Here's a different reading by him of The Raven (not the one from The Simpsons): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXU3RfB7308 — he chooses to almost ignore the meaning and stick to a recitation, which is great: his voice perfectly brings out the poem's cadence and assonance.
Other readings of The Raven, for comparison: Christopher Walken [1], Vincent Price [2], Christopher Lee (build-up in intensity, unfortunately some background music) [3], Basil Rathbone (the opposite of James Earl Jones: in places almost like prose) [4]
I think this is a really good primer for electronic music production if you're going to start from absolutely zero.
If you specifically want to program beats, I recommend this quirky book "Pocket Operations": https://shittyrecording.studio. It's basically guitar tabs for drum machines. Pick out some styles as a foundation and then build on top of it. Think of it as boilerplate code.
Being a software dev by day, and a former musician in high school, the current world of digital music production tools is as incredible as it is overwhelming. It's good to have something that orients your practice and experimentation.
I tried hard to make Sweet Home work for me. It solves the quick and dirty use case but I really wanted something where I could measure out every dimension in the house with a laser measurer, describe the shape and the relationships between the objects and let the computer do the rest. In a program like Sweet Home, and every other floor plan program out there if you make one change (like updating the measurement of the wall thickness you have to manually and carefully move everything else around.
> "just do yourself a favor and get the 4 layers boards so you can make ground and power planes"
In general, you should avoid power planes on 4 layer boards if you can. They tend to cause a lot of trouble with return currents when signals jump from the top layer to the bottom layer through a via. Prefer using ground planes for both inner layers and make sure you have ground return vias near every signal via.
I think the problem here is that rubber bridge is just very low intensity compared to most modern games.
Of course there’s a frisson when you correctly bid a slam or sacrifice to prevent your opponents from finding theirs. But most bridge players don’t even know how to recognize a borderline slam, and they just bid a game and don’t contest, leaving things pretty low stakes.
It’s so unfortunate that it takes 8 to play duplicate, as duplicate is my favorite of all games.
But I understand why people don’t get excited about bridge for 4.
If you enjoyed the Romero article there is an informative & belly-achingly funny podcast of Blindboy interviewing John and his spouse Brenda in front of a live audience in Ireland ->
John is great in that interview, but Brenda almost out shines - she has a really fascinating history and experience in the gaming industry.
If you're not far enough down the rabbit hole after listening to the above Brenda does a solo interview on the similarly awesome "Retro Hour" podcast that is a great listen as well ->
>Once you see a modern fab with your own eyes, it will change you in a deep way. I felt a sense of compassion for this incredibly complex and valuable thing that humanity is just barely able to scrape together. Nothing you see in media can prepare you for the real thing.
I interned at Micron as an industrial engineer looking at capacity and equipment purchases. I can very much relate to that. The whole summer was my mind being blown by the orders of magnitude across the board and it's somehow it's an economically viable process.
First, we take this giant silicon crystal taller than humans and cut it into wafers. Then we take these pure materials (like 99.99999% pure) and transfer a tiny big on to the wafers in a successive layering process. Oh no, the deposition process wasn't perfectly even across the whole wafer (because of annoying laws of physics), so we'll throw it into the chemical mechanical planarizarion process to skim off a tiny layer keep the internal mechanical stressed down. Add in other mechanical, etching, lithography, and measurement processes and it gets crazy.
Wafers go through hundreds of manufacturing steps depending entirely on purpose, and with each step there's a possibility of messing up part or all of the wafer.
99% yield on a per-machine basis is sub-par in most manufacturing environments, but achieving that would be devastating in semiconductors. For sake of demonstration:
0.99^100{manufacturing steps} = 36.6% total process yield.
0.995^200 = 36.6% total process yield.
0.9975^400 = 36.7% total process yield.
Each additional 9 on yield is really expensive to add.
In school we talked about 1/1000th of an inch being kinda tight to hold on a CNC mill, with 1/10,000th needing a lot more specialized processing and time. Suddenly I was hearing about nanometer thick layers with tolerances measured in angstroms.
And the capital expenditure was nuts! 6-figures hardly gets you anything in a fab, it's really in the 7-8 figure range where you see most of your equipment landing. That will be old but still viable equipment in a few years.
Somehow depreciating all that equipment designed to make chips sold at pennies to dollars each is profitable.
As far as I'm concerned, it's black magic and truly an incredible achievement for humanity.
At one point I spent a couple of days watching dozens of videos on procrastination, and this video [1] by Tim Pychyl was by far the best. I strongly recommend it.
It's ostensibly focused on helping grad students with procrastination, but the tips and techniques he gives in the talk can be applied by anyone.
In the same vein it's worth checking out Atkinson Hyperlegible -- a typeface that I find utterly beautiful and I've personally found legible at extremely tiny sizes.
I really, really want a monospace version, and while they've made the font "free software" (someone I know emailed them to double check the license), I lack the necessary knowledge to do that
The reason is that old toaster designs had unpolarized plugs and therefore a good chance of uninsulated live wires inside, even when off. Modern toasters don't anymore, but folk wisdom lasts forever. Although you make a good point that if your outlet polarity is reversed, you might still have a problem. I don't know if modern designs are robust to that...
I learned this from a video about old Sunbeam toasters that was unexpectedly fascinating: https://youtu.be/1OfxlSG6q5Y
