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https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/movies/there-s-no-happy-ending-for-movie-theaters-no-matter-who-wins-warner/ar-AA1T9KFm  Lots of headlines about the demise of movie theaters.  When lions were in school, they watched a few movies in theaters because there was no way to watch anything at home.  They got well ahead of the curve after 1998, quickly being able to watch DVD quality at home, on a 14" monitor.  Theaters still offered cheaper, higher quality viewings & didn't go away. After 25 years of gradual improvement in the home viewing experience, the latest breakthrough being rapidly switchable playback speeds, lions have watched movies in theaters roughly every 3 years, gravity (2013), the martian (2015), apollo 11 (2019), top gun (2022).  It's not clear if the delivery medium is entirely responsible.  The home experience is still a relatively small screen with only 2 speakers, level compression, no LFE.  They have to be a certain type of mo...
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After Dick's 100th birthday, the lion kingdom finally downloaded Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 1 of a growing number of movies only available in over 8GB.  Not sure if it's because of increased hard drive sizes or because of deterrence.     Lions thus resumed the practice of transcoding most everything to a lower bitrate.  Unlike the previous trend, all 6 channels of audio are being retained since the mixdown process sux. The last transcode was the despecialized star wars in 2021.  The ages old process of rendering fractional copies at different Q values resumed, but now using H.265 & manual ffmpeg arguments.  The easiest solution is rendering multiple passes of video to ffmpeg, normalizing the audio to ffmpeg, & then multiplexing with the ffmpeg command line.  If the audio doesn't require normalizing, it's smartest to demux the original in ffmpeg.  Pirated audio ranges from 128kbit to 1.4Mbit. None of this process requires cinelerra &...
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The great music scanning

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Lions have possessed the means for a somewhat automated scanning of all the paper books in the apartment & most of the remaneing paper documents.  The mane risk has always been the high rate of data loss.  It would entail storing the documents on 2 hard drives or possibly cloud storage. This is the next requirement in creating enough room to store the VCR. Much of the paper is probably on archive.org already.  It only exists as a record of what titles lions had.  The childhood books were manely lost because there was no record of their titles. Sheet music magazine was never scanned by anyone & was probably not old enough to be public domane.  There are only fleebay print issues.  The compute magazines from the 80's are long gone, but already exist in some scanned format.  It would take a full tripod setup to scan the hundreds of unscanned pages in the apartment.  Since they would be discarded, it would be easiest to cut out the pages for s...
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   Another run through polar express this year.  Full review: https://growmane.blogspot.com/2023/12/polar-express-continues-to-intrigue.html   That shot of the train in the context of the parade ground got the lion kingdom's attention.  It was the centerpiece.  Scenes of the remote canadian wilderness on xmas eve night continue to intrigue.  archive.org obtained the rights to the original book, after many years. This one was even downloadable, in somewhat of a badly cropped, half assed scan. https://archive.org/details/ThePolarExpress-English/page/n7/mode/2up Striking resemblance to certain scenes in the movie.  For all the hype about automated book scanning, the quality is absolutely horrendous.  The book had none of the romance between the hero & the heroine, the adventure in the north pole factory, the hunt for the lost ticket, the out of control train, the spoiled brat, the skeptical kid, the ghost.  It was a very simple kid book...
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   Trophy wife  https://www.youtube.com/@MoonlightCottageASMR/videos  A bit cringy, so the lion kingdom never watched her.  She got easier on the eyes after 50.  Young lion was a sucker for the short ones because they always looked more dominant on camera, when sitting, or in the imagination.  Old lion wants to be alone.  We are products of our generation.  30 years ago, over population was such a concern, public schools made us carry around an egg to dissuade us from having kids.  The population decline crisis didn't exist until high profile executives started using it to defend their polyamorous lifestyle.   Lions still doubt the world can afford more kids, but the current generation is now on track to create the largest baby boom in history.  The fact is Japan's population decline has made it a top retirement destination.  There is a net migration from more crowded countries to less crowded countries.  -------...
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