Money and time. I was on the grind for 20 years and poor as shit for the great majority of my life. I didn’t have the time to go do all the things I do now.

So I’m the middle aged guy riding a motorcycle, playing in bands, drinking too much in public as long as I’m not driving, going to every concert of nearly every genre I can get to…you know, living. I’m not in crisis, I’m having the time of my life. I’d say the last 8ish years have been the absolute most fun of my life.

Hell, iZotope was the standard for so many years. I use RX on my field recording to clean them up before making them into samples a lot of times.

Private equity kills everything, I swear. It doesn’t help that UA went native mostly and Waves prices so aggressively, Arturia and Akai are innovating, and Spitfire and OT cut Kontakt out of the loop. However, I’m fucking sure it’s like 90% on Francisco Partners getting rid of the support teams for outsourcing, deleting the highest paid engineers, stopped fixing bugs, and whatever the fuck they were doing with Soundwide instead of doing things for customers.

I guess it does depend on what you call a circle. There are maybe a dozen of us in one. In the other there are probably three or four dozen. I don’t know everyone. I got invited because I like genre bending. We’ve got a private forum where we share things.

Even outside of that, there is a place that used to be less private but has now gone private (guess why) where we would do Sunday songwriters. We’d get a topic, record a little something before the next Sunday, then share. After sharing we’d critique, do mashups, genre hop, create genre crossovers, and generally just have fun with each other’s music.

I do not know how prevalent this is. I know of two private places, one of which is very small, and a third place that used to be public (with no expectation of anyone actually seeing it) but went private because of Suno.

There’s already mystery music out there. Small circles of folks putting things out that they don’t expect or want people outside the circle to hear. I’m a nobody and I’m part of two different groups who share music with each other, build on each other’s works, try genre mashups and new shit that may never get done again, many times because it’s a mess but sometimes just because it was a fun one time thing.

I think short term, yeah, I think so. Medium term and I think we’ll see a bunch of model collapse or people will get tired of the same story line repeatedly so it won’t be profitable (or won’t be regaining the money they thought they’d save on actual creative folks). Long term, I have no fucking clue if they’ll get around the fact that training AI on AI makes it even weirder.

I was mad when they got rid of our local Video Zone. That place had the best ridiculous horror movies. Blockbuster had only the most middle of the road bullshit.

I saw somewhere (ok, I probably didn’t imagine it) that they believed pigmentation was linked somehow to adrenaline production. But it wasn’t proven at the time.

An adult or a pup? That’s going to make a big difference. You’ll never be able to domesticate it in one or two generations, but depending on temperament and dedication you could probably have a coyote that allows you to live in proximity to it after a year if you spent all your time working with it. But never turn your back on it.

A pup would obviously be easier. But I still wouldn’t turn my back on it.

They worked on domesticating foxes in Russia for decades. Selective breeding for less aggression and fear. It’s funny, the domesticated ones start looking slightly more like dogs, with some even getting floppy ears and little curly tails. I assume it would be similar for coyotes.

Reaper, Studio One (although we’ll see what Fender does to it, we all remember the Gibson Cakewalk fiasco), and Bitwig are all native. Kind of depends on what your workflow is and what plugins you’re using. Yabridge is workable for a ton of stuff and not difficult.

He didn’t shut himself away, but this isn’t far off from what happened to The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. He had an ending all lined up dealing with a cold type disease that made everyone stupider. Then COVID happened. He had a storyline about how some shitty British political shit. Then Brexit happened. He stopped writing the main line series for a few years because he couldn’t keep up with how batshit things were getting.

If you like computers, math, Eldritch monsters, dry humor, making fun of bureaucracy, and thinly disguised metaphors for anthropomorphic climate catastrophies, you might enjoy it. He’s got one book left in the main line coming out in 9 days. Thank goodness because I’m going to need him to stop predicting a worse future. He’s moving on to a space opera or some shit so I’m hoping he’ll start writing about how wonderful everything is so we can start heading that direction.

I said no contact, dammit!

A lot of people have a terrible relationship with at least one person. An ex, a parent, a grandparent, an old friend who stole all your alcohol and refused to give it back or pay for it even though he knew you needed it for a get together you were having so you had to go buy all new alcohol on short notice which means you had to leave your brisket smoking unattended so you could drive to the next county and ended up with a brisket that was overdone, whatever. I don’t think it’s “wife bad” so much as it is “everyone knows a shitbag”.

Depending on the position I could see any of them, but I can’t imagine why you’d need all three for one application. Social Media Director of Programming Middle Management?

They already scraped it. Why would they care if it became public domain?

I can’t believe you’re really mine

You’re a true gift from heaven

And I loooooove you.

No game for me. Leave it for the gamers who need it more than I do.

That being said, this is cool as hell! Merry Christmas, awesome Internet person

You’re probably right. I just prefer to err on the side of over explaining that I never have a problem with what any adult is doing with any other consenting adult.

About 15 years ago there was a company I did some work for (I was at an MSP at the time) who wanted to virtualize certain systems. Great. No problem. Except those systems needed to read floppies. Ok, I can pass it through. Except they wanted to get away from floppies. Great, let’s get you a newer system from a different vendor because this one went out of business when NT4 was still the big dog. Nope, too much money and the process would change.

So I had to reregister every DLL by hand because the installation didn’t work on Server 2008 r2. And every few months it would have to be done again because one of the guys thought himself a genius and kept messing up the janky ass workflow we put together to download info from thumb drives to a virtual floppy.

So plug in the drive, janky ass script creates a virtual floppy in drive A of the server, and manually (eventually I just wrote a script because I didn’t want to get that call on a Saturday) register each DLL every so often. And they’d rather pay the company I worked for several hundred dollars a month than pay a couple of grand one time that would have paid for itself in less than a year.

Yep. I had a friend who, when she would get the “up” she’d engage in very risky sex with whoever was around. Then when she’d come down she’d hate herself for it and have to deal with the fallout.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sex positive. Do what you want with who you want. I just see how much it hurt her to constantly be getting std tests and spending all that money on plan b and fucking up her cycle.

Entirely unrelated, but the only thing I could think of