This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You're just proving his point. All of these used to be, at some point in time, seen as technical limitations worthy of contempt. Now they're deliberate artistic choices.
Early CD compression has a unique sound, which is what many a 2000s nostalgia pieces are now trying to recreate, go play Night-Runners: Prologue for a good example.
The jitteriness of digital video is so common an aesthetic you may not even notice it anymore, mainly because we don't associate video with digital video tape which is what created all those artifacts and motivated the continued existence of film for some, but half of modern horror relies on it. And even purely digital artifacts have had this phenomenon. You can look at this year's Ghost in the Shell for lots of proeminent examples. It pays big homage to pixel sorting and other databending techniques which only exist to recreate and magnify the quirks of digital media.
8bit music used to be seen as ridiculous and antiquated when we finally managed to have decent sounding music on the SNES. And now you don't even consider it as "wrong" or "poor", it's just another genre of music, with its own nobility. QED.
No. There is no such thing as cd compression. Cds do not have distortion period. He is full of shit.
Brian Eno is full of shit about music production. Well, golly gosh.
Other revelations:
Escoffier was full of shit about cookery, he couldn't boil an egg.
Newton was full of shit about physics, he had no idea what planet he was living on.
Pasteur was full of shit about microbiology, dude didn't even wipe the cow dung off his milk bottles.
More options
Context Copy link
Be pendantic about bitrate if you want, dynamic range compression is a thing, the loudness wars did happen and Californication sounded like shit on CD at the time, and so did much of the output from 1995 to 2002 in a way that was noticeable enough to create a style.
We can argue about the technicalities of how that happened, audiophile forums probably have terabytes of flamewars about the specifics at this point. But that's all besides the general point about how people perceive media over time.
I think Eno was talking about reader distortions anyways. Which are also a staple of eerie sound design now.
In other words, Audio CDs did not use audio data compression (the techniques used to make things like MP3 files smaller, at the expense of making the audio sound slightly distorted), but did often use dynamic range compression (an audio editing technique used to make the volume of a song more consistent, by making quiet sounds louder and/or making loud sounds quieter).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link