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Da5id Weatherwax

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Everything posted by Da5id Weatherwax

  1. Da5id Weatherwax
    Then I think he would be proud of his daughter.
  2. Da5id Weatherwax
    Matches? I haz kerosene. And a zippo!
  3. Da5id Weatherwax
    "The true warrior wins without ever drawing his sword." Your dad chose to keep his hands off the stick because he was done with that part of his life. He had no more need to set his hands to something he always saw as a weapon.
  4. Da5id Weatherwax
    As somebody who is ex-military (RN, not chair force) I must say that it's not "showcases for machines of death" - The military puts on these shows to not just announce to the public that they are still there and still ready to defend them, but also to honor and express respect for the people who flew these planes, who sailed those ships or marched in their formations... and did not come back. Here in the UK it is almost impossible to NOT find a family in your street who doesn't remember a relative who was lost in Big Mistake I or II. When the military honors them, those families know that they are heard, acknowledged and recognized.
  5. Da5id Weatherwax
    /me ties the rails in a pretzel and snickers... "Good luck with that!" Dyna, I've been a chanop on an old contentious IRC channel. I know, as well as you do, how futile that particular plea is. This is THE PEEVES THREAD - if it ever had any "rails" they are LONG gone.
  6. Da5id Weatherwax
    See your $20 and raise you $20 that if it goes that way it will crash and burn. And they know it.
  7. Da5id Weatherwax
    The point is not to desire immortality, but to not fear death. I'll do everything in my power to stave off that day but when it comes, that's the time to lay down the burdens of this world and embrace the challenges of the next. What's to fear in that? If I manage to maintain my RL life long enough that it becomes possible to be digitally uploaded and continue there then why the F not? But the Lab had better make it possible to puppeteer properly by then! I will want to control my own anims if I ever "manifest" inworld
  8. Da5id Weatherwax
    It is. You can skate for quite a while but if reported "fake name accounts" are promptly banned. The zuckage is sufficiently aggressive about it that folks have been trolled by being reported as "fake" when they aint and had to jump through all sorts of "send RL info" hoops to prove it.
  9. Da5id Weatherwax
    juggling the numbers can make your head spin. Here's how I figure it. The lower the amount you cash out the worse it is. So you cash out when you need to and not a day before. And you track it and account for it on your tax forms as "self-employment income" - the taxman goes all grumpycat if they find out about a source of income you haven't declared, even if it only amounts to pennies in taxes.
  10. Da5id Weatherwax
    I make no secret of who I am IRL. I guard certain data but particularly to ladies I do not try in any way to conceal my identity. They get enough hassle from "Richard Anonymous" that I find being completely open about who I am knocks down barriers. In particular I dont ever ask for anyone's trust without demonstrating that they can trust ME - or know where to find me if I should prove unworthy of that trust. That's a principle I've always followed IRL and I never saw a reason to do otherwise in SL. (plus, I've been on the internet since before it was called the internet - concealing my identity would be somewhat futile) Having said that there is "social media" I just don't use. I don't have as big a "social media" presence as perhaps somebody a decade or two younger than me would.
  11. Da5id Weatherwax
    If you're thinking about Alan Aldridge's classic illustration....
  12. Da5id Weatherwax
    If your guitar "gently weeps" properly then you're channelling George and can't do it wrong
  13. Da5id Weatherwax
    I'm not reading the reaction here as exactly "negative", @Blaise Glendevon, perhaps "cynical" would be more accurate. There's lots of positives to this if it can be done right, it's just that many of us are rather used to a SL feature implementation being, well, not right. In this case, though, I - personally - am moderating my cynicism. The approach seems a little different this time. I'm looking forward to what develops.
  14. Da5id Weatherwax
    Been there, done that, collected the beer bottle upside the head My current "stable" is a Martin 6-string and Takamine 12-string acoustics, American Performer-series Strat and a Reverend Airwave 12 for the electric side. I'm hoping that's me done with instrument acquisition for a good long while (unless some evil sod of a salesman puts a nice resonator or mandocello in my hands when "I'm only in here to buy some strings, honest!" - NEVER visit a music shop right after the day-job's payday. It always hurts.) I truly wouldn't be nervous about performing in SL in your situation. You already know how to create a live sound. Just do it as if you were performing live-RL and send the main mix to the stream, the same way you'd send it to the "House PA" - with the SL-sound muted so you don;t get pings, beeps or 20-second-delayed-applause-gestures sneaking into your audio You know, that's actually the cleanest and simplest way to say it. The software to send it and the stream server are the "House PA" - if you can handle that, you can send a stream.
  15. Da5id Weatherwax
    Reverb, the Aladdin's cave of "whatever weird piece of kit you want, somebody here will be selling one." Talk about an easy way for the "broke musician" to become the "bankrupt musician" in 30 seconds flat if they don't ease up on the GAS. And everybody is on there. Buddy of mine sold a fx pedal he'd bought when he was 13 (he's now 62) on there and it went to a buyer who was actually quite a big name and had been looking for one for years... It's also my go-to place if I'm looking for parts to complete a keyboard restoration.
  16. Da5id Weatherwax
    Isn't that "some" pretty close to "all"? When I was starting performing in SL I don't think I met a single established performer who wasn't more than happy to hang out and talk gear, software, inworld stage settings or any other aspect of performing inworld.
  17. Da5id Weatherwax
    Nice axe
  18. Da5id Weatherwax
    one day I will come up with a suitable vengeance for that. one day.
  19. Da5id Weatherwax
    If it were that simple it would be a much easier economic problem for governments to address. Right now, we're coming out of an extended period of both low inflation and low interest rates. During this time wages for almost everyone except the very top earners have stagnated, not really rising at all. While low, inflation hasn't been zero so the cost of living has still been rising but it's the classic "boiling a frog" scenario. The pan hadn't got hotter quickly enough for folks to notice the change. Pressure on wages has been building but very slowly. The "real terms" value of most folks pay packet has been slowly but surely declining and it was almost at the breaking point where people were going to be demanding pay rises as they started to feel the pain. Now the energy crisis in particular is pushing inflation up and there's no slack left in anyone's pay to absorb the - more severe and very noticeable - cost of living increases, particularly since the "biggest lever" a central bank has to control inflation in a free market is via raising interest rates - making money more expensive. Unhecked, we are looking at a perfect economic storm where the richest countries might be seeing 40-60% of their population pushed into a poverty situation unless they DO demand - and get - a significant upwards correction in their wages. In a (relatively) sane world, one would expect this to cut into corporate profits, but in many cases it isn't doing. Businesses have been operating on a ratchet - they pass increased costs onto their customers in their entirety, maintaining their profit margins. When costs go down, they don't reduce their prices, they just make a greater profit margin. This is particularly true of something like the energy sector where you can't really refuse to buy their product because it's too expensive! Both of these things push an inflationary cycle into overdrive. and the situation will not reach any sort of equilibrium without intervention by governments. Either with government expenditures to damp out the cycle or by the governments regulating the market - making it a little less "free".
  20. Da5id Weatherwax
    Yeah but latency is time travel in the wrong direction. The delay on the stream buffering doesn't matter any to the audio performance quality, it just makes it unusable for monitoring. Where it does matter for performance is that I need to hit the footswitch to advance my inworld lighting or anim cues about 2-3 bars after when I'd do it playing IRL, so that they sync up better with what folks are actually hearing Having somebody else run the inworld cues for me based on what they are hearing on the stream would be best but I have neither a fat enough income stream to hire an inworld stage manager nor a girlfriend I can persuade to do it for free
  21. Da5id Weatherwax
    I just upgraded my mixer to an Allen&Heath Qu-16 and its PC interface is awesome. Full 32in/34out in ASIO mode for feeding a DAW and even exposes the main mix and three aux stereo channel as "standard OS devices" for those programs that dont speak ASIO.
  22. Da5id Weatherwax
    it truly isnt - think about it. If you're singing to a karaoke machine IRL you're hearing the backing track in realtime and singing to it. On a stream what everyone else is hearing is about 20sec behind you opening your mouth and singing the notes. That means you need to be listening to the backing track - or your instruments, or both - BEFORE it goes up the wire to the stream server. In my case I do all my mixing externally and have a set of studio cans fed from the "main FOH mix" that I have my PC send to the stream server. Means I'm hearing what I'm sending in realtime, I do it that way because I'm also a RL performer and that's how I'd feed my floor wedges for monitor feedback on a RL stage.Somebody who mixes their voice (or instrumental talent) with tracks played from the same PC as they are using to send sound to a stream needs to be more careful - it's easy to get into a situation where you're hearing the backing tracks about half a second in advance of the mix going to the stream and that - frankly - sounds like sh*t. The closer you are while still being "off" the worse it sounds You just need to be aware of where latency comes in and decide how you do it to make sure that what you're HEARING is in PERFECT SYNC with what you;re singing/playing when the mix goes up the wire. It's not that hard. It's just almost impossible to advise on unless you have EXACTLY the same gear as the guy you're advising
  23. Da5id Weatherwax
    The exchange rate between RL and SL currencies goes a long way towards insulating SL from RL inflationary pressures. We see something with a price labelled in thousands and we think it's "expensive" when in fact it costs less than a good 12" pizza IRL. Put the price too "apparently high" and it won't sell, even if in RL terms it's pretty cheap. The exception to this, of course, is the land market and tier. Downsizing ones holdings and reducing monthly tier has a visible impact on ones RL budget even if one is not an island-owner or larger - along the same order of magnitude as cutting out streaming subs and Amazon prime membership etc. All things that are amongst the first to go if one is feeling squeezed in ones RL monthly or annual budget. At the same time the cost of buying land remains a significant chunk of RL change in much of the grid and rises in RL prices of everything else will depress that market. If you want to offload your land to reduce your tier you may not get as much for it as you thought you would if there is significant RL inflation happening. Perhaps counterintuitively, therefore, inflation in RL is a deflationary pressure in the area of the SL economy most likely to impact ones RL pocket book - the land market. Where the cost of RL living is rising "in a scary manner" folks will want to spend less on their SL. It doesn't even have to be a reduction in expenditure that makes much of a RL difference, it will still feel like one ETA: to illustrate the difference between "how it feels" and "how it really is" consider my position as a musician performing in SL. On a regular day (not including festival season or Hogmanay - it's a lot more profitable then) I can busk the streets of Edinburgh and make around £25-£30 per hour of performance. Most individual tips during that hour are £1-£2. In a SL venue with average traffic over the same hour I will make about a fifth of that but it doesn't feel like that to the audience - a "good tipper" in SL will throw me 200 or 300 lindens - call it £1 (it's less after cashout fees etc but I minimize those costs by cashing out as infrequently as possible) but the number of folks who have the opportunity to tip in even the biggest and most populated SL venue is a fraction of the numbers of tourists that pass me on a good pitch on the Royal Mile or the number of students who wander past to their favorite sunbathing spot if I'm on the Meadows. But I'm putting in exactly the same amount of work and have the same expenses in both. This is not a criticism of the SL population - I'm NOT calling you folks "stingy" or anything. It's just how the virtual world works and that's fine by me and I dont ever see myself stopping performing in SL. But it feels - to both the punter and the artists - a lot more in SL than it actually is.
  24. Da5id Weatherwax
    Technology is a profound efficiency-multiplier. It multiplies the efficiency of operation of murphy's law. It multiplies the efficiency with which one can get oneself into the very deepest sh*t possible. It multiplies the efficiency with which one can embarrass oneself when drunk. It tremendously multiplies the efficiency of your frustration in driving you to drink, leading to the above-mentioned embarrassment. And then there's the other thing. You know how they say dogs can sense fear? Well, computers can sense impatience....
  25. Da5id Weatherwax
    This is every "progress meter" everywhere. The ones that REALLY peeve me are the ones where they count "% complete" by x of Y files done, when file (Y-1) is fifty times the size of all the rest combined. So the meter shoots up to about 97% complete and then... just... stops...
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