TECH2

Last week we talked about The Distortion of Sound, the new documentary concerning the gradual decline in audio quality that plagues the music current music industry. If you haven’t watched it yet (it’s free, incidentally) you really owe it to yourself to take the half an hour, and to share with a less-tech-savvy friend. For those of you who can’t stream a video right now, the gist is this: music fans are getting deprived of the ability to hear the full quality of the music they’re downloading, streaming, and YouTube-ing. Initially, the desire for convenience of carrying a small device necessitated the severe compression of music files, but as tech has advanced beyond that point, the quality of the music we’re hearing hasn’t. In fact, since the CD, the clarity and authenticity or recordings has largely decreased. Buy the best headphones, speakers, you name it, and they’re all worthless if the audio you’re playing isn’t high quality. Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park is a vocalist, songwriter, guitarist and keyboardist, as well as producer, and was one of the many members of the music and recording industry who participated in The Distortion of Sound. I sat down with him before the documentary premiere to talk about the state of the music industry, how he listens to music, and what it was like to record an album analog.

If you have a child, or friends with kids in your life, you probably saw the recent New York Post article somewhere in your social media feed, complete with its click-bait-ish title: “It’s ‘digital heroin’: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies.” Fear-mongering headline aside, the question raised is a good one, especially for those of us who are A/V fans. When it comes to developing brains, how much media is too much?

It’s been nearly two months, and if you haven’t seen it, I have to assume you don’t want to. Cool, have fun with that. You’ve probably skipped past this post anyway.

But if you’re still here, I have some thoughts about Episode VII that I want to talk about and I figure it's been enough time not to spoil anything... even though there are no spoilers here (I don't think).

I can’t stop listening to it. I’m listening to it again as I write this.

The core Just Cause 3 game came out at the tail end of December… 2015. Throughout 2016 several DLCs came out. Clearly, I missed all of them. What’s the point in talking about this game now? Well, it is fun so if you missed it, here's why you should check it out.

What’s interesting to me, however, is how the game is fun. You see, there’s absolutely no challenge to it. Your character is essentially invincible and immortal. There’s no death penalty, you have essentially unlimited ammo and explosives, and despite sort of taking place in the real world, your character can basically fly.

And yet… it still manages to be fun. Why?