Random Thread

[Travis B.]

I was reading this and it seemed that the author was of the opinion that FLOSS ought to be centered around donations. Of course, that belies the fact that for many FLOSS developers such as myself money is not the goal in the first place. My bills are paid by working in MR imaging, and I work on FLOSS not for money but for other things -- the fact that I like building and creating things, and the fact that I like it when other people use the things I build and create. I even appreciate bug reports and requests for help, because they are evidence that other people are really using my software. Yes, I could set up a Patreon, but I probably would not get much money anyways from it, because Forth is a niche area with a relatively small userbase. And I could take my software proprietary and start charging money for it, but all that would do is probably dissuade people from using my software while not actually netting me much money, and that would run counter to my actual goals and motivations.

[Raphael]

Travis, the author of that piece might be talking about people who are trying to make a living as full time FLOSS creators. People like that are in a very different position from hobbyists.

[Travis B.]

Travis, the author of that piece might be talking about people who are trying to make a living as full time FLOSS creators. People like that are in a very different position from hobbyists.

I get that. But the author ignores the fact that many people have no expectation of making money off of developing FLOSS, and do it out of other motivations such as altruism and seeking recognition, and the author seems to blanketly regard FLOSS development where the authors are not being paid for it as being "exploitation".

If I was concerned about being "exploited", in my case, I could have made zeptoforth proprietary and charged money for licenses for it. But the thing is that I would prefer to have many people using it while not getting a dime out of it over having few if any paying customers.

Hell, I specifically chose for zeptoforth to be MIT-licensed rather than copylefted so that people could integrate it into any project regardless of license, whereas, say, GPLing it would have forced users to GPL their own code (because zeptoforth is fundamentally integrated into code compiled with it, in such a fashion that it is inseparable from it). The copyleft partisans would say that this is simply allowing it to be used in proprietary software without anything being given back, but I see it as that I want to give users as much freedom as possible (aside from things such as a warranty disclaimer), and I want to encourage as many people to use it as possible, regardless of how they want to license their own code.

[WeepingElf]

There is currently a discussion in a German music forum about the phenomenon that few new music genres emerged after the year 2000, wherein I noticed that this was a similar phenomenon as what we conlangers know as ANADEW: there are only so many ways something (such as a conlang or a piece of music) can be done, and when there are enough items around, the typological space eventually gets crowded and nothing fundamentally new can be made any more. I coined a term for this: I call it typological saturation. This also seems to be the reason why the avant-garde in the high arts has run its course - what can be done has already been done, and no uncharted terrtitory remains. An example from nature may be that after the Cambrian explosion, fewer and fewer new body plans appeared as time progressed, because more and more ecological niches were filled, and the viable body plans were already in existence.

[zompist]

There is currently a discussion in a German music forum about the phenomenon that few new music genres emerged after the year 2000, wherein I noticed that this was a similar phenomenon as what we conlangers know as ANADEW: there are only so many ways something (such as a conlang or a piece of music) can be done, and when there are enough items around, the typological space eventually gets crowded and nothing fundamentally new can be made any more.

Interesting idea, but I'm kinda suspicious. If you said it was hard to find new melodies, that could be convincing. But it's a pretty strong claim that new genres are hard to find. I'd say new genres come about in a few ways:

* new technology (e.g. the saxophone, electric guitars, synths) — are there no new instruments possible?
* new venues— e.g. there is a big change going from stone cathedrals, to orchestral halls, to nightclubs
* people relax standards about what sounds good (a centuries-long trend theoretically ending in atonality) — are there no conventions to be upended?
* music from a new group is discovered — have we really exhausted everything in world music? (My vote is no, when I hear something excitingly new, it's often from Africa or Asia.)

There's a guy on Youtube, Bill McClintock, who makes mashups, usually heavy metal + soul. And he's very good at it— usually it sounds amazing. Maybe the world isn't ready for heavy metal soul, but why couldn't it be?

We've talked about the genesis of rock before, but I wonder if what your music group is feeling is not that there is no new music, but that rock has been around for a very long time now... at least 70 years. And sure, rap has appeared in that time frame. But a new genre should be something that isn't rock and isn't rap and probably sounds unlistenable until it appears.

[malloc]

You know the political spectrum in Northern Ireland maps onto the Catholic-Protestant divide? What happens when someone belongs to one side of the divide but prefers the policies of parties on the other side? Do they cross sectarian lines to vote for the party more inline with their views or simply abstain from politics in frustration?

[Travis B.]

You know the political spectrum in Northern Ireland maps onto the Catholic-Protestant divide? What happens when someone belongs to one side of the divide but prefers the policies of parties on the other side? Do they cross sectarian lines to vote for the party more inline with their views or simply abstain from politics in frustration?

The "Catholic"/"Protestant" divide is misleading. It is really nationalist/republican versus unionist/loyalist, and the former tend to be more leftist while the latter tend to be more rightist. And remember that there are, e.g., plenty of atheist Irish republicans.

[Raphael]

You know the political spectrum in Northern Ireland maps onto the Catholic-Protestant divide? What happens when someone belongs to one side of the divide but prefers the policies of parties on the other side? Do they cross sectarian lines to vote for the party more inline with their views or simply abstain from politics in frustration?

From what I've heard, there are a few people there who have highly unusual views for the communities into which they were born, such as Protestant Irish Republicans, but they seem to by mainly a handful of eccentrics.

[Raphael]

There is currently a discussion in a German music forum about the phenomenon that few new music genres emerged after the year 2000, wherein I noticed that this was a similar phenomenon as what we conlangers know as ANADEW: there are only so many ways something (such as a conlang or a piece of music) can be done, and when there are enough items around, the typological space eventually gets crowded and nothing fundamentally new can be made any more. I coined a term for this: I call it typological saturation. This also seems to be the reason why the avant-garde in the high arts has run its course - what can be done has already been done, and no uncharted terrtitory remains.

That's been kind of my idea, too.

There's a guy on Youtube, Bill McClintock, who makes mashups, usually heavy metal + soul. And he's very good at it— usually it sounds amazing. Maybe the world isn't ready for heavy metal soul, but why couldn't it be?

That reminds me of something Ares Land said in the previous music discussion here:

I remember there was more of a genre divide than a generational divide when I was a teenager.
There was the pop/rock/metal crowd and the rap/R'n'B crowd, and neither group could stand the others' music.

That mention of a "pop/rock/metal crowd" makes me wonder how a mashup of the cheeriest bubble-gum pop and the darkest (non-nazi) metal would sound like.

We've talked about the genesis of rock before, but I wonder if what your music group is feeling is not that there is no new music, but that rock has been around for a very long time now... at least 70 years. And sure, rap has appeared in that time frame. But a new genre should be something that isn't rock and isn't rap and probably sounds unlistenable until it appears.

Well, yes, I've been asking for years why nothing like that seems to have appeared yet.

[WeepingElf]

There is currently a discussion in a German music forum about the phenomenon that few new music genres emerged after the year 2000, wherein I noticed that this was a similar phenomenon as what we conlangers know as ANADEW: there are only so many ways something (such as a conlang or a piece of music) can be done, and when there are enough items around, the typological space eventually gets crowded and nothing fundamentally new can be made any more.

Interesting idea, but I'm kinda suspicious. If you said it was hard to find new melodies, that could be convincing. But it's a pretty strong claim that new genres are hard to find. I'd say new genres come about in a few ways:

* new technology (e.g. the saxophone, electric guitars, synths) — are there no new instruments possible?
* new venues— e.g. there is a big change going from stone cathedrals, to orchestral halls, to nightclubs
* people relax standards about what sounds good (a centuries-long trend theoretically ending in atonality) — are there no conventions to be upended?
* music from a new group is discovered — have we really exhausted everything in world music? (My vote is no, when I hear something excitingly new, it's often from Africa or Asia.)

All valid points. New instruments, new ways of presenting music etc. can of course still be invented, and the whole richness of "exotic" musical cultures is not entirely explored yet (and such exploration is now often thought to be "neo-colonialist cultural appropriation" after it had been considered "progressive empowerment of disadvantaged cultures" in the last century, and often avoided). Indeed, in the discussion I mentioned, someone posted a link to this - and I had never before heard someone play the uillean pipes like that! Also, I am currently exploring a way of making music about which I don't know whether it has been done before, namely using the voice as a synthesizer. Yet, I don't feel as if that was enough to constitute a new genre (it surely could be used for many different genres), and I am not sure whether it indeed hasn't been done before - I am just not aware of such prior art.

Also, it is well known that music genre terms are usually not come up with by the musicians themselves (who often reject either the terms themselves or the entire method of classifying music), but by record companies and music journalists. Now, facing diminishing returns, record companies have become shy of taking risks by signing unconventional music acts and therefore no longer "need" new genre terms, and music journalists have taken so much criticism for the way they classified music in the 20th century that they too have become shy of the business, and now prefer shoving new music into old drawers already labelled, even if it doesn't really fit in. But then, music classification has for a very long time been an arcane art where the criteria can hardly be understood by laypeople (what, for instance, is the difference between "shoegazing" and "post-rock"?), and in this postmodern age, genre terms are easily repurposed, as one can see with "prog rock" (the main point in the discussion I mentioned), "jazz" (which now even seems to include laptop music using jazz samples), or, best known case, "R&B".

Yet, it is probably a truism that the more prior art is in existence, the more likely it is that an artist trying out something that is new to him accidentally hits on something that has been done before. That's only logical, I think. And someone even made a song about that

There's a guy on Youtube, Bill McClintock, who makes mashups, usually heavy metal + soul. And he's very good at it— usually it sounds amazing. Maybe the world isn't ready for heavy metal soul, but why couldn't it be?

We've talked about the genesis of rock before, but I wonder if what your music group is feeling is not that there is no new music, but that rock has been around for a very long time now... at least 70 years. And sure, rap has appeared in that time frame. But a new genre should be something that isn't rock and isn't rap and probably sounds unlistenable until it appears.

Yep. When bebop started in the 1940s, many people said that it was "just noise" and "no longer jazz"; the same happened with free jazz in the 1960s. Or consider the way contemporary classical music alienated the audiences to the point that many art directors of opera houses and symphony orchestras shy away from programming anything written after 1900. And of course it is hard to imagine a genre that doesn't exist yet (unless it is a cross-over of things already existing). And finally, when something new emerges, it takes some time to see whether it started a new era or turned out to be just a passing fad.

[Raphael]

And finally, when something new emerges, it takes some time to see whether it started a new era or turned out to be just a passing fad.

Oh, I'd say even something that, from a grand historical perspective, turned out to be "just a passing fad" might still be great music, and can be unique, too.

[sangi39]

I remember there was more of a genre divide than a generational divide when I was a teenager.
There was the pop/rock/metal crowd and the rap/R'n'B crowd, and neither group could stand the others' music.

That mention of a "pop/rock/metal crowd" makes me wonder how a mashup of the cheeriest bubble-gum pop and the darkest (non-nazi) metal would sound like.

Not "darkest", but there's BabyMetal (especially their earlier stuff), Hanabie, LadyBaby and similar bands for the kawaii metal "cheery cute meets heavy" vibe

[Raphael]

Not "darkest", but there's BabyMetal (especially their earlier stuff), Hanabie, LadyBaby and similar bands for the kawaii metal "cheery cute meets heavy" vibe

Thank you for the recommendations!

[WeepingElf]

And finally, when something new emerges, it takes some time to see whether it started a new era or turned out to be just a passing fad.

Oh, I'd say even something that, from a grand historical perspective, turned out to be "just a passing fad" might still be great music, and can be unique, too.

Yes. As you certainly know, I am much into prog rock, which is often considered a fad, or worse, an aberration of the early to middle 1970s that has been mercifully ended by punk rock and heavy metal, and those who are still into it were just nerds who have missed the boat.

[alice]

Yes. As you certainly know, I am much into prog rock, which is often considered a fad, or worse, an aberration of the early to middle 1970s that has been mercifully ended by punk rock and heavy metal, and those who are still into it were just nerds who have missed the boat.

An exercise for the reader: in the following statement:

"<genre A of music> is often considered a fad, or worse, an aberration ... that has been mercifully ended by <genre B of music>, and those who are still into it were just <pejorative term-PLURAL> who have missed the boat."

find as many combinations as you can of A and B for which it is true. Use both sides of the paper if necessary

For example, when I was younger, A would be "quite a lot of genres, actually", B would be "acid house", and the pejorative would be "unenlightened individuals who won't open their minds with various combinations of psychedelic drugs".

[Zju]

How do you think the word thousand would be autotranscribed by youtube? <1000> or <thousand>? Well, yes. And no. It's both. And neither at the same time:

drum rolls...

More: show

th000

[Raphael]

Looks like the software correcting itself in mid-word.

[keenir]

not sure if this is the right thread for this...

I was looking at some newspapers today, but the last one was grabbed before I could pick it up to buy it...I think these were fairly interesting headlines:

Hezbollah(sp) threatened Israel, but is refusing to attack, for fear of losing their power and place in the Caretaker Government they're in. {I think they said the Caretaker Government had been around for ten years...I'd've thought that by that point, it would just become The Government, wouldn't it?)

Kenyans are not allowed to have their flags out (not sure if the threat of arrests was for this article or a neighboring article)

Thailand's democracy is being threatened by the continued existance of a scion of a (political? royal) dynasty.

[Linguoboy]

Kenyans are not allowed to have their flags out (not sure if the threat of arrests was for this article or a neighboring article)

It's interesting to me how little coverage the protest movement there is getting in US media. I've hardly seen it mentioned at all (and not just because the Presidential election is, as usual, sucking up all the air in the room; there's been at least some headline coverage of Bangladesh, for instance).

[MacAnDàil]

There is currently a discussion in a German music forum about the phenomenon that few new music genres emerged after the year 2000, wherein I noticed that this was a similar phenomenon as what we conlangers know as ANADEW: there are only so many ways something (such as a conlang or a piece of music) can be done, and when there are enough items around, the typological space eventually gets crowded and nothing fundamentally new can be made any more.

Interesting idea, but I'm kinda suspicious. If you said it was hard to find new melodies, that could be convincing. But it's a pretty strong claim that new genres are hard to find. I'd say new genres come about in a few ways:

* new technology (e.g. the saxophone, electric guitars, synths) — are there no new instruments possible?
* new venues— e.g. there is a big change going from stone cathedrals, to orchestral halls, to nightclubs
* people relax standards about what sounds good (a centuries-long trend theoretically ending in atonality) — are there no conventions to be upended?
* music from a new group is discovered — have we really exhausted everything in world music? (My vote is no, when I hear something excitingly new, it's often from Africa or Asia.)

There's a guy on Youtube, Bill McClintock, who makes mashups, usually heavy metal + soul. And he's very good at it— usually it sounds amazing. Maybe the world isn't ready for heavy metal soul, but why couldn't it be?

We've talked about the genesis of rock before, but I wonder if what your music group is feeling is not that there is no new music, but that rock has been around for a very long time now... at least 70 years. And sure, rap has appeared in that time frame. But a new genre should be something that isn't rock and isn't rap and probably sounds unlistenable until it appears.

Exactly. So much more is possible. We have only barely begun striking the depths of the instruments, venues, tonalities and genres that exist, let alone inventing new ones.