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[1.Ch.] Quietus 

As part of our Quietus celebration, we're putting together some small "ritual participation kits" to mail out to folks who'd like to join us, or who could use just a bit of outside encouragement to keep in touch with your spiritual side.

If you'd like to receive one of our kits, please fill out this form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI

You don't have to commit to participating to receive a kit; this is just us trying to help people make their lives a little more magical.

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[1.Ch.] Quietus 

Hey, fedi. The Fellowship of the Phoenix, a queer neopagan mystery order to which I belong, has begun hosting its rituals virtually and streaming them as part of our ongoing practice.

Next Saturday, January 9, is our celebration of Quietus, where we honor the Queer Elder and the divine gift of wisdom; in our tradition, this is a time for reflecting on the past year and preparing ourselves spiritually for new growth in the next.

(cont.)

@porsupah She's at @millimax@high.cat and her profile banner and avatar are both great art. Credits in profile, make sure to read the pinned toots. *grin*

@porsupah In the Eberron game my spouse is running, my little fantasy-cybernetic unicorn has front legs made of copper-and-porcelain plates. Her special someone is a gryphon who's figured out that she can get the tip of her beak or a talon into the gaps between plates and said unicorn squirms and makes the most interesting sounds... :)

re: Is anyone else using Element (formerly Riot.im (formerly Matrix))...? 

@packbat I did already deal with a little jank in my early testing with my spouse. It's way too easy (at least with the Android client) to set up a chat that tries to be encrypted but fails, and without "developer mode" turned on, the error message isn't "hey goofus you gotta verify keys with the other party" but "waiting for message and it could be a while"... indefinitely. And only sometimes? We fixed it, but if has confusing issues that early in the user experience, it's gonna be a hard sell to folks.

But I really want it to work!

Is anyone else using Element (formerly Riot.im (formerly Matrix))...? 

I'm hoping to minimize my reliance on Telegram. I mean, I've wanted to do that since before I started using it, for so many reasons, but everyone's primary reason for staying there seems to be... stickers, I guess?

Element seems to be the best alternative for many reasons such as server federation, a web client that isn't a second-class citizen, trusted encryption, and the like. It can also bridge with Telegram, IRC, Slack, and quite a few other things.

Is anyone else using this? Is there some catch I'm not seeing or any particular reason to steer clear?

today listening to Foo Fighters and the Pumpkins. Druid healing a fighter won on Mastodon, throne with villains won on Twitter, so I did both!

someone: the genesis had bad sound compared to the super nintendo

me, listening to Gauntlet IV's soundtrack for some reason: what

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What Were They Thinking?: Nintendo 64 Audio 

What I thought I knew about audio on the N64:
- There's no dedicated multi-channel sound hardware like the SNES had;
- Nintendo's official development kit (SDK) uses software mixing on the CPU;
- There's a default sample bank ("soundfont") in a 256K ROM on the system board that should have been twice the size but was halved to save costs.
- Mixed audio could be output at (effectively) any sample rate from 16 to 44kHz but was usually set around 32kHz

What I learned about it today:
- The SDK actually does software mixing on the RSP which is the chip that primarily handles graphics, meaning developers had to balance sound quality versus graphics performance;
- That sample bank never existed (which might be why no N64 emulator has ever needed an external system ROM file which you'd think I'd have noticed by now?) so developers also had to make room in limited cartridge space for every single instrument sample used in the music, even the default ones that were included with the SDK;
- Mixed audio could be output from 3 to 368kHz... but most games set it around 32kHz.

What I learned about the 64DD disk drive add-on that fizzled not long after release in Japan:
- It contains a really good sample bank in a whopping 2.75M ROM!

What I already knew before that still annoys me to this day:
- Even Game Boy Advance had more dedicated sound hardware!
- ...but only because it had the Game Boy Color sound chip in it alongside PCM that could only be used as two mono channels mixed together or one stereo channel;
- ...and that PCM is only 8-bit and most games ran it at 22, 16, or even 11kHz!

Why did Nintendo give audio the short end of things when the SNES was praised for lush sound?

re: Semi-automated audio conversion. 

@packbat Aw, heck. Sorry about that! Worse yet, I had a much better CW that would have made it more obvious, but I ended up editing it away. Lesson learned!

And yeah, I totally get that about not wanting to pick up new software. It's why I still have so many of the old-fashioned habits I do as far as how I organize files and such... and why when I must find something new for a task I want to do, I try to find the thing that's most versatile for wrapping around the old way of doing things so I don't lose track of it all!

Semi-automated audio conversion. 

@packbat The looping is best done in Audacity and the like, but I recommend foobar2000 to do everything else there in basically one step. It's got a very versatile setup for doing automatic signal processing while converting files! I've got it set up so I can convert dozens of videogame soundtracks from odd original formats to FLAC with metadata preserved and reformatted as desired, with slight reverb, normalization, and other desired effects with a couple clicks. Then, when it pops up a list of the FLAC files it made, I drag all those right back into the playlist and convert them to Vorbis (or MP3) with another click!

For working with tags specifically, I highly recommend Mp3tag, which is amazing for working with tags specifically. Copy from one set of files to another, read tags from a text file, search-and-replace that can use regular expressions, even reorganize a tens-of-thousands-of-files collection into a better folder structure based on tags and filenames. With undo history, even! This is probably overkill, though, if you only need to convert individual files on occasion. *grin*

Talking to yourself, + 

"Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking"

"A lot of attention has been given to the power of spoken self-affirmation as a means of self-empowerment, in the spirit of positive psychology. However, as Kleist says, talking to oneself is also a cognitive and intellectual tool that allows for a wider array of possible use cases. Contemporary theories in cognition and the science of learning reaffirm Kleist’s speculations, and show how self-talk contributes not only to motivation and emotional regulation, but also to some higher cognitive functions such as developing metacognition and reasoning."

psyche.co/ideas/talking-out-lo

Meme creators are the bards of the digital world :thinkhappy:

"Ah, my favorite of the NES Mega Mans."

"Mega Mans?"

"Well, it sure isn't 'Megas Man'."

this is just to say
i have digitized
the orange
that was in front of
the laser array

and which
you weren't expecting
to send to
the Grid

Forgive me
here goes something
here comes nothing
Now Tron is confused

Today's gripe: "Urgent paperwork." (slightly long?) 

@porsupah It's necessary in the "must jump through hoops" sense.

And that reminds me: Each PDF I got was set up as US legal (8½×14") paper, but with wide top and bottom margins to allow it to be printed on US letter (8½×11) size. By default, a PDF reader will shrink the legal down to fit the letter page so it prints much smaller than it should for no reason.

Shit like this is why I smoke so much weed.

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