience in many highly authoritarian cultures. Many Asian cultures have extremely strong social norms about following and not questioning superiors or orders – even if they cost you your life. Leaders do not ask your opinions or input, invite you to the planning meeting, nor do they bother wasting time to explain themselves or the goals. Your job is to carry your orders and job out at peak efficiency – for good or ill.

Only later do these people even brush elbows with the real people in power when the plan fails or succeeds. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Berserk, Psycho Pass, and many other anime fit this bill. Blade Runner 2049 does this when you find out that K is not the protagonist he imagines himself to be. There’s a sense of disillusionment that hits very different – often leaving the viewer with a sense of powerlessness, confusion, and anxiety. Your life is controlled by forces you don’t have access too.

How Stories Work with Jay Sherer shares how the story works from a writer/director’s perspective. When you see how well these narrative structures and writing are done – you see why most modern movies (superhero movies, cheap series cash grabs on Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, and Preditor series for example) are so bad.