PositiveNoise's recent activity

  1. Comment on Do any other olds remember Land of the Lost? Sleestak maybe came from Peru. in ~tv

    PositiveNoise
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    Even as a kid I was kind of horrified by how low quality the production and acting was, but still...that show had tons of super cool stuff going on in it. The world building and extreme sci-fi...

    Even as a kid I was kind of horrified by how low quality the production and acting was, but still...that show had tons of super cool stuff going on in it. The world building and extreme sci-fi weirdness made the experience worth it. It deserves a high quality remake some day (as opposed to a silly movie like the one released a few years ago), kind of like the 'Battlestar Galactica' treatment. Try to keep/bring back every weird neat idea, but do it with a really big budget by a production team that doesn't hate what made the original really cool, and take the material seriously. Bits of humor would be fine, but there is no good reason to make fun of itself all the time.

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Can you sell musicals to someone who hates musicals? in ~movies

    PositiveNoise
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    Cabaret is also a REALLY well made film, with interesting and very serious subject matter that is still quite relevant to current times.

    Cabaret is also a REALLY well made film, with interesting and very serious subject matter that is still quite relevant to current times.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Is there a name for the "this is not who I am" defense? in ~talk

    PositiveNoise
    Link Parent
    These days I try to imagine 'difficult' people as their inner 7 year old kid who is just trying to do their best. That brings out my compassionate side right away, usually.

    the question came up of how to continue to respect, value and love people who clearly are not fully "evil" or with whom I don't interact in one life dimension as to allow isolating them to some select poor actions and behaviors.

    These days I try to imagine 'difficult' people as their inner 7 year old kid who is just trying to do their best. That brings out my compassionate side right away, usually.

    19 votes

  4. Comment on World of Warcraft players trick AI website into covering fictional update known only as 'Glorbo' in ~tech

    PositiveNoise
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    What a masterpiece. I love all the crazy details added by commenters on Reddit, and even from senior employs at Blizzard. The actual article sure is funny, for anyone who is familiar enough with...

    What a masterpiece. I love all the crazy details added by commenters on Reddit, and even from senior employs at Blizzard. The actual article sure is funny, for anyone who is familiar enough with WoW to realize all the wild inaccuracies.

    OK. Enough Tildes for now. I'm getting back to grinding for Zoop on this lovely Saturday morning.

    9 votes

  5. Comment on Favorite ambient / instrumental music? in ~music

    PositiveNoise
    Link Parent
    The Campfire Headphase is another amazing album by Boards of Canada...my favorite. I really like your list. Several of my favorite chill electronic albums are on it.

    The Campfire Headphase is another amazing album by Boards of Canada...my favorite.

    I really like your list. Several of my favorite chill electronic albums are on it.

    1 vote

  6. Comment on What are the best cover songs that reinterpret the original into a different genre, style, or mood? in ~music

    PositiveNoise
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    +1 for Devo's 'Satisfaction'. It was an amazing musical explanation of what this very quirky new band were all about, and is wildly different from the original Rolling Stones version. I had heard...

    +1 for Devo's 'Satisfaction'. It was an amazing musical explanation of what this very quirky new band were all about, and is wildly different from the original Rolling Stones version. I had heard a few Devo tracks before I heard this, but suddenly it all clicked into place upon hearing this cover, and I WAS HOOKED.

    easter egg: Their producer, the famous Brian Eno, does the cool little vocal section where 'baby' quickly repeats in 1/8 note rhythm a bazillion times, because Mark Mothersbaugh couldn't perform the (fairly challenging) part in the studio. Eno had done plenty of similar vocal tricks on his own albums, so he stepped in to perform it. Once you know about this, it's really obvious that it's Eno singing that part, in a cool way.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on Why did you select your username for Tildes? in ~tildes

    PositiveNoise
    Link Parent
    (mostly unrelated) I really like Rush, and I have a game on Steam I created and develop called Outpost on Syrinx, with Syrinx being a reference to the greek nymph, but also the title track of...

    (mostly unrelated) I really like Rush, and I have a game on Steam I created and develop called Outpost on Syrinx, with Syrinx being a reference to the greek nymph, but also the title track of 2112's lyrics.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Why did you select your username for Tildes? in ~tildes

    PositiveNoise
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    1 - I wanted to remind myself to focus on creating positive posts and comments, and avoiding too much social media negativity and doomscrolling. 2- 'noise' is mostly a reference to contributing...

    1 - I wanted to remind myself to focus on creating positive posts and comments, and avoiding too much social media negativity and doomscrolling.

    2- 'noise' is mostly a reference to contributing stuff in a large social circle, and I was kind of thinking about all these new people joining the Fediverse. I don't think of 'noise' as negative in the context of my username, more like 'blade of grass'...being one humble person in a much larger community.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on What's something you want to understand the appeal of? in ~talk

    PositiveNoise
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    Oh, you certainly don't come off as a villain. Wanting to protect your family is totally OK.

    Oh, you certainly don't come off as a villain. Wanting to protect your family is totally OK.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on What's something you want to understand the appeal of? in ~talk

    PositiveNoise
    Link Parent
    I appreciate your honesty, but to me this point seems like a good argument for making huge tank-like vehicles illegal. It's great to want to protect your kids, but if you ever get in a serious...

    In a crash, mass wins. I don't care about the SUV itself, I care about my safety. I'm about to be a foster dad to two kiddos. I want them in "the tank", because in the event of a crash, I need all of us to walk away without a scratch.

    I appreciate your honesty, but to me this point seems like a good argument for making huge tank-like vehicles illegal. It's great to want to protect your kids, but if you ever get in a serious crash you are more likely to kill a couple of innocent passengers in a much smaller car you collide with, while your children are at school, totally safe anyway. And if one of your kids gets hits by a similar huge vehicle while they are riding their bike, the odds of them being killed is quite high. This is the sort of stuff that justifies having government regulations that attempt to make everyone in society safer, rather than the chaos of a 'every person for himself' approach to society.

    75 votes

  11. Comment on Lalo Schifrin wrote an amazing Mission Impossible theme song in ~music

    PositiveNoise
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    I'm a big fan of this song, and familiar with some of Lalo Schifrin's other work, and am familiar with Brubecks hit album Time Out as well. The author certainly nails a combination of interesting...

    I'm a big fan of this song, and familiar with some of Lalo Schifrin's other work, and am familiar with Brubecks hit album Time Out as well. The author certainly nails a combination of interesting points about the song, how it was written, and what it was influenced by.

    I'm reminded of a couple very positive things about human artistic abilities. Schifrin was on a creative roll when he wrote this, and so it's not terribly surprising that he created a totally baddass piece of music that fits super well with the theme of the show.

    Also, I totally love how a huge number of the best pieces of music were actually written in an astoundingly short amount of time. It happens a lot less often these days, when occasionally mediocre artists are propped up by multiple writers and producers helping turn a basic piece of music into something that will work as a 'pop hit', going thru revision after revision. Being able to write a classic hit tune in 90 seconds is to me an affirmation of how great artistic humans can be.

    The same goes for producing, arranging and recording the music. In the 60's and 70's creating an amazing version of a song in a couple of hours was quite common, as long as the composer, musicians and producer were on a roll and familiar with each other. I'm reminded of how many of Elton John's smash hits were done when he quickly came up with a song early in the morning, and band learned and jammed with it a bit, and recorded all the main parts that afternoon. A bunch of famous Beatles tunes were written in similarly short periods of time.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Evernote, the memory app people forgot about, lays off entire US staff in ~tech

    PositiveNoise
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    I used Evernote up until yesterday, when I exported out my main notebook (again, to get the latest version), and imported it into Joplin. I went with Joplin because it's free and open source, but...

    I used Evernote up until yesterday, when I exported out my main notebook (again, to get the latest version), and imported it into Joplin. I went with Joplin because it's free and open source, but also because it was totally painless to migrate my huge amount of notes from Evernote, including tags.

    I guess I might migrate to something else later, but for now, I feel like I've escaped from the sinking Evernote ship quite nicely. I find that an elegant note-taking app is essential to me these days. I knew a while back that Evernote was basically closing shop over time, so I just needed to find a way to transition away.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on Overuse of commas in ~humanities.languages

    PositiveNoise
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    Exactly, or maybe some folks are running low on commas, so I added a few extras

    Exactly, or maybe some folks are running low on commas, so I added a few extras

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Overuse of commas in ~humanities.languages

    PositiveNoise
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    Are you me? I also use commas more often than most people, I sometimes think about the issue, and I wanted to put commas in the same places you mentioned as I was reading your example sentence. I...

    Are you me? I also use commas more often than most people, I sometimes think about the issue, and I wanted to put commas in the same places you mentioned as I was reading your example sentence.

    I used to work as a Game Outsource Manager, which involved tons of written communication, and that role made me a bit self conscious about my writing style. Use of commas was one thing, and also I use parentheses WAY more than most people do (it sort of reflects my own stream of consciousness, as far as I'm concerned). But similar to what Maethon mentioned, comparing writing to having a personal music style, I came to accept and enjoy my own writing style quirks rather than worry about officially correct grammar. After a couple of overseas business colleagues sent me email snippets of their workers mentioning how they like my communication style, I chilled out about the issue.

    There are a ton of thoughtful grammer-based responses in this thread, but I would emphasize that most people seem to have pretty bad writing skills these days. Here in the US, education in general has been pretty successfully attacked and weakened by 'conservatives' for about 40 years. And in the internet age there are tons of people from all over the world, many which know English as a second language, so it make sense that many of them don't have polished writing skills. And here in social media land, there are often tons of children posting and commenting, and they haven't even had the time to become good at written communication. This all makes me much more forgiving about how people write, so I don't mind when people write in all sorts of different ways. , , ,

    4 votes

  15. Comment on "Layered" music that builds throughout the song? in ~music

    PositiveNoise
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    'Regyptian Strut', by Frank Zappa on the album Sleep Dirt, is a great example of this, and done in a very 'Frank Zappa as a classical composer' style.

    'Regyptian Strut', by Frank Zappa on the album Sleep Dirt, is a great example of this, and done in a very 'Frank Zappa as a classical composer' style.

  16. Comment on "Layered" music that builds throughout the song? in ~music

    PositiveNoise
    Link Parent
    Oh heck yeah! In particular, the last big sequence of the piece. It starts with just a super cool bassline, and eventually builds up into a huge number of layers. It's amazing that such a young...

    Oh heck yeah! In particular, the last big sequence of the piece. It starts with just a super cool bassline, and eventually builds up into a huge number of layers. It's amazing that such a young musician pulled that off, with multi-track tape machines that were quite primitive compared to modern tech.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on Can someone please explain like I'm five how or whether the energy needs for technical civilization in the future can possibly be met? in ~talk

    PositiveNoise
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    The energy needs for our technological society will easily be met, especially after a few more decades of science advancing. There is a huge amount of energy that comes to Earth (in the form of...

    The energy needs for our technological society will easily be met, especially after a few more decades of science advancing. There is a huge amount of energy that comes to Earth (in the form of light from the sun, which we harvest using solar panels) and is generated by the earth (wind, power from dams, from geothermal wells, from the tides of the ocean etc). The amount of energy we could harvest is WAY WAY more than we use right now.

    The thing is, we didn't know how to harvest much of this energy in the past. Many hundreds of years ago we figured out how to get energy from water flowing downhill, using things like water mills which could grind wheat into flour. Primitive windmills were being used a couple of hundred years ago as well.

    We need to use MUCH more energy than we used to at this point, but we now know a bunch about how to harvest it. We are right in the middle of the period of time where we are developing this technology. It was primitive a hundred years ago, and a hundred years from now it will be very easy for us. We are also getting really good at storing energy in batteries and other stuff, and that will also get WAY better over the next few decades.

    The problems we are going to face is mostly other stuff. For example, wars, climate disaster, and evil rich people trying to stop everyone from switching from burning fossils fuels to renewable energy.

    But overall, the good news is that we already know how to get the energy. It's become very cheap to harvest, just in the last couple of decades. If we eventually need 100 times as much energy as we currently need, that will still be something we can do, as we keep improving tech.

    I'll let other people address the other stuff you mentioned, but the energy issue is mostly solved in theory already. We mainly need to just build a whole bunch of energy harvesting stuff, the storage to store it so that things like electricity going out becomes super rare, and the stuff it takes to move the energy around, so that everyone's home and work place etc all have as much power as they need.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Louis Armstrong's dazzling archive has a new home — his in ~music

    PositiveNoise
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    Very nice! A big lovely modern space to show off the big collection of Armstrong's stuff, but with his humble house right across the street, so visitors can get a nice sense of what his day-to-day...

    Very nice! A big lovely modern space to show off the big collection of Armstrong's stuff, but with his humble house right across the street, so visitors can get a nice sense of what his day-to-day life was like in some ways. And I'm sure it will bring in more money to the local community, as visitors go to local restaurants and such as part of their visit. I hope there is at least 1 good jazz club within a couple of blocks, and that they have regular 'Armstrong nights' or some such, to keep his memory alive in the form of living breathing jazz music.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on OpenAI: Introducing Superalignment in ~tech

    PositiveNoise
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    I think that humanity is making a giant mistake by charging full steam ahead in the development of AI without being careful and trying to avoid disaster, yet since humanity is just endless...

    I think that humanity is making a giant mistake by charging full steam ahead in the development of AI without being careful and trying to avoid disaster, yet since humanity is just endless different people and many countries each doing their own thing, it's not surprising that this is how the technology is progressing. So, I find the goals the article mentions to be much better than nothing, even if they are kind of vague right now. I'd hate to be so cynical that I think it would be better for people to not even try to control this new branch of technology.

    Will AI Superalignment work? Maybe. Can it even work at all? Maybe. Will bad actors such as authoritarian governments ignore the idea of safeguards? You betcha. But trying to save ourselves from an obvious potential disaster is better than not trying.

    11 votes

  20. Comment on Favorite "cozy" games? in ~games

    PositiveNoise
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    I've played a LOT of rimworld, and usually play it in a fashion that feels fairly cozy. I'm not having tons of brutal raids, and am usually just building up my colony in a very chill, relaxing...

    I've played a LOT of rimworld, and usually play it in a fashion that feels fairly cozy. I'm not having tons of brutal raids, and am usually just building up my colony in a very chill, relaxing manner. It's a game that allows you to have a lot of down-time if you want, just watching your pawns go around and do stuff you have set them up to do.

    Also, I tend to have very non-warcrime focused colonies, so the whole vibe doesn't seem nearly as dark as it is for the organ harvester folks among us...