Oh wow. I forgot about this game for a long time, until just now.
Our elementary school didn't have enough buses to take everyone home at once. The bus departures were staggered so a few buses would take some kids home and return for the next groups.
You definitely wanted to be in that last group of kids to leave, which meant you got to sit in your classroom and play one of the three games we had on our two Macintosh SE machines: Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and The Incredible Machine. Hours and hours spent waiting on the bus playing this wonderful game, usually with your friends sitting next to you quietly yelling suggestions at you. Thanks for the reminder!
Does this work for others not running the browser extension (or outside of your Slack organisation)? Also, Emoji has been part of Unicode for more than a decade...
Just adding another recommendation for those at all interested to check out the above YouTube channel. You can choose a video at random, they're not very serial, but they are fascinating if you're interested remote places.
> I'm not sure how I feel about it. I feel like it feels kind of hollow. Like there's a lot of energy in it, but the vocaloid part just feels so emotionless.
In Japan, the term is "denpa" (電波ソング). Denpa music is intentionally strange as it is catchy, and hypnotic as it is awkward. There are many producers creating high-BPM electronic vocaloid music that is chaotic for effect. It is a bit more twee than the western sounds, as you mentioned, but it can be quite enjoyable if you're in the right mood.
Also, I think you'd enjoy the Song Exploder podcast. If you haven't heard it already, check out the episode where 100 gecs break down how Money Machine was created:
I looked up the vessel mentioned in the article (USCGC Oliver Henry) to get an idea of how large it was. It led me to the Wikipedia entry for the namesake Coast Guardsman himself, Oliver Henry.
Henry started serving in the Coast Guard as a mess steward, which was an all-black rating while the armed forces were still segregated. Due to his his pre-service work as an auto mechanic, he was the first Coast Guardsman to transfer from the mess steward rating to a motor machinist mate. He ended his career as a warrant officer.
The mess steward rating has been renamed to "culinary specialist". Clearly it's no coincidence this particular boat was chosen to reflect this interesting article. His Wikipedia entry is worth a read:
The degree was very interesting! It was a good mix of acoustics + electronic engineering. The first two years' base courses were a lot of math and physics mixed with more general biology/anatomy with a focus on how the entirety of the human body perceives sound. Then the latter upper-level courses were more hands on electrical engineering mixed with artistic theory. One one occasion, an actual graded exam consisted of our professor playing obscure recordings where we had to guess what month/year in which it was recorded based on the aesthetic and recording techniques, as well as technically describe as best as possible _how_ it was recorded. Cycling '74 was big at the time, and I first got into all of the audio engineering by messing around with Max/MSP/Jitter as a teen, which eventually led to a more stable programming career in Javascript, but I still enjoy audio engineering as a hobby.
"A Bigger Bang" by the Rolling Stones is another great example from that era of an album with great songs that was horribly recorded. It was remastered in 2009 but the original 2005 recording was intense. (The fact that it was remastered four years after release says a lot!) I recall record reviews at the time describing the mix as "rough and ready" but really it sounded half-finished to me. I think we can now look back on these records as artistic decisions associated with the era, which is interesting in itself.
I agree with you. I have a four-year degree in audio engineering technology and I think my college years (2004 - 2008) were some of the most hostile for audio recording. Listening back to Memory Almost Full, Paul's songs are fully there but there's that Strokes flat-as-a-pancake pastiche layered on top that's hard to hear through. There are moments where he breaks through (the middle bars of "Gratitude") but you can tell it's a fight for the dynamics from top to bottom.
In fact, he alludes to just the opposite with the title of his 14th solo album, "Memory Almost Full", which itself is an anagram of "for my soulmate LLM" (Linda Louise McCartney).