Codex North

Fiction is a fiction

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“You don’t speak to people’s minds. You speak to them physiologically. You speak to what’s underneath the mind.”
— Jonathan Bowden

When people think of midsommar, they largely think about people smashing the heads of elders with a sledge hammer, and people getting drugged, killed and/or raped in a terrifying rural cult full of nice-looking Swedish people dressed in white. I have spent considerable time reassuring non-Scandinavians that Sweden and midsommar is not creepy.

This is not because they think Midsommar, the film, is a documentary or based on a true story. They know it isn’t. It is usually not because they don’t know midsommar is a real tradition in Sweden. They know. If you ask them “Do you really think that’s what it’s actually like?” They’ll say no. However, if you ask them “Do you want to go?” you’ll also get a no.

Film is an incredibly impactful medium. It assaults your most important senses with very strong emotional impressions. Many people judge a film mainly by how strong of an emotional reaction it was able to trigger in them. So naturally, many films today seem created specifically just to evoke emotions. More crying, fear, tension, et cetera, equals more good. The film art we have ended up with as a result is refined emotional rape on disc. It will force emotions into you. A “good” film will be as impactful as humanly possible. The brain is not built for this. It doesn’t actually have any way to distinguish between the impression of a film, and the impression of a real experience. Both will shape you. Consciously and subconsciously.

After that film, when people see the midsommarstång or a white girl in a white dress with flowers in her hair, they get a sting in their chest, and a rush of negative emotions. This is important, because your conscious thoughts around things matter far less than the emotions they cause in you. Your conscious thoughts are mostly the foam of rationalizations on top of a river of intuitive and aesthetic decisions.¹

Taking something as beautiful, pure and holy as the Swedish tradition of midsommar, and corrupting it this way is spiritual vandalism. Curse those who do it. I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about how “good” (read: emotionally impactful) the film is, if it corrupts and twists people’s intuition around what is good, and what is creepy. We should not give funding and power to people who see something beautiful, good and pure, and think: “This would be great to corrupt and undermine on film”, instead of “This is great, more people should see how great this is”.

Midsommar isn’t the only film to do this, either. There are plenty of films that take something pure and good only to corrupt and destroy it for emotional effect. You could look at the same directors earlier film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, where he takes the beautiful and sadly rare image of the black family with a father in the home, and connects it with rape and incest. “When you see a well-dressed black family, think incest!”

This is evil.

Conversely, this power of film can also be used for good. It can be used to uplift and lionize the good of the world. Lord of the Rings does this. Yes, it is full of gross and negative things, but they are portrayed by characters that are correctly and truthfully dark. Their opposition, correctly, are a beautiful and glorious band of brothers and friends. True heroes.

Such art shapes and hones your aesthetic and moral intuition in a good way, rather than corrupting it. It doesn’t make enemies out of friends, and friends out of enemies. It doesn’t portray the orc horde and poisonous spiders as the good ones, and the human sword-wielders as the evil ones. It doesn’t undermine the image of family with incest, or the image of brotherhood with closeted homosexuality. It doesn’t impose lies on your subconscious.

This is a key aspect to whether something is truly good. If it damages you and your moral intuition, it is not good. Doesn’t matter how “impactful” it is, how many views it got, nor how many tickets it sold. What corrupts and destroys is evil, not good. If it adds beauty to the world, if it hones your moral and aesthetic judgement correctly; only then can it be good.

Films can obviously still fail along the normal technical lines, such as being badly paced, having awkward dialogue, a bad sound mix, and so on. Among those criteria, however, should be if the film is or is not bad on a spiritual level. Does it corrupt and undermine the good, and the human, or does it lionize it?

Nobody thought Jaws was a documentary, however, it caused a massive drop in people going swimming. ↩︎

Islander Magazine #3 is ugly

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I bought it fully knowing it would be ugly, but we’re in the magazine’s early days. I want to help them get through this initial phase of cluelessness. So, if you’re one of the Lotus Eaters reading this, or even Carl Benjamin himself, I say this: I like you guys, I’ve been with you since GG, and this whole article will be full of exceedingly tough love. Know that it is love, though, even if I am harsh. I offer guidance and construction, not mere destruction. That’s not we do on our side.

Ok, enough ass-kissing, time to get harsh. You can tell by the garbage “artwork” the Lotus Eaters have sold before, and by how sloppy the trailer for Issue 3 is, that these Englishmen sadly have zero taste or skill in art. Hopefully, they eventually find someone who does, and gives them power over Islander.

Now, who the hell I am to say this? I am a competent individual who has been doing graphics, art and typography all my life. I am the son of two book binders. I grew up with this stuff in my hands and in my blood. I have a deep appreciation for the art of crafting great items of literature.

The cover is beyond unworthy

First of all, it is obvious digital AI slop, with a little guy drawn in. The artist might’ve had to draw the guy by hand or at least retouch him, because he’s the most coherent and detailed element of the scene, even though, less coherently, he has managed not to leave a single footprint in the snow! Impressive!

It is very out of character to involve any AI slop here what so ever. Carl is the creator of The Metaphysics of Slop, but then he turns around and plasters Fiverr-level AI slop on the cover of his magazine? Sad.

In the art world it is known, Khaleesi, what a terrible crutch it is to juxtapose a small guy with a massive object. It is a cope junior artists use when trying to replace the difficult work of creating a good composition and story, by assulting your senses with sheer scale. Wow, look it’s so epic! If you had commissioned a great illustrator to do art for the cover of the magazine, he would not have made that, unless he’s absolutely phoning it in.

There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it.

In this clip (which I recommend you muster the attention span to watch in full before reading on) legendary illustrator Feng Zhu shows a good student portfolio, and then demonstrates how easy it is to make the “epic” slop he is tired of seeing. It’s almost feels uncanny how accurately he describes the cover of Islander 3. Some big central shape, “epic” 45 degree sunset lighting coming from behind the big shape, bright background, dark foreground, the big shape is a ruin because that’s way easier than making it pristine, and a little guy to add “story” and scale. On the Islander cover they even made the little guy into the traveling stick merchant! The traveling stick merchant is an inside joke in the art world, when the little guy you put in for scale and “story” has a stick. It is so far beyond generic that it’s a joke.

The logo on the cover doesn’t fit the artwork or theme, and is mismatched with the font on the spine, though that may be intentional. Having a big © after ISLANDER was a big mistake. The © grabs more attention than your traveling stick merchant! And you even wrote your website URL on the front page?? This stuff is back cover material, not front cover material. And of course, in typical amateur “zine” fashion, they didn’t actually utilize the back cover at all. It’s blank. At least put a blurb about who you are and what the goal of the magazine is there.

All-in-all the general style of the cover doesn’t fit the content, nor does it properly represent the quality of the written work within. This is extra sad, because as far as I’ve red, it is pretty good. It’s decidedly not AI slop, and doesn’t deserve to be represented by AI slop.

I will say, though, that the print quality seems pretty good, and the paper is alright! Looking at it with my father, we were concerned that the plastic laminate used to make the front cover matte might eventually peel off, but can’t say for certain.

The graphical elements

In the trailer Mr. Benjamin says “it is rendered in a beautiful revivalist medievalist style”, which is mostly true. It is medievalist and revivalist, and sometimes it even is beautiful. What they seem to be chasing is the style of illuminated manuscripts… sometimes. Most of the time they seem to be going for something post-Gutenberg, but we’ll get into this.

In this little bit of Speculum Historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, from the late 1400s, we see an initial / drop cap, rubrics, which is a section of red text, and plenty of beautiful and colorful decorative marginalia.

Illumination is an artform that evolved over many hundreds of years. It is an aristocratic and expensive process. Back before the printing press, this work was done by hand, by experts, and only the richest in society had access to books, let alone the ability to even read them. This is a grand and high tradition that we are completely detached from. Not just because because this required skill and method which is not passed down to anyone in today’s society (In fact we seem to be deliberately destroying it), but also because the tools used for creating these items of literature have long been replaced. Therefore it is very easy to get the fundamentals of this work wrong, which they do. I don’t blame Mr. Benjamin, the Lotus Eaters, nor the editor R. C. J. Cranstoun for this, of course. It is not their fault that our civilization and art is completely disconnected from the tradition that built us. They’re at least doing great work to mend this divide to the past!

You will notice from the examples above that these illuminated manuscripts are very colorful. Colors, especially blue, is a kingly and aristocratic trait. Something which initially fell more by the wayside after the introduction of the printing press. The general style of this survived, but usually not in color. It is much cheaper and easier to print only black ink. That seems to be the style they’ve gone for in Islander. Except when they didn’t.

Sometimes they use colorful marginalia. That’s fine in and of itself, but look at this page. It is so clearly a product of moving around PNGs and SVGs in an unbounded computer program. When illuminating, the text is written first, with space reserved for ornamentation. This ornamentation will then be painted at the scale it is going on to the page, so the detail levels of the different elements will match. Here, however, we see some autumn leaf marginalia with big thick outlines which was clearly intended for a way smaller scale, a scaled down illustration of a child in the air which has a frame jarringly skinnier than the outline of the marginalia, and an initial that is suddenly extremely detailed because it is a massively downscaled image, with no frame. This inconsistency, could all be remedied by some handy work and judicious layouting. At least pass the leaves through an AI to give it more detail. Or drop them completely, and keep only the initial or main illustration, because it’s distracting from the main point, and doesn’t match the theme of winter what so ever.

What is very consistent though, is that the scans they got all the marginalia elements from are much too low resolution, and are marred by pixelation or terrible automatic vectorization artifacts attempting and failing to hide pixelation.

This is the one place where AI most definitely should’ve been employed, but wasn’t. I know you probably can’t afford to hire artists to paint original high-resolution marginalia for you. Even though that would be nice, because you could have it fit the theme of winter for the magazine, instead of all these random summery and flowery royalty free / public domain scans off the internet. So long as this is your only option, however, please run it through some AI upscaling before you try to convert it to vector graphics. These vectorization artifacts are awful.

The typography and layout

I will not be complaining about the font. Obviously they are not going to, nor should they, render the entire book in some historically accurate blackletter font. That would be awful and unreadable. Basic errors of visual hierarchy and grouping such as this, I will complain about, however.

On the left, you see the original, on the right is my very quick and rough edit. Notice how in the original there’s more space between the lines of the paragraph, than there is to the next title. This muddles the relationship and hierarchy between the different elements. Control your spacing, people!

On the note about space, looking at the style they’re trying to revive, you will notice that a key aspect of the aristocratic book is heaps and heaps of margin. This makes the text more comfortable to read, gives space for ornamentation, and also demonstrates a disregard for the cost of paper. They don’t need to absolutely maximize how much they can fit on a page, covering the entire page with text. They are above that. Compare that to this spread from Islander Issue 3. (Blurred, because you should’ve bought it, if you wanted to read it)

It’s practically marginless! You can barely even hold this without your thumbs covering the content. This is the column layout of most of the pages. This will change at random, however, so sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they put more margin between the columns than beside them:

Margins around the illustrations and ornamentation vary just as much. Sometimes it is comfortably generous, sometimes it causes blatantly amateurish separations, and sometimes it is unforgivably tight.

Despite all this, I do like the magazine. The few articles I’ve red so far are quite good, and some pages are very beautiful. Aside from those specific pages, however, it is typographically chaotic and inconsistent. You sorely need to find someone with better eyes to help with the next issue, or give your current eyes more time to polish it. And with that, I wish you the best of luck, and are you not a Lotus Eater, I hope this at least was entertaining or educational for you.

How to set up Windows 11 almost without killing yourself

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Here we go again. New laptop, new Windows update.

When you boot up the machine for the first time, do Shift + F10 to open command prompt. Run oobe\bypassnro. The computer will reboot, and you can now make a normal offline account by saying “I don’t have internet” at the WiFi screen, after selecting region.

Then the begging for eavesdropping we’ve all come to love:

Say no to Windows Hello facial recognition
Say no to location tracking
Say no to location tracking again
Say “Required only” to diagnostic data (Such a fuck-you)
Say no to them spying on your handwriting
Say no to “tailored experiences” based on their spying
Say no to advertising ID (wtf)
Say no to presence sensing

And now we wait…

While we wait, I will say that it seems they’ve reduced the begging slightly from Windows 10. I can appreciate that. Though, this probably just means that they spy more by default, without presenting you the choice to opt out.

I won’t go into fully stopping the spying here, because as I mentioned in the Windows 10 article, these anti-telemetry tools all seem really sketchy to me, and they seem to get new replacements all the time. Therefore, I don’t feel I can safely vouch for any of them.

Finally, it finishes and we are greeted with the new pile of turd taskbar.

Imagine actually thinking it was a good idea to move the most important buttons away from the corners by default. First thing to do is go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar so we can:

Hide the search button, because it’s completely useless
Hide task view, because we have Alt + Tab
Hide widgets, because they are retarded
And of course: Taskbar alignment > Left.

Now we go commit programicide and uninstall:

Capcut (Are you serious?)
Office 365 six times in Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, English and normal(?), slowly, one at a time, because only one of these uninstall windows can be open at once
- By the way, I timed it. This garbage managed to waste 3 minute and 7 seconds to uninstall the Finnish copy of Office 365. On a brand new multi-thousand-dollar laptop!
Do that again five times for OneNote in Danish, English, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish
OneDrive
LinkedIn
Solitaire & Casual Games (To be replaced by Zachtronics Solitarie Collection, of course)
Family by Microsoft Corp.
Outlook (New)
Journal
Microsoft Bing Search, Clipchamp, News, Teams, To Do, Whiteboard, Power Automate, Quick Assist, Weather, Xbox, Xbox Live

And now we drop by ninite.com for the essentials (Must-haves are 7-zip, VLC, K-Lite Codecs and Everything), before also grabbing:

FilePilot, because Explorer sucks, and they’ve made it even worse now
LibreWolf, or any other browser you prefer
PowerToys, for Always On Top and various other tools
AltSnap, to make Windows windows usable
OpenShell, not because it’s good (it’s not), but because my normal Windows search completely broke one week in and now never returns any results.
qView or Cactus Image Viewer, because Photos sucks

Do these registry edits (Here’s a script that does them for you):

Restore the functional right click menu: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32 Only needs to contain an empty (Default) String Value.
Fix wallpaper quality: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop New DWORD (32-bit) JPEGImportQuality set to 100 in decimal.
Disable Window’s reaction to Win+Shift+F23 (aka. the “Copilot key”): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CopilotKey New DWORD (32-bit) SetCopilotHardwareKey set to 0. The Copilot key should now just bring up the start menu, and should be a lot easier to rebind to something useful with PowerToys or AHK.

This cat and mouse game keeps going. Microsoft keeps making their product worse, and we keep fixing it for them. It’s genuinely comical at this point how far removed from the reality of their user’s experience they are.

What in the fuck is a loom

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 17:02:18 +0200

I once worked with a group of people where using cool new webapps was all the rage, and I can’t stand it.

Loom? Miro?? Jira? Figma?? Nearby? Around? Veed?!??!? Yes, these are all real, and yes, none of them do anything new, beyond having a nice domain name and logo. Yet, they do expect you to make a business account and pay for their premium features on a monthly basis.

Remember IRC? MSN Messenger? Well, now you can have the same thing, but slower, and in your browser, if you pay for Meet, Around, Whereby, Teams, Slack, Zoom or Appear (One of these isn’t real). Video chat was solved 30 years ago. Putting it in the browser, and masking the webcam feeds to be circular is not a value-add, and is definitely not worth $15.97 a month.

Remember screen recording? Now you can have that for $12.50 a month per “creator”, but slower, and inside your browser, and with a version that doesn’t just give you a video file you can share. It gives you a link to a website, where there is a video file that other people might be allowed to access, as long as the servers are up, and they like having JavaScript enabled in their browser. Oh, and it’s been nouned, so what you have made is not called something confusing like “a video”. What you have made is of course called: “a loom”.

Now, remember, it’s not just you using this, it’s your entire company. After a while, when your company is nicely infested with looms everywhere, then all your internal documentation becomes 2-hour long rambly videos that you start linking one another. This is your life now. And re-doing all the documentation in a reasonable format is not an option, of course, because that would take time and effort. Better to just keep paying for loom.

Dear Lord, all mighty, wash this planet clean and set it ablaze for we are sinners far beyond saving

You know video editing, right? Now you can have that for $12 a month, but slower, and in your browser, and with restrictions like “up to 720 minutes of subtitles per year”, “Up to 1080p quality” and “up to 25 minute-long videos”, if you pay for Veed! For that price, they’ll even remove the ugly watermark they slap on top of your videos! And if that isn’t enough for you, you can subscribe to the Pro option for $24 a month, where you get 1440 minutes of subtitles per year! Wow! And if you pay us $59 a month, you’ll even get to export in 4K!

I am dead fucking serious. You don’t pay them to solve any real problems, you pay them extra to remove their own arbitrary resolution limits and watermark. This is a real company, and this is their real product in the year of our lord, current year.

Remember taking notes? Well, with Miro you can have that for as low as $8/mo.! But slower, and in your browser, requiring WebGL, with everything placed in virtual Post-Its, and with insanely annoying access policies that can be set per user account that you have to register to get access.

Oh, I forgot to mention! All these services need you to make an account with your email. They have EULAs, ToS, and privacy policies that you definitely will read very carefully. These companies and their data will definitely never get sold to another company with a shady past. That never happens. Not to mention, your employees will simply love making accounts on all these platforms! They’ll love all the emails they’ll get about “tips” on how to use the latest features!

Remember GitHub issues, and having a TODO list? That has a mediocre webapp replacement too! Jira! Now you can track your GitHub issues… on another website! Great. Don’t you feel productive?

In fact, that’s what all these services are about; feeling productive. They don’t assist you in doing anything at all. If you want to be productive, produce product. Go create. Do the work. Ship.

Take a Miro brainstorming session, for instance: Having everyone’s cursors show up on screen is just distracting. As is seeing everyone else throwing sticky notes around and accidentally occupying one another’s space. This gives a feeling of intensity, of busyness, of doing something! Despite probably being less focused on the ideas you are putting down, due to having to think about the location, scale and paper color of these ideas in a limited 2D space shared with others. Now that you have to juggle all these things, you feel like you’re doing more, which you are! Issue is, you’re doing less of the actual task.

I was going to find out how to do a specific thing in our Unity project. There was apparently an article about this on Notion, but in that Notion article, they decided to make graphs of the information with some embedded Miro boards. Because how cool isn’t it that Notion is actually just Chromium, so we can embed anything we want!? However I’m not signed in to Miro… inside Notion. So, I can’t see any of that information, and the login button just pops open my real browser.

Despite all of this seeming completely bass ackwards in the most obvious of ways, people still fall for it. They still pay for it. With the Netflix logo tattooed on their forehead and Coka-Cola on their cheek, they go around enthusiastically calling it “a loom”, while scoping out more funnels to fall into.

Using this stuff is a massive NGMI-signal. The people that don’t get swept up in any of this garbage are of a higher ilk. I have been blessed with a great circle of such shipper-friends, and encourage anyone wanting to actually achieve something to seek out the same thing.

Deliria Builds Empires

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 20:42:07 +0200

Conviction to a degree considered delirious by modern attitudes is a prerequisite for greatness. The all-too-modern calm rationality and reasonableness is a disease of avolition.

I have always been a calm, rational and reasonable person. I would definitely be classified as an “intellectual”. However, to use a somewhat banal example, in all my greatest workouts, I have had a very clear sense of drive, fire, and to some extent delirium. I’ve become increasingly able to conjure it as I’ve connected with my intuitive human spirit more with time. It used to happen maybe once every 10 or 20 workouts, but now I achieve it about every 3 or 4 workouts. I see visions of the glorious future I’m bringing fourth. Toward the later stages of a set, when sweat and fatigue seem like all I know, desperate to squeeze every last rep out of my depleted glycogen stores, I might clench my eyelids shut in concentration, causing visions to appear.

I see my future wife, angelic, her platinum hair blooming with the speckled sunlight shining through the trees, a healing presence, feminine like a nymph, turning in her white tulle dress. The greater my effort, the more beautiful she becomes, and the deeper she admires me. We’re in our magical remote forest home, she melts into my arms, smiling up at me. I see our sons playing in the bushes; strong, capable, respectful. I see them guarding their sisters; beautiful, playful, happy.

It’s all gone again within the decisecond, but like the bloom of a stun grenade, the imprint remains on my retina. Glimpses of the scene come back to me between the fighting of iron and sweat. Whenever the fates deem I need it most.

This same sort of passion, zeal and fire-in-the-torso thumos has been the driving force behind most of my proudest achievements.

If you are a modern reasonable person, you will clearly think this is silly and delirious! You’ve been inculcated to view any passion as dangerous. That people working towards something much bigger than themselves is delusion.

Modern man, therefore, has no idea the dedication and conviction needed to realize something like the Duomo di Milano. They have no theory of mind for the men that spearheaded this. No way to even imagine the internal texture of the mind of someone steeped in this sort of fervor. He is alienated from this flame of life and vitality. And so he judges it harshly. He decries everything that lead up to it: The religion, the passion, the philosophy, the conquering, the supposedly insane idea that it was even possible to build. Yet, he would be a fool to deny that this is greater than anything he will ever contribute to. He must admit that these achievements are among man’s grandest. He curses the tree, the seed, and its planting, all while enjoying its fruits.

How many people deem Elon Musk insane? Hell, he may even say so himself! However, all the people calling him delusional for thinking we can or should conquer Mars sure aren’t doing anything for our conquest of space. He is.

Alexander saw himself as the son of Zeus-Ammon. “He was insane! Delusions of grandeur!” they claim. Yet, he was the one who reined over more than half of the known world, and to this day we call him “the Great”, so who is really the delusional one?

Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad. You need to be comfortable looking insane. To move outside the myths and conventions of the commoners. Ignore the charges of delusions of grandeur, because they are only delusions up until the point at which grandeur is achieved.

Dare to Disturb

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A.M. Hickman recently encouraged people on 𝕏 to go on an adventure. Go drive around the country for a couple of months. Avoid the major cities and explore the land, the small towns, talk to people! See if you find the girl of your dreams. Talk to her, ask her out! A beautiful sentiment, at least in my book.

However, the thread quickly filled with perfect exemplars of slave morality. Sad, shriveled gonks spewing naught but discouragement from their pitiful tongues. This split was a surprisingly stark political divide. The people with bios containing “(he/him/his)” or “Parent of a trans kid”, and names containing pride flags were the ones going:

“NOoo! Don’t adventure! Don’t talk to people! It might be a slight inconvenience to them!”

This is driven by their own experience of interacting with people, which always results in them being a drag. Us well-adjusted, vital and normal people are the opposite. Everywhere we go people smile, we strike up small conversations with strangers, we make people’s day. So naturally, our view of talking to people is that we bring joy, because of course we do! Conversely, if they imagine themselves chatting up a stranger, they see it being bothersome, weird or even creepy. Because it would be! They are bothersome, weird and creepy people. That is the problem, not the suggestions of interacting with people or asking them on dates.

These people become closed-in husks, walking around afraid they might “bother someone” or “cross a boundary”. Barely able to speak to anyone without getting consent first, let alone go for the kiss at the opportune time. They are valueless, deformed and mentally broken. They know this. Subconsciously, they know their own negative nature. Rather than fixing this (because that requires the humility to realize it’s true and doing the hard work to improve), they have logically concluded that the best thing to do is minimize themselves and their impact on the world and the people around them. To minimize the spread of this sad energy.

They will then assume this is true for everyone else as well, and advise you to do the same. They are wrong about this. Don’t be like them. Don’t you ever derive moral superiority from minimizing yourself and your impact on the world. Be expansive, cross borders, piss some people off, cross boundaries, get laid, get slapped, adventure, love, lose, love again. Go fucking live! Don’t ask for permission. Just fucking do it.

My Journaling Method

Wed, 22 May 2024 03:48:25 +0200

I started journaling for the first time in 2018. At the time I had no good productivity system and no properly formalized TODO-list, but I wanted to start getting some real work done, and so I needed something. I stumbled across the Bullet Journal system, and tried that. Did a bunch of variations on that for a few months while I struggled to get the habit down, and then did it consistently for about a year. The physicality of it was key to getting the habit in, because I could literally place the journal in my own way the night before. This is the advantage to real journaling, the physicality of it, and that is why I keep returning to it. If you try to journal in a computer program or app, you can just… not open the app, and suddenly your journal doesn’t exist. And you’ll forget.

I mostly stopped during my studies, because at that point the university’s own systems mostly replaced the role my journal played. Came back to it a couple of times with fresh eyes, though, kept refining it, reducing state, and now, this time, I’m back to it with renewed Vigor and Telos. I now feel I have a system that is good enough to be worth sharing, and even recommending.

I’ll go through this in the order I would when setting up a new journal. Nice thing about this is that we’re not using some standardized template journal you’ll find at a book store, so you can customize this method to your needs and preferences.

I get a Moleskine Classic Collection Soft Cover Dotted Notebook. Black. 192 pages, 12 x 21 cm. You don’t need to get the exact same one, but I do recommend dotted instead of line grid, and that you get one with pages that are at least 32 grid rows tall, to fit all the days of a month in a list.

For writing I currently use a Pentel GraphGear 1000 0.5 mechanical pencil. I’ve heard good things about the Uni Kuru Togas, but haven’t used one. Either way, being able to erase is essential. I used to use Pilot FriXion pens. They did write good lines, but they run out far too quickly and writing where you’ve erased is unpredictable and annoying. Reject modernity, embrace graphite.

Index

I almost never need to go further back than one month, so an index isn’t vital, but it can be nice to have. After the first page, where I’ll usually draw a little logo or something, I’ll title two pages “Index”. Each new month, I’ll go back and write what page number the new month starts at.

If you’ve bought one, you’ll notice that the Moleskine doesn’t have numbered pages. I like this, but it does mean you have to write the numbers yourself. Just get to it, and do it.

Month

When

The name of the month I place centered atop a pair of pages. On the left side of the left page goes a list of all the days of the month, and the first letter of the corresponding weekdays. Next to that I have my tracker columns. I’ll usually do 4. Any more than that, and I find it gets tedious. What I decide I need to track varies by the month, but the ones that never change are the first two: Did I journal morning and evening this day? Did I work out this day?

                    MAY
     
      J   W   Z   =
      _   _   _   _ 
1 W  |■| |·| |5| |'|  |
2 T  |■| |·| |4| |'|  | Reality TV shoot 
3 F  |■| |·| |5| | |  ○
4 S  |■| |·| |9| | |  
5 S  |◢| | | |8| |'|  ♡ She said "I love you"
6 M  |■| |·| |8| | |
7 T  |■| | | |8| |*|  
8 W  |◤| | | |8| | | *△ Important deadline
9 T  |□| | | | | | |

The columns are headed by an icon denoting what I’m tracking. J for journaling, Zzz for sleep, a dumbbell for workouts, a book or bookmark for reading, etc. Below that, using a ruler, I will neatly make an outline for each column.

Inside the tracker columns you can make up your own syntax for how you’d like to track stuff, but for journaling morning and evening, I’ll fill in the top left of the square when I journal in the morning, and the bottom right of the square when I journal in the evening. This means a day where I journaled morning and night will make that day’s J-tracker-square one filled in square. A full month of consistent journaling will be one long filled in bar down the left of the page. Very satisfying.

For my workout tracker, I’ll write a symbol in the top left of each square saying what type of workout I’m doing that day, > for push, ^ for pull, └ for legs, ◦ for core/other, and when I’ve done the workout, I’ll put a solid dot in the middle of that square. If I had dedicated cardio days, that might have been a heart symbol. This is all up to you and your regiment, of course.

I will also commonly track things like time spent meditating, working, pages red, sleeping, anything I’ve felt like focusing on and improving that month.

Next to the tracker columns, I’ll write information regarding the days using this syntax:

  ○ Single-day event
* ◌ Star of extra importance
  ○
  | Multi-day event
  ○
  ♡ Memory
  △ Deadline
  ! Idea

I don’t put TODOs on that list, because that’s what the next page is for!

What

The page on the right, also with the name of the month, centered atop it, I will have two things: My TODO-list for the month (what), and the why, which we’ll get to later. Usually I’ll have some TODOs to put there as soon as I set up the month, and then a few more will creep in and/or get crossed off as the month passes. Not many. The fewer the better. Don’t dilute this, the month’s TODOs are the major tasks for the months.

They’re written with this syntax:

· TODO item
X TODO item, done
y TODO item, half done, to do more next unit of equal timescale
< TODO item, deprioritized to higher timescale
> TODO item, delayed to next unit of equal timescale
- TODO item, cancelled

Go through all the TODO items for the previous month. If any still need doing, that’s marked as >, as the next unit of equal timescale is this new month, and then I’ll write it in this month’s TODO aswell. If it doesn’t need doing, I’ll strike-through the dot. This process helps to show you if you’re carrying around a TODO that you just keep neglecting, and pushes you to either get it done, or realize it’s not that important.

I use a dot instead of a square, because it can be neatly converted into any of the other shapes, by being the middle of the meeting lines.

Why

This is the newest and possibly strangest addition to the journal. Titled with “WHY” in the middle of the right-side page, I’ll have the bottom half of the page dedicated to reminding my future self why all this that I’m doing is important. I’ll allow myself to be grandiose, poetic, delusional, anything that will help spur some Thumos. I’ll talk about my future wife and family, the history of my homeland, great achievements by men I admire, etc. Use every tool at my disposal for kindling the fire in my soul. It might read something like this:

I want to go out, destroy my work-tasks, journey back home and be greeted by a loving, warm embrace from an admiring and admirable wife. I want to build a home with a great woman. A home filled with joy, warmth and beauty. I want to make her feel safe, protected, delicate, beautiful, vital, happy and full of life. I want to be her stable pillar through the coming storms. I want her to want me. Vigorously.

To receive these blessing I must become worthy. I must achieve sovereign stability. Biggest current opportunity for improvement is cash flow. Money. Heath and mindset are at a great point, but my income must be increased. Good thing there’s plenty of work to be done this month, and plenty of untapped sources of lead generation I already know about. Let’s smash it.

This I will write in cursive, everything else is small caps. Helps me visually parse out the emotional/inspirational/aspirational text from the technical TODO-text. Sort of like syntax highlighting, but by changing the font.

Find that text cringe? Ok, good thing you get to write your own, with your own motivation.

Days

Days start on the page after the month pair of pages. A day in May might start out looking something like this:

05 26 —————————————————————————————————————————
○ Meeting with John @ 10:50
X Take delivery of book
· Fix bug #563
· Order plane tickets

Great morning. Got my book. Smashed the workout.
Time to eat, shower, squash that bug,
and impress the shit out of John.

The days use the same syntax as the month for the TODOs.

I’ll also write a couple of sentences of “why” or general High Thumos stuff below there, just to force my mind to think about the why. Push my mind into the High Thumos mode.

After I’ve written this, I can fill in the top left half of the journaling tracker.

As the day goes by, I will have the journal open in front of me while I work. My whole day will be oriented around checking off everything I’ve said I’ll get done. This is how to stay on track, and stay focused. It needs to be physically present, and not in a window open in the background on your computer. The words “Fix the bug” and a tempting “checkdot” are right there in front of you. Get it done.

After the end-of-day journaling session, it’ll look like this:

05 26 —————————————————————————————————————————
○ Meeting with John @ 10:50
X Take delivery of book
> Fix bug #563
< Order plane tickets

Great morning. Got my book. Smashed the workout.
Time to eat, shower, squash that bug,
and impress the shit out of John.

X Go buy wooden cooking utensils

Fixing the bug took longer than expected,
but the meeting with John went fantastic.

05 27 —————————————————————————————————————————
· Request log file from Steven
· Fix bug #563
· Plan Dad's birthday present

> means that something has been postponed to the next unit of equal timescale. Aka. the next day. < means that something has been backburned, moving it up one unit of timescale. Aka. moving the item from the day’s TODO list to the month’s TODO list.

Any extra stuff that might have come up through the day will be written below the motivational morning sentences, and then I’ll write a quick recap that will also contain potential criticism of what went wrong that day, what distracted me too much, or it will be just me boosting myself up, gloating a little about how great something went. Whatever I think is needed at that time.

After that, I write the plan for the next day before I go to bed, so that when I get up the next morning, the plan is already there, and I can just start executing. Plan your day the day before, this is one is such a game changer.

Once I’ve done this I can fill in the remaining bottom left half of the journaling tracker, making a satisfying filled square.

Last step is to place the journal in my way for tomorrow, so it cannot be forgotten. Usually, this means on top of my keyboard.

What I don’t do

Future Log

After the two index pages, I think the original BuJo method wants you to have a “future log”, which is 4 pages with said title, each page broken into 3 horizontal blocks, each representing a month, totaling one year’s worth of months. The point is to write stuff for the future there, stuff you need to remember for when you get to that month, or something. I never use it, anytime I added one I always forget it’s there, and because it’s at the beginning of the journal, it’s too far away from the actual month that it’s not useful. It’s also just more state to keep synchronized and that sucks.

Need to remember something for a specific day months in the future? Put it in your calendar, and have it send a notification. Have a big long term goal? Put it on your wall.

Dear diary

This is not a diary. I don’t re-tell my days into text form. I never write out a full page in cursive. Only exceptional, actionable, inspiring or informational things get written down. This is a tool to help keep me focused and moving. Not a diary.

Grid calendar

You don’t want to do this, trust me. Putting your days in a grid, like a traditional calendar sucks. Either you make a small one for each tracker, or you make a big one that covers the page. With multiple small ones you can’t easily see correlations between your habits, like how your sleep effects your hours worked or something like that. With the big one, you have the same problem, but now it’s also harder to write what happens in each day, and harder to visually parse how many days you have until a certain deadline or event.

My experience going Carnivore

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 23:17:53 +0200

After having wanted to try it for years, I finally gave the carnivore diet a shot. I’ve only heard great things from great people. (Not the people that just have a degree, but actually highly respectable individuals) Maybe I’d even see some improvement in my eczema, since elimination diets often help against autoimmune issues.

The plan was to go strict for 3 weeks (with one notable exception), and after that try expanding to something like a modified paleo diet. “How strict?” I hear you ask. Well, here’s everything I would eat:

Meat (Beef, pork and chicken)
Salt
Water
Eggs

Literally nothing but exactly what is on that list. No seasoning, no condiments, no seed oils, no greens, no processed versions of the meat containing preservatives or starch and no dairy. However, I did introduce a tiny amount of well-aged cheese after week 2.

T+3 Days

Half way through day three I noticed two key things:

I wasn’t sleepy at and around dinner time.
I haven’t shit for three days.

The first point really surprised me! I didn’t realize it was possible to not have the 3 PM slump, but it is! It just disappeared completely. Matter of fact, all slumps disappeared. I wasn’t groggy when waking up anymore, and I became sleepy at a reasonable hour. I would also wake up right before my alarm went off. (Though, that could easily have been because the sun is in sync with my alarm at this time of year.) This completely straight and predictable energy level was an absolute game changer for productivity. The cause of it is probably that at this point I am in ketosis, with my body steadily burning fat for energy instead of being reliant on eating carbs all the time to keep my blood sugar up.

The second point didn’t really effect me. I knew that the keto flu would be coming. It’s quite the mode-shift the body has to go through, so I’m prepared for a week of absolutely liquid shits at some point.

I’ve also had a couple of dreams where I accidentally ate something like bread, and had spit it out, which was pretty funny.

T+7 Days

I have met other people by now, and I’m getting all the questions and resistance you expect: Isn’t that unhealthy? You’re giving yourself cancer from the red meat! The body needs fiber! What about vitamins?? You’ll have a heart attack from the cholesterol!

Without going through every single objection, the common reply to all of them is: If you’re an active person, then it’s completely fine, don’t worry. Basically everything you’ve ever heard about nutrition from “official” sources is wrong.

For instance: Burning fat instead of glucose for energy only requires half as much vitamin B1/thiamin. You don’t need as much vitamin C when your body doesn’t have to digest carbs, because vitamin C and glucose compete for the same transmitters. Therefore, your vitamin C utilization improves, and you don’t need as much. Reducing glucose also improves magnesium and potassium levels. Fiber is a scam. You don’t have 4 stomachs, you’re not a cow, you can’t digest it. It doesn’t do you any good beyond causing a more lactic-acid-producing microbiome in the intestine, but that is also caused by regular exercise, so I’m not worried. Why care about that? Because that type of microbiome is associated with slightly lower risk of cancer. Other than that, fibre does nothing but cause constipation.

Speaking of which, I still haven’t shit since this began.

T+10 Days

Here come the shits. Luckily it only lasted for about 3 days, but yes, everything you’ve heard about the keto flu shits is real. Liquid ass-puke for 3 days. I was fully able to control the timing of it, though, so it wasn’t that bad. Stomach also hurt a little leading up to, and during this. However, no flu-like symptoms. No fever, or cold sweats. I felt fine.

My daily intake at this point looks something like this:

1 kg of meat, cooked in bacon fat
5-9 eggs
Plenty of water

T+14 Days

Shits return to “normal”. Still somewhat reduced volume, however. I’ll have a small poop about every 2-3 days. This continues throughout the rest of the experiment, and up until this day. No more issues. I suspect the reduced volume is because way more of my food is actually being absorbed than what usually would be the case on a modern mixed diet.

I notice that vision has gotten sharper. I’m usually very, very slightly myopic. When looking at the houses on the opposite side of the neighborhood, the lines between the planks are normally a bit indistinct. Now they’re not. They’re tack sharp.

I’ve also noticed some reduced performance when training. I track my calories for a couple of days, and see that I’m very slightly below a maintenance level of caloric intake. My energy levels generally are still absolutely amazing, but specifically when working out I can tell my rep count has taken a hit. I’m definitely noticing the lack of muscle glycogen. I am aware of this and decide to try introducing a carb source…

I try bread. I am fucked.

Within an hour my focus is absolutely shattered, my eyes feel lazy, just imagine five afternoon slumps stacked on top of each other. My brain went from C to python within 60 minutes. After trying to get work done for an hour through this state, I lay down and pass out for a few hours, and wake up feeling groggy. Sleep that night is slightly impacted by the fact that I slept so long in the afternoon, but otherwise, the morning after is OK, and I’m back on it.

T+20 Days

This weekend was the 3-week mark, so I ate some really nice, organic sour dough bread from a local bakery with my friend Sam, of Serēnum fame. This one loaf was over $10 so it better be good. And it was. Didn’t really feel the impact of this one. Maybe because it was organic sour dough, or maybe it was because I was intensely socializing with Sam. Not clear.

Anyway, time to transition to something like an expanded paleo. I re-introduced real butter, goat cheese, honey, whole milk and black-as-sin chocolate. All only organic, of course, and low-pasteurized where possible. Norway is a modern soy democracy, so non-pasteurized milk has been illegal since 1953. They can’t take away our raw eggs, however, which I have shlonked a couple of at this point. It’s not that bad.

What is pretty bad, though, is eating boiled egg with the shell on. It is like eating food full of hair. My entire body was wanting to reject it continuously while eating. I got through all of it, of course, because I’m not a quitter, but I didn’t do it again. Why do it in the first place, you may ask? Mostly out of curiosity, but also out of desperation when looking for new ways to prepare the same meal I have been having for almost a month. Because if you’re going to go carnivore, then prepare to find variety in other parts of your life. Eating will be less interesting. It will still be good, in fact, now that you drop the seasonings, you will probably notice a lot of nice subtleties of meat flavor that you’ve never noticed before. I’m all for skipping seasoning.

After this 3-week point I want to make clear that I am still staying far away from seed oils and soy, which I will probably keep avoiding for life.

T+25 Days (Time of originally writing this article)

My conclusion so far is that this is great. Has made no difference to my eczema so far, but feeling evenly energized the entire day is a game changer, and my sleep has been great. I’m experimenting with some carb sources to aid in the workouts. Whole milk, honey and creatine has helped massively. The workouts have been feeling a lot better. Been getting great pumps, and been feeling sore in the best way. And of course, all concerns of getting enough animal-source protein are gone!

The biggest problems so far are that it is not very cost effective if you want to be on a caloric surplus, and that chewing resistance is hard to come by. Minced meat provides none and is a staple for budget reasons, steaks are expensive and often too tender, and there’s no epic hard bread crusts to chew on like I usually would have. I suppose I could buy mastic gum, but that stuff is expensive! Maybe adding a tiny bit of pan fried broccoli could work for this. More experiments are to be done.

I can also now confirm that people who can’t stick to diets are weaklings. Sorry, not sorry. I was there, I felt the cravings. I was at dinner parties where they served chocolate and offered soda, coffee, beer, etc. I had the condiments staring at me from the fridge door. I was with my friends at aromatic restaurants and kebab shops. Saying no is so easy. Frankly, if you struggle with this, get your shit together and just stop struggling. You know what to eat and what not to eat, so just do that. The cravings stop after a couple of weeks anyway.

T+37 Days

I had an interruption in the diet. Just finished a one-week job on a reality show, where we had catering. I did what I could to at least minimize the seed oils and soy I was exposed to, but around day 2 I was reminded that my left knee normally hurts a bit. Sometimes my back does too. I didn’t realize I used to have all these slight pains, but now that they came back, I realize they had disappeared at some point! That was pretty cool.

When I got back on after this, the aches subsided within a few days.

T+50 Days

Honestly, paleo was just more work for little reward. I didn’t feel any better, and the benefit of “varied flavors” isn’t interesting enough to warrant the more involved preparation. Currently, I’ve settled on still eating 95% meat, but allowing for elements of small bits of dried fruits, egg, honey, dairy and plant-spices. Feeling great, none of this has killed any of the benefits I’ve been feeling.

In fact, the benefits seem to only have been compounding! My energy-levels have been fantastic. I had a period of time recently where there was a lot of work to be done over a very short amount of time, pulling all-nighters, and it felt way easier than it usually does. I did what was probably an 18 hour day no problem, slept 2 hours, got up, worked another 8 hours, did chores and got ready to celebrate the 17th of May, slept 4 hours, got up, celebrated all day, traveling between parties, went to sleep around 2 AM. Barely felt sleepy at all throughout any of that. And the day after the 17th, I also had a ton of work to do, and I went that whole day working. Didn’t even eat, didn’t need to, got plenty of work done. I am not being hyperbolic when I say this feels a little like the movie Limitless. I now truly understand why the Mongol warriors were so feared by the Han Chinese. If I was some malnourished farmer, I’d be scared of the invading pastoralists too.

No Nut November: A Socratic Dialogue

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 09:59:44 +0100

A dialogue between Epicurus and Socrates.

Historically inaccurate.
Obviously.

I am partaking in No Nut November this year. Are you, Socrates?

No. I did not think you a self-pleasurer? Surely, Epicurus, you do not also engage in pornographics?

Why of course I do, as any man would. Do you not?

No, for it is lowly. It is of the flesh.

Is eating not also of the flesh? Is love-making also not of the flesh? You, surely would not reject these things for being lowly or of the flesh?

I concur these things are of the flesh, yet they are not in the same way lowly.
Is eating the activity of a man unfit to hunt? Is love-making the activity of a man unfit for love?

No.

However, is self-pleasure not the act of a man unfit for love?

No. For I certainly can and have enjoyed the company of many a woman.

Would you not say that those whom regularly enjoy the company of women would self-pleasure less?

I would say so. Would you not agree, however, that women whom have shared their heart with many, have less heart to share with one? This being the case, even if each individual interaction was loving and fair?

Yes.

Therefore, would it not be better to fracture no more hearts before I vow away my own?

Yes, but why not, then, halt this and select one to marry soon as day?

Because, do you not agree by my Thumos and trajectory that myself of tomorrow will be worthy of a greater woman than myself of today?

Doubts have surfaced, as this surely saps of your Thumos?

In the past I have had periods of time, each longer than a season, with exclusively women, exclusively myself, and neither. I say with confidence that no difference in Thumos was felt. If anything my time with exclusively women sapped more.

Why cease for two seasons, and why partake in the current cessation, if you do not consider self-pleasure an Evil? Surely, this is hypocrisy?

Although I do not agree with him in all things, by the words of your student Aristippus, I must know that “I possess, I am not possessed”. If I found myself possessed, only then would I consider it an Evil.

Have you not seen the devil of pornographics sink many a man?

I have seen her eat lesser men.

And do you not think these men thought themselves immune to her influence?

Surely, these men were aware of their downfall?

How else, then, do you think they allowed themselves to fall?

By giving up. They knew not the danger of possession, or even reveled in their possession. I do not.

And therefore you think yourself capable of dancing with this devil, without being seduced?

Yes.

Do you not see how this hubris is the exact way of the devil? Maybe not by possession in this field, but in corruption in another? How do you think, for instance, this molds your preference in women?

This surely will only hone my aesthetic preference, not my preference in character.

Would you not agree a woman’s outer beauty is naught but the fruit of her inner garden? Certainly, some women may be cursed by deformities, but you, as a wise man, can see the signs of inner beauty past these things?

Certainly.

Can you not, as a wise man, see the beauty of pornographic women is mere imitation, a caricature of the fruit of beautiful character? Or sheer over-optimization? Their noses minuscule, their hips wide, skin of porcelain, bosoms ample, none of which born of nature, but by science?

I am and remain repulsed by this description. The only beauty I accept is that which one could reasonably discover instanced among the streets.

Among the streets certainly, but in your future home? As the mother of your children?

Sure.

So you have certain restrictions. Why not restrict entirely? Find you not even greater peace of mind in periods entirely without?

I certainly do for the first week or three. Beyond this, my mind gradually fills with distractions, and thoughts of women. The highest challenge in my time without either was avoiding their close company, and remaining unaffected by their presence. Would you not agree this hunger, left unaddressed can make men unwise? Do you not think a lion less hungry a greater judge of meat?

I do.

Is it not the case, then, that it is best for man, to relieve himself of this hunger?

I could agree to this, but then, why the introduction of pornographics at all? Why not do so without?

Would you not agree that it is better to practice with the impression of a woman, than by the impression of the toilet?

I would. Your mind, however, is capable of conjuring any impression, given closed eyes. Would you not rather exercise the imagination?

Not in all things, of this being one. I would rather not practice conjuring of this imagery. My preference is to keep the generative mind unpracticed in the creation of potential distractions.

Is that so? Is it also the case then, that practicing painting is best done without ever studying references?

No, of course not.

Then is this activity not creating more of these thoughts, more distraction?

I believe not. As I saw no less distraction of these kinds late in my seasons without. Knowing there is a regular interval to which I can delay the thoughts assists in quenching them.

How regular? Is your time not better spent on anything else?

No more than once in a week, and never on a workday. Workdays are for work. This separation is part of the method by which the thoughts are displaced.

While this regiment seems acceptable, would you not agree to be practicing cuckery by watching another man love that which you would rather love yourself?

I would agree if I would ever consume such a thing. I explicitly avoid, however, any pornographics which might place me in such a perspective. It is all only of women.

These women, would you not agree their conditions are unworthy? Ought you not avoid supporting industries built upon broken morals?

If we ought to avoid products based on their conditions of manufacture, ought we not avoid confined farming? Ought we not avoid products of Chinese manufacture?

Farming keeps animals, as people we are above them. We are not in China, their people are not of our concern. Would you not agree that these actresses are our daughters and sisters? Whom you would not want partaking in such an industry?

As with farming, there are good farmers. Equally, there are kind manufactures to find in any industry.

If the manufacturer was kind, would you want your daughters partaking in the industry?

No.

Is it not the case that by enjoying the product of the industry, you provide economic incentive for our daughters to join?

No. I have never paid for access to any such content. Neither do I allow any advertisements to be shown.

Is this not fraud? Is this not theft?

I have the right to disallow advertisements, and the right to enjoy what is given away for free, do I not?

You do. Is it not the case that you are contributing to their economic success by bolstering their numbers?

Can an industry remain afloat by bolstered numbers alone?

Certainly not, however, do you not agree to be assisting in their business by bolstering their numbers?

No, as I do not provide any more money to the industry. I am merely shifting the proportion of each slice of pie, not increasing the size of its whole. Furthermore, the slices which I favor, are ones with no higher management. Would you not agree that the field would be significantly cleaner if it was all volunteered?

The field would be cleaner if it didn’t exist at all.

Will the field ever cease to exist?

Unlikely.

Would you not agree then, that the better alternative is if it was all volunteered?

Most assuredly.

Would a daughter of sound mind choose to volunteer herself in such a way?

Of course not.

Then my daughter will not, as I shall raise her with sound mind.

I trust, then, that you only select from volunteered pornographics?

Of course.

These are not simply free samples, acting as the beginning of a funnel?

I do not fall into funnels. I possess, I am not possessed. Do you not think there is difference in alcohol usage as a possession, and as an activity of enjoyment on occasion?

Would you consider drinking every weekend “on occasion”?

If a round of drinking took less than the hour, and was not deleterious to health, yes.

Is it not possession if you cannot go more than 3 weeks without before it effects you?

It is. However, this is possession by the condition of manhood, not by pornographics specifically.

The visions accompanying this possession, is it not that of pornography previously seen?

It is.

Is it not the case that such visions would not be, if not for this previous exposure?

That may be. Is it not, however, essentially impossible to engage with modern society without an onslaught of suggestive imagery?

Certainly. No trip to the markets can be made now without seeing near-equivalents of pornographics.

Does this not affect you? Do these things not hammer upon your mind?

They do, but I try my best to avoid them, and reject the thoughts. However, are you not here expressing a certain animus toward this imagery?

To a certain extent, yes.

Is it not unreasonable, then, to further supplement this onslaught yourself?

Perhaps.

So you would agree that your indulgence demonstrates lack of virtue?

Virtue is a difficult consideration. Why would this demonstrate its lack?

Sexual discipline, modesty and restraint are all virtues are they not? In women as in men?

Of course.

Ought you not act in virtue, even if not convenient? Is difficulty adequate excuse for lapse in virtue?

It certainly is not.

Your words profess so, yet your actions contradict. Is your reasoning not simply that of finding chastity challenging? That wisdom is difficult in the face of fleshly urges?

I suppose.

Do you not agree then, that this path of virtue, which we now agree about the location of, ought be walked possibly because of, not merely in spite of its difficulty?

I do.

And so I ask: Are you not master of your own mind and body?

Only within the range allowed by my condition as a mortal man. Are you able to will yourself out of hunger?

Of course not, but no matter my hunger, it is not justification to break with virtue.

I cannot say I disagree.

Then do you not think it time to live up to this ideal?

I suppose.

You suppose? Or you do?

I do.

The Zoo-Keepers, and The Devil's Seduction

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 22:15:56 +0200

George Hotz often uses this analogy of the tiger and the chum.

You’re a tiger and get the choice between two ways of living:

Being a zoo-animal, where you get to mope around, being fed buckets of chum.
You live out in the wild, like tigers do, having to hunt antelopes and conquer nature’s challenges.

The tiger would choose the buckets of chum. Even if there was an open door between the two, once the tiger has entered the zoo, and experienced the buckets of chum, he won’t leave. The zoo-keeper isn’t stronger than the tiger, it is just smart enough to control the tiger with chum.

This is analogous to our current state. In the west, we live in very controlled societies with massive governments that rule over us, deciding what we’re allowed and not allowed to eat, sell, learn, say and (without them admitting it) think. This does afford us an extremely convenient life. Schooling is provided the young, band-aids for the hurt, and money for the poor. Buckets of chum.

However, as is discussed at length in Industrial Society and Its Future, this convenient life leads directly to the death of autonomy, dignity, purpose and humanity. It leads to centralization, depression, nihilism, hubristic atheism, and all the degeneracy the Ring of Gyges can afford you.

There is an alternative. Escaping to the woods, building small, local, low-tech and independent communities. Almost nobody does this, because you have to give up your buckets of chum. It is difficult.

There is here an illusion of choice. The fact that it is mostly physically possible to choose the alternative makes it seem as though the buckets of chum aren’t bad, like the zoo-keeper isn’t bad. They’re just giving you food! However, you have become a tourist attraction, completely deprived of everything that once made you, a pathetic husk only human by name. If convenience will tempt the people into going along with something 100% of the time, that is not significantly different from forcing them to. Sufficiently advanced temptation is indistinguishable from force.

Speaking of names, this process has many. Some call it “perverse incentives”, some call it Moloch, some call it the devil or the Beast, some call it Loki. No matter what name you give him, this is how he operates. Nobody forced you to enter this state.¹ You choose it yourself, by the small choices you make every day. He doesn’t come and threaten you directly. Almost nothing of the devil purports to genuinely be of the devil. The devil wears a suit and tie, and will at the very least disguise his antics in sarcasm. If you’re under the impression that you’ve seen nothing but increased fun and enjoyment, then force is never needed. If all goes according to plan, you’ll simply follow where ever the pleasure leads you, never even aware of his existence. Supreme victory is achieved if you even started vehemently denying the existence of the devil! For you will never fight what you refuse to see.

In that case, if someone tries to tell you about this, you might even get mad! Why are you trying to take away my buckets of chum!? Why are you insulting my zoo-keepers?! You would naturally think them cruel, for trying to deprive you of your chum! Every zoo-animal deserves the right to free chum!

I say all this to you as a hypocrite. I have not escaped. I too am addicted to the buckets of chum. Maybe less than other people, but my lesser indulgence doesn’t mean I’m not a zoo-animal. Just that I am a begrudging zoo-animal. No better than the others, just hungrier.

Given that we agree the end result of this process is bad, how do we stop it? Is it even possible to fight the urge to indulge? Clearly there is something in us that wants to fight. Some would call it our better nature, some would call it the voice of God, or Odin. Whatever you call it, we have better start listening sooner rather than later.

I believe this is the ultimate fight of our time, if not of all eternity, and I’m not entirely sure we will win. I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a fight if I was. At least this difficulty makes it possible to describe as a fight or as a war. This helps to explain that it is real. That the enemies of the Good in humanity are real. The enemies of the Æsir. That we stand before forces much larger than ourselves. We’re facing the Jotun, and we better be preparing for war, for Ragnarok, for it is coming.

Yes, the government is free to kill you if you ignore or fight them. But, if you minimize how much you are seen to struggle against their rules, and put aside enough money to pay their ransoms, you’ll be fine. ↩︎

The Myth of Norse Discontinuity

Mon, 29 May 2023 02:32:37 +0100

First, a note on the term “pagan”: This is what most people seem to use when describing people who believe in Norse mythology. To me they are just the stories, because I’m surrounded by them. I’m a fish in water. However, I see the need for labeling it. “Norse mythology” is simple and descriptive enough to make sense, so that’s what I’ll default to.

If you read or listen to Americans on this subject you will often hear them say that Paganism, or northern mythology, or Asatru or whatever they may choose to call it, died a long time ago, and has long been replaced by Christianity. Therefore, anyone still telling stories of the same variety, or people calibrating their moral compass from these stories are simply LARPing being vikings. That they are playing pretend based on what they’ve seen in TV-shows or heard from YouTube-gurus, because they have no connection to the old Norse culture. While this is likely true for a lot of non-European pagans (which I find to be immensely cringe examples of true bugmanism), it’s a very different thing for me, an actual Norwegian.¹

The mistake

These Americans tend to have this view that the populus equals what the books say. That the books say that around year 1000-ish Norway became Christian, and therefore the people must all be Jesus-lovers from that point on. That in the religion field of the Excel spreadsheet, Paganism was deleted, and Christianity was pasted in its place. And that, randomly, a thousand years later, a bunch of LARP’ers decided to pretend to be living in year 900, without having any actual connection to it.

Sure, if you were to look at a list of countries and their religions in the 1300s, you would see Norway listed as a Roman catholic country. However go to rural Norway, and all the stories you hear are of the kind descendant of the world before Christianity pretended to be “the religion that people in Norway believe”. Stories of trolls, elves, and gnomes.²

We have mountains named things like Jotunheim. A jotun, for those that don’t know, is a sort of god-giant from Norse mythology. The first creatures of the world, and the opposition of the Æsir.

“Til valhall!” is a war-cry used in the Norwegian army, especially in the Telemark Battalion.

Reading the inscriptions on old rune staves, you will find classic insults towards cheaters, gays and fat people that have survived to this day. My favorite being “deigræv”, an insult calling someone fat, that translates to dough-ass.

Our streets bear viking names, our cities bear names of the Æsir (I live right by Heimdal) and are adorned with statues of jarls, which also feature on our coats of arms.

Our weekdays include Tirsdag (Týr’s day), Onsdag (Odin’s day), Torsdag (Thor’s day), Fredag (Frigg’s day), which are all Æsir.

Despite the explicit religious practices having faded, we are still extremely noticeably descended from the Old Norse heritage and culture.

I liken this to the thing that happened when the Norwegian state decided that the correct way to pronounce numbers is from left to right. 34 is to be said as “thirty-four” (trettifire). Most pronounced it as “four-and-thirty” (firogtredve). It’s been decades since they imposed this, and if you only consume official government media, or only talk to people who live in big cities, you would think everyone changed over. However, many people still say “four-and-thirty”, especially in rural areas.

Imperfect continuity

None of this is to say that we have a perfect surviving verbal tradition of Norse mythology. We have had hundreds of years where practicing anything other than Lutheran orthodoxy was strictly prohibited. Therefore, much of the most overtly “religious-sounding” parts of Norse mythology have faded. You won’t find anyone in rural Norway that believes in the Æsir and commits blot because their family has done that for a hundred generations.

However, enough of the culture has survived that deciding to stick more to the Norse tradition rather than Christianity, for a Norwegian, is very far from the act of sheer bugmanism that it is often made to sound like. We have a real connection to the history. It’s not like a Swede suddenly deciding he’s a Buddhist after reading the Buddhism Wikipedia-page and listening to some Alan Watts.

The actual loss we suffered was that of our ancient sense of fervor, conviction and grandeur. Christendom’s most successful usurpation was bending the culture from one that worshiped the grand, to one that worshiped the poor, suffering and tortured. For yes, it is easier for a camel/rope to pass through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich man to enter the poor man’s heaven. This, in turn, gave birth to the same malformed culture you find all throughout the Occident today. Child and son of Christianity, the Last Man, judges the poor, malformed and “humble” as worthy of heaven, and the great as hellbound oppressor. Yes, it took time for this bastard child to reach maturity, and although the ancient pagan fervor did see some death-throws in Wagner, the renaissance, et cetera, we sit today in the midst of the common ruins of Christianity. Such is the true nature of pagan discontinuity.

I say this not to make an enemy out of Christians. There is a revival of true Christianity in the modern day, and I respect these men as my brothers in the war against evil and decay. They too are following the red thread back out of the cave of despair, and back along the trail of tradition. This is good.

Of course there are movements and groups in Norway too that are pure cringe bugman LARPs. Åsatrufellesskapet Bifrost is an officially recognized “religious society” in Norway that mixes together “current nature-religions” and “neo-heathen experience” to basically make itself whatever you want it to be. This is just a bunch of nerds pretending to be spiritual while painting themselves with cool viking branding, rather than any serious religious belief. As evidenced by their softie version of blot (ritual sacrifice), where they dress up like they’re going to a fair, yet they never seem to kill anything, nor spread any blood. Instead, sacrificing teddy bears, poems and groceries. ↩︎
Americans and reconstructionists tend to only emphasize the role of the Æsir and Vanir, ignoring how most people’s stories of mythical nature were about fellow Midgard creatures like trolls, elves, gnomes, fairies and vetter. ↩︎

Imagine using Pro Tools

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 20:53:07 +0200

Note: This article was written at a point in time. This information will eventually (hopefully) become out of date.

I’ve been working in Reaper since 2016. For working with audio (as opposed to composing electronic music), it is the best DAW I’ve ever used. In fact, it is one of the best pieces of software I have ever used in general. I don’t think any other DAW can measure up. And that’s big, coming from me, because aside from the notable exception of Cubase/Nuendo, I am probably the person I know who has used the most DAWs, and still do on a regular basis. LMMS, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Reaper, Renoise, BitWig, Ardour, I have and use them all. Some are good, some (like LMMS) are bad, but none of them are anywhere near as awful as the God of Shite itself… AVID’s Pro Tools.

A few months ago I had the displeasure of preparing a bunch of Reaper projects to be delivered over to a Pro Tools user, and he asked me what files would be mono and what files would be stereo, as if that might cause a problem. That’s not his fault of course, because he’s used to a DAW where that might be a problem. Imagine using a DAW where you can’t just toss stereo and mono files together on a track.

Imagine using a DAW that makes working with different sample rates something you need to think about at all. Well, I suppose you might have good reason to make people want to avoid resampling if your DAW has this fucking shite of an anti-aliasing filter. Here, compared to the resampling algorithm shipped with Reaper, r8brain.

Pro Tools 2021	r8brain

Analyses courtesy of Infinite Wave Mastering

All that purple you see in the background is noise, and that laser blast you see coming back down is aliasing. The retort is always “you probably won’t notice”. But trust me, you will, and when everyone else is doing a vastly better job than you, you have no excuse to be this bad. Especially when you’re charging many hundreds of dollars for your program every year, all while getting beat by a buy-once-own-forever, $60 DAW with extremely lax DRM.

Imagine using a DAW where people don’t render, they play back their whole project and re-record it to a new track to avoid problems with “using the bounce mix feature”. Yeah, what a feature. Imagine even speaking about faster-than-realtime rendering as a “feature”. It was added to Pro Tools as a “feature” in 2013, where as Cubase has had it since the 1990s.

And for anyone who does anything vaguely challenging for your CPU, rendering by re-recording live playback is an absolutely idiotic idea. Imagine recording a file and getting underruns. I suppose it’s a good thing that Pro Tools by default stops everything it’s doing and throws up an error box if one single underrun occurs. (An underrun is when you hear a click/pop due to high CPU load)

Imagine having ownership of your DAW be bound up in a subscription fee and fucking iLok. Imagine not being able to just download your DAW from the website and install it in mere seconds, if you ever need to. Or just carry around your more-than-fully-featured DAW setup on a memory stick because the entire installation is less than 140 MB, as opposed to the requirement of 15 fucking GB for a Pro Tools installation. That’s more than 100x larger, with far less features and far worse user experience!

Imagine being able to put up to 10 whole effects on a track! Wow! 10 entire effects! All on one track?? You bet’cha! 10 entire effects, all on a single track. Isn’t that amazing? (sarcasm)

Imagine not having industry standard normalization tools built in to your “industry standard” DAW.

Behold, Reaper's industry standard normalization tool

Imagine being happy that in 2022 you were finally allowed to change your keyboard shortcuts.

Imagine being told to disable Hyper Threading because it can cause CPU errors in your DAW.

Imagine paying $600 every year ($300 every year if you’re ok with having a “Limited audio post-production workflow toolset”) for this absolute hunk of garbage. (And that’s with the 50% discount for paying upfront for the full year!)

Imagine using Pro Tools.

The False Diamond Problem

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 02:32:37 +0100

You finally decided to listen to that Nigerian prince, and as it turns out, you’re the lucky recipient of a true random selection of 10'000 of the worlds diamonds! And you know that 30% of diamonds are fake/synthetic¹. Yet, when you look at your brand new collection, only 10% of them are marked as synthetic. About 20% of your collection is lying about being natural diamonds.

No problem, you think! Time to go through the collection, marking the outliers. Problem is, you can’t tell them apart. You know there is a 20% discrepancy, but you can never tell if any individual case belongs to said discrepancy or not.

On a macro level, you know there is a massive error. However, on a micro level, no individual case will reveal itself as part of that error. There is a known discrepancy, but no good way to detect discrepant cases.

This is what I call the False Diamond Problem.

UuUUmmM AchthualLy DiaMONDs caN’t BE FaKE, bEcAuSE dIAMOnDs ArE sTiLl DiamOnDs eVEn iF ThEy WeRE MaDE in A LaB.
Also, the 30% statistic is completely made up. ↩︎

PlasticSCM: The Nightmare SCM

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 19:15:19 +0100

Context

I’m working as a composer for a videogame. We use the Unity engine (Yes, I know. Not my decision.), and something called PlasticSCM for source control. It is the single worst SCM software I’ve ever experienced. It makes git feel like absolute heaven.

Constant empty changes

The Plastic people supply their own GUI, which is nice. The GUI is alright. At least it has a dark mode. But no matter how many times you tell it not to give you update popups, it still gives you update popups every time it launches.

In this GUI, you have a list of uncommitted changes. Or as they call it, “Pending changes”, because there is no such thing as a commit. There are only changesets. When you “commit”, you also push. You have to push when you commit. These push-commits are called changesets.

Well, this list of pending changes is constantly getting filled with unchanged files. Files you never touched, but they’re there in the list, as if they’ll be part of the changeset. You can click on them and see the diff. Nothing. No difference. They’ve even added a button you can press to remove all the changes that don’t contain any changes. Incredible. This is true innovation. With two clicks of your mouse you can revert all your non-existent changes to how they were before you didn’t change them. Exactly as they already are now.

And if you don’t do that it can actually cause problems. One time, I was going to do the equivalent of a pull, and it said that the lead programmer had made changes to the master soundbank. Which is completely stupid, he would never have.

Luckily, this was a small changeset, and I knew to look out for this. If I didn’t, it could’ve easily done a bad auto-merge with some old version of a file nobody noticed that Plastic had erroneously added to the changeset. Et voila, mysterious bugs!

The Catch 22 Lockup

I tried to checkout another branch once, and all the changes it made to the files in order to get me to that branch, it thought I had done and was waiting for me to commit them. 884 pending changes I never made.

If I tried to revert these changes, it threw an error saying it didn’t know what to revert to.
If I tried to change branch back to where I was, it threw an error saying I had uncommitted changes.
If I tried to temporarily shelf the changes, it threw an error.
If I tried to commit the changes, it threw an error.

I literally had no way to recover, and all I could do was download the project all over, and set it up again. And because it is a Unity project, that took multiple days. I had heard Unity was slow, but holy shit.

This is it trying to open the project for the first time. That number means 13+ hours. This also happens when you change the build target. Download the project, try to open it, leave that over night, change the build target, and leave it over night again.

This is it literally just quitting. It sometimes takes 5 to 6 minutes to just quit the program. Usually it takes just a few seconds, but on occasion it just sits there for multiple minutes.

Selective merging

After doing that, and finally starting to get back to work, it was time to merge my changes with the progressively named “main” branch. I needed to merge all the stuff I had added and removed, but I didn’t want to touch the files that the rest of the team had been working on. Good thing there’s absolutely no way to do that.

With git, all you need to do is checkout the branch you’re wanting to merge into, and from there, checkout the specific files you want to bring over from your branch.

In PlasticSCM, however they have two options: Merge, and Cherry Pick.

Merging means you have to merge everything, and if the program thinks it can auto-merge your files, it will. Even if you go to the merge options and tell it you want to do it manually. After merging everything, the merged things go in the pending changes list. If you then try to undo the changes to specific files, it won’t let you because you can’t undo just some of a merge. You have to undo all of it at once. WHY?? JUST LET ME DO THAT, IF IT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANT TO DO.

The other option, Cherry Pick, doesn’t let me cherry pick anything, it just randomly happens to merge only the exact files I don’t want it to merge, with no actual way of selecting what files I want to merge. It just picks the two files I don’t want to merge, and I can’t do anything about it. All the files I’ve added it just leaves behind. It’s as if it only can see the changed files, not the added files. Maybe because those files weren’t there in the master branch before my branch started? No clue, but either way, it leaves the cherry picking option useless.

My solution: Copy the files I want to merge to another folder, checkout the branch I want to merge into, and copy the files back into the repository. All the while praying I don’t get stuck in the same catch 22 lockup I was earlier when changing branches.

Diff and merge tool

When the merge tool has you resolving conflicts, it seems to copy and rename the files it needs to diff into a temp folder before launching the merge tool. This means that when you look at the incredibly unhelpful file titles of “Source”, “Destination” and “Base”, you will have no help to understand what files are what, because they’re all named “D:/Something/PlasticSCM/temp/F79QPFG.temp”.

Even better is this thing:

Which has me resorting to the command line version of Plastic, which is fully capable of giving me the diff. What makes the GUI so much more handicapped is a mystery.

Goodbye Babylon

The project is nearing its end now, though, and I can’t wait to go back to git. I’ve been wanting to try out Sublime Merge, because even as a vim user of many years, Sublime Text has recently impressed me.

Twitter's fractal Rube Goldberg machine of bloat

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 05:47:11 +0100

In my previous post about software bloat I ended on a somewhat unsatisfying note.

Is there an actual solution?

I have no clue. Refuse to write and use shit software, I guess.

However, we might be seeing another, much brighter light at the end of this tunnel unfold before our very eyes: Twitter!

Of all places, I had never expected a code-bloat reduction revolution to come from silicon valley. Especially not a web company. All it took was a controversial acquisition from the Elon Musk of our time: Elon Musk.

If you haven’t been keeping up with these news, Elon is trying to do a few things:

Optimize for unregretted user hours
Bring free speech back to the platform
Actually become profitable for once

The latter requires not having thousands of unnecessary engineers on payroll, like they do now, even after his initial downscaling. Doing that requires simplifying the codebase massively, because with a bloated codebase, you need the bloated workforce that created it. Untangling this mess is incredibly difficult, because nobody knows what’s going on in the codebase. Nobody knows what anything does other than their in their exact department. Twitter is a many-million-line behemoth and it doesn’t need to be.

Luckily, Elon seems to be conversing with actually skilled engineers about these problems, such as George Hotz and Jonathan Blow.

There is a natural crossing between the code reduction they’re doing, and the goal to bring back free speech. They seek to undo the huge mess of automated censorship and suppression models/algorithms that exist in Twitter’s codebase. For more about this, you can read Dave Rubin’s thread from when he had visited Elon and the Twitter gang. [Nitter link] It’s worth the read, because it is interesting for a whole bunch of reasons other than software bloat.

I asked Elon what I could share and he said, “anything that’s true.”
— @RubinReport, 6:51 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Basically, over the last couple of weeks they had gotten a vague sense that something was wrong. The numbers just didn’t seem quite right. That’s how complex this system is now, that things were good for a bit, and now they’re not, and nobody knows why. Dave Ruben came over to talk with them about this, because his account was affected by this downturn in numbers. Then, when digging around in the codebase after multiple weeks of day-and-night work by engineers at the top of their game, they discovered additional ways that the system was suppressing people on the platform. They didn’t know this was happening. They discovered it.

Accounts aren’t just hit with labels that are obvious to insiders. They now found more “secret” labels which are causing shadowbans. My account was hit with all three; “Recent abuse strike,” “Recent misinformation strike”, “Recent suspension strike.”
— @RubinReport, 7:03 PM · Jan 26, 2023

It’s unclear so far what these strikes actually do, but for sure they suppress views and recommendations, they are trying to figure out to what extent.
— @RubinReport, 7:06 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Do you have any idea how much of a problem it is when you dig around working ‘round the clock for multiple weeks to suddenly discover unwanted functionality in your codebase? It’s a billion line dumpster fire. Elon describes Twitter as “a fractal Rube Goldberg machine”. For every problem they solve, they discover more problems. And I’m sure he’s right. It’s what I’ve come to expect from big software companies at this point.

So, about that unsatisfying end note. This one will be more satisfying.

If Elon succeeds in his mission here, we will have the first big public example of how to do code cleanup at a massive scale. I really hope he does, or at least gets the total rewrite he’s talking about. And I really hope he survives the stress of seeing it through, so he can share what he learned along the way. Getting to mars, solving AI alignment and all that is nothing compared to trying to un-need 20 million lines of Scala.

Ok, marginally more satisfying at least.

Determinism changes nothing

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 01:51:42 +0100

determinism · /dɪˈtəːmɪnɪz(ə)m/
The idea that all events, including human action, are the result of preceding events.
The idea that cause and effect also applies to humans.

The idea that cause and effect also applies for our minds is wholly irrelevant to all of philosophy and morality.

Many people speak as if determinism should lead to wildly different conclusions about how we judge people’s actions. The thinking is something like “Well, he had a difficult childhood, and that determined him into murdering his wife, so we can’t blame or punish him for it”.

This reasoning is no more valid than the murderer himself saying “But I was really mad at her!”. In either case, the explanation does not excuse the murder. Determinism does not invalidate millennia of moral philosophy. Murder is still wrong. Murderers should still be punished.

Even if you look at it from a purely utilitarian point of view: You want to punish immoralities, because people knowing that immoral actions get punished will be the cause for the effect of people deciding not to do immoral actions. Decisions are still made in a deterministic worldview, it’s just that those decisions are based on things.

The same is true for less severe ethical issues, such as wallowing in self-pity, shirking from your responsibilities, or inaction in the face of injustice. All those things are still bad for the same reasons they’ve always been bad. They may even be more potently unethical for a determinist, as you’re more aware of the fact that your actions will be the cause for an effect on other people, their actions, and the world. It is therefore your responsibility to be the best possible cause for the best possible effect on the world and those you care about.

Professionals should use 32-bit float recording

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 04:11:57 +0200

TL;DR: In choosing a solution to clipping, 32-bit float is simply superior to limiters.

What is 32-bit float recording?

Digital Audio

Standard digital PCM audio is 2-dimensional. One dimension is amplitude, the other is time. When you have different amplitudes over time, that is a waveform. Both dimensions need to be stored in the computer using numbers with limited resolution. The resolution of the time dimension is the sample rate, measured in kHz. The resolution of the amplitude dimension is the bit depth, measured in bits. Every sample is a number, stored in a unit that is the size of the bit depth. These samples occur at the interval set by the sample rate, so commonly 44,100 or 48,000 times per second.

(It should be mentioned that with dithering, the effective resolution of any bit depth is preceptively “infinite”. This comes with the trade-off that you’ll be introducing noise at the lowest possible volume level you can store in that bit depth. Meaning that increasing bit depth doesn’t actually increase resolution, but instead it decreases the necessary level of dithering noise. However, because the electronic and environmental noise in our recordings are way beyond dithering noise, you can ignore this.)

24-bit integer audio

In the common 24-bit audio file, these samples take up 24 bits. What is key about the 24-bit audio file is that it is an integer number. The only thing a 24-bit integer can store is whole numbers between 0 and 16,777,215. Signed integers sacrifice one bit to say if the number is negative or not, so they can go from −8,388,608 to 8,388,607. The number of unique numbers a 24-bit integer can store remains the same either way. 16,777,216 unique numbers. In PCM audio, these numbers represent the range between -144 (ish) dBFS, and 0 dBFS. If you try to go above 0 dBFS, it clips. When you only have 24 bits, and they’re all 1, then you can’t add another 1 to make louder. Which means you have to avoid clipping at all costs.

That is why we use limiters. Instead of letting the waveform cut off at 0 dBFS, it warps the dynamics to avoid clipping. This is an imperfect way to work around the limitations of storing audio using 24-bit integers.

32-bit float audio

32-bit float is fundamentally different. Not just because it is 32-bit and can therefore hold a vastly larger set of unique numbers, meaning a higher resolution. But because it can store decimal place numbers, in addition to extremely large numbers. That’s what “float” means. Without getting into the technical details, they’re awesome. The smallest 32-bit float number, other than 0, is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001175. There are 1,065,353,215 unique float values between 0 and 1. Although not linearly distributed, this is way more than the 16,777,216 total unique values of 24-bit.

Will you hear this increase in resolution with your ears? In most cases, no.
Will it technically be better? Yes.
Is that all? That’s it? Oh, hell no.

The way 32-bit float audio is implemented means that it can store values above 0 dBFS. That’s beyond clipping. With the right recording hardware, it is possible to record audio that is “clipping”, but not really, because the information is still there, available for recovery. This means you don’t have to use a limiter and warp the dynamics of a recording to avoid clipping. No more messed up dynamics, no more clipping, and higher amplitude resolution.

What is the downside of using 32-bit float audio? It requires 8 more bits pr sample, compared to 24-bit. However, audio is so cheap on storage anyway, that a 33% increase in size is completely ignorable.

With these benefits, you might imagine audio professionals like us would be scrambling to make use of this great development. No more need for limiters to catch the occasional loud laugh or loud impact sound! However, no. Watch or read anything about a 32-bit float capable recorder from a location sound mixer, and you’ll hear nothing but hesitancy and people brushing it off as a “neat fallback for noobs and kids who don’t know what they’re doing”. That’s why this article is not just some info about 32-bit float and why it’s cool. It is to show that it is actually something professionals should be excited about. Not gawk at as though we’re too good for high quality audio encoding.

Answering the hesitancy

“I don’t need it, because I’m good at my job, and professionals don’t clip their audio.”

Don’t flatter yourself. You trigger the limiter every now and then. Though, by this logic, you surely turn off said limiter on your recorder too, right? Just in case you won’t need it? After all, professionals don’t clip, so what would you need a limiter for?

Our job is to deliver the best possible quality sound. Not as low quality as possible before post production or producers complain and ask us to do better. So get out ahead of the curve. Use the highest quality format available. When a bad workaround like a limiter is replaced with an actual solution to the problem of clipping, use it whenever possible.

“Camera people don’t constantly shoot in raw.”

32-bit float is not raw. It’s vastly, vastly superior. This is a terrible analogy.

Audio is cheap, video is expensive. Audio is 2D (amplitude across time), video is highly multi-dimensional (R-amplitude, G-amplitude and B-amplitude, across X and Y, across time). Audio is always captured uncompressed, video is nearly never.

Cameras still blow out when shooting in raw. If you try to clip using a decent 32-bit float recorder, you’ll hit the limit of the amplifier or microphone first. If that was how raw worked, it would be the equivalent of giving the camera sensor enough dynamic range to capture something so bright that the lens would break. While also putting an end to all banding issues. And all that while barely making a lick of difference to the file size, or how slow it is to edit! In fact, editing with it is faster than 24-bit, because 32-bit lines up better with current CPU’s word lengths. If that was how good raw recording was, you’d never turn it off! However, that’s not even close to how raw works. So they don’t. It is how 32-bit float works, however. So use it.

“My recorder/mixer can’t do it, so there is clearly no demand for it in the industry.”

There were no good train routes before the tracks were laid, so people clearly didn’t want trains. And besides, when did we start thinking it was a good idea to only upgrade when it is demanded of us? In my book, if you were slower than “the industry”, and had to be asked to upgrade, you were too slow.

“Why change the workflow, when it already works just fine? “

The simple answer is: There is no workflow change to be made. There is no adjustment to be made, no software to learn, no workflow to change. Everything just works exactly like it used to, except now, you can instantly recover peaks above 0 dBFS.

“Plugins and software don’t ‘work with’ float anyway!”

Yes they do. Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro all work just fine with float. As does any DAW that isn’t complete trash. Any decently modern DAW like Reaper also does all of its internal processing in 64 bit float. Plugins all mostly work using float too. Try pushing a way-too-loud signal through an EQ. It isn’t digitally clipped when coming out the other side. You can still turn down and recover the signal. Et voilà, you just revealed that the plugin is using some form of float.

Reasons not to use 32-bit float

“On my recorder, it increases the noise floor.”

Fair. On some recorders, like the SoundDevices MixPre II series, using 32-bit float brings up your noise floor a bit, making it a sidegrade instead of a simple upgrade. This means that it has a downside in some cases, and that you should consider whether to use 32-bit or the limiter.

“The post people are stuck using OMF.”

OMF somehow doesn’t “support” 32-bit float. A timeline interchange format like this shouldn’t need to “support” any format, because it shouldn’t need to know what format any of the files are. It should just tell you where in the timeline they are placed, and leave the files alone. OMF doesn’t because it is a retarded format made by Avid. Don’t use it. Use OTIO, XML or AAF.

“I’m running an all-digital all-wireless system, which is 24-bit.”

Fair enough. In this situation, you won’t have any use for 32-bit float at all. Let us all pray that the Audio Ltd. A20 system will be capable of transmitting 32-bit float.

“Ok, great but my recorder actually doesn’t do 32-bit float.”

The current line of pro-level recorders were released before this recent wave of 32-bit float recorders came out. So they can’t record in 32-bit float yet.

Sound Devices have this to say on their website:

The A/D converters used on the Scorpio, 888, and 833 are 32-bit resolution parts, but this is unrelated to 32-bit float files. The ability to record in 32-bit float is a future possibility.

I have no idea what this means. The first part seems to imply that these 32-bit ADCs are not built to do float recording, but the second part seems to say that it only takes a firmware update to enable the functionality. And I don’t know which is true.

I imagine they could leverage their great limiters, and program something that perfectly amplifies in the digital stage to compensate for the limiter’s attenuation. Returning in the digital stage, the dynamics that were lost in the analog limiter stage. Maybe. This depends on the power of the ASICs they use, and the bandwidth of the interface between the digital components and the limiters. This is all speculation and daydreaming on my end, of course.

In closing, 32-bit is good. You should use it if you can.

RSS: Savior of The Internet

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:11:13 +0200

What is RSS?

It’s like podcasts — but for reading.
— NetNewsWire

It stands for Really Simple Syndication (Or RSF Site Summary, if you’re a nerd). Basically, it lets you gather updates from all sorts of websites and Internet-channels into one program/feed. Any blog, news site or Internet-channel you want to follow, just grab the RSS link, put it in your RSS reader of choice, and you get all of it in one simple feed. No need to visit a bunch of different sites to see what you care about. It’s all there in one place.

YouTube channels have RSS feeds. This is PewDiePie’s RSS feed. NRK has a bunch of RSS feeds you can follow. Any decent blog has RSS feeds. For instance, the singularity is nearer has an RSS feed.

And of course, I have RSS feeds for my website. One for the whole site, and one for each tag.

Just go to any tag listing (Such as Technology), and look for this icon:

RSS is an old standard. A protocol. It is NOT a service or website. There is no RSS Premium. Anyone can put an RSS feed on their website, anyone can read that RSS feed. Nobody can stop the author, nobody can stop the reader. It’s freedom. And it’s completely site-independent. You can mix and match RSS feeds from wherever you want, however you want. You get to choose how they’re categorized, organized and displayed.

Why use RSS?

You know all this talk of censorship and/or content moderation and social media algorithms? Conservatives saying they’re getting censored, leftists saying they’re not being protected enough. People being addicted to likes and interaction counters. Facebook manipulating what you see to manipulate your mood. You’ve seen the debates, articles and documentaries.

Well, the solution has been right under our noses this whole time. Just use RSS and be happy. As a publisher, it’s on your own website, so YouTube won’t delete your account, or your videos. As a reader, you get to actually see everything people share, unfiltered. You won’t be randomly unsubscribed, or randomly miss notifications. It is all in the user’s control, and that is sadly becoming rare nowadays.

So, to help keep the Internet free, and user-controlled, use RSS.

Better “content”

RSS is more than just freedom, philosophical superiority and convenience, however. The content¹ you’ll find when browsing the web with an eye out for RSS feeds, is more likely to be of way higher quality than the stuff you’ll passively consume on social media. It’s the difference between being force fed spoons of refined sugar, versus organic grass-fed local game you hunted down yourself.

“But… but… scroooolling on TikTok feels so goooood”

I’m sure it does, but I’m also sure you know you shouldn’t be doing it. Especially when you snap out of it, wondering what happened to the previous 4 hours of your life.

You could start by having a look at my recommendations. After that, browse the web, follow links between random people’s websites, explore, and you’ll discover interesting stuff. Many people (such as Zoraster) maintain a list of other good websites to check out. Those are great places to look. Infact, if you find something really cool, send me an email. I’d love to hear about it.

How to use it

Download an RSS reader.

There are lots of great RSS readers to choose from, but here are a few good ones:

Android
- Feeder
- RSS Reader
Apple stuff
- NetNewsWire
Linux / Termux on Android
- newsboat (My favorite)
Windows
- No idea, I just use the Ubuntu terminal and newsboat again

Your quest

Grab one of the readers from above.
Find an RSS icon on my site.
Right click it, copy link, put it in your reader.
…
Profit, and save the web.

I don’t like the term “content” because most of the stuff called “content”, especially in the media industry, has absolutely zero actual content in it. It is only made to make you think about a brand. Vapid, empty, shameful spam, made and consumed with zero respect for the human soul. ↩︎

Replacing Adobe

Sun, 08 May 2022 21:25:08 +0200

Here’s a bunch of reasons why I’m really starting to hate Photoshop and Adobe’s software generally.

The obvious reasons is that it uses a parasitic monthly subscription business model. Everyone and their moms already hate Adobe for this, but the actual quality of Adobe’s software is tanking. I say this as someone who has grown up using Photoshop since I was 11 years old.

They killed my boy. I shall avenge you, CS5.5. The greatest there ever was.

Photoshop

My once beloved Photoshop has taken an absolute nosedive over the last decade. They added an ugly and slow start screen that wastes my time trying to load previews of old projects. Get out of my way. Just let me get to work. Please stop trying to make me watch your stupid tutorials. Stop auto-updating everything so I lose my plugins. Stop pushing your stupid vendor lock-in cloud storage on me. I will not store anything in your cloud.

In Photoshop 2022, the normal save menu is now replaced by some fucking “Save to the cloud” menu, where a gray button in the corner lets you save “On your computer”.

They are pulling a Microsoft, and replacing fully functional and fast menus with slower, bloated versions, that are missing basic functionality. Just like the new Settings menu in Windows. Control Panel is much better, more comprehensive, and faster, but they’re still pushing their awful replacement.

There is now a modern “export” button, and a “Save for Web (Legacy)” button. The modern one is extremely slow to load, and isn’t even 10% as useful as the original, being completely lacking in the ability to save and customize the compression of GIFs. The “Save as” button used to let you save as any file type. Now they’re pushing you to use some modern, slow and unintuitive export menu, or press something called “Save a copy”, which brings up the actual save menu. They say their hand was forced by Apple, but I don’t believe there was no way around the API change, and they certainly didn’t need to break the Windows version in the process.

And to top it all off, Photoshop feels like unfinished beta software when trying to work with 32 bit float images.

Which is my segue to talk about GIMP!

This is one of the main reasons I’ve had to pull out GIMP, because while it has a bunch of usability problems, such as not letting you select multiple layers, at least it almost fully works with 32-bit float images. This became very relevant to me on a fairly major (by my standards, at least) VFX project. Photoshop was absolutely shitting itself trying to make a 32-bit float clean plate of a scene, and so GIMP was the only viable option. It worked great in comparison. And I can compare, because I’ve been using both for many years. Photoshop on Windows and GIMP on Linux.

There are many other things GIMP is better at too, though.
The gradient tool leaves the line you drew on screen, so you can move and manipulate it afterwards, and it lets you change all the color stops along it. You have much greater control of gradients and how they’re rendered generally in GIMP.
The pencil tool (which is a brush tool without anti-aliasing) displays as snapped to pixels. In Photoshop, it floats along with the cursor, being able to be put in-between pixels, even though it can’t draw that way.
Marquee selections can be transformed after making them.
Unique shortcut keys for each tool. If you press R, it selects the rectangular select tool. Every time. Consistently. Unlike Photoshop, where every time you press M, it selects a different version of the marquee tool.
Brushes take effect outside of the image bounds. In Photoshop, a brush stroke just gets abruptly cut off at the edge of the image. This is a consequence of GIMP’s individualized layer-size system. And a vastly superior selection of blending modes, and much better RGB curves, and so much more.

However, GIMP is not perfect, and is lacking a bunch of Photoshop’s nicer features. Such as: Content Aware, non-destructive layer effects, adjustment layers, Save for Web’s GIF compression options, an actual GIF workflow at all… (To do something similar to what Photoshop offers, I suppose you’d need to use Trout’s GIF Optimizer.)

There is another competitor that does have those things, however, and that is Affinity Photo. A commercial software, but very affordable, and they actually let you buy the program.

I’ve been using Affinity Photo since v2.0 came out in November of 2022. It is very good. Definitely faster and more comfy than modern Photoshop. It has its own equivalents for Content Aware, layer effects and adjustment layers. Infact, Affinity’s layers effects and effect layers are way better, because they lean much more heavily into the non-destructive workflow. It actually feels more like After Effects sometimes, where I’ve just got a bunch of live effects stacked on layers and adjustment layers.

For its speed it does make some sacrifices though. Many things seem to render using an estimative heuristic, rather than what the final “render” would use. So unless you’re zoomed in to 100% or more, I never feel like I can trust the final image to look exactly like what is on my screen. The noise effect, for instance, will render a different noise pattern depending on your zoom level. And about 60% of the time, when you paste an image, the 3 columns of pixels at the right-side edge of the image, will be glitched over to the left side of the image. These things will hopefully be ironed out over time, but as of now it is not as robust as GIMP or Photoshop. It is my new daily driver.

After Effects

If you work in VFX, you should have replaced After Effects with Fusion, Natron, and/or Nuke a long time ago. They are vastly superior for compositing and VFX. And they don’t require that one god-awful single-threaded plugin implementation of OpenColorIO to do proper colorspace manipulation. Of the three, I found Fusion the least user friendly, but they’re all massive improvements. Natron is a clone of Nuke, so it is also more comfortable to work with than Fusion in my opinion. Fusion has weird names for things, makes a lot of small things really annoying to do, and requires a stupid USB-dongle to be plugged in while using it. Or else it will silently sneak in random frames of noise into your renders, leaving you to wonder whether it’s a bug, or if your GPU is failing. Took me hours of research to figure it out myself. They could’ve chosen to give you a pop-up saying “Please re-insert the USB dongle”, but no. They chose violence. DRM-violence. Apparently it is possible to buy it using a product key, but I couldn’t do that in my region.

Cavalry is the only alternative I know of for motion graphics and that sort of animation work. It is sadly another fucking subscription-based parasite, but at least they give you a free version thats main limitation is a max resolution of 1920x1080, and withholding random features like the 2D physics sim, API access and render management. I’ve tried it out a bit, but the their GUI is kind of janky, and the user friendlyness is massivaly hampered by their focus on responseness and exporting to SVG and web and responsive stuff. This means you can get it to do a lot more cool procedural stuff while keeping everything vector-based, and responsive, but the layers and other things just don’t work how you would reasonably expect from every other program. I’m excited to see where it goes in the future, but it certainly has issues at the moment.

I have also been wondering if TouchDesigner is a viable alternative, because it does let you render videos. It is perpetually licensed and a lot faster than every alternative, being that it was created for real-time graphics. It might be cool for compositing, but I’ve not had the chance to try it significantly for hand keyframing.

Illustrator

Inkscape has recently started to not suck ass. I’d use it.

Affinity Designer by Serif is also promising. Again, I’ve been using v2.0 since November 2022, and it is very good. Way faster than Illustrator. In fact, it was my saving grace when I had to work with an architectural project that had hundreds of thousands of shapes in it. Inkscape just crashed, Illustrator was completely unusable, and Affinity Designer was just medium slow, which was enough for me to be able to hide some layers and make it manageable. Designer is still lacking a few features, such as image tracing. Inkscape has you covered there, though.

It really is too bad that Affinity software doesn’t run on Linux.

Lightroom

The new Lightroom is terrifyingly big-buttoned and bloated-looking, and forces you to upload every single image you want to edit onto the retarded cloud system to make you pay more. And the old one is extremely slow.

If you’re a bit technically minded, replacing Lightroom with RawTherapee is easy. It has most of what you need from Lightroom, but a lot of it is exposed in a more raw, math-y way. Instead of a slider labeled “magic bad stuff removal”, you’ll get 4 sliders that can do the same thing, but labeled something like “Delta decorrelation”, “Cyanic phase interlock amount”, “μ-rotation” and “Linear epsilon sync density”. (Note: Not real sliders) Which is just fine by me. It is faster, produces equally good images, has a fantastic blackframe calibration feature, and I also greatly prefer RawTherapee’s export menu and workflow.

I also don’t think it suffers from the gross Fuji worm-noise problem.

What RawTherapee doesn’t do is organization in the same way that Lightroom does. I really liked how Lightroom would import my pictures into a folder for each year, with folders for individual days inside that. Now, I just do that using ExifTool by Phil Harvey. The command looks like this:

exiftool -r -P -progress "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d D:\Pictures\%Y\%Y-%m-%d\ \Input\Directory\

(Ugly backwards slashes, becuase I do this on Windows. It’s gross, I know.)

That’ll move the files from the \Input\Directory\, and organize them neatly on my harddrive. ExifTool is also way, way, way more powerful than just a batch organizer, but if you want to look deeper into that rabbit hole, go to their website.

Affinity Photo also has a raw editing module, like Photoshop’s Camera Raw. It has some things RawTherapee doesn’t, and vice versa. It’s notably lacking blackframe calibration/compensation.

Premiere Pro

Usually, all you need is the ability to assemble clips and export them. For this, Kdenlive is enough. They’ve made great strides in speed and stability recently. However, it is still missing fundamental editing tools, like ripple delete, and feels somewhat awkward when coming from a commercial editing suite. If you give it time, and adjust your workflow to its quirks, though, you will have a very capable editior on your hands.

If you’re a professional, maybe try Vegas Pro (I know. I feel weird saying it, but it seems to have gotten better, and you can buy it without a subscription) or DaVinci Resolve. Resolve is the gold standard of color grading software, and as of late it has gotten pretty good for general video editing too. Easily beating Premiere Pro in responsiveness, stability and intuitiveness. It also integrates well with the previously mentioned compositing software Fusion. They’ve even got live collaboration within projects that is almost Google Docs-esque, but local and private.

Currently, I see two problems with Resolve.

Its interface can’t be customized.
It uses an absolutely retarded “database” system instead of letting you save normal project files anywhere you’d like. This is not optional. You have to use this dumb database system. This database system seems to be integral to the collaboration feature, but if you don’t care about that, then you should be allowed to disable it.

Audition

Haha, really?

Adobe Fonts

In my opinion, this is the only good thing about Creative Cloud. If you ignore how difficult it is to locate the actual font files on your computer so you can use them outside of Adobe software, the idea of a “Spotify, but for fonts” is really nice. And it’s even better because the price doesn’t start at $2500 pr year. Fonts are expensive, and I’m always looking for new ones, so being able to pick and choose, knowing the licensing is all handled for me is great.

So, when you lose that, the only alternative is: Buy the fonts. Lets be honest. You use 4 of the 68 fonts you picked out from Adobe Fonts, anyway. The rest you grabbed off of DaFont. However, when you start looking for fonts, you’ll quickly find that the basic set of Futura PT costs 300€. The basic set of Neue Haas Grotesk Display costs 329€. And don’t even get me started on the paneuropean version of Neue Helvetica. I mean HOLY $HIT. And all of them have frankly garbage licensing terms that are unacceptably annoying.

Therefore, I will gradually compile a list here of font foundries with acceptable terms and pricing, sorted by how much I like them:

United States Graphics Company has extremely tasteful monospace and technical fonts with the best licensing terms I’ve ever seen. Massive respect.
Fontspring’s Worry-Free license gains massive respect from me as well, and covers some genuinely great fonts too!
HVNTER is so good I almost don’t want to tell you about him. Very simple and permissive licensing system.
Züli has very few, but quite good over-stylized fonts. License is extremely simple: “No Limitations on Commercial Use”.
Omar Sacca is a bit of a legend. He’s made things you’ve seen. Some very cool heavily stylized fonts here, with fantastic terms.
David Jonathan Ross has some good fonts, with simple predictable pricing, aside from the web licensing which requires you track monthly “unique” visitors (Which is annoying, unethical, probably illegal in the EU not to mention technically impossible)
Indian Type Foundry has a few good fonts, with ok licensing, but charging for webfonts based on pageviews.
Lost Type has a couple ok fonts, with good licensing terms.
Artemy Lebedev Studio has a couple of decent fonts, and good licensing terms.
Uncarving Nation has plenty of great stylized fonts. However while the licensing is simple, it is restrictive.

How it all goes horribly wrong

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 14:06:43 +0200

The “Stack”

I see kids in uni taking notes using Google Drive, or Docs or whatever they call it. They use Google Chrome on their Windows laptop. Google Drive runs using a ton of JavaScript, and their servers run on all sorts of other stuff. Including whatever they need to do magic AI analysis of everything you write so they can rent out their model of your mind for targeted advertising.

Microsoft Windows: At least 45 million lines of code (Probably way more by now)
Google Chrome (Chromium): 25 million lines of code, spread across 36 programming languages
Machine learning probably done in Python: 1 million lines of code
Google’s monolithic repository of stuff is about 2 billion lines of code
Server OS, likely Linux: 12 million lines of code

This is a really small slice of all the stuff that goes into the software “stack” involved in typing stuff into Google Drive.

Google’s monolithic repository is about 85000 gigabytes of code. They employ 25000 engineers to work on and maintain it. They use 12.4 terawatt-hours of electricity pr year, which is more than most of the world’s countries use in a year.

And from all of this, you get the amazing ability to…

Write notes. Slowly.

In order to write some notes, that you won’t even open again after having written, you utilize all that. And you think you’re making things simpler by “Just using Google Drive”. Because the interface you see is white, and has rounded buttons, you think it’s simple. When in-fact, you are making things about as complicated as they could possibly be. And what you get out of it is still laggier than editing a text file in the 1980s.

Mo’ lines, mo’ problems

Throughout all this, the bugs will creep in.
More lines, more bugs.
More lines, more complexity.

Already, people have died in plane crashes caused by software bugs.

“Oh, but the kids nowadays are so good with technology, and they grow up with it, they’ll end up working on it, and fixing it”

No, the kids nowadays are good at using iPads, Snapchat and TikTok. If they ever learn to code, they learn to code in some bullshit language like python, C#, or very modern C++ with .NET, or even worse, whatever Duplo shit Unreal Engine comes with now. They will make their websites using Squarespace. And they’ll write their notes on Google Drive. And they will have absolutely no idea how any of it works. All while having convinced themselves that they’re doing it the right way, the simple way.

And then, when all the gray beards that created, maintained and understood all the underlying structures die off, and their wisdom is lost, we’re fucked.

We’re royally fucked.

You already struggle to stay on top of your projects when they cross 2000 lines of code. Even the professionals at Microsoft are absolutely fucking incompetent at writing software. And every day, we add more code. More layers. More “solutions”, to problems created by complexity. Oh, your server software is buggy and crashes all the time, because nobody knows how it works, or how to fix it? Here’s the solution: A program called Docker, that lets you run every program in a viritual machine, and just automatically reboot the whole thing when it crashes. We are 20 billion band-aid “solution” lines of code deep into this problem, and it shows no sign of stopping.

Not to mention that massive amounts of this code does stuff we don’t even want. Advertising, cookie popups, tracking, fingerprinting, update nags, DRM, adware, spyware, malware, content ID, social media post priority.
And so we develop “solutions” to those problems. Ad-blockers, cookie blockers, tracking and fingerprinting resistant browsers, pirate sites, browser extensions that give back control and customization on social media sites.

Too much code? Too much bad code? Solution: More code!

Is there an actual solution?

I have no clue. Refuse to write and use shit software, I guess.

Doing sound with child actors

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 23:26:21 +0100

An entirely different workflow

As of writing this, I am half way through production on the second season of a children’s TV show. Bjørnis.

Every aspect of this production is carefully considered for us to get the best possible performance out of the child actors we work with. This has to be done because nearly every episode, we work with new amateur actors, so we don’t have the luxury of doing extensive casting in pre-production, and sticking with the same two or three kids for every episode of the show. This means we have to have a very child-friendly workflow, that can deliver the footage we need to tell the stories, but without the consistency of known skilled child actors. (This is not to say none of the kids are good at acting, a lot of them are surprisingly great, but they are still kids.) These are some of the compromises we make:

We rarely do more than 4-5 takes of anything, if they say their line with the right words in the right order and vaguely the correct emotion, we circle the take.
We use their real names in the script, and their real parents play their parents in the show. This means even the adults aren’t pro actors, but it allows the kids to act more natural around their storyline-parents, and helps keep them comfortable on set.
We shoot in their house, again, for them to feel more comfortable. We did one shoot out in boats, and that turned out to be quite challenging for the child actor.
We take breaks if they get scared or nervous, or start to feel bad about forgetting their lines, etc.
Everything happens on their schedule.
Luckily, we have an absolutely wonderful lady on set who’s entire job is to be someone they’re comfortable with. She can help out when they get nervous, scared, ashamed or maybe just refuse to say their lines or to act out a specific scene without their favorite plushie.
For the most part we never slate. Just in case any part of that process would distract the kids, or make them feel any undue pressure.

As you can understand, working with children, especially children who are not trained actors, changes the required workflow of a shoot massively.

This is why they say never to work with kids, animals or the weather.

Wiring kids

I’ve found basically no difference in booming around child actors, other than the fact that they can move a bit erratically, so you really need to be paying attention. Giving them a lavalier, however, is a process sometimes, so most my advice will center around this.

Elastic band pants seems to be getting more and more popular among kids. Instead of wearing pants that fit properly, they wear pants with an elastic band at the top. This elastic band keeps their pants up just fine, but they cannot support the weight of an A-10 transmitter with batteries in. Especially if they jump around and play in-between takes. Therefore, you will need some kid-sized URSA straps. And for once, you may actually want to use the pocket they have for excess LAV-cable, because with kids there will be a lot of excess cable.

Maybe you want to keep in mind that the kids are more likely to require a costume change between indoor and outdoor scenes. In a lot of episodes of this show, Bjørnis, a fire breaks out, and they run outside and call the fire department. That means that they’re not really supposed to put on additional clothes when they go outside, because they run out in a hurry to escape a fire. However, because we’re shooting outside in Norway, the kids usually need to put on a jacket and beanie. I cannot overrstate how great mounting a LAV under a beanie, on a kid’s forehead is. Yes, Boom is King. Absolutely. However, it’s not unusual for this to sound better than the boom sometimes.

This is because chest-mounted LAVs on kids is often not ideal. Children don’t have the convenient dip in the middle of their chest that adults have, so the consealer will show pretty obviously through the shirt, and you risk getting a lot of clothing noise. I’ve found that kids have a tendency to lean on their chest and stomach when standing in front of something. They also bring their hands up to their face a lot. Both of which will cover the mic, if it is on their chest. However, if you have no choice, they have short hair, and are not wearing a beanie, then get creative. If they have a front pocket on their shirt, then running the LAV out through a tiny hole in the back of the pocket works nicely. While I’ve never found this to work that well myself, I’ve worked with mixers that default to cutting a small hole in the back of the t-shirt collar, and feeding the mic around to the front of it. Maybe you’ll have more luck with that technique.

How to win friends

The kids will not let you mic them up unless they are comfortable around you. You could hand off the mic to the childcare expert, and I’ve had to do this in some cases, but it’s always best for someone from the sound department to do it.

There are three people on set that all need to become good friends with the kids as quick as possible. In order of importance that is the childcare expert, the director, and the one doing the wiring, whether that’s the boom op. or mixer.

Here are a few tips for making friends with kids on set.

Every deadcat I work with has a name. It’s bad luck to use a nameless deadcat. The first one I worked with is named Rufus and belongs to my best friend, and long-time collaborator Sindre Aalberg. My old Nanoshield¹ deadcat is named Rasmus. Sindre named it, I named his. They’re brothers, in a sense. This lore is always fun to tell the kids. I give it a hug and then I let them meet and hug the deadcat, that’s always a hit. Usually they’ll have a plushie of their own that they’ll want to show, or talk about. Do that. I’ll say that I have another one at home that still needs a name, and we’ll try to come up with funny names together.

This also applies to the URSA strap. Not the names and all that, but let them feel how soft it is while it’s still rolled up. Maybe even let them unroll it themselves. Helps make them more comfortable with putting it on. I usually say that it will be giving them a permanent belly-hug for the day.

Peekaboo is a classic for a reason. It’s not uncommon, if you’re working with siblings, for one of them to decide that it’s awkward to meet new people, especially young adults, like me. This means they might just be silent or only nod or shake their head if you try talking with them. You can break through that barrier over time, but we don’t have much time. We have transmitters to rig. So, I’ve found that if the sibling is more open, then you should play a bit with them. Do it in a way that is showing you’re both having fun, and make sure that the other sibling can see it. It’ll work to demonstrate that you’re a cool person, and that they can play too. Maybe they’ll even get a bit jealous and jump in pretty quickly because they want to play too! That’s wonderful, if you can all play together like that for a bit.

Now, it might feel weird or disingenuous to do this, just to make giving them a mic easier. However, I think greatest consequence of this, way above mic’ing being easier, is that they can relax and have more fun on set. You’ll really be helping them see that being an actor can be really fun and rewarding. That telling stories, playing characters and making movies is a lot more fun than just learning lines, reading scripts, walking where the director says to, and all the other things adults tend to focus on. Which leads me to the next point.

Adults suck

The most annoying thing that adults do, almost universally, and I always have to go around telling them to stop doing is: Scaring the kids. They find it funny or something. I hear this almost every time I go to wire up the kids, and it pisses me off.

“Now he’s going to hear everything you say and do, so you have to be careful!! Haha, noo just kidding, haha.”

That sentence. That damn sentence. Every time. And they always laugh, and think it’s funny. But the kid never does. Sometimes, I’m lucky, and the kid doesn’t really hear it. Other times, I’ve had kids get scared to put the mic on, or flat out refuse, and it has become a 40-50 minute process getting them to be OK with getting wired by the childcare expert, if I promise to never listen to their mic. Firstly, I don’t want to lie. Especially not to kids. I don’t like doing it. Secondly, even if I do promise that, we might have a problem if I ever need to adjust the mic. This is because the kid will go “But you promised not to listen!!”. At worst, the kid will then refuse to wear it again, because I obviously still listened, and we’re back to square one. Or, at best, it will bring down the all-important mood, and remind them of the feeling that they’re being snooped on, and make them harder to work with.

However, telling people what not to do isn’t very helpful without replacing that behavior. I could get parents to stop saying that line, telling them beforehand to not do it. But then they would just get quiet and stare awkwardly. That is definitely much better, but still can induce some unwanted discomfort. Therefore, my solution is to say that they’ll be a secret agent, and that they’ll get their own secret hidden microphone, and that they can send me secret messages. Usually combined with me pretending like I’m whispering into my own LAV and saying some stupid secret message like “Psst, do we have any waffles? I really want waffles!”. Turn it into a game. Make up some silly move that signifies that you heard their secret message. This makes it so much better if you ever have to adjust or check on the mic, because instead of being reminded of something uncomfortable, they’re glad you’re making sure the spy equipment is working.

Have fun!

This may seem like a lot to consider. Heck, I think it’s 2000 words. If only I had this much to say about essay topics in school. Anyway. Don’t let this discourage you from working with kids in film and TV. It’s a very rewarding experience, and now that you can come into it more prepared than I was, it’ll be a lot easier and hopefully very fun. Because that’s really what works best with kids. Having fun. If it is clear to them that you’re having fun on set, then they’ll be much more likely to have fun on set.

The Rycote Nanoshield is terrible. Even with the Enhancement Kit, I’d just go straight to Cinela. ↩︎

The Joe Rogan Experience is not a podcast

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
I’ve seen many people talk about the Joe Rogan & Spotify deal as a “gREaT sTRiDe fOR POdcAsTIng!”, but it is exactly the opposite.

What is podcasting?

Podcasting is a standard of publication. You publish a collection of audio files via a public RSS (Or Atom) feed. That feed is the “cast”. Anyone can then read that RSS feed using an application like Podcast Addict, or any other podcatcher. It podcatches the podcast.

This is why podcasting is such a symbol of freedom. Anyone can publish whatever they want to their RSS feed, and anyone can catch that feed. Nobody needs to know what you listen to, or who is downloading their podcast. Nobody can stop the creator, nobody can stop the consumer. There is no middleman. There is no youtube.com that forces you to make an account to watch certain content. There is no 3rd party of underpaid Indian contractors sitting around deciding what content is acceptable and not based on poorly defined guidelines. There is no low-level staff that can complain about what episodes their service is hosting.

What has the JRE become?

It has become exactly what I described there. The JRE is now exclusive to Spotify. Spotify is hosting the content and intentionally only making it available in a format that doesn’t work with normal podcatchers. This is of course, so you have to use Spotify to listen to their exclusive podcasts. There is no public RSS feed, now that Spotify has shut down anon-podcast.scdn.co. Meaning, there is no cast. There is no podcast. It can’t be podcatched.

The opposite of a great stride

Using Spotify requires an account, not just to “"“prove””" you’re over 18, like with YouTube, but to listen to anything at all. Many episodes of the JRE are still missing after migrating to Spotify. Mysteriously, mostly the ones that some people at Spotify don’t like. Especially the ones featuring Alex Jones, a man who’s actual podcast was removed from Spotify.

You can’t remove a podcast from a podcatcher. That’s not how podcatchers work. However, Spotify isn’t a podcatcher. You can’t input an RSS feed into any Spotify client. The creators have to submit an application for Spotify to feature your podcast in their catalog. So whenever Spotify says anything about having podcasts, they’re lying right in front of your fucking face.

Worse than this, is that Spotify is going to heavily integrate tracking and advertising into their system. Which will be very targeted advertising. Much more targeted than the normal ad-read just being related to the podcast’s topic, as is the status quo for podcasts. This targeted advertising will be way more profitable and effective, because that’s the point of targeted and privacy invasive advertising. This means big money will be pushing long-form audio shows like the JRE to stop podcasting and start “Spot”casting (Eh? Like it? I came up with that myself. I know, give me the Nobel Prize in Literature.), so we can have even more privacy invasive and targeted ads. This will lead web audio shows in a direction far away from podcasting’s freedom, and right into the hands of a few large corporations. Again.

The future of online audio content still has the chance to remain free, or you can willingly let it slip into the control of a few corporations, and become dependent. This process has happened many times before, and it is about to happen again. This time, will you be doing anything to stop it? Or will you keep being a good little obedient and unthinking consoooomer?

Update 2022-02-05:

As of writing this, another 71 episodes of the JRE have been removed from Spotify, in addition to the ones they never published to begin with, totalling 113 episodes. For the full list of vaporized episodes, you can go to JRE Missing. Once again, nothing is sacred when you give up control of your content to random centralized corporations. All these episodes would still be up if he was actually podcasting. Maybe the video versions would’ve been removed from YouTube, but you could still find them in you favorite podcatcher. And then Spotify would still have some incentive to keep them up to compete with YouTube and actual podcatchers. These corporations don’t deserve you. They don’t deserve Joe. Don’t use Spotify, use actual podcasting and podcatchers.

How to anti-alias the threshold effect in images

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was looking into generating black-white images that were anti-aliased, but all I found were ways to definitely not do anti-aliased thresholding.

Among these non-solutions was an article that suggested using curves instead of threshold to just increase contrast a lot, and pretended that they had somehow created anti-aliased thresholding. What they actually made was a black and white photo with a lot of contrast, not even remotely similar to thresholding. And if you were to push it far enough to have the same contrast level as threshold would have, you would still end up with the same jagged edges and noise splotches as normal thresholding. People on forums were saying to blur it, which of course looks terrible, because you end up with all the same issues, but this time they glow.

Turns out the actual solution is pretty simple. You need to super-sample.

Scale up the image 8x or 16x
Apply the threshold effect.
Scale the image back down to 1/8th or 1/16th the size.

As you can guess from how simple this is, it can be done in GIMP, Photoshop, Krita, really anything. If you are using Photoshop, I suggest using Preserve Details 2.0 when upscaling, so you’re maintaining as of the shape as possible. Maybe you could even use waifu2x.

You can do it using G’MIC, too, which would look something like this:

gmic input_image.jpg resize 1600%,1600%,1,3,3 adjust_colors 0,0,0,0,-100 threshold 127 normalize 0,255 resize 6.25%,6.25%,1,3,3 output output_image.jpg

Here’s a comparison of the different methods:

Standard threshold

Blur

8x supersampling using waifu2x

16x supersampling

Source image

How to set up Windows 10 almost without killing yourself

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Windows 7 was amazing. I used to think “7 was way better than 8, but 10 is also ok.” However Microsoft’s behavior has increasingly been becoming really fucking disgusting. It’s so disgusting in-fact, that I’m having a hard time telling people to not buy a Mac.

Back in the Windows 7 days, you turned on your computer for the first time, set the language, keyboard layout and chose a username. After that, you’re good to install a better browser. Maybe you’d have to uninstall McAfee, but that’s about it.

Now, with Windows 10, the list of shit you have to do to set up a normal, non-surveilled, non-bloated, ad-free experience is so long it’s honestly idiotic. When I first saw the Microsoft Store wanting you to install “apps” (ew) to Windows I was already scared, but I didn’t think it would get this bad.

Not including normal things like picking language and keyboard layout, the list is:

Say no to expanded telemetry
Say no to location tracking
Say no to device tracking
Say no to both ad-tracking options
Say no to “online speech recognition”
Probably a couple other things I’m forgetting
Find a way to block internet access, so they can’t force you to make a Microsoft account instead of a normal account
Uninstall Office 365
Uninstall OneDrive
Uninstall Dropbox-MS-Store-Edition
Uninstall Spotify-MS-Store-Edition
Uninstall McAfee
Uninstall the games they pre-install for some reason
Uninstall Microsoft Mail
Download an actual decent browser to replace the executable turd known as Edge
If you downloaded Chrome, you have to click past the “Please don’t upgrade!!” screen
Find out you can’t install anything at all because of something called “S-Mode”

The list goes on, but first, we need to talk about “S-Mode”. This is absolutely disgusting, unethical, unacceptable behavior. In order to install anything using normal installers and avoid using the Microsoft Store or making a Microsoft account, you have to download an unlocker from the Microsoft Store, which requires a Microsoft account. A catch 22 that means no matter what, Microsoft gets to register your computer up against your Microsoft account. If anyone figures out a way of getting past this without buying Windows 10 Professional and overwriting the OEM OS with it, let me know.

Buy it on eBay, btw. It’s only a couple of bucks, and I’ve yet to get scammed after buying at least 5 licenses. Even if you have to try 3 sellers, you’re still saving hundreds of dollars.

Now, continuing the list.

Re-do everything you just did, because you’re overwriting the OS with a fresh version of Windows 10 Pro.
Finally install a better browser, like Brave, Chromium, Vivaldi or Firefox
Remove the Edge icons from everywhere
Remove the other trash software icons in the start menu
Go to settings and disable everything, including location access, camera access, everything-access for anything that doesn’t need it
Download whatever the latest sketchy telemetry-disabler tool is

These tools let you actually disable things like telemetry, tracking, calling-home, ads and Cortana. They change all the time, and they’re super sketchy. It used to be Anti-Beacon, but that’s paid software now. None seem open source, and when you search for them, all you get is SEO blog-sites that list off 10 of them, leaving you thinking all of them are viruses, or possibly worse than just letting Microsoft track you in the first place. Nevertheless, if you find a good one (Maybe ShutUp10 is good? Or maybe Windows10Debloater is better?) it’ll help you get rid of a lot of telemetry and other bullshit. I still can’t fucking believe they put ads and ad-profiling in the actual operating system.

Back to setting things up.

Either use registry editing to give you back the normal Windows Photo Viewer that doesn’t blur images when you zoom in, or install qView
While you’re in RegEdit, might as well set JPEGImportQuality to 100, so Windows won’t ruin your wallpaper quality
Install Everything Search by Void Tools, because Windows search is broken
Install AltSnap, because Windows still doesn’t doesn’t let you conveniently manage windows
Hide all the unnecessary search buttons on the bottom bar, because they don’t do anything you can’t do by just hitting the Windows key and typing what you want to search for
Install an actually decent media-player like MPC or VLC

And after spending so much of their resources making the experience markedly worse, you have to spend a lot of your time and brainpower undoing their hard work. Yet after all this, Windows is still far behind MacOS in a lot of places. Windows still doesn’t have a proper terminal, aside from an option of installing a really slow uncustomizable Ubuntu terminal through the Windows Store. Windows still has shitty audio, and no virtual aggregate sound card functionality, or low-latency audio option without using third-party drivers like ASIO. No ability to let multiple programs use a media source like a webcam at once. And apparently, they’re getting rid of the control panel and completely replacing it with the horrible settings menu, and rounding the corners of the windows?

At this point, I can’t recommend getting a Windows machine over a Mac unless you’re building it yourself, and will be installing Windows 10 Pro. Especially with Apple’s frankly fantastic track record on privacy and fight for encryption. The best option now is just to buy a laptop purely on build quality, and installing some flavor of Linux. Well, that has always been the best option, but it has never been the easiest option. Not that it has gotten much easier, just that installing Windows 10 properly is so damn difficult now. Seriously. Jump ship as fast as you can.

Codex North

Fiction is a fiction

Islander Magazine #3 is ugly

The cover is beyond unworthy

The graphical elements

The typography and layout

How to set up Windows 11 almost without killing yourself

What in the fuck is a loom

Deliria Builds Empires

Dare to Disturb

My Journaling Method

Index

Month

When

What

Why

Days

What I don’t do

Future Log

Dear diary

Grid calendar

My experience going Carnivore

T+3 Days

T+7 Days

T+10 Days

T+14 Days

T+20 Days

T+25 Days (Time of originally writing this article)

T+37 Days

T+50 Days

No Nut November: A Socratic Dialogue

The Zoo-Keepers, and The Devil's Seduction

The Myth of Norse Discontinuity

The mistake

Imperfect continuity

Imagine using Pro Tools

The False Diamond Problem

PlasticSCM: The Nightmare SCM

Context

Constant empty changes

The Catch 22 Lockup

Selective merging

Diff and merge tool

Goodbye Babylon

Twitter's fractal Rube Goldberg machine of bloat

Is there an actual solution?

Determinism changes nothing

determinism · /dɪˈtəːmɪnɪz(ə)m/

Professionals should use 32-bit float recording

What is 32-bit float recording?

Digital Audio

24-bit integer audio

32-bit float audio

Answering the hesitancy

Reasons not to use 32-bit float

RSS: Savior of The Internet

What is RSS?

Why use RSS?

Better “content”

How to use it

Your quest

Replacing Adobe

Photoshop

After Effects

Illustrator

Lightroom

Premiere Pro

Audition

Adobe Fonts

How it all goes horribly wrong

The “Stack”

Mo’ lines, mo’ problems

Is there an actual solution?

Doing sound with child actors

An entirely different workflow

Wiring kids

How to win friends

Adults suck

Have fun!

The Joe Rogan Experience is not a podcast