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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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It is wild that vinyl, tapes, and CDs were physical artifacts that still had "git branching hell" syndrome.

In many ways it was worse: in analog, you lose fidelity on the original every time you make a copy. You see this a bit wit accumulating recompression artifacts on images, but professional production pipelines manage to limit this. But on film it has historically made effects shots look "worse" than others (more copies), leading to some unintuitive choices. Kubrick in 2001 in some parts did multiple exposures of the same film to minimize compositing noise (most notably the darks washing out to shades of gray), which is why it looks good even by modern standards.