Literally waiting for January. New employer won’t have an opening until then. Current job doesn’t know yet.

I haven’t had a cost of living increase in 3 years.

I work in events. The events are now only business events not party events. The only parties that are still happening are weddings. Even fundraisers have scaled back.

Audio engineer here, if you need assistance let me know.

As the saying goes “You’ll know a hero from a coward when you see which way they run.”

Fun fact this actually comes from an old tradition where a pineapple was a symbol of hospitality, and when the pineapple disappeared the hospitality was gone, the party was over and you needed to leave.

So literally a DJ fruit.

Spec ops the line. White phosphorus.

1. You can upgrade straight to hotels you don’t need to get houses before upgrading to hotels it’s just that no one has the capital to do that.
2. The original rules had a second phase to the game that replayed the game with the capitalism taken out using socialism instead, it was created by a school teacher as a way to showcase the dangers of capitalism. When Mattel bought stole the game from the original creator, they removed the second phase keeping only the capitalism phase.

I’m going to start this with allegory and bring it back around to practical application.

My neighbor IRL legitimately has greener grass than I do. She also has 4 dogs who poop and fertilize the lawn everyday. She can’t walk into her yard without shoes on or without watching where she steps. She has a toddler who isn’t allowed to play in her backyard because of the dog poop. I may see her greener grass and want greener grass, it’s fine to want greener grass. But once I stop and look at why she has greener grass and what not only her, but her family has to sacrifice to get that greener grass, I realize it’s not worth it to me. I like being able to grill outside, I like being able to walk barefoot, I like not worrying about what’s in my lawn. Would I like it to be greener? Sure, but not at the cost of losing the very thing that I want.

The way things are perceived doesn’t reveal what it actually took to get those results. Especially in the social media age where everything is a cherry picked version of reality. You are never getting the full story in today’s social media environment, and with the prevalence of filters and AI what tiny story you are getting might straight up be a lie.

The best advice I can give is to look at the greener field, and actually talk to people who have a greener field. Don’t just follow them on social media or watch videos about it, talk to them. It’s much harder to lie face to face than it is on a video. If you can, try it for a week, then ask yourself, would I still want to do this when life happens and things aren’t perfect. Would I want to do this for the next 5, 10, 20 years? Once you have an idea of what sacrifices it will take to get the greener field, then and only then can you ask yourself is it worth it? It may be, in which case, attack it with gusto. It may not, in which case, fantasizing is fun, but that’s all it is, a fantasy.

Good luck.

Because it hasn’t been long enough for the patent to expire so no one is allowed to make it.

In the live production world, there was a product called “spider pod”. It is a riser for a camera tripod to get the camera up higher. It came with a step for the camera operator. A metal worker who used to work in television made it, patented it, and ran the entire business out of his shed. It became a staple in the television industry. After his last kid graduated college, he retired. You can now only get them used and nothing has replaced them on the market.

I just recently had this happen and have started looking for new jobs as a result. Our company fired someone and a VP sent an all staff email and was publicly telling everyone that the now fired employee couldn’t be trusted etc. Rather than responding to the email so everyone could see, I sent a private text that information like that didn’t need to go to everyone and if someone needs to know that the individual was fired, it should be explained that “They were no longer able to uphold company standards.” And leave it at that, because anything more opens you up to a libel lawsuit. The VP’s apparently didn’t like that I was trying to protect the company, and hold to HR’s standards. So now I’m looking and realized I should have started looking 4 years ago because I can get a 40-50% raise by jumping ship.

My time at this company is coming to an end.

Politicians, they used to be expensive. Now it’s almost downright affordable.

Noai.duckduckgo.com

I work at a smaller company, everyone has to carry their weight, and the owner pays about double the industry average. He always says I would rather have shit equipment and good techs, than good equipment and shit techs. Obviously we want both, but if push comes to shove, you pay for the right people, because that’s harder to replace than a machine.

Comma 3x it’s a module that adds sensors and compute to turn your car into a level 2 self driving vehicle.

Glinet travel router. I always have both wifi and hardline with me wherever I go, whether or not I have either.

Sabrent thunderbolt dock. It has NVME drives inside of it so I can have my laptop be mobile then come home and have all my games ready to go.

Dockcase dongle. Most dongles suck, this does 100 watt pass through charging, gigabit, 4k 120hz and 20gb transfers on the ports.

Obviously Luna is up there, but my personal favorite is Pluto’s moon Charon. It’s so large it turned Pluto into a binary dwarf planetary system, the only binary system in our solar system. It also shares an atmosphere with Pluto.

Technically I have multiple TV’s only because I wanted multiple large high resolution screens for my computer. I don’t actually use them as TV’s.

Couldn’t find my drink when I was at work, found it…

Also ignore the spring pollen in the south it gets bad.

They changed how they measured loudness a few years back on both the mixing side and the playback side. Back in the 00’s the measurements were based on peak volumes, so brick wall limiting was used to get the most volume that you were allowed to have in playback. This caused the dynamics to be essentially non existent. Filmmakers hated this, movie goers hated it, the only people who liked it were the lawyers because it meant lawsuits didn’t happen.

Laws were changed in the early 10’s that changed how loudness was measured. Now it’s measured as exposure over time. This has had many benefits in the production of both films and music, however the laws, at least in the USA and Canada, were written very broadly, and consider movie theaters and concert halls to both be performance venues. This means movie theaters have the same restrictions as concert halls.

Because the law measures exposure over time it allows the loud areas to be loud as long as there’s quiet areas to offset it. This means when you have someone who doesn’t understand yet how the new laws affect the audio mix, the dialogue will get buried to make the explosions more “impactful”. It has started to get better since the laws have been around for a while and people have gotten used to them.

As dumb as all this sounds the calculations themselves, are very well calculated and you are way less likely to get hearing damage these days from a concert or movie theater than you used to. Your ears get damaged from long term exposure easier than peak volumes, and with measurement stick now measuring long term exposure as opposed to peak volumes, you end up better protected. Because of the regulations you are more likely to get hearing damage from headphones than you are a concert or a movie theater.

I used to tune the speakers in movie theaters.

If it’s a Dolby certified theater there will be a chair that has a placard on it, that’s where the mic was placed to tune the theater. It will always be center, about 2/3rds of the way back. Most other certifications mirror this in some way.

We did THX certification and that was a little bit more broad, we wanted the “sweet spot” to be an area, not a single seat. This is why a THX certified room will look different than most other theater rooms, because it’s designed for maximum coverage. This also means we are sacrificing sound quality for sound consistency, making sure every seat sounds the same. With that being said we completely ignored the margins, they were called quarter margins and anything within 25% of the edge was disqualified from primary readings. We would take secondary readings from the edge, but that was just to verify that there were no glaring problems, not for actual certifications.

In short… central-ish is good for any movie theater.