np NP, Wednesday August 24, 2016

[Vorlonagent 442]

Spaceballs actually improved for me over time.  I hated it when I saw it in the theaters.  Now I kinda like it.

I enjoyed History of the World Part 1 as well.

[hkmaly 490]

4 hours ago, mlooney said:

5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Now?

It's a youtube link.  Not following it.  Lay long odds it to that Damn Movie.

Mel Brooks, he either makes GREAT¹ movies or FULL ON FAIL² movies.   Spaceballs is made of fail, more so than most of his type 2 movies.

¹Silent Movie, Blazing Sadles, Young Frankenstein

²Every thing else he made.

Nevertheless, Spaceballs is on topic. I don't think any of the others was mentioned in EGS.

9 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

16 hours ago, ijuin said:

Repeat to yourself: "It's just a show. I should really just relax."

Ah, but discussing details like this is how many of us relax....

+1. So often someone is telling me that I should enjoy something as if I wouldn't be enjoying it just because I'm nitpicking it ...

[mlooney 3,417]

2 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Did you forget about The Producers, Prince Myshkin?

No, I did not forget about The Producers, sir.

[mlooney 3,417]

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Nevertheless, Spaceballs is on topic. I don't think any of the others was mentioned in EGS.

Yes, and I think that Grace's face when she "objects" to Justin turing it off says it all.

[hkmaly 490]

31 minutes ago, mlooney said:

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Nevertheless, Spaceballs is on topic. I don't think any of the others was mentioned in EGS.

Yes, and I think that Grace's face when she "objects" to Justin turing it off says it all.

There is VERY few movies you can see multiple times per month. Justin saw it multiple times and Grace likely did as well.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

There is VERY few movies you can see multiple times per month. Justin saw it multiple times and Grace likely did as well.

I dunno, there are a few TV shows or movies I wouldn't mind having on a repeating loop.  Maybe it's my inner four-year-old, wanting to hear the same story read over and over.

When I was in a PE class that made us run all period around a boring track, I made cassette tapes of maybe three favorite movies and shows, and would just listen to one on my Walkman the whole hour.  Only having three, that made for a lot of repeats.  This was back in the stone age (Magnetic Age?), before MP3 players and podcasts and having a century of music all on one little gizmo the size of a tic-tac box.  You could only fit 45 minutes on each side of a cassette, and you had to sit down and record stuff in real time to make a new cassette, not download a file in a few seconds.  Hence the limited supply of listening material.

[exterminator 37]

Back when car radios only accepted tapes, my father recorded the whole Cyrano movie, the one with Gérard Depardieu, to listen to it in long road trips. I must've listened to that movie thousands of times, and I never got tired of it. The swordfight scene at the theatre with all Cyrano's quips and jibs is still one of my favourites in any film.

[hkmaly 490]

19 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

This was back in the stone age (Magnetic Age?)

Magnetic age didn't ended yet, HDDs are still using magnetic field to record data. Although SSD doesn't, so maybe ...

The word you search for, though, is ANALOG. It was back in the analog age, which ended (for audio at least) with CDs - although CD still hold only 74 minutes of music, until mp3 made it 740 (12 hours) and then came DVDs (almost week) and then flash disc although not even those can hold century. Yet (seriously, that's like 50TB).

19 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

and you had to sit down and record stuff in real time to make a new cassette, not download a file in a few seconds

Not only that, you needed to sit still - or in other room, because walking around might make the record worse. Or, I guess, have professional equipment

19 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Hence the limited supply of listening material.

Hmmm ... surprisingly, it doesn't seem that weird for listening. I remember how I was able to play single cassette over and over, and even now when it's not problem I don't have more than like 30 hours of music and I don't really mind hearing the same song multiple times per week ...

... on the other hand, listening is background, when I talked about movies I was thinking about actually paying attention to them, but back on the first one, paying attention to them likely wasn't what Justin and Grace were doing ...

[Tom Sewell 268]

20 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

This was back in the stone age (Magnetic Age?)

If you want to go back to the dawn of the magnetic age, watch The Two Jakes. It's a sequel to Chinatown, set in 1948, and one of it's features is Jack Nicholson using wire recorders to record conversations secretly. I've actually used an ancient radio which had a built-in wire recorder. They were pretty much replaced by magnetic tape by the end of the 1950s.

If you really remember audio cassette tapes, you should remember trying to repair one that broke or got twisted up. Some of them were assembled with tiny screws, so as a last resort you could take one apart and actually put it together. And don't forget splicing.

Well, at least they worked better than 8-tracks...

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 minute ago, Tom Sewell said:

If you really remember audio cassette tapes, you should remember trying to repair one that broke or got twisted up. Some of them were assembled with tiny screws, so as a last resort you could take one apart and actually put it together. And don't forget splicing.

Yeah. I remember doing that. Usually it did not end well.

[Xenophon Hendrix 47]

Ah, the bad old days. The electronic revolution really has been wonderful. About the only thing I miss about the old ways is LP covers.

[hkmaly 490]

37 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

If you really remember audio cassette tapes, you should remember trying to repair one that broke or got twisted up. Some of them were assembled with tiny screws, so as a last resort you could take one apart and actually put it together. And don't forget splicing.

Hmmmm ... I remember taking apart one which I left in parked car in summer and putting the tape to another which was in original shape compatible with the tape player. The recording was also damaged, but still possible to listen to it ...

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

5 minutes ago, Xenophon Hendrix said:

About the only thing I miss about the old ways is LP covers.

The News of the World jacket just does not inspire when reduced to fit a CD.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

38 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Hmmmm ... I remember taking apart one which I left in parked car in summer and putting the tape to another which was in original shape compatible with the tape player. The recording was also damaged, but still possible to listen to it ...

Since it had been in the car for that long, presumably it had already turned into Queen's Greatest Hits?

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Hmmmm ... I remember taking apart one which I left in parked car in summer and putting the tape to another which was in original shape compatible with the tape player. The recording was also damaged, but still possible to listen to it ...

Since it had been in the car for that long, presumably it had already turned into Queen's Greatest Hits?

Why do you think it had been that long? It wasn't even whole day. The cassette doesn't really need much to reshape when directly lit by sun ... (it was on back window ; I guess if it would be elsewhere it wouldn't end up that bad.) And anyway, not all cars are doing that. Maybe. Ok, I can't really be sure about that, as I wasn't leaving the tapes in car over night.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Why do you think it had been that long? It wasn't even whole day.

You said you had left it in the car in summer. You didn't specify and that made me figure you meant either the whole summer or a large part of it. Or do you just have very short summers where you are?

[hkmaly 490]

21 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

You said you had left it in the car in summer. You didn't specify and that made me figure you meant either the whole summer or a large part of it. Or do you just have very short summers where you are?

Not THAT short.

I was specifying summer because in any other part of year leaving tapes in car wouldn't result in physical damage.

Is this an English language problem or general "sentence not specific enough" problem?

[Scotty 1,061]

14 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Not THAT short.

I was specifying summer because in any other part of year leaving tapes in car wouldn't result in physical damage.

Is this an English language problem or general "sentence not specific enough" problem?

Not specific enough, as I agree with Hack that it sounded like you meant it was left in the car for the entire summer. Saying "on a hot summer day" would have worked.

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

Not specific enough, as I agree with Hack that it sounded like you meant it was left in the car for the entire summer. Saying "on a hot summer day" would have worked.

Ok. Next time

Although ... wouldn't entire summer by "over summer"? (Doesn't solve the problem that "in summer" could've been week or month, but entire summer seems too much).

Also ... maybe "on a nice summer day" would be better, to suggest the higher temperature but not saying it directly.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

On August 28, 2016 at 7:10 PM, hkmaly said:

Hmmmm ... I remember taking apart one which I left in parked car in summer and putting the tape to another which was in original shape compatible with the tape player. The recording was also damaged, but still possible to listen to it ...

I remember accidentally hitting the REC button instead of just PLAY and erasing a few seconds in the middle of a favorite song.  It was something recorded live, by an obscure performer, and thus kinda difficult to replace.  :-(

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

4 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

I remember accidentally hitting the REC button instead of just PLAY and erasing a few seconds...

Richard Nixon had a similar problem.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Richard Nixon had a similar problem.

Big talk from the Pharaoh who had several hundred YARDS of steles turn up missing. Not to mention other monument inscriptions and tomb decorations. I never did get how you survived Hachupsetgate.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

The "Missing" Steles and Obelisks were never missing.

They were never built in the first place.

After the flying saucer crews helped us build the Pyramids, we in the royal house were generally inclined to trust the space travelers. 

Well, wouldn't you know it about a century later, just after the last Egyptian who had actually viewed the Pyramid construction had been mummified, a flying saucer landed outside the summer palace and laid out some plans for a new city.  It included an amazing palace, huge temples, and a larger mausoleum than uncle Khufu's.  We were all impressed. 

Then they told us that they would need to acquire some of the needed materials through purchase, so they would need a substantial amount of gold and silver in advance.  They took the cash, and we never saw them again.

To explain the loss of money, we spread the story that construction had begun, but was wiped out by a devastating storm.  The people did not believe it.  But the stories they concocted to explain how the treasury was depleted overnight were even more unbelievable than spacefaring con artists.

[NN1 0]

Pandora really doesn't need someone to be evil to raise magical awareness. She could just give Ashley a good pain relief spell and then point her at people with chronic pain and loose-lips. Goody-two-shoes Ashley would find it very difficult to let innocent people suffer when she has the means to help them (especially if Pandora stresses how bad some of them have it). Miracle girl will probably get quite a bit of press and possibly a religious following (or cult or witch-hunter). Whatever plays out it has a relatively high chance of raising magical awareness, more so than aura sense at least.

[Drasvin 123]

6 hours ago, NN1 said:

Pandora really doesn't need someone to be evil to raise magical awareness. She could just give Ashley a good pain relief spell and then point her at people with chronic pain and loose-lips. Goody-two-shoes Ashley would find it very difficult to let innocent people suffer when she has the means to help them (especially if Pandora stresses how bad some of them have it). Miracle girl will probably get quite a bit of press and possibly a religious following (or cult or witch-hunter). Whatever plays out it has a relatively high chance of raising magical awareness, more so than aura sense at least.

Pandora wants transformation spells, because they're very overt and obvious. Something subtle like a pain relief spell can be difficult to verify and stands a good chance of being disregarded as one of those fancy new wave treatments or some such. And even if it isn't disregarded, it will take time for it to be verified and studied enough to have a meaningful impact outside of those already with a significant interest in the paranormal.