Whoever it was that had the idea to take the exact business model of casinos and market it to children as a Chuck E. Cheese’s is a the definition of an evil genius
been seeing a few car ads pitching collision avoidance/warning features whose emotional thruline is “something to protect you from those thoughtless menaces like city dwellers who expect you to let them cross and motorcyclists occupying the lane you’re merging into”
been seeing a few car ads pitching collision avoidance/warning features whose emotional thruline is “something to protect you from those thoughtless menaces like city dwellers who expect you to let them cross and motorcyclists occupying the lane you’re merging into”
and I guess thanks but also fuck you, buddy
tbh I guess they can’t openly pitch themselves as having your back when you’re trashed
Right-militant symbolism encountered in the last two months playing the Battlefield franchise of online shooters:
One Nazi flag profile image, all colors and proportions on-model
A wide variety of South American users and private servers with 4-letter clan tags and logos (frequently in quartered unit patch format with skulls and lightning bolts as prominent elements) that map to local paramilitaries
A few Rising Sun flags and uyoku dantai slogans
(just now) one profile tag consisting of a large silver police shield bearing an image of a modern rifle above the large numbers “88″ in blue
Left-militant symbolism:
One profile image of a red flag with yellow hammer and sickle flapping in the wind
A swastika made of right-facing handgun stamps that was actually the most novel take on the subject I’ve seen in a while
A LOT of Blue Lives Matter iconography - the American flag (often subdued color) with one blue stripe, the Punisher skull, often with “first responder” subculture signifiers like the numbers 5.11, etc.
Right-militant symbolism encountered in the last two months playing the Battlefield franchise of online shooters:
One Nazi flag profile image, all colors and proportions on-model
A wide variety of South American users and private servers with 4-letter clan tags and logos (frequently in quartered unit patch format with skulls and lightning bolts as prominent elements) that map to local paramilitaries
A few Rising Sun flags and uyoku dantai slogans
(just now) one profile tag consisting of a large silver police shield bearing an image of a modern rifle above the large numbers “88″ in blue
Left-militant symbolism:
One profile image of a red flag with yellow hammer and sickle flapping in the wind
A swastika made of right-facing handgun stamps that was actually the most novel take on the subject I’ve seen in a while
A LOT of Blue Lives Matter iconography - the American flag (often subdued color) with one blue stripe, the Punisher skull, often with “first responder” subculture signifiers like the numbers 5.11, etc.
Today alone:
A member of clan WYTE with a Klan hood profile picture
“No need to review this code, the test suite will reveal any issues.”
*runs tests*
*machine literally explodes*
“Well, like I said.”
At Cornell I had a class called something like Learning Music Theory Through Digital Music Technology. I didn’t know any theory (I was a drummer, and tbh still don’t see the point of tonality) and I was like “learn by making techno, yes please!”
I didn’t learn any theory and pretty much had to teach myself the technology in lab hours; the instructor was a space case who would spend lectures trying to show us something, then the system would crash and he’d tell rambling stories while his assistant scrambled to fix things, rarely successful before the lecture ended.
ANYWAY, the story I remember was that when Robert Moog, who’d been a Cornell engineering grad student, was designing his eponymous synthesizer, this instructor was assistant to him and his business partner. So they’d worked up a prototype that was finally ready for the public.
A big part of how it worked was like an old-tyme telephone switchboard, you “patched” different modules together by connecting them with cables, to this day the various settings to create a particular synthesizer sound are called “patches”.
That was actually something that bugged me a lot about what I did manage to learn about this stuff – for I guess reasons of backwards compatibility with existing equipment and skills, incidental peculiarities of older technology – cables, voltage regulation, multi-track tape recording, samplers/synths/sequencers as rack hardware – were faithfully carried forward in terminology and practice. Meant a lot of things were done in confusing backwards-ass ways, while the software regularly crashed for trying to communicate with itself. Maybe the generation that grew up on FruityLoops got past that by now, I hope.
So the two creators were like “it’s finally ready, try it out!” and this instructor, then a student working in the summer, stepped up for the first time, patched something wrong, and the unit caught fire.
