[micrex22]

I recently had a dream in a partially lucid state where Disney had a recalled episode in Mickey Mouse called "the honeyman": Mickey turned into a Pooh-Xi Jinping hybrid.. which became known as the honeyman (followed by a song "the honeyman can" to the tune of the candyman).

Probably because of Hamei calling Microsoft "Mickey Soft" along with me laughing about the AI Winnie-the-Xis generated on the internet. *sigh*

[Raion]

Don't say anything bad about China too loud or you'll get an admonishment from someone here who thinks that 中国 is unfairly maligned... And apparently thinks that having adequate plumbing, water you can drink cold from the tap, not being welded into your house if you're suspected of being sick, not blasted randomly by policemen with toxic chemicals, not being bombarded by Street vendors who only know a choice few words in English and don't take no for an answer if you don't look or act Chinese, oh and let's not forget that it performed unethical experiments on viruses that caused a mutation that ripped through millions of people worldwide and caused some of the greatest human rights violations of all time. Yeah. Love the culture, love the food, adore the language, but I can get all that from Taiwan. There's nothing that the mainland offers. Communism, or communism with Chinese characteristics, or whatever weird socialist hybrid that China's calling its government now, and the people who implement that should be given very brutal punishments. No I'm not talking electric chair. I'm talking put them into a gladiator style arena, cover them in sheep's blood then let loose a pack of rabid wolves upon them. Sell tickets for $1,000 each someone will buy them.

Insanely anti-commie/socialist diatribe aside, lucid dreams have happened for me and they generally are extremely absurd. Recently most of mine have been work related and as soon as I realize I'm dreaming I generally tend to completely clear the world space and rebuild the dream as I want it. For me as I obtain lucidity I always end up obtaining full control over the world space I don't know if that is true for other people. I will usually destructively remove all of the offensive elements and construct things that are calm/positive as I don't enjoy waking up with extreme paranoia in my mind.

[Shiunbird]

Raion, I've just finished reading "Chip Wars". It was very interesting. About how the Chinese tech industry got to its current state, all the way back from the first transistor being invented and East Asian countries working with the US government to improve local living standards (as communism was becoming more popular), thus leading to the first American electronics factories in the region.
In the queue, I have the story of a Brazilian journalist invited to teach in China and then coopted to work in Huawei back in Brazil. Sadly, in Portuguese only so far.
(I agree with absolutely everything you said, wouldn't change a word)

Lucid dreams don't come too often to me. When they do, I am usually flying. Flying is difficult - I usually end up hitting power lines or a skyscraper.
I don't like dreaming in general, because when I wake up I can't fall asleep again and the night is ruined.

[micrex22]

Don't say anything bad about China too loud

There is only one China, go back to sleep!

I don't like dreaming in general, because when I wake up I can't fall asleep again and the night is ruined.

At least only your night is ruined, and not your day

For me it's the weirdness of the dreams, or the anxiety that can cause. Oh well...

[hamei]

I recently had a dream in a partially lucid state

Oh poop. I thought this was going to be about the 8824 and Sonic Studio. I think jan-jaap has that running on some older Big Boxes ? The floor type ? I don't think it ever ran in 6.5 or 6.4 or 3 ? or even 2 ? J-J, if you have some screenies, that'd be cool to see. That's one program I never got to play with.

But on the optical subject I had an observation maybe an audio person knows about. Octane has a toslink / adat / whatever you want to call it connector. Very cool. When I bought speakers I jumped over the swan desktops for the kind that starts with E but isn't edifier entirely because they had an optical input. Active speakers. They worked nice, sounded good. Not as good as Swans but hey, they had optical, talk to the Octane ! Hi-tech bro ! (I think my walkdat has optical too ?)

And then for some reason I hooked them up with normal rca cables - maybe moved them farther than the toslink cable would reach - and ... oh-oh. They sounded better. Honest, I didn't imagine it. Not wishful thinking, this was the opposite of what I wanted.

I don't think it was the cable, I bought a longer higher-priced optical cable and got the same result. So it's either the speaker amp or the Octane but does anyone have hands-on with the subject ? Just in case I ever get an Octane back and drag these speaks out of the closet ? Because I'd rather trade them for swans if the optical is never going to be an advantage.

Don't say anything bad about China too loud or you'll get an admonishment from someone here who thinks that 中国 is unfairly maligned...

This was going to be a problem, because refuting a bunch of stupid crap is a lot of work. And then I realized it's actually easy - that whole paragraph was just a bunch of stupid shit that has no relation to reality, written by someone who hasn't got a clue about what he's talking about.

There, that made it easy and just as effective as trying to discuss anything, because fruitcakes with lalaland fixations never listen to facts anyhow. Good, finished with that subject.

Love the culture, love the food, adore the language, but I can get all th
at from Taiwan. There's nothing that the mainland offers.

A small correction, no, you cannot "get that from Taiwan."

Taiwan is pretty. Mountains is good. The food is like any of the regions, there's specialties. A few good dishes but none of my favorites. But everyone has their own favorites so could be another person's best dishes. But too many that are fun and interesting are missing, for me.

None of which are available in the US, btw. China food bears some resemblance to what is served in the US, but it's remote. For one thing, almost all china dishes have bones, stems and seeds. That's part of what makes it a china dish :-0 It's also not that purple prose stuff the food writers always squeal. It's decent, tastes okay, but they don't go head-over-heels like the french. Home cooking, basically.

This is sort of sichuanny, not too bad

https://files.catbox.moe/6bjrer.mp4

I should scrounge some more cooking vids, they can be hunger-inducing. Or disgusting, depending on your viewpoint :-) but it is what people in china actually eat so pretty sure you can classify it as "genuine".

"The culture", you gotta be kidding. The 1.4 billion people who live in the cities and areas that date back to the yellow emperor, that's "the culture". Taiwan cut itself off from "the culture" until now it's basically a Disney version of Chinaland.

If one thinks Pirates of the Caribbean is a documentary, then fine, Taiwan has "the culture" but ... yeah. It's cool if people like that shit but I'm more into reality. And "the language", Taiwan accent is so bad that the actors can't even dub their own scenes. Exceedingly country, equivalent to "he shore got a purdy mouth" english. I wonder if they play banjos in tainan ?

There's lots of accents but the standard is supposed to be clear and clean. Here's a short thing of standard chinese, typical singsong girl. Fill her mouth with mud and that'd be the Taiwan
accent.

https://files.catbox.moe/yd9jfb.mp4

Taiwan is okay, you can have fun there, but thinking this is "the real China" is as silly as thinking Flint, Michigan is "the real USA".

Well hell, maybe that was a bad comparison, the way things are going Flint is becoming more and more "the real USA" every day. Anyway, this thing about taiwan being "the real thing" is bullshit. It's a backwater, kind of like east Oregon. Nice enough people, sort of, except wacked. Thoroughly wacked. "Sovereign citizens" upset about being charged for "their" grazing land, that logical conflict doesn't jump up and smack them in the nose?

... photo

Umm, micrex ? I'd be careful if I were you. Those bears are trademarked and copyrighted, Walt is not going to be pleased. That is stolen intellectual property you have posted, if you care anything about truth, justice, the rule of law, and paying people for their hard work you will of course take it down ?

This is what Edward really looked like anyhow - yes, this is the original. Like I said, Disney versions are kind of blancmange. More than kind of, actually. Pretty disgusting. But at least the rides are fun.

   

[jan-jaap]

Oh poop. I thought this was going to be about the 8824 and Sonic Studio. I think jan-jaap has that running on some older Big Boxes ? The floor type ? I don't think it ever ran in 6.5 or 6.4 or 3 ? or even 2 ? J-J, if you have some screenies, that'd be cool to see. That's one program I never got to play with.

I think I know what you mean but I don't have it. Sonic audio was a PCI card for the early Octane, no? With a sort of SCSI like pigtail hanging out. I do have a pair of Lucid ADA8824 8 channel A/D D/A converters. One of them is the Discreet special version. They are used in a Discreet setup (duh). You use ADAT to the host (Octane or Onyx2) and the Discreet A232 edition of the ADA8824 can be configured from inside Discreet. The other version can be controlled by MIDI I think.

I had to evacuate part of my desk to make space to rework PowerSeries era PCBs to right now both of them are in a corner on the floor, eating dust.


Lucid ADA8824, Discreet A232 edition. This one is not mine.

[hamei]

I think I know what you mean but I don't have it. Sonic audio was a PCI card for the early Octane, no? With a sort of SCSI like pigtail hanging out. I do have a pair of Lucid ADA8824 8 channel A/D D/A converters. One of them is the Discreet special version. They are used in a Discreet setup

Ja, sort of, I guess ... really don't know, that's why I'm curious. The audio stuff on SGI is less discussed than old Alias programs ... you'll hear references to Sonic programs here and there but I've never seen a rundown or even a screenshot.

The midi stuff is sort-of documented but mixers, equalizers ... I have seen references to those things but never been able to find any or really read about audio applications in Irix. There was some stuff a long time ago about electronic music (which is still out there in a loonix version) but that never interested me, but other sound utilities would be fun.

And the mystery of the optical input/output, too. The analog rca jacks sounded better ... that was a shock.

Speakers were edirol, btw, Finally remembered, name was too peculiar to stick in the meat ram. Then I remembered Roland backwards.

[Irinikus]

The scariest thing I've ever seen is myself in a mirror in a lucid dream. This has happened to me more than once, with the same result, which is pretty scary!

I also tend to suffer from isolated sleep paralysis and have had numerous encounters with shadow beings in this state and have even once seen two "grey aliens" in this state. (The only shadow being I haven't encountered yet is the hat man, but I've seen the other two prominent ones a few times.)

I've once been levitated in a state of sleep paralysis, in my own room, which is quite an experience to have.

I've also been visited by other entities which aren't of the shadow being kind. (They appear human like but are significantly more powerful than we are.)

Some of my experiences have been in line with what people who have been supposedly been involved in the "Montauk Project" have experienced, in my case, I was exposed to their magnetic bottle experiment and cast into a void of nothingness! (After listing to me talk about one of my experiences, one of my friends lead me to the fact that the experience was strikingly similar to those described by the "Montauk kids".)

All I have are fractured memories, but as sure as I'm sitting here, these are experiences I've had.

The thing that really interests me about all of this is that people all over the world are having shared experience of this type, with no connection to each other what so ever, which kind of exposes the fact that there's more going on in this world than meets the eye, which is kind of scary and comforting at the same time.

Has anyone else here had such experiences?

[vishnu]

The Wachowski brothers explored pseudo realism in a rather interesting way in their sadly short-lived series "Sens8." Unfortunately, the show was too intellectually sophisticated for mass appeal, which is the only thing Netflix understands (mass appeal), and it was canceled after the second season.