Re: Realmedia

From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
Newsgroups: alt.slack
Date: Fri, May 3, 2002 11:21 AM

In article <20020502121136.29719.00006085@mb-bk.aol.com>, Bobdiddley
<bobdiddley@aol.com> wrote:

> >> Real media pisses me off for some reason.
> >
> >me too.
> >
> >> It is like the white trash bastard child of audio formats.
> >
> The eight-track of the digital age. Luckily for me, I've never gotten it to
> work at all, so I've never even heard its noise on my own computer. Which
> means
> I listen to Hour of Slack from mp3 CDs.

I think ya'll are nuts... Real Audio sounds amazingly good when it's
done right, especially considering the teeny tiny size of the files and
the pipes it's piped through. Music loses a LOT of course, but spoken
word gets this whole new feel to it -- like words heard spoken through
spinning fan blades. Kind of whispery. My only complaint about RM
format is that there aren't easy conversion methods for bumping it back
up to more common formats.

There was an interim stage there where RA changed every three months,
and some of their beta players were fucked. And the BOOTLEG copies of
their better players were likewise fucked.

Before I got my cable modem, I used RA a lot. And the guys used to post
nifty stuff to a.b.s. in that format, which I somtimes went to the
trouble of copying to tape for re-use.

The fact that ANY of this electric shit works at ALL is STILL blowing
my mind.

--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected (Rev. Ivan Stang, prop.)
P.O. Box 181417, Cleveland, OH 44118 (fax 216-320-9528)
A subsidiary of:
The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. / P.O. Box 204206, Austin, TX 78720-4206
Dobbs-Approved Authorized Commercial Outreach of The Church of the SubGenius
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For SubGenius Biz & Orders: call toll free to 1-888-669-2323
or email: jesus@subgenius.com
PRABOB

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: "St. Marc the Perpetually Amused" <disciple@templeoferis.org>

"Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com> wrote in message
news:030520021121262221%stang@subgenius.com...
> In article <20020502121136.29719.00006085@mb-bk.aol.com>, Bobdiddley
> <bobdiddley@aol.com> wrote:

> The fact that ANY of this electric shit works at ALL is STILL blowing
> my mind.

Sometimes, as Agent Smith suggests, I have to sit back and marvel at its
complexity, its beauty.

I'm not really an expert at anything, but I know varying amounts from a
little to a lot about almost *everything.* And it's *all* like that.

Everything!

It just doesn't seem like it could *possibly* work!

Ever read, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel?" At one point, the protagonist, who
is restoring a space suit he's won in a contest, is reading about all the
environmental variables that a space suit has to maintain in the proper
range to keep its wearer in working order. After finishing, he comments, "I
didn't see how anybody could stay alive anywhere at all, much less in a
space suit."

The same goes for pretty much any system, from a virus to the Space Shuttle.
(Well, the Space Shuttle doesn't *always* work, but it does a surprisingly
large amount of the time.) Things like this are why I am an agnostic
Discordian SubGenius. The world doesn't make enough sense to be run by some
authoritarian old Man in a robe, but billions of years to evolve or not, it
makes too *much* sense for *somebody* not be be cheating somewhere, somehow.
For all I know it's our remote descendants playing with time machines in an
infinite closed causal loop.

Sometimes it's very reassuring to reflect on this. If they've kept it up
this long, they might just keep doing it until July 5th.

St. Marc

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Original file name: Re- Realmedia.txt - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:48