Random non sequitur posts catch-all thread

Jonman wrote:
RawkGWJ wrote:

I agree with Prederik. Pred specifically said, “largely gone”, not gone entirely. There will still be some pockets of what resembles a “local scene”, but it’s nothing like it was 25 years ago.

This argument drives me nuts. It SHOULDN'T be anything like it was 25 years ago, because if it was, then it's been stagnant for that entire time, and who wants that?

Local music scenes have been constantly evolving during that entire period, and don't look the same every 5 years. That's as it should be. That's how they stay vibrant and relevant.

The problem here is that we're all aging out of vibrant and relevant, until we're barely able to even recognize it as such and just gripe about how it used to be in the old days.

I don’t mean that these geographically defined scenes are no longer cultivating the same flavor of music. I’m saying that geographically defined scenes are mostly gone. It’s one big global scene now. With a few exceptions.

It would be pretty weird if Orange County, CA was still the world capitol of crappy 3rd Wave Ska/punk bands.

I think I prefer the global scene model. And personally, I don’t gripe about the “old days”. I think the old days sucked! I don’t want my MTV. I want my Apple Music. I want waves upon waves of new releases by fresh innovative artists. And I largely feel that that’s what I’ve got now. It’s such an enormously huge embarrassment of riches. I love today’s global music scene.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

Tangential: what do you call people who write automated tests?

I get that you're mainly interested in the programmer/QA angle, but the usage I'm talking about is orthogonal to that. If someone works in QA and their main task is writing code, anywhere I've worked they'd be called a developer on the QA team. There's no implication about what business activities are involved, people just use "developer" and "programmer" interchangeably.

This wine bar near my house:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ZDaaZG5.jpeg)

fenomas wrote:

This wine bar near my house:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ZDaaZG5.jpeg)

Drink what you think tastes good.

fenomas wrote:

This wine bar near my house:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ZDaaZG5.jpeg)

Does the spoor of copulating cattle produce an inferior wine?

thrawn82 wrote:

Does the spoor of copulating cattle produce an inferior wine?

TIL why the word "terroir" is so close to "terror".

Mixolyde wrote:

Drink what you think tastes good.

One interpretation is that that's already what the sign's saying, so..

fenomas wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Drink what you think tastes good.

One interpretation is that that's already what the sign's saying, so..

unless you're someone who enjoys a good carafe of f*cking bullsh*t wine from time to time.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
fenomas wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Drink what you think tastes good.

One interpretation is that that's already what the sign's saying, so..

unless you're someone who enjoys a good carafe of f*cking bullsh*t wine from time to time.

I’ve been known to enjoy an entire BOX of it from time to time. But not all at once.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

unless you're someone who enjoys a good carafe of f*cking bullsh*t wine from time to time.

Aha but if you enjoy it then it can't be f*cking bullsh*t wine. Therefore the scenario is ontologically impossible, Quid Malmborg in Plano.

My weird taste in white wine includes Liebfraumilch, 4 euros/bottle (which one of my friends likes to call "the whore of wines" for some reason...) and fairly expensive Chardonnays. That sign does *not* inspire me to purchase the latter there. You like what you like.

I appreciate that the people at my local liquor store agree that i'm not NEARLY smart enough to tell the difference between a $60 Malbeq and a $12 (and, according to some studies, neither can many sommeliers), so I'll just swill the $12 one and stay up too late watching YouTube videos of music from when I was 16-21.

Prederick wrote:

I appreciate that the people at my local liquor store agree that i'm not NEARLY smart enough to tell the difference between a $60 Malbeq and a $12 (and, according to some studies, neither can many sommeliers), so I'll just swill the $12 one and stay up too late watching YouTube videos of music from when I was 16-21.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD! I also pick up the guitar and strum along to my high school favorites when I am in this mood.

"But you left me FAAAAAR BEHIIIIIND!"

Mixolyde wrote:
Prederick wrote:

I appreciate that the people at my local liquor store agree that i'm not NEARLY smart enough to tell the difference between a $60 Malbeq and a $12 (and, according to some studies, neither can many sommeliers), so I'll just swill the $12 one and stay up too late watching YouTube videos of music from when I was 16-21.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD! I also pick up the guitar and strum along to my high school favorites when I am in this mood.

"But you left me FAAAAAR BEHIIIIIND!"

Substitute wine for whiskey and you two are talking about exactly what I'm doing now.

Prederick wrote:

(and, according to some studies, neither can many sommeliers)

For some reason I've always been interested in questions of "aesthetic expertise" like that -whether there's really anything to wine tasting, whether Stradivariuses really sound different, etc. So whenever I hear about a study in that area I tend to jump on it.

And it's uncanny - every single time, the study finds that the experts can't detect what they think they can detect. I've never seen an exception.

The one that really surprised me was a study that pretty exhaustively showed that, once blindfolded, not even the soloist playing the violin can reliably distinguish a Stradivarius from a modern violin.

For being supposedly table wine, I've found that Malbec is tasty across the board.

I've never had Malbec whiskey though.

I wonder if bullsh*t would be better for making beers? Especially if its grass fed bullsh*t...

fenomas wrote:

And it's uncanny - every single time, the study finds that the experts can't detect what they think they can detect. I've never seen an exception.

Agreed. There's a ton of emperor-has-no-clothes stuff going on throughout the culinary and art realms, with tons of people either being afraid to admit they can't tell a difference, or truly believing that they can (even after experimentally failing to do so). I have a vague recollection of an experiment being done with steaks, with the diners exclaiming over the high quality of the ostensibly super high end meat, when in fact it was a basic cut from a local supermarket. Sommeliers are famous for talking about grape regions and then not being able to tell the difference when truly blinded. There was a podcast episode about tea-tasting in which one of the hosts accidentally backed a "professional tea taster" into making wildly incorrect assertions about what they were drinking.

So yeah, eat, drink, listen to, watch, or otherwise enjoy what makes you happy. Everything else is just people posing.

Well, 7up did once conclusively prove in blindfold taste test that it is better than the competition.

My opinion on tea, wine, whiskey and steaks is all the same - the theory of marginal gains very much applies to "you get what you pay for", and it ramps in quick.

That is, the cheapest/lowest-quality will taste that way, but once you get beyond mid-range, the objective differences fade into noise, and you're into "try what you like".

The Two-Buck-Chuck certainly tastes that way, but the twenty dollar bottle is indistinguishable from the two hundred dollar bottle in a blind tasting. That's not to say they'll taste the same, but rather that no-one will be able to reliably guess which is which.

When it comes to cooked food, the preparation is half of the game anyway. A perfectly cooked cheap steak will taste better than a poorly cooked good steak.

Prederick wrote:

I appreciate that the people at my local liquor store agree that i'm not NEARLY smart enough to tell the difference between a $60 Malbeq and a $12 (and, according to some studies, neither can many sommeliers), so I'll just swill the $12 one and stay up too late watching YouTube videos of music from when I was 16-21.

Dude! Let’s hang out.

And that's another thing the pandemic took from us: local wine tastings. I try it, and then if I like it, I buy it.

Wine, wine, wine is very tasty.

fangblackbone wrote:

For being supposedly table wine, I've found that Malbec is tasty across the board.

I'm a Riesling man, FWIW.

Prederick wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

For being supposedly table wine, I've found that Malbec is tasty across the board.

I'm a Riesling man, FWIW.

Me too. When my wife was in law school, the firm she was a summer associate for had a free wine tasting and I really liked Liebfraumilch* and Riesling. I've deliberately not learned too much more so I can safely be happy in that price range.

I got a nice bottle of "90+ Cellars" Riesling at Wegmans for about $12.

* I also remember wondering just what the hell *that* was when I'd find it playing the 2D original Castle Wolfenstein.

Coldstream wrote:

There's a ton of emperor-has-no-clothes stuff going on throughout the culinary and art realms, with tons of people either being afraid to admit they can't tell a difference, or truly believing that they can (even after experimentally failing to do so).

Yeah totally. I remember another study that blew my mind, where basically they took took a chemical with a distinctive odor, and had people smell it out of a jar that was either labeled "blue cheese" or "vomit". And not only did people like one and dislike the other, but brain scans suggested that different parts of the brain seemed to be involved in making the decision.

So, my pet theory is that it's the same mechanism as the McGurk Effect. I think that one's expectation about a wine is just fundamentally a part of the process of tasting it, in the same way that seeing somebody's lips is part of the process of hearing them. I.e. it's not that people think expensive wines taste better; believing a wine is expensive literally makes it taste better.

Of course the upshot of all this is: buy $6 wines and tell your spouse they were really expensive.

When I was working as a department manager at a entry-level-classy (3.5-star) hotel, the purchaser and I organized a wine-tasting night for the relevant management and some board members to help us decide which wines to cycle on and off of our wine lists. It was blind in the sense that all of the wine was unlabelled so nobody knew what they were getting (except me, and I didn't rank them), and not blind in the sense that everyone was encouraged to talk with folks about what they liked and didn't like.

It was far from scientific, but I learned a few important things that night: (1) people tend to say they like the same wine as the people in the group who are perceived to have the most wine knowledge, (2) people tend to say they like the same wine as their bosses like, (3) points 1 and 2 still apply even when the wine in question is made in a local realtor's basement, and (4) always carefully consider work events that you plan to see if you're going to embarrass your boss _and his bosses_ in front of everybody.

On the plus side, my realtor buddy felt pretty good about his wine-making skills.

My wife and I often do mini blind taste tests. She looks away while I set out two different beers in glasses, then I look away while she either swaps the beers or doesn't, so then neither of us knows which is which until we compare notes.

The main thing I've learned is: a surprising number of beers I like taste completely identical to beers I don't like.

BushPilot wrote:

On the plus side, my realtor buddy felt pretty good about his wine-making skills.

Lol epic

BushPilot wrote:

It was far from scientific, but I learned a few important things that night: (1) people tend to say they like the same wine as the people in the group who are perceived to have the most wine knowledge, (2) people tend to say they like the same wine as their bosses like, (3) points 1 and 2 still apply even when the wine in question is made in a local realtor's basement, and (4) always carefully consider work events that you plan to see if you're going to embarrass your boss _and his bosses_ in front of everybody.

That’s fun! And your observation about people deferring to the perceived authority figures matches perfectly with the results of extremely rigorous research.

Oh, there's just so much to be said about the power of suggestion on our perception of things. Like, I don't know for sure, but I am amenable to the idea that I might think that a $25 burger with all the locally-sourced yadda yadda yadda bells and whistles tastes better than a burger with meat I got from the grocery store and made at home just because the former one has a certain price tag the bells and whistles, that I've already convinced myself "it's better" ahead of time.

Also see bottled water. I still remember seeing bottles of Bulgari-branded bottled water in a store once, selling for $5 a 750ml bottle.

Have you ever tried other fruit "wines"? I was in a men's chorus that went on a mini-tour of Ontario, and we stopped at a winery that did everything but grapes. The blue berry wine was an amazing red wine, that I'm sure I couldn't tell from some normal red wines (some fancy local restaurant carried this one). I got elderberry wine just to say I tried it...also quite good. The dessert wine from strawberries was also amazing. They were very into only using locally grown fruit, so I guess Ontario, Canada does produce a bunch of great fruit.