I had some in a drawer and used it on a lock that was stuck to loosen it until I could get graphite from the hardware store. Then went on a mission and de-squeak the whole house.

Happens to the best of us. Ozzy was ready to go see him.

He wasn’t an original Sabbath member. Ozzy, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward were the members. Rhoads was Ozzy’s guitarist when he went solo.

I was wondering the same thing. I guess I need to go back to visit again.

5g is fine (not great, but fine) on my phone until I get millimeter wave. The mw in the HEB parking lot down the street is amazing. If I get into the city proper it’s a crapshoot if I am able to get on the Internet.

This is exactly it. I’m glad you could explain it better than I could. I still don’t understand it necessarily, but I don’t understand a lot of what I lived so I’ll survive.

I mean I really only solved it by having accounts I don’t look at (emergency fund, retirement), accounts I use regularly (bill pay, “entertainment”) and an accountant who helped me set it up so I wasn’t spending every dime. It can be done by yourself but I wasn’t psychologically prepared. I’m also the only employee of my LLC so there’s a business account but it’s just taxes, my salary, and enough for a new computer every few years. That’s not my account and I never personally touch it.

I was planning on a good afternoon of crying anyway.

Struggling taught me that if I don’t use my money right now it’ll be gone.

And I’m not saying that to contradict you. It’s funny how different people learn different lessons from the same experience. I grew up dirt poor. If I didn’t spend my money as a kid it might be called upon. And that’s the lesson I took for years. I didn’t really start saving seriously until I was closing in on 40. I have money in retirement now (and will likely retire early), but it’s because I did without for a few years trying to play catch up while making good money. It’s not a tactic I recommend. If I had started it back when I was 18 I could be really close to retirement right now.

Depends on the day. Between a few hours and a few days. If I’ve got something due at work later in the day, hours. If I have no hard deliverables for a few weeks then one of the bars where I’m a regular and play music would be the first to figure it out. All the bartenders and sound guys know how to get in touch with me.

Mom would figure it out in a month or so.

I drop off the earth pretty frequently but I always keep my gig and work commitments or call if I can’t. So it depends on my next commitment, which happens pretty much weekly.

Here’s my unmedicated and completely idiotic take.

I’m glad he’s doing these tests, but it’s pretty obvious in this case. The lyrics are very obviously AI generated, first of all. The overuse of certain words (smoke, boots, multiple song titles with the word dust, shakes, whispers, echos) are a strong indicator. Not every song using those is AI generated, obviously. But it’s like they said “see what words an LLM overuses when trying to write songs and put as many of them in a verse as possible”.

Ok, so maybe they just use it as a songwriting tool because they have no lyrics but they’re great musicians and want to put something out. Even without splitting stems most of it currently feels unnatural. But he makes a great point. Just listening without splitting there’s weird reverb. There are strange vocal artifacts. The guitar transients don’t make sense (which is part of why his splitter tool couldn’t split things properly). For a while everything sounded underwater and there are still traces of that. I see they moved past the country voice that was all over the place for a while. There’s a “shimmer” (I wish I had a better word to describe it) that sounds wrong.

It sounds like they took a human track and put every free plug-in they could find on it and dialed it up past the point of good taste. There’s no dynamic range. There’s too much (or just flat out wrong) reverb. There’s digital artifacts. A lot of that doesn’t matter if you’re listening on a Bluetooth speaker because you’ll never hear it. Vehicle systems hype and mask certain frequencies and may not reveal it. But if you listen on any halfway decent system it’s currently pretty obvious.

The real question: will enough people care? I do. Even if they could perfectly replicate session musicians and if they didn’t sing about whispering to your boots and shadows echoing through the dust but were able to really write in the style of my favorite artists I would care. Because the people making new music, trying new things, and pushing boundaries wouldn’t get the funding. So we would eventually end up with homogenized rehashes of what currently exists. If this had happened when all we had was orchestral music we’d all just be listening to AI rearranging that instead of having rap, rock, blues, metal, EDM, country, and all the other genres and their endless subgenres. We’ll never get to moon stank or whatever the next big iteration of music is. And that’s a loss for humanity because art is important.

Many credit cards also offer virtual cards for this exact reason.

Same. I used to write articles for an industry mag and that’s how I was taught to do it.

Some word processing apps automatically convert two dashes to an em dash. I’ve got that turned off right now.

I’m thinking that’s what he’s doing here. He’s threatening to fracture the furthest right to get what he wants and he’ll spend a pile to do it. I’m convinced this is his play to buy the Republican party.

Well is it?

Wait, I thought whoever was in charge of the government had the weather machines. So who really killed those people?

Announce that they’re opening the investigation but need all their land back because the documentation is scattered due to the war. Oh, we just can’t investigate with all this bombing going on, but we really, really want to.

The thing I found out when I was a manager is you will get exactly what you measure. If you measure how long it takes to close tickets your customer service will suffer (that’s a stupid thing to measure anyway, but we had a stupid director). If you measure the number of tickets closed then you’ll get each step of a process as a ticket. If you measure billable hours you’ll get a bunch of time padding.

So since the religion is measuring the amount of sin and (in some denominations cases) good works performed, that’s what you’ll get. How many of the big 10 did you stay on the right side of? Did you put in 2 hours at the soup kitchen? Cool, here’s your ticket to heaven. It’s not measuring how good you are to your fellow humans. And they’re pissed if you don’t have to follow the same rules they do because you don’t believe in the same sins. So they try to force others to live by their dumb ass rules instead of trying to get others to be good people.

I do audio mixing and having another scroll wheel is very nice up to a certain point. Per track volume, master volume, send volume, panning, scrubbing, jogging and fine jogging, track height, nudge…

I’d have to go look but I have something like 12 rotational devices programmed (it’s a macro pad with a bunch of layers and 3 wheels). Some of them I don’t use very often. Some get used every time I sit down. Because of them and way too many hours planning and setting my macros I rarely touch my mouse or keyboard anymore. It’s either done at the mixer or on the macropad.

ETA: I just looked again. The way it works would be incredibly cool for jogging the play head a single tick at a time. I already have a solution for that, but if I didn’t I would totally give this a try.

Peppa isn’t as bad as shit like Caillou, but Bluey is the best one by a mile.