Michael Kamper

@michaelkamper.bsky.social

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life-long nerd, full-time father & husband, film geek
audio @ Epic Games, he/him
@michael_kamper on mastodon and the twitx

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The Inside Out characters in my head

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Michael Kamper

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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

The entire genre of dancehall (more or less) came about when a reggae producer repurposed a "rock" beat he accidentally discovered on a casio kid's toy keyboard. People recently discovered the long-anonymous Japanese woman who programmed the beat was in fact a huge reggae fan and scholar.

Okuda Hiroko: The Casio Employee Behind the “Sleng Teng” Riddim that Revolutionized Reggaewww.nippon.com The “Sleng Teng” riddim revolutionized reggae music in the mid-1980s, and has spawned hundreds of versions in the decades since then. Less well known is the story of how the distinctive bassline origi...

The Truman Show (1988)

the sky crashed at Planet Hollywood

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Michael Kamper

I’ve been obsessed with the story of Arthur Baker’s forgotten remixes for Bruce Springsteen’s BORN IN THE USA & was thrilled to have the chance to do a deep dive (including a chat with Baker) for NPR: www.npr.org/2024/07/02/n...

The nearly forgotten story of the 'Born in the U.S.A.' remixeswww.npr.org In 1984, on the cusp of superstardom, Bruce Springsteen agreed to let a producer remix three songs from his upcoming album, Born in the U.S.A. 40 years later, those remixes have nearly vanished.

Excellent advice

A couple things I've heard that I like: Don't take criticism from people you wouldn't take advice from. When someone makes you angry, they control you.

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Michael Kamper

“Life is too precious to spend it with important people.” -Harry Partch #BOTD musical instruments designed by Harry Partch

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Michael Kamper

It's not that people necessarily want more money, it's that they want to need less.

Honestly if money were made unnecessary to live we would almost certainly be getting more art out of people, not less, let's make money superfluous to existence and find out

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Michael Kamper

Imagine the deep moral vacuity you'd have to have to use the phrase "shouldn't have" here. Like it was somehow WRONG or IMMORAL for creative people to get paid for their work. Work that OpenAI has pirated to fuel their immoral, unethical machine. Deeply, deeply repugnant worldview.

In an interview, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati says "some creative jobs maybe will go away" due to AI, "but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place" (Kate Irwin/PCMag) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Michael Kamper

this hasn’t gotten a ton of press but Krikzz (maker of Everdrives) has released schematics and software for an open source Sega Genesis / MD flashcart with a price target of $30 github.com/krikzz/open-ed

This is one of those “edge of my memory” things where I have a few scattered images of seeing this as a child, even though I would have been 4.

📺NBC Primetime, June 18, 1977: — TV movie ‘Exo-Man’

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Michael Kamper

If you're a fan of REALLY WEIRD MUSIC, nerds, women, neurodivergence, rebelliously independent spirits, or triumphing over historical erasure, I highly recommend Lisa Rovner's "Sisters with Transistors" doc on female electronic music pioneers, now on Amazon Prime. [Daphne Oram in her DIY rig]

And 12 year old me would never be the same

🎶’Weird Al’ Yankovic released his third studio album ‘Dare to Be Stupid’ 39 years ago, June 18, 1985

Do you all want Blipverts? Because this is how you get a Blipverts.

One of the bleakest uses for gen AI I've seen yet: a bank is rolling out a system to detect when a call center worker is on the brink of "losing it"—and play them AI-made family photo montages to calm them down. Behind the latest fresh hell AI promises: www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-cant-fi...

AI can't fix everything automation already brokewww.bloodinthemachine.com Generative AI is the latest in a long line of technologies that promise innovation and fixes but grind away at public life

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Michael Kamper

Check this out. The music for Back To The Future NES is godawful. Here’s the main theme. WTF is this? youtu.be/EOMu36rw-Yg?... But if you slow it down to 33%, you get this. Recognize it now? youtu.be/bOw56d2A95c?... Turns out they locked the whole soundtrack at 150bpm by carelessness.

Is that a Sebastian the crab on that cow?

Good Morning

I'm a pretty corner male.

I'm a vertical slice male.

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Michael Kamper

it's been almost 20 years since the Gears of War Mad World trailer and we are still trying to escape its shadow. no one will update their marketing plans. we are scraping the bedrock of songs we can slow down and make mournful. we are about to crack the molten core of the Al Yankovic catalog.

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Just to make sure everyone knows, this console is funder by palmer lucky. So do not buy it.

"A Ton Of Money" Has Been Spent On ModRetro's Chromatic Screen To Ensure Accuracy (Image: @ModRetroHub)

"A Ton Of Money" Has Been Spent On ModRetro's Chromatic Screen To Ensure Accuracywww.timeextension.com "We used custom color filters to mimic the GBC LCD"

Trying to force a team and their tech tools to create something neither of those were built for, coupled with unsteady creative direction will destroy any studio. I’ve seen it in person multiple times at this point.

NEW: What went wrong with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? This is the story, based on interviews with two dozen people who worked on the game, of how Rocksteady Studios went from the revered Arkham series to a $200 million flop: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Behind ‘Suicide Squad,’ the Year’s Biggest Video-Game Flopwww.bloomberg.com After seven years of tumultuous development, Warner Bros. took a $200 million loss on the Rocksteady game

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Michael Kamper

This piece on Fury Road by @priscillapage.bsky.social is absolutely epic, mining the story for its underlying ideas - about Songlines, about Dreamtime, Jung and more. Made me want to watch it again right now. www.patreon.com/posts/105414...

Mad Max: Fury Road | Priscilla Pagewww.patreon.com Get more from Priscilla Page on Patreon

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Michael Kamper

I think there’s a real tendency, esp among certain types of knowledge workers, to equate having knowledge with having skill—that if you know HOW to do something or know how something works, that’s basically the same as being good at it. They’re deeply not the same. You’ve gotta put in the reps.

One of my goals for this month is to be more intentional about doing things one at a time. I cannot overstate how hard this is.

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Michael Kamper

Libraries are one of the most radical social institutions we have, because they’re based on the idea that *everyone* has the right to information, for free. It’s also what makes them crucial to democracy. I will never stop yelling about this!

Poor people use libraries. Rich people shut them down because they don't *want* poor people to read.

*sees that a post I made has randomly gotten a lot of attention* *quickly scrolls through my other posts to make sure there isn’t anything embarrassing* It’s like there is a sudden knock at the door at 7am and you quickly run around the house picking up all the dirty laundry.

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wanted to share one of my all-time favorite photographs of George Miller here on the cover of Geo magazine '82

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how i wish how i wish you were here we're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year running over the same old ground what have we found? the same old fears wish you were here

I think this sums up late stage capitalism. We have already bought everything we need. We’ve even bought a bunch of things we really didn’t need. Now they are trying to sell us on things we specifically said we didn’t want.

every company that did “here’s the AI you don’t want. You’ll learn to love it” thing merits total and irredeemable destitution

This neatly sums up my dissatisfaction with Furiosa. Generally, if I come away from a film feeling this way, I tend to think the “pacing” was off, which it was in this case. Unclear stakes kills any potential emotional investment and will help gloss over things like bumpy pacing or clunky visuals.

FURIOSA, FURY ROAD, AND THE NECESSITY OF STAKES by @chuckwendig.bsky.social terribleminds.com/ramble/2024/... "If the stakes are crystalline, many narrative sins can be forgotten. When the stakes are unclear, we are at persistent risk of… let’s call it detaching emotionally from the story..."

Furiosa, Fury Road, And The Necessity Of Stakesterribleminds.com The tl;dr is I saw Furiosa, it was good! I liked it! It was also not amazing, and I think it fell way short of Fury Road (to be fair, nearly everything falls short of Fury Road) — and so I ha…

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)