The BBC is releasing over 16,000 sound effects for free download
THIS will be sooo good for my soundboard. Those online sessions are about to become even better :D
First music, then voice modifiers... Now this. Perfect.
Also, I’m pretty sure it can be used for a lot of other activities.
Yay, no more Soundbible!
The direct link: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary.htm
For any content creators who’d like it!
the new counterculture needs to be anything that involves zero makeup and curation. the revolution will not be ‘content creator’-able.
im 100% serious. aliexpress fishnets and tiktok tutorial eyeliner is not punk. wearing a tshirt from 5 years ago with a simple, functional hairstyle is punk. in the age of aestheticisation rebellion cannot have an appearance because every ‘look’ is infected by capitalism. wear what you have. women, ask yourselves ‘would a man do this to their appearance in the same circumstances’ and if not, don’t do it. concealer exists to cause you mental anguish. ‘-core’ exists to cause your wallets to empty. refuse culture of perfection and accept the messiness and asymmetry of a human body. if your first thought is “but i will look ugly” ask yourself why you think an unmodified human body is ugly. secondly ask yourself why you are so afraid of that. reject the veneer, reject the facade. become un-commodifiable. the revolution will not be marketed
i appreciate the spirit of self acceptance but capital subsumes everything. you try this and it’s just going to be called “sleazecore” or some stupid shit like “florpcore”. they will find a way to market it and there’s nothing you can do about it. there is not a single ‘counterculture’ that has not tried to become unmarketable - that’s the point of counterculture - and they have all failed. even revolutionary aesthetics are repurposed into liberalism. the only way to fight back against capital does not involve any aesthetic choices. it involves rigging politician’s cars to explode when they turn on the ignition
my number one woman behavior is saying i’m fine with any pronouns and silently ranking people in my regard based on what they do with that information
This is George Costanza behavior
GEORGE, at a function: Pronouns? Oh, you know, anything. Anything fine. It’s the twenty-first century, right?
-Cut, establishing shot of Jerry’s apartment, bass riff.-
GEORGE: He/him, Jerry!
JERRY: No, they just him’d you?
GEORGE: HE. HIM! I gave them a BUFFET, and they went for plain white bread. Genders as far as the eye could see! Something with an X in it!
JERRY: The X ones are fun…
I lived and worked in a lighthouse at a previous job. There was a thick line painted in a circle around the shack where the fog signal was kept. The line represented how close you could get to the fog signal without experiencing physical harm in the form of eardrums shattering or worse.
Even in the house it was LOUD. Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval. You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off. It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.
At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks. People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.
One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit. It did. Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that. People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.
That said Id do it all again, I really do treasure those days
you know you could’ve just said “no they don’t have wifi” and that would’ve answered the question
But then you wouldnt have known about the moose
I really wish more media would engage with beauty more as a skill/type of labour, rather than an inherent virtue. Like I find the “waif who doesn’t even know she’s beautiful” trope so frustrating because I genuinely think effortless beauty is a complete and utter lie.
Every person I’ve ever met who is traditionally beautiful actually puts an INSANE amount of effort into it behind the scenes. Like even with the best genes and most naturally symmetrical face in the world, current beauty standards are so high you will STILL need to be putting a lot of effort into your diet, makeup, hair, clothing, skin routine, etc etc to compete. And like, al of those not only cost money and time, but require a level of skill. It’s not just “put on makeup” it’s have the skill to select the right products and apply them well. And this doesn’t even get into the more extreme end of intensive surgical and other cosmetic treatments.
Like so often “beautiful” characters in media have absolutely no relationship to their beauty, it costs them nothing, taking none of their brain space or effort to maintain, and I find that so frustrating when in fact an absolutely BONKERS amount of effort and time is required to maintain something like that.
— Frank Bidart, from “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; ‘The Third Hour of the Night’", published c. 2017
yesterday my date made me promise to "not talk to any random russians this time" only for me to immediately become best friends with a kosovan gang member. saved on a technicality
after i successfully taught him how to play uno via google translate i explained to him that my date's phone got stolen, prompting both the most threatening AND the most hilarious sentence ever typed into a translator:
"why did you have to promise that you won't talk to russian people in in first place" because after a certain amount of alcohol i enter a stage of inebriation my friends have dubbed "russian hour" in which the duolingo trained part of my brain takes over and i sniff out russian speaking people like a bloodhound and exitedly talk to them until i am physically dragged away.
reading a textbook for class and i’m going insane. why is this just poetry. what. this is a STEM class what’s going on.
HELLO????? HELLO?????
Unrestrained summer fun 😁
this must be such a delicate experience for a creature that can dive two stories deep and has been seen cliff diving into the ocean
"you can't ship that, it'll never be canon!"
look, when I was your age, we shipped characters who never even met in canon. uphill. both ways. in the snow.
I feel like this would be a slippery slope towards making it illegal for people to choose to not vote.
that’s already how it is in australia
That’s just so fucked up. :( Do certain medical conditions exempt you?
?????? why is it be fucked up to have compulsory voting? that’s the way it is in most democratic countries? it’s a part of being a citizen, like paying taxes and obeying speed limits? the fine for not voting is only like $50 and because of the compulsory voting law, our country bends over backwards to make it accessible: it’s always on a weekend, lasts most of the day, and is set up at schools and community centers so there’s one within easy reach of almost everybody. you can also mail your ballot or vote early if you’ll be out of the country on the day. like, IT’S EASY TO VOTE, and the penalty isn’t even that ridiculous. i don’t understand why the usa doesn’t have this, except obviously it would make it harder to literally stop minorities from voting.
salparadisewasright
I think we Americans tend to forget that a lot of other countries don’t actively work to make it harder to vote.
Adding to this here, in Australia you don’t have to vote. Or, more precisely, there’s no way they can tell if you ruined your ballot. You have to turn up, get your name marked off, but you can put a line through the ballot if you don’t think any of the candidates are worth voting for. Or do this:
Or this:
Or this:
You have get your name crossed off (if you don’t want to wear the fine), but you don’t have to make your vote counted if you’re opposed to it.
And it is so, so easy to vote. Stuck at work or on holidays? That’s fine. Do a postal vote. Stuck in hospital? That’s fine. They’ll go to you. Stuck in an old people’s home and can’t get around? Again, they’ll go to you. It’s amazing to me that it’s so hard for so many Americans to actually vote. If you make it compulsory, than at least the government is obligated to provide you with the means to vote.
And look, I get it. Sometimes I don’t want to vote either. But I suck it up, I walk three minutes down the street, and I hope that this year they’re selling lamingtons again. Oh, and I buy a democracy sausage, which, even if all the candidates suck, makes the effort of turning up pretty worthwhile.
ALSO, you can see even on the fucked up ballots that you NUMBER CANDIDATES IN ORDER OF PREFERENCE. There’s no need to calculate whether I would be throwing away my vote on the candidate that I most agree with if they’re not from a major party. I can say, I want that independent person to get in, but if not them, give me Big Party A, and if not them, that minor party person is still better that Big Party B, and I’m not giving any preference to the Lunatic Fringe Party.
Our system certainly has some issues still, but I can show up to somewhere nearby, line up for a few minutes (if at all), vote exactly in line with my values (on paper, leaving a paper trail that can be recounted), and then buy a sausage and some home made cupcakes on my way out.
A country’s voting system matters a hell of a lot and every citizen deserves one that makes it easy to vote and results in a government that is representational and accountable.
And by the way, one time I had a bad asthma flare-up on Election Day and didn’t make it to my polling station. I got my fine in the mail, I filled out the form explaining why I couldn’t vote, no more fine. I would rather have, you know, expressed my preference for who should run my country, but they were cool with the fact that I couldn’t do it that day.
batmanisagatewaydrug
“oh no, what if people actually have to participate in picking the government officials who will impact their lives” jesus christ
For the last time, for everyone who still doesn’t understand: not voting is not a tool of resistance, it’s a tool of surrender.
LOUDER FOR THE PPL IN THE BACK
For the last time, for everyone who still doesn’t understand: not voting is not a tool of resistance, it’s a tool of surrender.
Pouring one out for Afghanistan and Anguilla and Antigua and Barbuda and Australia and the Bahamas and Bahrain and Barbados and Belize and Bermuda and Botswana and Brunei and Canada and the Cayman Islands and Cyprus and Dominica and Egypt and the Falkland Islands and Fiji and Gambia and Georgia (the country) and Ghana and Gibraltar and Grenada and India and Iraq and Ireland and Jamaica and Jordan and Kenya and Kiribati and Kuwait and Lesotho and Malawi and Malaysia and Maldives and Malta and Mauritius and Montserrat and Myanmar and Nauru and New Zealand and Nigeria and Pakistan and the Pitcairn Islands and Qatar and St Lucia and Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Helena and Ascension and Tristan da Cunha and St Vincent and Grenadina and Seychelles and Sierra Leone and the Solomon islands and South Africa and Sri Lanka and Sudan and Swaziland and Tanzania and Tonga and Trinidad and Tobago and Turks and Caicos and Tuvalu and Uganda and United Arab Emirates and United States and Vanuatu and Yemen and Zambia and Zimbabwe tonight
its so shiddy when u have to convince yourself to do your hobbies. like, its fun, you like it, why cant you just do it. do it. do it. but what if.... mindless media consumption instead....
im so sorry to the seven thousand of you so far who relate
upset at the accuracy of these tags
my friend who works in theatre just pointed out to me that WICKED is still showing tonight and the first line of that musical is "GOOD NEWS! SHE'S DEAD!" i really don't know how they're gonna work around that one
West End Wicked 2022-09-08 about to become THEE most valuable bootleg of all time
“I went to school for game design! I am highly qualified to talk about any game out there!”
I bet you don’t even know how big an 8 year old’s hands are.
You cannot meaningfully understand a great deal of Nintendo’s game development decisions without understanding how a child holds and uses a modern game controller. People love to critique game companies like Nintendo, especially core gamers and educated developers, as if they are some authority on game design but in twenty years I have never seen this type of individual talk about how Nintendo’s game design is constrained by the size of a child’s hands.
So…how big are they?
Big enough to use a dpad on the playstation controller but not large enough to use the analog stick comfortably. The opposite is true on the xbox controller. The shape of the joycon is designed for easy access for small hands for both.
Still, the kid’s thumb will have difficulty reaching both so rapid switches are not possible. On the left hand of the switch the stick is above and the dpad below, and the opposite is true on the right. This is a direct consequence of how a kid might use the controller. In most games the left hand controls movement - meaning an analog stick - and the right hand controls discreet inputs - meaning the dpad/button diamond.
Children’s also struggle to reach shoulder buttons and have lower grip width, so the natural gamer grip in which two fingers are resting on the shoulder buttons does not work at all for children. They usually have to use all four fingers to hold up a heavy device. The shoulder buttons go from being the most easily accessed buttons on the controller to the most difficult.
A child’s grip strength is lower, and thus so is their ability to hold a heavy controller comfortably, especially one not designed for their hand size. A single joycon in sideways mode, often used in child’s party games on the switch, is a far better controller size for a child while it is uncomfortably cramped for an adult.
It is not a coincidence that the Switch, which is marketed as a family console, comes prepacked with the controllers that are kid friendly and adult friendly controllers are a secondary purchase.
There are more things you can point out, but in a practical sense you can see these design principles applied by comparing something like Kirby vs Metroid Dread.
Kirby is almost entirely controlled through the face buttons, with only the rarely used defense button mapped to the shoulder buttons, and you can really get by with never using it. The triggers are not used at all. You rarely have to combination press anything. If my memory is correct, the shoulder buttons are never used for any temporary transformation abilities. The difficulty of using new abilities should not be compounded by hard to reach buttons.
Dread on the other hand uses combination presses a lot and ties three critical abilities (free aim, missile use, and sliding) to the shoulder buttons. The omega cannon, a rarely used but critical and time sensitive ability, is tied to the shoulder buttons for the easiest and most intuitive possible use. The stress of defeating an emmi should not be compounded by fumbling with controls.
Smash Bros in particular is pretty cool in how its control scheme is set up. The most basic functions that a child might use are very simply mapped to the single stick and face buttons. As you learn to play better and try more advanced techniques (like an adult might) like timed grabs, dodging, and shield use you move away from the face buttons, incorporating more and more use of the shoulder buttons. It splits the difference for the best of both worlds. You can trace the principles of this design all the way back to the N64 and I would not be surprised to learn that the in game mechanics were built specifically to compliment this novice to expert transitional design, which is what makes smash bros so friendly to novice and expert gamers alike.
This is an excellent point as well, something I wasn’t going to get into but so much of game design just ignores accessibility issues like this all together. So many of the basic assumptions of game design from input device to button mapping to in game accessibility features are built around the assumption of fully abled adult between late teenager and middle age.
man lord of the rings just fills me with such profound sadness its a world that just…… makes me feel whole and hollow at the same time
14 yr old me saw this and knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to explain what the feeling this frame invokes in me is
I have my quibbles with Jackson’s interpretation but THIS, THIS RIGHT HERE, THIS proves that he got it thematically. He understood the core of what Tolkien was conveying with words. There is wonder and joy and fulfillment in doing things in this world, in striving to make things better we can be the host of miracles…but by the same token living in this world is not the true final path for us, we must always depart for distant shores unknown and sail off hoping only for that “silver glass and a swift sunrise.” THIS FRAME is everything the LOTR was trying to say condensed in to 70mm of film because Jackson and his team understood the heartache of no longer belonging to a world you helped to better but also the joy of having been able to do so: brilliant sun shining onto a lone ship as it glides perfectly across the straight road to the world beyond. Sadness at having to depart joy at having been present in the first place.