It’s largely learned; people who are born deaf don’t vocalize their sneezes, because they never heard anyone else do it.

I mean, it depends on how many people you have available. Five or six strong dudes could easily overpower him in like 10 seconds. Have another dude ready with a pre-tied noose, so all he has to do is throw it over a bar and pull it tight. Once Epstein is being bearhugged by like three dudes, getting him into the noose would be trivial.

A minute would be tight, but if you keep cameras in mind and bum-rush him with a practiced team, it could be doable.

There is one instance where I have heard of a literal Suck Button. Gonna copy and paste it here…

Not my story, but I like to read it again from time to time and get a good chuckle:

My band’s drummer, John, is also a sound guy; for several years before we hooked up musically, he had been doing sound for other bands I was in, as well as for touring acts I booked shows for. He’s very good at what he does, and has a pretty massive rig. Anyway, he’s the nicest guy in the world at band practice, at Burger King, or at a gig we’re playing, but when he’s running sound for other bands, he can be pretty crabby.

Very little patience for bands who start late or end late. Even less patience for bands who take an encore when they’re the second band playing out of five. Very little patience for singers who ask for more vocals in the monitor while cupping the microphone ball in both hands (feedback, anyone?) In general, just an altogether grouchy sound man.

For example, he ran sound once for this seven- or eight piece ska band. One of the trombone players said he needed two mics: one for his horn and one for his backup vocals. Normally at this venue (a 120-seater), John didn’t bother to mic horns at all. Rolling his eyes, John put up a Shure Beta 58 and some AKG condenser mic. “This Shure is for your vocals, and this AKG is for your horn, OK?” he said. “Don’t blow your horn into the vocal mic, because your horn is about 30db louder than your voice and I’m going to have everything mixed properly.” Horn player nods his head. During the second song of the set, apparently this trombonist was set to get a solo. Right before his solo starts, he grabs both mics and pushes them close together, so that the capsules are actually touching. He then blows this fortissimo opening note into BOTH mics. I was sitting at a table in back, by the sound board, at the time. John’s limiters caught most of it, and I STILL had ringing in my ears for two days. At the end of the song, John mutes both of the guy’s mics (and leaves them mute), and basically threatens to ream out the guy’s plumbing with his own horn if he ever pulls that shit again. John does this through his talkback mic, which is clearly audible over the monitors. The crowd bursts into laughter, and the horn player goes bright red in the face.

At any rate, for years I had heard John threaten bands with the “suck button.” Bands who were taking too long to set up, or whose members repeatedly refused to follow reasonable directions (please keep that vocal mic away from the monitors!), would be threatened. “Pull that shit again, and I’m gonna hit the suck button on you guys!” I took it to mean that he would intentionally make them sound bad, but he never followed through on the threat, so I took it as a vague general warning.

So anyway, a little while back he’s running sound on a four band show. The second band, a Matchbox 20/Train kind of band, has him running 20 minutes behind before they even play a note because their lead guitarist was late. Their allotted set time is 40 minutes, but their last song runs over and by the time it’s done, they’ve played for almost 45 minutes. John says quietly over the talkback mic, “Hey guys, you’re done.” The lead singer says loudly over the vocal mic “Sound man says we gotta get off the stage. We got one more song for you!” as they kick into another soupy jangle-rock tune. John shakes his head at me. Then, the most amazing thing happened. After their “encore,” this band kicks straight into ANOTHER song without announcing it, apparently in the hope that John wouldn’t notice it was a different song.

John leans over to me to be heard over the PA and asks, “Hey, wanna see the suck button?” “Sure,” I replied. I figured he was going to muck with the levels or just turn them off or something. Instead, he reaches to one of his racks and starts scrolling through patches on his trusty DigiTech unit. Sure enough, he gets to a patch titled SUCK BUTTON. He engages it, and all hell breaks loose onstage. The lead singer and the lead guitarist (who was singing backup), immediately start to sing WAY off key. They try to get back in tune, fail, trail off in mid-line, try again, and start glaring at each other. The guitarist is so distracted by this that he starts muffing the chord progression. If not for the drummer, I think the whole song would have derailed. For the entire four minute duration of the song, I was treated to this asshole band sounding like crap and getting madder and madder at each other. John explained the patch to me; basically it pitch shifts all tracks from the vocal submix up one step, BUT ONLY IN THE MONITORS. So the audience, out in front of the mains, was treated to the sound of two guys trying to get in tune, only to be utterly confused. If they got it sounding right in the monitors, they could tell that something was grossly wrong in the mains. And each of the singers thought it was the other guy who was singing out of tune. I just about died laughing.

Yeah, Humble has been spiraling, and this is one of the largest symptoms. If they’re out of stock, they shouldn’t be allowed to list the game for sale. It’s particularly bad on their Humble Choice offers, where trying to claim after Day 1 often ends up with half of the keys listed as out of stock.

I actually wanted to ask about that… Is it considered best practice to run a bunch of different compose files, and update them all separately? Or do you just throw all of them into a single compose file, and refresh the entire stack when updating?

The latter definitely seems like it would be more streamlined in terms of updating, but could potentially run into issues as images change. It also feels like it would result in a bunch of excess pulls. Maybe only two images out of a dozen need to be updated, but you just pulled your entire stack. Maybe you want to stay on a specific version of one container, while updating all the others. Sure you could go edit the version number in the compose, but that means actually remembering to edit the compose before you update.

Yeah, I get severe weather warnings all the time. Usually for hail or damaging winds, but also occasional tornadoes. But I have only ever seen a few tornadoes actually touch down, and it has always been dozens of miles away. Even the hail warnings are usually overblown. Warning about baseball sized hail, then we only get some wind and a light sprinkle.

My favorite is when it's a local/college-age band and parents are around. Or spouses of older band members. "No, I can't get her vocal any louder because she's whispering six inches from the microphone and Jimi Hendrix up there is blasting his amp at 11."

There’s a reason the lead singer’s girlfriend is the butt of so many jokes. And I have 100% had to use the Baffle of Shame for guitarists who won’t turn down. It’s just a doghouse made out of pink foam board and tape, that you can throw over the top of problem amps. Add a corner notch for cables to run in/out, and dust it in some black paint.

If it’s a tube amp, I can at least understand it; Tubes distort at higher volumes, and the distortion is part of the tone. And if you try to argue with a guitarist about their tone, you’ll lose every time. The nice once will smile and nod, then not make any changes when you ask them to turn down. The rude ones will make direct eye contact as they turn it up more.

But if it’s a solid state amp, putting a 2x4 block under it (or putting it on a spare guitar stand) to tip it towards their head usually works. The guitarist is used to having all of the sound blow right past their knees, so actually aiming it at their head makes a world of difference.

She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to "fix" including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.

My buddy has a $6000 projector. He found it in the trash. The only thing wrong with it was a cracked solder on the power supply.

Similarly, I have a $5000 audio console that I got for ~$100 in parts; it had a bad power supply. Honestly, probably just a bad capacitor on the power supply, but I didn’t feel like desoldering every capacitor to check their capacitance. Diagnosing the power supply took about 5 minutes, and most of that was just finding all of the screws that were holding the case together. A quick read with a multimeter told me everything I needed to know. Swapped out the supply, and it has been working fine ever since.

That I can make the band suck less. Sure, there’s something to be said about polishing a shit... But ultimately, it’s shit in>shit out. Your guitar doesn’t sound like ass because of the EQ; it sounds like ass because the guitarist had nine beers before he even walked on stage, and he can’t stay on beat to save his goddamned life.

Psychoacoustics is a fascinating subject. Just like placebo, people will fool themselves into thinking that something sounds good or bad, simply because they want it to. I always keep a DFA fader on my console, for when random people walk up and have suggestions. I make an adjustment to the DFA fader, they smile and nod to themselves, and then walk away. DFA means “Does Fuck All”. It’s literally a fader that isn’t doing anything at all. It’s not in the mix, it’s not in the monitors. It’s just a spare fader. But by adjusting the DFA, audience members will feel like I took them seriously, and they’ll placebo themselves into thinking that I took their advice.

To be clear, not all audience advice is bad advice. But for every “it’s too loud” complaint, you’ll inevitably get an equal and opposite “it’s too quiet”. There’s a reason music festivals have their audio console fenced off with a very wide perimeter. It’s specifically so drunken audience members can’t just saunter up and start yelling suggestions. That shit is distracting and 99% of the time is entirely unproductive.

They legitimately just hadn't fucking planned for how they were going to present their slideshow at this off site location and expected the CTO to just magic it together. Why they needed to do it offsite when they had a fancy ass overly expensive room built for conferences at the HQ? No fucking clue.

I work at a place with a banquet room, and consistently ask myself the same question. So many corporate meetings that show up with basically zero plan. I’ve had to tell clients “no” when they asked last minute if we could put up a projector and screen.

Sorry brotato, you should have mentioned the need for a projector during any of the six emails where I specifically asked if you needed a projector. The projector is already in use across the building; you said you didn’t need it six times, so we rented it to a different client instead. And even if it were available, that shit takes two people and fifteen minutes to put up. And I know you aren’t going to crawl around on the floor in your suit to help snap it together, so it’s just me here. And I’m not doing it by myself. So the answer is no, you can’t use our projector and screen at the last minute.

Aleshire said it’s not unusual for government agencies to tap the common-law privacy exception in an attempt to withhold records from the public. But he’s used to it being cited in cases that involve children, medical data or other highly personal information — not for emails between an elected official and a businessman.

Until proven otherwise, I’m assuming the emails include details about Musk’s ties to Epstein.

Every time Ted Cruz flees the state, a supply-side angel gets its wings.