Good advice: if you're gonna die, wait until you're the headliner.

12 years ago
Le Butcherettes' Teri Gender Bender Talks Bloody Pig Heads, Malcolm X and Abuse

How has your stage show changed since the days of performing in Mexico?

We used elements before like the blood and the pig's head. [...] Now, it's just me. It's too expensive to be spending so much money on meat and it's bad for our luggage [laughs].

Did you used to lug that around from city to city?

In Mexico we did the dumb mistake of leaving the meat in the luggage for three day and we opened it up and it was the worst smell you can imagine. I think that's probably one of my motives to stop doing that.

When you throw yourself in the crowd, do you ever get nervous that the audience won't catch you?

[...] The stage was six or seven feet away from the rail and the people, and I didn't think about that. I literally backflipped off the stage and onto the floor bashing my head. My head was the first thing to bash against the floor and then my body fell on top of my neck. I didn't get hurt, I didn't get one bruise on my body, not one fracture or anything. I could have seriously paralyzed myself. I didn't feel fear and that kind of scares me, because when I'm onstage I'm capable of doing so many things to myself, which is bad.

I got this long email from my mom saying, "Teri please don't do this again. You don't want to die -- especially as an opening band."

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An important message about Floppy Disks.

12 years ago
Floppy Disks: It's Too Late

Why am I telling you this?

I am telling you this because I am grabbing you by the fucking collar and shaking very hard because it is obvious you need to be shaken very hard and told that this is it. This is the endgame for floppies. We went over the hump, and the chances of rescue are slim to none now, but there are still chances. It's a chance that needs to be taken now.

If you have an archive or cache or hoard of floppies, you need to get in touch with me. I will help get the data off of them for you, whatever piecemeal amount is still thriving on there. We'll get errors up the wazoo, and some of them will be simply unreasonable, but it has to be done, I have to try.

(Pffffft. I, of course, archived my floppies years ago.)


Whoa: I just noticed that my "floppies" blog posts that I linked to up there are very nearly a decade old. This is like that scene in Why I Hate Saturn where she's lying on her bed drunk and reading her old journals, and she comes to a journal entry about her lying on her bed drunk. Except I'm not lying down or drunk. But wow, I've been sitting in this chair a long-assed time.

Also, it was just about too late a decade ago. For the floppies I mean.

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DNA Lounge: Wherein good help is hard to find.

12 years ago
After two weeks of failing to fix our espresso machine, the repair guy found time in his busy schedule to stop by again today. This time what he had to say was: "This used espresso machine that you just spent $1,500 on is junk. What you ought to do is buy a used espresso machine from me for $2,500. Oh, it's not a La Marzocco, it's some model that nobody else uses. And it's bigger, so it will waste another foot of your bar. But I'll give you $400 for your machine that I don't know how to fix!"

We'll be going with someone else now.

More days down the drain.

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Location: 37° 46' 15.63" N, 122° 24' 45.70" W

How bad an idea would it be to re-encode the audio on all of my videos?

12 years ago
Something like:

# Extract the audio track from the video as a 16 bit 44.1kHz WAV.
ffmpeg -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 44100 -ac 2 TMP.wav -i OLD.mov

# Use lame to determine the volume adjustment for that WAV:
lame -f TMP.wav /dev/null | grep ReplayGain

# Convert dB to a ratio: r=10^(db/20)
# Convert ratio to ffmpeg's -vol arg: r*256

# Use ffmpeg to re-encode the audio at the new volume, while leaving video alone:
ffmpeg -i OLD.mov -vcodec copy -vol VOL -acodec libfaac -ab 160k -map_meta_data 0:0 NEW.mov

My worry, of course, is that doing this without actually listening to each file afterward might be a crazy thing to do, since it's a lossy process, and the files are huge, so I'm not going to want to keep both copies around for long. And also because I don't trust ffmpeg to not just go off and do something completely insane every now and then.

I'd be really, really worried about losing A/V sync on some files and not noticing it until later. Is this a way in which ffmpeg is likely to fuck up?

I am only even considering this, of course, since Apple broke the "Volume Adjustment" option on video files in iTunes 10, and I have no reason to expect that they'll ever fix that bug.


Update: Two things:

  1. Apple fixed the bug! They obey Volume Adjustment again as of iTunes 10.5 beta!

  2. That doesn't help with videos that require more than +6dB, though, so I wrote this: video-replaygain.pl.

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