Narrative Morse Dust

Transitioning from Medicare to Marketplace. (.pdf)

Narration In Film. 

Narratology in Film.

Narratology Of Film.

My sister is making shadow puppets for our upcoming opera.

USB Lavalier Microphone.

Sharon Fogarty
 

Sleigh Ride.

Opinions on OpenReel.

Telestream.

A way to learn Morse code.

A Russian movie called Dust.

Greg Bodine's Christmas Carol

Groove to Greg Bodine's Christmas Carol. This is the 2020 version shot because of the whole pandemic thing keeping him from not performing live this season. 

My review of the the Kala UBass

I made a review of my new Kala UBass. 

So many tabs, so little thyme

Richard Byrne interviewed about our Flamingo movie. 

Chris Vander Kaay on the silent film action movie tradition.

Wayrates is very much our visual aesthetic for film.

Building a successful post sound workflow.

Chris Vander Kaay's Indie Filmmaking Master Class. 

Cleanspace full-faceplate respirator.

How to achieve good audio loudness on YouTube.

It's Winter is a post-Soviet sandbox game. 

Broadway world on Flamingo. 

This barely closes a third of my open tabs.

Making a MIDI controller.

Prague recording orchestra.

Eight sequence method for film writing.

Narratology in film.

Eventfinity Expos.

Riverside.fm lets you record audio and video separately for podcasts and videocasts.

Real Time Messaging Protocol. 

Vmeet specifications.

New York Times on making cold sesame noodles:

INGREDIENTS

• 1 pound noodles, frozen or (preferably) fresh
• 2 tablespoons sesame oil, plus a splash
• 3 ½ tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons Chinese rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons Chinese sesame paste
• 1 tablespoon smooth peanut butter
• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon finely grated ginger
• 2 teaspoons minced garlic
• 2 teaspoons chile-garlic paste, chile crisp or chile oil, or to taste
•  Half a cucumber, peeled, seeded and cut into 1/8-inch by 1/8-inch by 2-inch sticks
• ¼ cup chopped roasted peanuts

PREPARATION

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add noodles and cook until barely tender, about 5 minutes. They should retain a hint of chewiness. Drain, rinse with cold water, drain again and toss with a splash of sesame oil.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining 2 tablespoons sesame oil, the soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame paste, peanut butter, sugar, ginger, garlic and chili-garlic paste.
3. Pour the sauce over the noodles and toss. Transfer to a serving bowl, and garnish with cucumber and peanuts.

Tip

• The Chinese sesame paste called for here is made of toasted sesame seeds; it is not the same as tahini, the Middle Eastern paste made of plain, untoasted sesame. But you could use tahini in a pinch. You need only add a little toasted sesame oil to compensate for flavor, and perhaps some peanut butter to keep the sauce emulsified.

Flamingo

A socially-distanced shoot. Written by Richard Byrne, produced by Laura Schlachtmeyer, composed and directed by Andrew Bellware. 

So much cleanup to do.

 I like Aurora.

 

Aurora concert.

Black and gold engravable acrylic.

The MFOS Voltage quantizer. I tried pricing out the parts and it was about a hundred bucks. And there aren't any kits available. And apparently it really wants .1% tolerance resistors. A whole bunch of 'em.

There is group video calling on Skype. 

Nux Horseman pedal.

Lament progression. I VII VI V. You know. Dido's Lament. Purcell. 

Micachu is kinda interesting. Atonal pop music. And some scoring. 

Consumer Reports likes Icelandic Provisions Vanilla Skyr.

Murray Gold composed a bunch of stuff including the new Dr. Who.

Laser engravable aluminum plates.

I don't know that I ever was able to read those inversion markings under the bass. I certainly can't now. Dido's Lament arrangement in .pdf.

A video on the accuracy of the costumes in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.

Last Call

Rebecca Kush in "Last Call" by the Lincoln Project. 

Keep this in mind

 Four Cat 6a feeds:

1. Internet/main office network

2. IP private network

3. Dante network

4. Comms network

A Pair of Shoes (with interior music cues)

This is the version of our movie with the interior music cues.

Pair of Shoes

This is the version without the interior music cues. 

A small number of tabs cleared

 Risk minds convention splash video.

Titles for journal articles.

The risks of self-citation.

Gender citation gap.

OBS Ninja, for adding people's webcams to your OBS feed.

Suzanne Valadon. Artist. Model. Etc.

Oscillator

Filter

VCA

LFO, modulators, effects

Sequencer

Condorcet Paradox

16 step sequencer kits

Eurorack power kit

Synthrotek 16 step sequencer kits

Modular Addict Eurorack 

The Neinhorn

Zlob VCO's

Thonk stuff

Teensy Audio designer

The magic of a Pultec EQ

Synthesizers.com VCO's

Music from Outer Space boards from Synth Cube

Haplopinderous

 Programming the Teensy?

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-the-teensy/programming

The production bot switcher.

Married to the Sea.

Victorine Meurent

Things to know.

 How this does, and does not, apply to video games.

One might reasonably presume that dramatic "moments" do not occur in video games as such. 

The direct analogy for a dramatic "movie" in a videogame is, of course, the "cutscene." Outside of the cutscene, however, the player controls the moments in well-designed and well-written music in a videogame. 

Moments in the game, which is typically attached to the player entering into a specific physical area of the game, can be revelatory in a story sense (seeing the "Big Bad" for the first time) or in an emotional sense (discovering the entrance to the golden cave), or even in formative (you can ride whales here.)

A post-sound workflow.

Sometimes you need just a white, black, or blue screen. Whitedisplay. I'm not proud. I've used it as fill light.

Streamyard is a multiple participant video-production software which you can use for webcasts and panels and such. 

Reticulated Giraffe

 You all know about the Filmmaker Master Class by Chris Vander-Kaay? 

Eventfinity Expos.

Risk.net

Zlob Modular 

Maybe I AM a Robot

How to write a detective story. I've been reading a lot of posts about how to write stories and the one big thing is to add an antagonist, which honestly I hadn't thought of for a detective story. RIMS is a risk-management "society." They have podcasts. PRMIA is another one. Beechwood Cafe in Jersey City. Sennheiser HD 800's. Man, this post is starting to look like a 'bot wrote it. The Production Bot is a box with some SDI ins and out, it can record to internal hard drives and runs on Windows 10. Outlining with index cards.

Hypatia of Alexandra

The Shadow calculator. I'm not entirely sure how to really use it. But for the shoot next week it seems like we'll be in sunlight all day. I should remember to bring a hat. Astra light panels. Adobe is making things which might automatically take out "um's" and such. Well, at least find them all for you. The Eight Sequence Method of writing a screenplay. 

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.

Get the magazine

Get a full year for just $10!

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.

Get Ready

Brittany Bowman is a drummer.

Here are a bunch of images from my desktop.