Yamaha watched all those “I made a guitar out of…” videos on YouTube and finally had enough

I think this Vulture article sums up the veracity of the Scientology claims. Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s accusation included the allegation that she is a true-blooded Scientologist, and she has yet to deny it. By my estimation, Scientology is an ugly (if not evil) organization using the veil of freedom of religion to deflect any criticism of its predatory and abusive practices. Armstrong really does have an excellent voice for this role, but I refuse to support anyone who participates in that shit.

She posted a note to refute the Danny Masterson connection, yet she pointedly ignored the scientology allegation. I think I land in the same place as @harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com on this one. Until she publicly refutes the Scientology connection, I don’t want anything to do with a Linkin Park that includes her.

So what to make of the Scientology links, then? And the whole thing where she doesn’t “believe in” mental illness? If her statement is true, then she has dodged the most disgusting allegations, but idek if u can trust that it is true.

it’s sounding more and more like they should have…

100%. It’s made me rethink all of my support for the remaining members of the band. This choice aside: if they truly respected Chester’s legacy, why not rename the band? You can still play a Linkin Park song or two at shows for your new band, no one will care. To me, all of this just smacks of “Mike Shinoda and friends didn’t want to set aside the fame and album and ticket sales that come from having the Linkin Park name.” It feels like they spent seven years honoring Chester’s legacy so fans wouldn’t revolt when they replaced the irreplaceable.

I’m not saying any of that is necessarily true, but the air of deception around this move makes one start to wonder if they have been deceived in other ways.

Australia a.k.a. the place that every cool punk and metal band of the 21st century comes from

thanks for coming to my TED talk! this is one of the few niche topics that I am weirdly knowledgable about. lol

it’s a fun word, but this meme of redoing songs in this specific soundfont has people misunderstanding the definition of the word. Soundfonts are specific to MIDI tracks/files. MIDI are a specific type of file that tells a synthesizer which notes to play, but does not specify much about how each instrument should sound. So if you have the MIDI file for “Corridors of Time” from the Chrono Trigger OST, and if you have appropriate music-making software, you can assign whatever instruments you want to each of the MIDI tracks. The advantage of this is that the files themselves are quite small, which makes it easy to fit the track data on a cartridge. The downside is that a track will sound different depending on which computer you play the MIDI track on, which may compromise the composer’s original vision. Back in the day, the game console would just use the onboard synthesizer to read the MIDI files and synthesize it in real-time as you are playing the game, so composers could get some consistency from this because if a game only came out on one console, it would always use the same synth and make the same sounds.

In the modern day, soundfonts are a cool way to capture the original sound of older synths. The soundfont is sort of like a snapshot of the specific synth instruments and their specific audio settings, which you can pair with a MIDI file to regenerate the song with identical-sounding instruments on basically any computer. Some seem to think that all games, even into the present, still use MIDI and soundfonts, but this is not the case. Ever since games moved to CDs (and especially DVDs) instead of cartridges, most game composers simply save songs as complete audio files (like you would for an album release), which are more like “snapshots” of the final product, and which contain no data about how the song was created. With DVDs and digital games, there is no longer any real need to keep filesizes down, and so composers can just create tracks with whatever real samples and recordings they want, and the song will sound the same no matter which system you play the game on. Video game music is mostly better off for it.

I say all this to educate folks that “soundfonts” aren’t really a thing anymore, but modern hobbyist producers still have fun making new tracks out of old soundfonts. The “joke” of using the SM64 soundfont for everything is that the composer had to create the MIDI track from scratch, so it’s like a cover but intentionally silly.

bad bot. lol

Lol fair point. I’d rather get out of the pool and piss on the people ruining it for everyone.

We can try to not make things worse. That’s something.

If half the people around me are pissing in the pool, does it matter that i didn’t piss in the pool?

This shit infuriates me so much. Half of what Trump says is threats against people he doesn’t like. After antagonizing everyone and indisputably making America and the world a worse place to live, we aren’t allowed to say that we wish this POS was dead? Idk, i get the sentiment that we need to dial back and use less violent language if we want to see less violence in the world. Problem is, nothing we say or do is going to get Republicans to use less violent language, and I kind of feel like if they don’t change, then there’s no benefit to everyone else dialing it back. In fact, let’s skip straight to Godwin’s law: was it morally wrong to wish death on Hitler during World War II? Was it morally wrong in 1933, when Hitler gained dictatorial power but had not necessarily committed moral atrocities yet?

I’m not saying that it’s likely, just that it is more likely following this event. And yeah, this is absolutely showing that Jack Black is either spineless, or he’s a moderate that truly believes we can defeat fascism by simply getting out the vote. Neither reflects positively on him, but then, I wasn’t looking to Jack Black for political theory.

his millions and his fame, only one of which he is at risk of losing over expressing his opinion

You’re forgetting a third one: his life. The gun nuts are out there, and going up on a stage every night is exposing oneself to those gun nuts.

it doesn’t suddenly become inappropriate

downpunxx was not saying that it was inappropriate. They’re saying that the current political temperature is high, and as a public figure, Gass’s comment could put a target on Tenacious D as “woke liberals ruining America”. Right now, that’s a dangerous label to have if you aren’t anonymous on the internet, and doubly so if you were planning on spending a lot of time in front of audiences over the next few months. Even if the chance of a violent event only went up from 0.1% to 0.5%, canceling is just the smarter move. Why risk it?