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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I got started pretty recently!

    I wanted a cheap drawing tablet for taking whiteboard style handwritten notes for a totally different project.

    Decided since I had it I would play around with making some art. I ended up really enjoying it! It’s super relaxing.

    Basically I just have Krita, which is free. Then I’ll take photographs or otherwise source images that I might want to paint, and try to recreate them as a reference. NOT tracing, but having the image side by side with the drawing. I find that to be the best for learning. I’m primarily a musician, and that’s how I was taught to learn music as well (listen to a piece and try to recreate it).

    I checked out a few youtube videos about colors as well. Similar to above, I knew I didn’t want to just use a color picker to match the reference image (and I think the result would be bad anyway). So I watched how oil painters and watercolor people made their colors by eye, and have tried to recreate that process in Krita. This part has been the most fascinating, a lot of times your brain tells you you’re looking at a certain color, but because of shadows and lighting and stuff you have to know to choose a totally different color to produce that effect.

    I’m pretty happy with it and I want to keep practicing so I can hand paint my own album art someday! 30+ too of course, altho now that I know I enjoy it I wish I had started much earlier



  • You’re absolutely right about that. My use of “literally all it does” was employed poorly, and is a pretty extreme oversimplification

    There’s a whole mathematical thing happening with FLAC generally, regardless of L/R channels, where it replaces your original waveform with a polynomial approximation of it + the differences between that approximation and the actual. When played back together, those two things always result in a perfect recreation of the original.

    The various compression levels you can choose from essentially control presets relating to how sophisticated those approximations can be, thus cutting down on the amount of differences that need to be stored.

    The reason you may want to play with these settings is somewhat outdated now. But a higher level takes more time to encode, results in a slightly smaller file size, and also takes slightly more processing power to decode. Any modern piece of equipment can handle the maximum setting with no issues.

    But yeah, as a result of these processes (rather than as the prime goal explicitly, if that makes sense), it does joint-encoding and merges anything from the L and R channels that can be merged. This enables it to pull “identical” sounds from L and R even when the data itself is totally different, which is actually more common than not in music due to the use of multi-channel effects such as reverb.

    In the end, a massive amount of the space saved as a result of the compression in typical music comes from removing duplicate information from the stereo field. But all sorts of funky stuff would happen if you opened up a DAW and started contriving different situations for it to compress



  • lol. They can’t hear the difference even with the most expensive equipment. The resultant signal from decompressing a FLAC phase cancels with the original signal if you invert it. Meaning they are indeed 100% identical. Lossless, dare I say.

    Literally all it does as a file format is merge data that is identical in the left and right channel, so as not to store that information twice. You can see this for yourself by trying to compress tracks that have totally different/identical L and R channels, and seeing how much they compress if at all













  • That’s where I’m at as well. Could go so many different ways; how do I know someone is intelligent? Do their conversations feel particularly deep to me? Do they invest their money well? Good at memorizing baseball facts?

    At a certain point yeah, obviously if they just have wind blowing around inside their head it’s unlikely that I would find them desirable as a partner. So in a way it is very important to me. But the vast majority of people are capable of nurturing loving and rewarding relationships rooted in who they are as a whole, whether or not they are remarkably intelligent. So in another way it’s not important at all