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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • I can corroborate that it gets crazy even in courses expecting high literacy. I had the painful experience of teaching a 3rd year course in communication studies that was part of the media production stream. It required writing preproduction documentation and a script. There were a lot of questionable attempts but there’s always a range of interest and skill, right? One student, and let me remind you this is third year at a university, I called into office hours. I’m a fan of poetry, so I just had to be sure that she wasn’t cleverly lampooning Gertrude Stein in some ironic way. Sadly, no, she just had no fucking clue how to write ANYTHING coherent. Amazing.



  • This is laughable with respect to the far right in BC, who are masquerading as small-c conservatives.

    The discourse of outrage that’s promulgated throughout social media is full of unsourced, proven lies. How do we know? Because they get airtime and volume, and are examined and debunked.

    In traditional media, the arguments for the unambiguous bullshit that gets aired are clearly founded in emotional, unscientific rhetoric, and mouthpieces for this bullshit are confronted and then immediately dissemble into a related issue backed by equally unsubstantiated emotional bullshit.

    Note that I am using the dictionary definition of bullshit here.

    Inevitably, when people complain about bullshit that is rather obviously propaganda built for oligarchism but hiding behind populism, some toady pops up to claim that true objectivity should put the opposing viewpoints on equal footing, and those that were educationally deprived of critical thinking skills will applaud.


  • Various external forms of ratfuckery from Alberta culture leaking into the ripe compost of BC bigotry : KlownKonvoy fans running rallies, the Take Back Alberta crowd running various astroturfing schemes, funding flowing into rural communities for campaigning via Harper-derived organizations, and as one NDP campaigner pointed out, intense “microtargeting” in social media in a divide-and-conquer approach which was successful.

    People are unhappy about the economy and are blaming local conditions; combined with anti-Trudeau tribalism it’s all very emotional and truth doesn’t mean anything.







  • Verified: group cooking is the way.

    I have friends and family who live in a cohousing building. About 50 people in 30 units. Each apartment is complete but the kitchens are slightly smaller than typical.

    Cohousing is mutual ownership of the building. About 20% of the building is common areas, like widened hallways with couches and bookshelves, or a games nook, music room, workshop, laundry, etc. It’s basically a tall village, and they are like roommates with privacy.

    The giant kitchen and dining room is used six nights a week. One person is chef with a small crew, and dinner is for around 30 people. It costs $5 CDN per meal, though if you raid the leftovers later it’s pay what you want, usually $2. The cooking volunteer roster is optional and organized by a Slack channel. Food is usually awesome and everyone wins.

    If you want you hardly ever have to cook dinner for yourself.




  • I worked in the specialty AIDS ward in St. Stephen’s hospital in London (before any meds were available).

    AIDS has a devil’s banquet of particular cruelties as the diseases it kills with are many, some are particularly horrific, and they overlap so that the comorbidity of all this horrible shit happening at once is itself an overriding cruelty.

    Sometimes it goes on forever, and also I watched buff fit vibrant people burst out in painful cancerous lesions and waste away to a stick figure in a month.

    AIDS is a concentration camp not a prison, unless you have the best meds and care.



  • You cannot call slapping on an external storage device “upgrading storage”, WTF are you on about? Are you just completely unaware of what a *ridiculous* solution that is to a problem that the OEM _intentionally_ created?

    Oh I am very aware of how annoying and hostile it is to users: I repair computers, including macs.

    I didn’t write upgrade, don’t twist arguments or it’s bad faith. Adding TB4 drives to a workstation is just normal in the industry, don’t take it out on me. In that situation it’s no big deal, and yes all the gear is expensive to an amateur.

    We are getting off the original point that someone trying to break into an industry has to hew to the existing standards, and those standards often use FCP ProRes files so you better give in. While your tone was contemptuous and dismissive, you seemed a little curious about why that might be. I have tried to address that.

    Suggesting that a young professional trying to break into a decent paying job in the media production industry would use a chromebook or any version of linux for production is a non-starter.

    If a Framework workstation (I had no idea they made one, thought it was all laptops) runs something other than Linux or Windows, I am curious what it could be.

    Still, if you had to provide support for a wide variety of everyday users, I suspect your opinion on ‘user-friendliness’ would shift. Even Mint is problematic for most users as soon as they are required to step out of basic admin production. Windows is worse, unless you fully bend over for MS.

    Now I have to get back to ungluing a shitty battery out of a shitty macbook., hidden by sleazy little pentalobe screws.

    [Side note that “botched” means incompetent or clumsily made, i.e. intentionally broken.]


  • I thought we were talking about media production but your goalposts are over there in the playground.

    Botched means I asked for more industry standard production files and you gave me something else, because you don’t understand ROI in industry. Equipment is cheap compared to time. Just use the tools the job requires.

    I used to teach guerilla filmmaking back in the day of “desktop video is the next big thing” so I see where you’re coming from, even if you hide your ignorance about the work behind ideals. Knock yourself out learning to edit with a cheap gaming rig and the free version of Resolve, make cool stuff and upload, start a wedding video business.

    But get work in a large production as a contractor? The tools are cheap compared to time and amortized quickly in taxes. Buy the tool the job requires. Skills should be platform agnostic.