kontextmaschine

Sketching the Bill Cosby Trial - The New York Times

HOW was this not titled “Bill Cosby’s Picture Pages” tho

Generation X was pretty good but I remember him kinda coasting on that as the 90s became the 2000s with insights that weren’t that insightful

keiayamine:

i think i’ll try screaming

timefortigers:

skelenabones:

averyterrible:

dextersexter:

whats the difference between Long Island and Staten Island

they are two completely different islands.  long island is the big long island sticking out of New York.  Staten Island is the tiny island in New York City between the west coast of Long Island and the mainland

long island is where you go to experience total ego destruction over a period of decades. staten island is where you go to get stabbed by a clown

#staten island is a portal to clown world? long island is ALSO a portal to clown world but a different part of clown world

me: ::busts open knuckle, bleeds all over the goddamned kitchen::
also me: hey you know what canonical metaphor we've never experienced?
me: 
also me: rubbing salt in a wound!
me: ::rubs in kosher salt::
also me: unimpressive. maybe finer grains?
me: ::looks at two different bougie-ass grinders of sea salt::
me : ::rubs in Lawry's Mediterranean Herb Seasoned Salt::
also me: aaah, that's the stuff

Trump’s Trolls Are Waging War on America’s Civil Servants

Career civil servants often endure stressful working conditions, but in the Trump White House, some of them face online trolling from alt-right bloggers who seek to portray them as clandestine partisans plotting to sabotage the president’s agenda. The online attacks often cite information that appears to be provided by unnamed White House officials or Trump loyalists.

Cernovich acknowledges that he’s going after McMaster’s staff. “Personnel is policy,” he wrote in response to queries for this article. “The NSC and State are the most interesting beats to cover, because the hiring and firing decisions within State and NSC will determine whether America enters another disastrous ground war, as H.R. McMaster and his mentor David Petraeus desire,” he wrote. “McMaster has stacked the NSC with pro-war globalists, some of whom came from the Obama administration and others who were ‘Never Trump’ers.’”

“alt-right” seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, without it you have a pretty Dog Bites Man story of “administration factions wield media leaks against each other”, but if I’m reading between the lines right, hey, Steve Bannon’s realized Mike Cernovich’s following can be operationalized against low-level enough officials to cut H.R. McMaster’s supporters out from under him.

The Fall of Working-Class New York

antoine-roquentin:

But the power imbalance between the city and the banks was not simply conjunctural — it was structural. As Doug Henwood points out in his book Wall Street, “the bankers have the advantage in a debt crisis; they hold the key to the release of the next post-crisis round of finance. Anyone who wants to borrow again, and that includes nearly everyone, must go along.”

By the fall of 1974, the banks forced city officials into an austerity program against their will. As a City College graduate, Beame was himself a product of the city’s welfare state and genuinely did not want to cut programs or impose layoffs. But during the winter of 1974–75 the city began to lay off workers, and even though many were subsequently hired back, the signal was clear; the crisis would be resolved at the expense of New York’s working class, whether their elected officials liked it or not.

In the summer of 1975, the state established a new agency called the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) to oversee the city’s financing. Led by Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker and liberal Democrat, MAC’s board was dominated by a group of businessmen whose first priority was to pay back investors and cut municipal spending.

As Phillips-Fein observes, while MAC was technically a vehicle for marketing the city’s bonds, “its real purpose was political. It had to force the city and its unionized workers to accept a staggering array of budget cuts.”

New Yorkers protested the cuts, and some of them even won. Phillips-Fein devotes inspiring chapters to the successful campaigns to save Hostos Community College in the Bronx and what became known as the People’s Firehouse in Brooklyn. But despite protests in the streets and fulmination from City Hall, business got its way.

Unelected, business-controlled bodies like MAC and the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) succeeded in pressuring the city to lay off tens of thousands of workers, close public hospitals, raise subway fares, and begin charging tuition at CUNY. By the early 1980s, the municipal budget was back in balance, the city could borrow in capital markets, and the stage was set for New York’s transformation into the gilded playground it is today.

In the popular mind and in much of the academic historiography, the death of postwar liberalism is primarily attributed to a backlash of racist working and lower-middle-class whites. This is an important part of the story, and outbursts of racial animus in neighborhoods like Bensonhurst or Forest Hills should not be minimized or overlooked.

But the backlash against New York’s postwar order was led from boardrooms high above Manhattan — not the white ethnic strongholds of the outer boroughs.

the first 2 neoliberal coups were 1973 in chile, and 1975 in new york city

mapsontheweb:

The United States of America Territorial Expansion, 1783-1898.

swarnpert:

birdfriender:

I love that one of the restrictions on name changes in the UK is that your name cannot “promote criminal activities” and fucking hell every name I can think of that violates that is just stellar honestly like fucking hello nice to meet you my name is Commit Arson, I’d like you to meet my daughter Dont Pay Taxes and my son Steal From Work

this is my son, rob

(they’re hearing aids)

People since the Hilton era of reality TV, certainly since the Kardashian, be all “we didn’t USED to pay so much attention to the petty doings of the vapid rich". Girl YES we did, that was the society pages. Same concept, same audience.

(My father was in the society pages once. As an old-for-America commercial city, Philadelphia had a respectable “society” presence, and he escorted some girl to a cotillion in the ‘50s.)

Course they had actual aristocrats to fill that role in Europe. The “jet set” of the ‘60s was basically air travel making it practical for American “society” to merge with the Eurotrash in seaside resorts, rather than the distinct continental and Vineyard-Palm Beach-Pasadena circuits they’d had before.

That kind of faded as time went on, maybe countercultural anti-rich-WASPiness. Maybe that as superstructure to the relative eclipse of heirs after the New Deal and publicly held Managerial Revolution. (Eclipsed by professionals, as “bright young things”, heroic engineers and surgeons, “yuppies”, “symbolic manipulators”, the “creative class”?)

Writings of the 80s often describe the period as particularly celebrity-obsessed, that always struck me as odd. Maybe we’re still swimming in that world and can’t notice the water. But Beatlemania was in the ‘60s, Hollywood celebrity fandom predates WWII. (I do notice that models seemed to become celebrities more in the 80s-90s, where now it seems more celebrities from some other field are used as models.)

I think I’m starting to realize that part of it is “celebrity” started filling that “society” niche. Part of it was celebrities claiming some authority(-from-authenticity) to intervene in society, especially in the “New Hollywood” of the ‘70s - Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather in his place to the Oscars, Jane Fonda in Vietnam, Warren Beatty reminding America of its communist traditions. That’s when it became normal for movie stars to “have a cause”. And then into the ‘80s in music, Live Aid, Band Aid, Farm Aid, Bono. Fuckin’ Bono.

Of course, a lot of this just turned into charity-for-the-purpose-of-attention-getting, but how do you think all those society charity balls worked?

I suppose the transition moment from “society” to “celebrity” would be Henry Kissinger at Studio 54.

Of course actual royalty is still a thing, in the older-tilting supermarket tabloids. The Charles-Diana wedding in '81 was huge in the states, a lot of contemporaries linked that to cultural retrenchment after the '70s went off the rails (heterosexual monogamous monarchy, hard to top that for tradition).

And if now we’re back, on reality TV and Instagram, to gawking at the callow rich and their hangers-on, courtiers and courtesans, well, we’ve been there before.

dieselfutures:

Falcon Hoverbike by Sunder-59

znk:

jaiwithani:

sinesalvatorem:

tropylium:

sinesalvatorem:

reasonableapproximation:

sinesalvatorem:

TIL that it’s possible for earphones to be misconnected such that they’re playing the instrumental to a song without playing the lyrics?

This is super weird, but I assume it has to do with how the audio encoding works. I assume different tracks are layered over each other such that the singing is a different stream of bits from the instrumental? Or something? IDEK.

I learned this because I was listening to Kartel song after Kartel song, becoming more and more distressed by the idea that the worlboss had decided to only upload instrumentals from now on. It’s only on a whim that I thought to pull out my headphone jack.

I believe sometimes tracks are set to have lyrics in one ear and music in the other, so if only one side of the headphones is working you could get that effect.

I’m not confident this is what’s happening, but I have no other immediate guesses.

Nah, both ears were working. Even to the point where instrumental effects that used one ear or the other worked fine. However, even though the lyrics were supposed to play through both ears, I heard none of them.

Analog stereo audio cables have three separate wires: left channel, right channel and null. If any of these breaks entirely, the effects will be obvious (no left channel / no right channel / no sound whatsoever)

On the other hand, in one failure type, which I believe is a short circuit between the right and left channels specifically, what you end up with is hearing the subtraction of the two channels in both ears. Probably phase-inverted with respect to each other, but that’s usually not an audible distinction.

Most music has some degree of stereo mixing, which means that you will not be left musicless. Also, since the voltage remains, volume is not really affected (though I would assume fidelity is).

Vocals, on the other hand, are usually mixed dead center, which means that they will be zapped from the mix entirely.

…The fact that this is a thing that can even happen is so cool and so annoying.

Fun fact: this is a pretty reliable method to remove vocals from a stereo track. Try it in audacity!

@tropylium is right. Connecting the left and right wires¹ yields the difference between the signals.

[Attention conservation note: Press J to skip some hobby audio engineer infodumping applications of linear algebra to stereo audio signals & going off on various tangents. Maybe I should do a separate post on how to use it for fun?]

It‘s called the S (side) channel. Instead of getting stereo by having separate left and right tracks, you can encode the same information in a mid and a side channel:

M = (L+R) / 2
S = (L-R) / 2 ²

In linear algebra terms, it’s a change of basis in 2D vector space, and can be easily reversed to get the original representation back:

L = M+S
R = M-S

L/R is the natural scheme for stereo playback: L goes to the left poweramp + speaker, R to the right. Simple. That is the obvious thing for CDs, cassetes, tape reel … - the playback device doesn’t have to do much.

But M/S encoding comes in very handy for lossy data compression (called Joint Stereo in MP3, OGG etc.):
Good quality M with bad quality S yields overall good quality for the important stuff in the middle (most things get mixed to near the center anyway, and even the rest is all added in there, just quieter³. The main mono tracks for vocals, bass, kick drum and snare are usually dead center.). And then, even the few information you get out of a shitty S channel adds spatial stereo fanciness. Nice.

It also ensures mono compatibility: What was in the middle before compression, stays there.⁴ If you highly compress L and R seperately, all the important center stuff gets spread out over both channels, but might be rounded off a bit differently by the compression, depending on what else is mixed in from each side, which could result in a ~wobbly effect. Not nice.

It’s also how vinyl LPs do stereo. On mono records, the groove zig-zags left & right, making the needle follow the waveform of the one channel signal: Electron microscope video of a phono stylus moving along the grooves on a vinyl record.
You can’t move up & down as much, because then the needle might bounce off the track. That means you can’t encode as much information that way. You wouldn’t want to just use the horizontal movement for one speaker and vertical for R - then the violins might sound crystal clear, but the cellos sound like muffled, noisy garbage. Asymmetry, yuck…
Instead, keep left-right for M, and use up-down for S, the difference between the L and R channels. (Equivalently, you can think of the needle moving diagonally upleft-downright / upright-downleft as the L / R channels. Change of basis!). That also means older phono players will just ignore the up-down motion and just use the left-right signal as usual.⁵

Radio adds the S to the usual mono transmission on a different frequency so receivers can make it stereo optionally. (FM is a bit complicated…)

Finally, there’s a neat analogy to video: When broadcasters introduced color to analog TV, they kept the black&white luminance (brightness) signal where it was, and just added two chrominance channels on another frequency⁶. That way, people could keep using their old monochrome TVs. Yay for smart standards!
And just like with the spatial S audio information, you can also
(a) save bits/bandwith by compressing the hell out of the color information, b/c we are far better at distinguishing shape & brightness than color; and
(b) be sure that if you transmit black&white footage, you get less weirdly fluctuating colorations added in because the brightness isn’t split up over three separate, low quality RGB channels.

---

1. This can happen if you don’t plug in the TRS jack all the way (such that the contacts of the plug touch multiple contacts of the socket. Not sure about the maths, but it might also involve feeding one of the signals into the ground, against which the voltage is measured); or if the isolation surrounding the three wires inside is broken. ↩

2. Halving (= subtracting 6dB) right away ensures that you stay in the original volume range. If you don’t, you might get clipping b/c you go over -0dB (max. Volume allowed by the data encoding / poweramp transistor). Might not be important for S though, since it should be a lot quieter than M anyway. ↩

3. Only components that are completely out-of phase (signal ) will not be present at all in M ↩

4. Sometimes you already want to ensure that during recording, if you mostly care about the center signal, and the stereo-ness should be subtle and natural instead of wide and flashy (e.g. classical symphony?). Using a normal (though probably ridiculously expensive) unidirectional mic, angled up against a weird bidirectional figure-8-characteristic mic, M and S actually correspond to physical microphones, which rules out weird phase issues from the start. ~so pure~ ↩

5. Though apparently old mono styluses are larger and more rigid, so they can “dig” into the groove and destroy the stereo information, making your LPs mono even on stereo players… whoops. ↩

6. Since regular humans have three types of color receptors in their eyes, colorspace has 3 dimensions (which is a pathetically lossy projection down from the ~infinite-dimensional continuous spectrum, even only considering the visible wavelengths). So in addition to the luminance, you need 2 chroma components (e.g. U for blue and V for red, each normalized by subtracting the brightness. Then low U and V but high brightness means green.).
   You can encode these two chroma channels in one frequency carrier, by using both phase and amplitude (which might also have different fidelity, so apparently you do another basis transformation such that the phase means hue and amplitude means saturation, landing you in ~HSV, the neatest, bestest color space… Abstraction! :D) That’s how most of the world (PAL & NTSC) does it. SECAM (Russia, France, …) only uses amplitude and alternates between sending U and V over the same frequency. ↩

lilacsinthedooryard:

fleurdulys:

Un soir sur la Loire - Felix Vallotton

1923

Felix Vallotton (Swiss, 1865-1925)

Watching Mallrats on the bar TV and the sexual politics are amazingly ‘90s

“thinking you, who stayed to have a day career at the mall, outrank a college slacker enough to exploit his girlfriend’s latent materialism and steal her for anal sex” is DEFINITELY the offense

and “fucking a 15-year-old on camera” is DEFINITELY the pretext to bust him on, ironic comeuppance ‘cause HE’s the one who tried to weaponize normiedom