Nigh on the Ides of September

Punctuation.

The Microsoft Lifechat headset.

Montclair Radiology patient portal.

Locking female 3.5mm to regular 3.5mm male connector.

The crime: there are three IAs who control the city. Each has it's own weaponry.

The White Queen controls the SUZI security android force.

The Medusa has an army of killbots -- floating little poison-infected things that can key onto an individual's biology.

Amaryllis controls nanobiotechnology. That's used for both medical and security purposes. 

Robots have certain other powers. They can see into the future. Some see better than others. The ones who see all the paths are called Cassandras. The Cassandras were all but wiped out in the wars between the Warlord AI's, before the truce and peace of The Triad. Their manufacturing plants were shut down and all the humans involved with creating them were exiled or terminated. 

Amaryllis, a powerful AI who is worshipped as a god, has died. But the only people who know this are The Medusa and The White Queen. This could permanently upset the balance of power in the city. 

The Cassandra is dead. The Cassandra was supposedly killed by the White Queen because the Cassandra knew of the Trojan Horse the White Queen had planted in Amaryllis and had warned Amaryllis (who ignored her.) 

Except both the White Queen and the Medusa know a Cassandra is very hard to kill. 

The Medusa believes that a hunt for the Cassandra's killer, will reveal the Cassandra herself -- putting her into grave danger before she can advise the Medusa on how to prevent it's OWN death. The White Queen believes that putting Logan on the hunt for the Cassandra will give the White Queen another opportunity to murder the Cassandra, leaving her free to take over the city with the Amaryllis nanobots. 

When Logan finds the real Cassandra, the two of them race across town to the Amaryllis Castle, only to discover the god has perished. 

Although seemingl

It was the Panda

OBS Studio can emulate a web camera so that you can use it with Zoom and suchwise. You need OBS virtualcam. (A Mac version is here.)

Mi electric scooter. 

Izotope academic policy.

Using .srt to After Effects plugin from Digital Anarchy

 

The scooter is six hundred bucks. I may be too overweight for it.

 

I don't know. But I've been told. Marketing an indy video game with no money.

Netflix captions character limits. 

BBC typography for captions.

Captions

If you have your captions in Word and you copy-paste them into a Notepad document, make sure that when you save you use UTF, not ANSI encoding, if you want to maintain Chinese characters.

My kitchen isn't even this clean right now.

Digital Anarchy's After Effects SRT Importer Script. If you need to format captions (which I way do) it's kind of a life-saver.

Nowadays

 Title safe nowadays. 

QLab on Zoom.

R0DE made a video on using lavalier microphones that's pretty good.

Oops

 Standdesk collapsed. I'd put wheels on it more than a year ago. I can't find the instructions for the wheels but they seem to all be stripped. I mean, they're loose -- and I can't imagine I put them in that way originally. But in any case, I went to move the desk and it fell off a wheel and then went gerblonk.

This makes me just want to lie down and sleep for a while.

No cats were harmed. I'd actually grabbed onto the desk as it was collapsing and I moved a lot a lot a lot of stuff off of it with one hand while holding it up with the other. That why there isn't, for instance, a smashed monitor or speakers on the floor. 

Let the Darkness In

Christa Kimlicko Jones as Dr. Ellen K. Henderson in Richard Byrnes' Let the Darkness In. This was shot entirely remotely, it's a "Zoom play." But we set up a second camera (a Panasonic GH4) and separate audio (a Zoom -- not the same company as the teleconferencing app -- F1 with a Sanken COS11). Laura Schlachtmeyer produced, I "directed" (more like a TV director, with Richard having worked with Christa beforehand and Laura as always having the best notes and adjustments.)

The lighting was all Christa's practical lights except for a ring light she has.

Christa really knocked this out of the park. There are two camera angles -- the actual Zoom call and the GH4 but this is all one performance (take 4.)

Notes.

 I'm working on a short with Richard Byrne and Laura Schlachtmeyer. Little do they know this is part of my PhD journey.

Here are Laura's notes. Followed by Richard's notes in all caps. The "You know, more yellow" is an old joke.

1. Title can be shorter than 10 seconds

2. Opening music could be more tension, excitement, nerves, less ominous and more busy. You know, more yellow. 

3. Can the second bubble at the beginning say "You have a new message" instead of "voicemail"? (Maybe that fits in the bubble better anyway)

4. Can the last bubble at the end say "Disconnecting" instead of "Good Bye"?

1. Title can be shorter than 10 seconds (I AGREE; MUCH.) 

2. Opening music could be more tension, excitement, nerves, less ominous and more busy. You know, more yellow. (BUZZY? AGITATED? FIZZY?) 

3. Can the second bubble at the beginning say "You have a new message" instead of "voicemail"? (Maybe that fits in the bubble better anyway) (YES)

4. Can the last bubble at the end say "Disconnecting" instead of "Good Bye"? (YES)

Your things for today

 

TDR Kotelnikov GE

It's a kind of cool compressor which seems to get a goodly amount of attention from classical engineers, which is cool.

The Star Wars Original Radio Drama. 

Use a wizard to create a Gantt Chart. Only works in Project.

Remote Production

 Today we're attempting a remote production of a short film written by Richard Byrne. 

Romulus is the catmer operator.

I dragged a microphone and a GH4 to Christa Kimlicko-Jones' in fabulous Sunnyside today. We are partly on Zoom, partly with the Panasonic. We'll find out if we can cut back-and-forth. 

Romulus pulling focus.

Photos by Christa, of course, because we're not there.

Crane Control

 https://www.gessmann.com/products/crane-systems-and-hoisting-equipment/crane-control-unit/crane-control-unit-kst-6-swiveling/ 

1 cup white, granulated sugar (can reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 cup water (for the simple syrup)
1 cup lemon juice
2 to 3 cups cold water (to dilute)

The Tokyo Dawn Labs Kotelnikov limiter. 

Ink beds. Next time we need a space bed.

LSβ

 The latest Scampr beta.

https://we.tl/t-XwNcHeB79I

The link will only work for a few months.

That which

The water's translucence amuses me.

Oof. The new Blogger interface makes it hard to see where the cursor is. And you can't tell if the images you post are "original size" or just some arbitrary Blogger size. Bleh. 

Tegeler makes some very interesting compressors and EQ's. 

Sound Skulptor makes an interesting 500-series kit for an SSL-style compressor. 

I actually own Camtasia, but it is a bit annoying. There are other options. Free Cam. And even the free, built-in screen recorder in Windows 10. Depends on what you're up to. 

All I've done during the pandemic is gain weight. I haven't gotten better at guitar. I haven't gotten into shape or written a screenplay. 

Dungeons of Chaos. I understand you can be killed by rabbits. Video game. 

The best lemonade. 

It works like this:

Ingredients

4 h 35 m10 servings145 cals

• 1 3/4 cups white sugar
• 8 cups water

• 1 1/2 cups lemon juice
• 
  

Directions

Add a notePrint

• Prep
  30 m
• Cook
  5 m
• Ready In
  4 h 35 m

1. In a small saucepan, combine sugar and 1 cup water. Bring to boil and stir to dissolve sugar. Allow to cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate until chilled.
2. Remove seeds from lemon juice, but leave pulp. In pitcher, stir together chilled syrup, lemon juice and remaining 7 cups water.

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Cook 5-star weekday dinners every time.

Nutrition Facts

Per Serving: 145 calories; 0 g fat; 38.2 g carbohydrates; 0.1 g protein; 0 mg cholesterol; 6 mg sodium.

I don't really have a way to measure of "cup" of anything. I should get one of those Pyrex things. I know, I'm such a single man. It's interesting to me that you make the syrup separately. And that you use more sugar than water to make that syrup. 

Stuff

Mind map of things I'm researching for my PhD.

Hypatia of Alexandria. 

Gavin and Frank rent cars.

Turo is a rental car place. They have vans.

The Stand.

Deciserations

For me, it's easier to just put everything into one blog. So I've stopped posting to the Tyrannosaurus Mouse blog, and to the Pandora Machine blog, and to the Puppies and Toast blog, and I'm putting all my nonsense here where I started -- the Pleasure for the Empire blog.

Why? Well. Yes. Why. I have no idea.

Winston, with Meydl in background.

Part of it is that I don't know whether some things belong under "music" or "film." Like, for instance, video games. Or my PhD that I'm working on, which is music in film.

Anyway, all my incoherence will be here now.