phantasmish

24fps looks a little different on a real film projector than on nearly all home screens, too. There's a little time between each frame when a full-frame black is projected (the light is blocked, that is) as the film advances (else you'd get a horrid and probably nausea-inducing smear as the film moved). This (oddly enough!) has the effect of apparently smoothing motion—though "motion smoothing" settings on e.g. modern TVs don't match that effect, unfortunately, but looks like something else entirely (which one may or may not find intolerably awful).

Some of your fancier, brighter (because you lose some apparent brightness by cutting the light for fractions of a second) home digital projectors can convincingly mimic the effect, but otherwise, you'll never quite get things like 24fps panning judder down to imperceptible levels, like a real film projector can.

Self-reply because I’m outside the edit window: the dvd “original” releases are based on the laserdisc, but supposedly they modify it to restore the pre-1981-re-release title, so I’m actually wrong!

I can’t find out if they fix the 3% speed-up from the laser disc. The audio mix, at any rate, will be a combination of the three (stereo, mono, 70mm) original mixes, like on the laser disc, so identical to none of them. The source should predate the replacement of Latin script with made-up letters (not conceived until ROTJ then retrofitted on some releases of SW and Empire) so that’ll be intact unless they “fixed” it.

Still stuck with sub-ordinary-dvd-quality picture, as far as official releases go, so that’s too bad. Oh well, fan 35mm scan projects solved that problem.

High twist wool, unlined, adds basically zero heat (“summer weight wool” is a term that may include all these qualities). Doesn’t even do much to block wind (but does block the sun, a bit!). Totally fine in that range. That’s before resorting to something like an unstructured linen jacket (ever seen Lawrence of Arabia? Those guys are wearing plenty of clothing in the heat, a linen jacket is nothing) or warm-weather cottons like a seersucker (I’ve not bothered with any of that for jackets, myself, as light wool does fine for me, though I have several other pieces in linen).

Hell I own sweaters that are totally comfortable up to about that point, and higher if there’s a breeze. It’s all about construction and fabric.

I want a tiny phone.

But I have kids, and am less willing to compromise on camera quality than I am size.

I’d pay the same price for a smaller phone if the camera specs (and ideally battery life—go ahead and make it a little thicker, they’re too thin anyway) were the same as the larger phones, but they’re not.

I bet those kinds of differences are what do it for a lot of folks. They’re like me and would prefer smaller, all else being equal—but all else is typically not equal, even compared to standard iPhones and not the ultra-high-end ones.

Blazers and sport coats.

They’re purses you can wear that also tend to make you look better.

They’re friggin’ great, and even the largest smart phones easily fit their hip pockets.

No more keys poking you through jeans pockets. No more sitting on your wallet. Even room for a smallish paperback book.

We never should have moved away from them. They’re a utility garment.

> But also a simulation called compression of a real thing is different from that real thing, so that purity test had already been failed

Quoted: the introduction of “purity test” to the conversation, from not one of my posts.

Well film grain doesn't matter because compression exists, apparently, and may as well be simulated because it's already failed the "purity test" and may as well be algo-noise. That holds for everything else! May as well maximize the compression and simulate all of it then.

[EDIT] My point is "film grain's not more-real than algo noise" is simply not true, at all. An attempt to represent something with fidelity is not the same thing as giving up and faking it entirely based on a guess with zero connection to the real thing—its being a representation and not the actual-real-thing doesn't render it equally as "impure" as a noise-adding filter.

I just feed AI the IMDB summary and let it re-create the movie for me. Just as “pure” as high-bitrate h.265, after all.

But… of course there is? A record of a real thing is different from a statistical simulation of it.

It’s really amazing how some Blu-ray do in fact manage to be net-worse than early dvd or even vhs, but it’s true.

An infamous case is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show. The Blu-ray (edit: and streaming copies) went back to the film source, which is good, but… that meant losing the color grading and digital effects, because the final show wasn’t printed to film. Not only did they get lazy recreating the effects, they don’t seem to have done scene-by-scene color grading at all. This radically alters the color-mood of many scenes, but worse, it harms the legibility of the show, because lots of scenes were shot day-for-night and fixed in post, but now those just look like they’re daytime, so it’s often hard to tell when a scene is supposed to be taking place, which matters a lot in any show or film but kinda extra-matters in one with fucking vampires.

The result is that even a recorded-from-broadcast VHS is arguably far superior to the blu ray for its colors, which is an astounding level of failure.

(There are other problems with things like some kind of ill-advised auto-cropping seeming to have been applied and turning some wide shots into close-ups, removing context the viewer is intended to have and making scenes confusing, but the colors alone are such a failure that a poor VHS broadcast recording is still arguably better just on those grounds)

Even those aren’t accurate to the 1977 film.

To pick an arguably-minor but very easy to see point: the title’s different.

One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.

The other’s fake noise.

One’s a real photo from 1890. The other’s an old-timey instagram filter.

It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference. Like, I love my old family Polaroids. I would not want a scanned version of those to have the “noise” removed for compression’s sake. If that had been done, I’d have limited interest in adding fake noise back to them. By far my favorite version to have would be the originals, without the “noise” smoothed out at all.

Lots of folks have similar feelings about film. Faked grain isn’t what they’re after, at all. It’s practically unrelated to what they’re looking for.

Playing them, handling them, and poor storage all degrade them. Most original prints will have been played many times, and often haven’t been consistently stored well.

The 4k77 et c. fan scans of the original Star Wars trilogy, which aimed to get as close as possible to what one would have seen in a theater the year of release, used multiple prints to fill in e.g. bad frames, used references like (I think) magazine prints of stills and well-preserved fragments or individual frames to fix the (always faded, sometimes badly) color grading and contrast and such, and had to extensively hand-correct things like scratches, with some reels or parts of reels requiring a lot more of that kind of work than others. Even Jedi required a lot of that sort of work, and those reels would have been only something like 30-35 years old when they started working on them.

Yeah I clicked this link going “oh god it’s because they printed to film, I bet, and man do I hope it looks worse so I don’t have to hunt down a bunch of giant 35mm scans of even more movies that can’t be seen properly any other way”

But no, of course it looks between slightly and way better in every case. Goddamnit. Pour one out for my overworked disk array.

And here I was thinking it was just my imagination that several of these look kinda shitty on Blu-ray and stream rips. Nope, they really are worse.

Piracy: saving our childhoods one frame at a time.

Antitrust needs to make a comeback in general. I've been seeing meme-graphics about consolidation in various industries (like how most of the stuff on the shelves in grocery stores comes from like a half-dozen companies, even if there are 20 "brands" on the shelf making the market look healthier than it is, 18 of those 20 will actually be owned by those very-few companies; ditto media, telecom, et c.) my entire life.

Why did everything consolidate terribly in the '80s and '90s? Because we basically stopped enforcing antitrust in the '70s, due to Chicago School jackasses influencing policy and jurisprudence.

We need to undo their fake-pro-markets horse-shit and get back to having robust markets in every sector, not just software (but yes, certainly in software too). That'll require a spree of breaking up big companies across the economy.

Until these recent rumblings out of Google, it was modern browser technology.

You don’t need to generate anything with JavaScript, aside from one call to build an entire DOM object from your XML document. Boom, whole thing’s a DOM.

I guess the fact that it’s obscure knowledge that browsers have great, fast tools for working directly with XML is why we’re losing nice things and will soon be stuck in a nothing-but-JavaScript land of shit.

Lots of protocols are based on XML and browsers are (though, increasingly, “were”) very capable of handling them, with little more than a bridge on the server to overcome their inability to do TCP sockets. Super cool capability, with really good performance because all the important stuff’s in fast and efficient languages rather than JS.

That’s the standard story, yes.

What’s always been missing from it for me is whether it actually mattered.

The NES wasn’t cheap. It didn’t do anything but play video games. Did its looking kinda (but not really) like some other piece of AV equipment (but having no other actual capabilities) contribute meaningfully to its success? Were a lot of its buyers, who weren’t exactly making an impulse purchase, swayed by the appearance?

I kinda doubt it. Meanwhile, the redesign did make it less-reliable than its Japanese counterpart.

IDK about pants pockets, but blazer- and sport-coat-wearing needs to make a comeback. Those hip pockets that can comfortably hold all the old pulp "pocket size" paperbacks from back in the day are so damn nice. Great for enormous modern smartphones, too.

This is true on multiple levels.

AFAIK this kind of situation is a result of a novel interpretation by an AG of a much older law some time around 1980. I don't think it's ever been tested in court, and we'd operated for decades under the old interpretation before then.

Trump could just say "we're going back to the old interpretation" and at-minimum buy several months of runway while court challenges happened (if they even did). This would be among the least questionable "stretches" (to be very generous) of presidential power he'd exercised.

Plus Trump's fighting in court to keep from having to release (as very fucking clearly required by law) SNAP funds that are already allocated by congress for exactly this kind of situation. Whatever your opinion on the rest of this, that part's certainly, 100%, on him personally.

Oh hell no, I need those guys to give me free, good early-to-mid-game light armor. Saves me from having to think about armor at all until I can get ahold of some glass (except subbing in the odd enchanted piece).

It also crashes a hell of a lot less than the official binary. I did a play through a couple years ago, with plenty of mods, and saw zero crashes in tens of hours of play, which is practically unachievable with the official .exe.

It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved nothing else.

I started using mods in Morrowind from basically my second play-through, way back around the time it was released.

Mods to make plants either vanish or (even better) switch to a different model when they're "harvested" instead of acting like static containers is a must. And I think most consider some kind of mod to at least chill out the cliff racers a little bit to be a must-have.

My usual mod set back in the day also included some light improvements to graphics (some of the later, heavier fixes involving wrapper-binaries and such didn't exist yet, or weren't stable), NPC schedules, and an Imperial Library just outside Vivec that would pay a little gold to be allowed to copy any books you provide that it doesn't already have (it starts empty) which would then spawn neatly organized on its shelves, mostly to give me a low-effort outlet for my book hoarding tendency in those games.

I think any time charges are over something so entirely lacking in even plausible potential (let alone actual) harm that each individual juror has suffered far, far more harm by being called to serve on the case, yeah, there's a good chance the prosecutor's going to be told by those same jurors to go fuck themselves.

This never should have been anything more than something in roughly the same legal realm as a parking ticket, for that if no other reason. Instead, probably a thousand-plus person hours and god knows how much money were wasted to use the process itself as punishment... over a thrown sandwich.

Paying Google to not attempt to scam me is... not something I plan to do.

There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.

Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".

Seconding this, I somehow managed to avoid encountering the coverage of COVID that people say shook their faith in institutions, despite following the news pretty closely. Like to the point that if not for others' reactions it'd never have occurred to me to regard the coverage as notably bad (unlike, say, the lead-up to the war in Iraq). I'd love to know what people are talking about when they bring this up, because I truly have no idea.

> That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will.

Within the last year I opened an Instagram account just so I could get updates from a few small businesses I like. I have almost no experience with social media. This drove home for me just how much the "this is where their attention goes, so that's revealed preference" thing is bullshit.

You know what I want? The ability to get these updates from the handful of accounts I care about without ever seeing Instagram's algo "feed". Actually, even better would be if I could just have an RSS feed. None of that is an option. Do I sometimes pause and read one of the items in the algo feed that I have to see before I can switch over to the "following" tab? I do, of course, they're tuned to make that happen. Does that mean I want them? NO. I would turn them off if I could. My actual fucking preference is to turn them off and never see them again, no matter that they do sometimes succeed in distracting me.

Like, if you fill my house with junk food I'll get fatter from eating more junk food, but that doesn't mean I want junk food. If I did, I'd fill my house with it myself. But that's often the claim with social media, "oh, it's just showing people more of what they actually want, and it turns out that's outrage-bait crap". But that's a fucking lie bolstered by a system that removes people's ability to avoid even being presented with shit while still getting what they want.

SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.