SciFi author, John Scalzi, introduces his daughter to vinyl.
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SciFi author, John Scalzi, introduces his daughter to vinyl.
Comments
42 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.I wonder if that’s real (he IS a writer of fiction). You’d think even a 13year old would have seen rap DJs using one for scratching. Anyway, he shows a newbie a COLORED vinyl LP? I cringed when she held it with her fingers against it. Funny there was no printing on the label.
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Yeah, I sensed some acting, and that looked like a new record. Anyone who listens to music with a middling level of enthusiasm is aware that records are still in existence. I’m a fan of Scalzi, but sometimes his stories just aren’t all that believable…
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Agreed. I grew up in the late 70s – early 80s and I was familiar music having been available on reel-to-reel, even though I’d never seen a setup in person (outside of electronics stores).
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Great episode of DS:9 , Up vote
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Give her an old 78. One song for each side, and toss the metal or wooden needle after each play. Or maybe a sheaf of papers with music printed and an instrument to play it on. Man are we spoiled today. I have thousands of songs and a few movies clipped to my belt (in the phone), and can stream many more over the wireless network. Even 15 years ago I wouldn’t have predicted that.
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If it were a 78, her little “oops I dropped it” would have been “oops, it is in 15 pieces”.
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I’d be a different person today if I had an ipod in high school. I used to have 1 tape album per day and be sure to bring extra batteries with me.
This makes me feel like an old crotchety dinosaur.
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Bad acting.
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I read Scalzi’s blog every day, I don’t think he would fake this. Its a nice blog & worth the read.
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Yes but if a certain percentage of people don’t shout out “FAKE!” after every video, we lose the internet forever.
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FIRST!
oops.
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Sorry, what I meant to type earlier was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qKcJF4fOPs
Now can I have an upvote? GEEZ.
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How well do you really know this man?
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“Strangest damn diffraction grating I ever saw.”
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what the hell would she say about an 8-track?!?!
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Probably, “a plastic hard drive? How many songs does THIS hold?”
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haha, yes, true
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This would be cool if the acting was better. Next time, have her bring a friend over and tape their response.
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Excellent!
But What record was it?
Orange vinyl too? the paper inner sleeve looked discolored… so its maybe from 50′s to 70′s??
Not a fake_ I say!
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Clear orange means it is most likely very new. Red and blue were fairly common in the 60-70′s. Every once in a while I see green. But yellow, orange and others are, for the most part, in the last 20 years.
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According to HuffPo, it’s a new Jonathan Coulton LP. Scalzi hadn’t owned an album in 20 years, so maybe that family’s just not big on the tunes.
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STAGED
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Vinyl is very available for printing music much as turntables are still manufactured…
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I’m a rabid music lover. I already had a sizable collection of cassettes in my early teens. I had a CD collection numbering in the high hundreds by my late teens and twenties. My dad, who tries so hard, but always ends up getting just the worst gifts, finally splurged and got me a 500 CD changer so I could keep ‘em organized better…the week after I got my first 64 gig iPod and dock. I ripped each CD, placed them lovingly into my brand new CD changer, and proceeded to never play another CD again.
But…uh…what were we talking about again? Oh yeah. F**king LP’s, how do they work?
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Hang onto those CDs anyway. I’ve also ripped all my CDs to MP3s for my portable player and also to FLAC for my “Jukebox” computer that’s wired to my stereo at home. I’m hanging onto the CDs though. Eventually a more efficient format (better quality/smaller file size) will come along and I’ll want to re-rip everything to that format.
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FLAC is the best lossless codec at the moment (and I doubt there is room for improvement until quantum computing goes mainstream)
I believe AAC is the current leader for lossy codecs, using about 3/4 the space of an MP3 for equal sound quality.
To all you old coots complaining about how LPs and 8-tracks make you feel old… I still remember downloading my first MP3 back in 1998: Beastie Boys – Intergalactic. We’re talking about the days of Winamp 1, and downloading on my school’s T1 because I still had a 33.6k modem at home. Heck, I’d only had my Discman for 3 years.
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Ooh, speaking of first downloads, I remember the first song I ever downloaded from the internet. I was exploring the interwebs on my 14.4k modem when I found a treasure trove of wav files. They were just stupid little sound effects like beeps, radar sounds, and some spoken blurbs like “Boy does my butt itch!” And they only took like ten minutes each to download! They were perfect for putting into the programs that I was just learning how to write back then, because hey, who doesn’t like clicking a button and hearing about someone’s butt?
Anyway one of the files was named “stupid_girl.wav” and I just clicked on it without giving any thought to the size. Several hours later it was my bed time and it was still downloading so I let it keep going while I got some sleep. The next morning it was fully downloaded and when I clicked to see what the sound effect actually was it turned out to be the entire song “Stupid Girl” by Garbage. That was years before the mp3 format and Napster became so popular, so it was a very rare treasure at the time. To this day I can’t help but smile whenever I hear that song.
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is it ok here for me to say that I have an album (vinyl) coming out next month? …??
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It isn’t if you don’t tell us everything about it and send over all the audio and video promoting material to Chris later.
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Heh… I don’t think Chris would dig that too much…. but, it’s a vinyl version (and bonus tracks on extra vinyl) of this record:
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err… this record:
http://bit.ly/8948jC
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I don’t mind at all. Sounds pretty damn good!
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Pretty good stuff, Niel!
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Sorry for downvoting you, Chris, I missclicked.
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I didn’t know if someone was mad at me for liking Niel’s stuff or for not minding that he posted it on this thread.
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Wow, thanks you guys! That’s very kind of you!
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Yeah, a 78 might have been better. Then you could spin it on a pencil and let her hold a straight-pin on it.
God, I watched WAY too much Mr. Wizard.
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I have an Edison cylinder record player (Circa 1920ish) and over 30 cylinders of various condition (a couple wax ones that are nearly shot) that was my wife’s great grandparent’s home entertainment system in rural Idaho.
Good for 3-4 minutes per song, then you have to change cylinders and crank it back up. No volume control either, but it was awesome to crank it up recently for probably the first time in 40 or more years.
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My dad has one of those Edison cylinder players. Such a wonmderful antique. He has a few dozen of the blue cylinders with their original sleeves. The thing plays great. I keep trying to convince him to let me display it at my house but he doesn’t fall for it.
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Ever seen this clip?
http://youtu.be/pnsizkVjGm8
An audiophile on a TV show is proudly demonstrating his one-of-a-kind cylinder and it breaks in his hands.
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Ha! People unfamiliar with technology that pre-dates their own existence are unfamiliar with those technologies when they encounter them!
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Obviously scripted. The girl did a fairly half-assed job acting but it’s very obviously acted. I would love to see a real reaction to an LP. I imagine it would make me feel about as old as I felt when one of my son’s friends said “Beatles? Who is that?”.
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