you spend so much time trying to make yourself more palatable that in the end you taste bland. forgettable
Tags:
#Hannibal #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #cannibalism cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Pov you walk into a pitch black room and you see two creepy glowing android eyes, two flashing red lights, and the fucked up thing cats’ eyes do in the dark
Further hc that Data can’t actually see in the dark either.
He’s just never thought to mention this because he has a photographic memory and direct neural access to all of the Enterprise’s schematics, and therefore doesn’t actually need sight to know where everything is.
Ok but imagine the Enterprise goes to help people on this planet where everyone lives underground in the dark because of radiation or something. Like it’s bad enough that hundreds of generations have lived underground and, over the course of time, have adapted to the darkness so well that light sources actually hurt them. So Picard has to figure out how to help them without sending people in with lights.
And the obvious answer is to send Geordi down, but the settlements are so far down the communicators cut out and Picard isn’t sending anyone into that alone.
“Data and I should be able to handle it,” Geordi says. “Neither of us need light to see and Engineering can manage fine without us for a few hours.”
Picard nods and is on the verge of sanctioning the mission with his trademark, “Make it so,” when Data speaks up.
“Actually, my visual sensors are designed to be as much like the human eye as possible,” he says. “They only process information transmitted by the reflection of light off physical surfaces. My ability to function onboard Enterprise in unlit spaces is due to my memorization of both the ship’s schematics and the design preferences of those whose quarters I visit regularly.”
Behind his visor, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, Geordi blinks as he tries to process this new information. He’s almost about to apologize to Picard and Data for the assumption when Data continues.
“However, I would be able to integrate the information from our tricorder scans to navigate without much difficulty. I could accompany Geordi to the settlement and provide some level of assistance.”
Picard looks a bit confused at the correction, but nods. “Make it so.”
Later, when they’ve beamed down into the caverns, Geordi asks why Data never mentioned that he couldn’t actually see in the dark. He would’ve turned the lights on if he’d known.
“I did not need it,” Data answers simply, as if that was explanation enough.
“Data, most people like the lights to be on, even if they don’t need it,” Geordi points out. “It’s a comfort thing. And polite, too, I guess.”
Data pauses, processing. “I was not uncomfortable, nor did I find the lack of light to be rude. I enjoy our conversations in the dark.”
“Huh.” Geordi stops, watching as Data continues down the tunnel a bit further. “But you keep your quarters dark sometimes, too.”
“Spot is nocturnal,” Data explains. “I have read that it is important for cats to maintain a sense of routine, including a regular day and night cycle.”
and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.
Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.
Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.
*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.
OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:
Fun fact: this is called the analog loophole, and it’s completely impossible to close, even in principle. No matter how much copy protection you add to a piece of media, it will eventually have to be sent to a display and then turned into an audio/video output that humans can interpret, because… that’s the whole fucking point
So even if they find some way to encrypt the signal sent to the display so you can’t intercept it with a VCR or tape recorder (which would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible), at the end of the day you just can’t do anything about someone pointing a camera at the screen or a microphone at the speaker. Yo ho ho
(By the way, I’d love to see someone actually talk about the legal precedent of this wrt it being literally the same thing as recording a TV show on a VCR or recording a mixtape off of the radio, both of which I believe are absolutely unambiguously legal. OP may be right that this is literally, legally, not piracy, but I’m not a lawyer nor am I opposed to crimes so don’t ask me)
What’s the advantage to including a tape recorder in this process, rather than cutting out the middle steps and just having Audacity record your headphone output? Is it just that it bears a closer resemblance to the situations that set legal precedent regarding time-shifting?
Don’t get me wrong, it did occur to me (though by the time I decided it was worth including in my response, I’d already left for work) that OP’s username is magnetictapedatastorage: presumably they take pleasure in integrating tape into their stream-archiving workflow.
But looking at the notes, there seem to be a lot of people under the honest impression that a separate recorder is *required*, and I would like to be clear that–at least in terms of practicality: I can’t speak to legal camouflage–the tape is in fact optional. You can plug a pair of non-lie headphones in and instruct Audacity to record what’s sent to them.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #oh look an update #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.
Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.
Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.
*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.
OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:
Fun fact: this is called the analog loophole, and it’s completely impossible to close, even in principle. No matter how much copy protection you add to a piece of media, it will eventually have to be sent to a display and then turned into an audio/video output that humans can interpret, because… that’s the whole fucking point
So even if they find some way to encrypt the signal sent to the display so you can’t intercept it with a VCR or tape recorder (which would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible), at the end of the day you just can’t do anything about someone pointing a camera at the screen or a microphone at the speaker. Yo ho ho
(By the way, I’d love to see someone actually talk about the legal precedent of this wrt it being literally the same thing as recording a TV show on a VCR or recording a mixtape off of the radio, both of which I believe are absolutely unambiguously legal. OP may be right that this is literally, legally, not piracy, but I’m not a lawyer nor am I opposed to crimes so don’t ask me)
What’s the advantage to including a tape recorder in this process, rather than cutting out the middle steps and just having Audacity record your headphone output? Is it just that it bears a closer resemblance to the situations that set legal precedent regarding time-shifting?
Tags:
#reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
#h/t hatethiscar: I saw theearnestonion’s tags in the notes and I needed them #music #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(people in the notes are waxing lyrical (so to speak) about My Head Is an Animal‚ but you know what’s even better?) #(Beneath the Skin) #(absolutely amazing album) #(almost every track is good and most of them are great) #((I was talking about this on Dreamwidth a while back and *nobody* could agree on what ”We Sink” is about‚ but we agree that it’s great)) #((maybe there’s shrimp emotions in there too)) #(((in semi-related news‚ have you noticed that store radios never play Florence and the Machine anymore?))) #(((it’s weird: I really thought they’d make it into the 50-year rotation)))
ALT
Brinens and Things 