#phosphor dot

[wirewitchviolet]

I need to rant a bit about scanline filters.

The one big riddle I still need to solve in this whole designing my own console thing is how I'm outputting the graphics, and as you might imagine, as I try to research this, I mostly keep running across forum posts and such from people trying to recreate the experience of playing their favorite old console games (or new games going for that sorta vibe) including the distinct differences between modern monitors and the CRTs they had back in the day. And a big part of that involves stumbling onto so damn many "scanline filters" that drive me up the wall.

If you zoom way the hell in on the above image, it is, to be fair, attempting to simulate a particular thing, but what it's simulating is not scan lines, and if the goal here is to look like a CRT, then essentially outlining every pixel with a black border, which is what this at least appears to be doing at a distance, is WILDLY wrong. If anything, color should be bleeding all over and filling any darker spaces.

I'd like to actually get into scan lines before getting into the other stuff that's wrong with this, but let me just hit you with another terrible example of what people call a "scanline filter" first just so we're on the same page.

For real here, what the hell are we even doing? The functional definition of what a "scanline filter" is seems to just be interlacing. That is to say, making every other row of pixels black. Now, this is at least a little bit tied to "retro graphics." I recall playing Day of the Tentacle back when it was new, and AT THE TIME, as the game itself had a maximum resolution of 320x200, and would be displayed on a monitor that even on the cheap end would be outputting at at least two or three times that, the graphics settings had an "interlaced mode" which rather than just displaying each pixel of the game's art as a 2x2 or 3x3 or 4x4 or whatever block of actual-monitor display pixels, it would only draw half of those, leaving alternating black lines that absolutely made it look like you were watching the whole game through some sort of mesh screen left half the visual information to your imagination, so you could just kinda pretend the resolution was higher and fill in the gaps between lines of pixels with your imagination.

But again, THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCANLINES!

When you have a CRT, rather than having a big array of liquid crystal squares or heated plasma blocks or LEDs or whatever other weird thing people are using now that just have a direct current run through to turn them on and off, you have this absolutely bonkers mad science to-this-day-I-can't-believe-someone-even-thought-to-do-this-let-alone-it-being-plan-A gun just straight up firing out electrons in an accelerated stream that is aiming around at practically unfathomable speeds shooting at dots of phosphor painted onto a sheet causing them to glow with an intensity proportionate to how many electrons they're getting hit with. We don't have a separate gun for each dot, just the one hitting each in turn (well, 3 really, we have separate guns for the red green and blue dots). And specifically, because I suppose the alternative would be to encode the signal for every other line backwards to keep shooting on the return trip or something, what they would do is sweep (or if you prefer scan) across from left to right, light up one row of dots, swing back and drop down slightly, sweep across the next line, and so on, then on finishing the final line swing back up to the top left corner to start sweeping across energizing all the phosphor dots at the right intensity for the next frame of video. Or really if you want to get technical I believe they'd hit more like: every odd line on the first pass, reset, hit every even line, reset, new frame, repeat. I guess reading about that is where people get this interlacing idea from maybe?

Anyway, if you wanted to simulate this on a modern display, you'd just need to draw a new frame for every scan line in real time (ideally more since it's not like the line appears all at once, we're really hitting one dot at a time and going down the line). We literally can't do that though. We're probably simming a standard definition TV right? Well the standard differs depending where you are in the world, but the big two are the NTSC standard, which draws one frame composed of 480 lines 60 times a second, and the PAL standard of 576 lines 50 times a second. That's easy math to do. We just need a refresh rate of... 28,800 FPS. Or ideally more, because again, you'd want to draw each line over multiple frames... and that's just for a standard TV. If we're simming a monitor, there were CRTs out there that I THINK still managed 60 FPS while spitting out 1600 or so lines on each frame.

Unless I'm severely mistaken, modern display technology just straight up cannot get anywhere near that. It's rare to find a display that can go any higher than 60 and again, we're drawing a whole screen in that time so the lines aren't relevant there. I'm not even sure if the materials currently glowing/controlling how much light gets out can, on their own, flip on and off as a phosphor dot being pelted with electrons, but I DO know we're still setting pixel brightness one at a time, a line at a time, so what would there really even be to sim there? Hell, famously, filming CRTs never works right because most cameras' shutter speed won't catch things right, and if you use a super high speed camera you actually CAN see the scan lines being rendered one by one but you're catching so little light you're kind of only seeing the one line, as in this video here:

Now, displays back in the day, and also displays, you know, now, break out the red/green/blue components and just cram something close enough together to blend together and give you some single color with a ton of potential range. It's an illusion technically, much like the whole screen being lit at once and not just the last thing to get an update or getting hit with electrons. So let's get back to those black pixels in these filters and what they're actually trying to simulate and how dumb all that is. Have a couple more visual aids plucked from the above video.

Now you might be looking at this first image here and thinking "aha! Look! There totally are solid black lines between the pixels!" but that first one is the modern high res display. The second image is the one from a CRT. You will notice there is an offset, such that even with crazy high zoom there is no horizontal line you can draw through here that's ever going to be all black (unless that part of the screen is showing something black). Furthermore, again, it's important to keep in mind that while in that first image, every subpixel you're looking at is, in fact, glowing steadily over a period of time, at any given instant, only ONE of these little phosphor strips (of each color) is actually getting shot with electrons and doing its full-bright glow. When a given dot on the screen is active it is WAY brighter than what the camera here can detect and if you're really looking at one, your eyes are taking so long to process that you don't even notice that literally only the 3 are active at a time. Even this camera here is catching a bunch of fading afterimages. Point is, in real life, this display isn't anywhere near this dark.

So OK, let's say you're doing your CRT filter effect, which again, you should NOT be calling a "scanline filter" by all means make use of the higher resolution you have to work with and have like 5 redscale pixels, 5 black pixels, 5 greenscale pixels, 5 black, 3 bluescale, 5 black, then shift alternate columns down by 3, BUT if you're gonna do that, remember to have the brightness cranked way up on those bright ones, and also bring up the corresponding color values of the surrounding few pixels to properly portray that intense emissive glow. i.e. the "black pixels" between red and blue aren't really black they're some shade of purple or magenta or whatever, and hell ideally the color bleed shout cover at least one neighboring "pure color" column. Because nothing on a CRT has ever looked like you're looking at it through a screen door like all these filters floating around.

Oh and side not to everything, that offset hex grid-y shadowmask arrangement was I think the most popular for color CRT TVs but different people roll in different ways. Pretty sure this was more common for PCs with higher available resolutions, for instance:

For real though, you could light a whole room pretty well just having a TV on back when everyone had CRTs. I do not understand why all these filters make everything so much darker.

Also speaking of darkness, I'm sitting in it because I am completely bottomed out on money and I'm penny pinching every way I can so... patreon, maybe?

[cozeecritter]

Today’s my last class for a while so I decided to bring Phosphor and Dot as tag-a-longs. My final didn’t take as long as expected so I decided to hang out in an empty conference room and unleash them.

Dot has an hunger for adventure that Phosphor notably does not have. Still, he doesn’t like to be away from Dot’s side so he’ll suck it up and tag along. As long as she doesn’t do anything too dangerous.

Nice dry erase marker camouflage, guys. I’m sure no one will notice.

Phosphor, she’s fine, I promise. There’s nothing lurking in the keyboard cave. Pinky promise. I have my eye on her. Besides there is only so much she can into in here—

DOT HOW DID YOU??? Get down from there!

“Fun time is over!” Phosphor has decided. It’s time to go back into the safety of the bag. Dot begrudgingly lets him drag her away from all the new climbing places. Maybe next time Dot.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

An electron, for instance, can be thought of as a particle – one that can leave a dot on a phosphor screen, as in Figure 4.4 – but can (and must) also be thought of in terms of a waving field, one that can contribute to an interference pattern on a phosphor screen as in Future 4.3b.³

3. One difference between force and matter fields is expressed by Wolfgang Pauli's exclusion principle. This principle shows that whereas a huge number of force particles (like photons) can combine to produce fields accessible to a prequantum physicist such as Maxwell, fields that you see every time you enter a dark room and turn on a light, matter particles are generally excluded by the laws of quantum physics from cooperating in such a coherent, organized manner. (More precisely, two particles of the same species, such as two electrons, are excluded from occupying the same state, whereas there is no such restriction for photons. Thus, matter fields do not generally have a macroscopic, classical-like manifestation.)

"The Fabric of the Cosmos" - Brian Greene

[letmeliedown]

the lights here are like 5 billion lumens giant ass fucking dinner plates full of 1000 leds in places that make no sense with like 3 on each switch. the landlord said we could install dimmers but the wiring is so fucked up we actually can't. got a couple floor lamps and 25w glass incandescents that finally don't make me want to rip out my eyeballs. thank god canadian tire still has 2 packs of dim ass 2700k bulbs that shatter when you drop them for $2.39. still need more but at least i can see in my room

[artbyblastweave]

With a couple days to chew on it I've gotta say I've really come to appreciate the Untwist surrounding Nina's character. She's coded as a specific kind of guy, right, who shows up in a lot of Ensemble superhero stuff and Gunn's superhero stuff specifically- the innocuous neurotic with a middling power who ultimately comes in clutch at the last minute and demonstrates why they actually did belong on the team the entire time. "Heart is an awesome power", in TVtropes parlance. Polka-Dot man and Ratcatcher, Vigilante, Groot to an extent in the first Guardians movie.

So you spend seven episodes with this one member of the ensemble who never kills anyone, doesn't try and doesn't want to, gets haplessly dragged from nightmarish situation to nightmarish situation with no say in anything, spends a significant amount of the show's runtime trapped in a goddamn bathtub, and you've been trained to assume that she's going to get some kind of big moment that retroactively justifies all of that, demonstrates why Waller thought she was a good addition to the team. And then it turns out, no, she actually was just fundamentally poorly suited to this lifestyle. She had a superhero origin, the same kind of emergency power-granting medical intervention that Cyborg and Beast Boy got, but it turns out that Gunn's version of the DCU is a weird enough place that that's just a kind of thing that can happen to children sometimes, not something that guarantees that you'll actually become a viable superhero. She genuinely had no business being on the team, except that she looked weird enough that she got legally unpersoned and handed over to Waller, and Waller thought she looked weird enough that there was no reason not to try pointing her like a gun to see if she could do anything useful. No skin off her nose if she's a dud munition- you don't end up on the Suicide Squad because you're hard to replace, you end up on the squad because you're available and there won't be any blowback if you go missing.

This is, of course, one of the tensions that Suicide Squad and associated projects occasionally run into- you need to strike a balance between staffing the team with villains who're competent enough that Waller doesn't come off like a moron for entrusting them with anything important, and villains who're inept, underwhelming or out-of-control enough to remind you that half the point of the squad thematically is that it's a corrupt and morally bankrupt idea that on a really good day breaks even on solving as many problems as it creates. The usual fix is to include some number of mauve shirts who're included entirely to die badly- Slipknot in the Ayer film, Mindboggle in the first arc of the original Ostrander run, Voltiac in the first arc of the New 52 run, Most of Rick Flag's decoy team in the opening of The Suicide Squad. All played for some combination of shock-value and kafkaesque dark humor (did anyone check if Weasel can swim?) but rarely played for tragedy. These deaths are tone-setters, too early for you to care enough for it to be tragic. Nina is a well-disguised Slipknot, with her pointless, anticlimactic death bumped to the end of the story in a way that lets you get attached to her- which in turn finally, finally allows the narrative to hammer home that what keeps happening to the Slipknots and Javelins in these stories is fucked up. Nina didn't belong here! She's the only one of these people who doesn't have a codename! She gets the big, heartfelt you-can-do-it- you're-one-of-us speech from The Bride and Phosphorous, she strides out to finally get her Big Moment, and then no, she really really isn't one of them, and all that happens is that she ends up getting gutted like a. like a. Hey. Hang on

[scoobydoomistakes]

All three members of the gang supposedly speak a line of dialog during this sequence.

So, how weird is it to think that, when this first aired...

...TVs were so tiny and low-res no one would've noticed.

*hears Alec of Technology Connections approaching in the distance, until I specify cathode-ray tube TVs don’t have resolution in the same modern sense we’re used to as phosphor dots aren't pixels, but you get the gist*

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Semiconductors: Cadmium sulfide

An inorganic compound that exists naturally in two forms, cadmium sulfide is used primarily as a pigment but holds increasing interest in semiconducting applications. Cadmium sulfide, chemical formula CdS, is a direct band gap semiconductor that exhibits electroluminescence and piezoelectronic properties. When doped it exhibits cathodoluminescence and can be used as a phosphor, and has been used in photovoltaics. Recent research has focused on cadmium sulfide nanoparticles, including quantum dots. However, applications of this compound must maintain awareness of cadmium's toxicity.

Sources/Further Reading: (Images source - Wikipedia) (LibreTexts) (2023 article) (PubChem)

[vidreview]

VIDREV: "The Biggest Lie in Hollywood | Technicolor" by NationSquid.

[originally posted june 15th 2024]

i'm just going to be honest right here at the start so we're all on the same page: i do not think this is a particularly good video. it is by no means bereft of redeeming qualities, but those qualities are massively overshadowed by this essayist's reliance on assumptions, generalizations, and outright bad information. in this review i'm going to talk about both the good and the bad, but understand that i'm not interested in being mean for the sake of meanness, nor am i here to bully or make fun of anyone. at time of writing this video has 90,000+ views, and NationSquid's channel has 390,000+ subscribers. with an audience of that size, i think some measure of critical scrutiny is warranted.

"The Biggest Lie in Hollywood" is about the history of color film in general, and the development of the 3-strip Technicolor process specifically. the "lie" in question is the idea that Technicolor films are truly "in color," because technically they were shot in black and white. this is true by a dictionary's standards, and to NationSquid's credit he does a good job explaining the process that led him to this conclusion. with Technicolor, three strips of monochrome film are shot with red/blue/green filters in front of each; when developed, those monochrome film strips are then dyed cyan/magenta/yellow; when projected on top of each other, the result is the "appearance" of full-spectrum color, despite the fact that no color information was captured on set. basically: Technicolor films aren't "in color" because they weren't shot on color film.

it would be very easy to spend the bulk of this review hammering on that specific technicality. first of all, color information was captured on set. you have three different monochrome frames capturing the relative luminance of a scene as shot through three colored gels. yes, technically even after the dying process those three frames are still monochrome… but they're monochromes in three different hues. it's not a "trick" or an optical illusion that they reproduce color when combined, it's just how light and color work. NationSquid insists several times that this is proof that Technicolor films aren't "in color," that it's actually "your eyes tricking you," but that just is not true. the process is irrelevant; if the end result appears to your eyes to be "in color", then it is definitionally in color. his later furtherance of this supposed presentational deception through the lens of a CRT's phosphor dots at least has a symbolic case in that, if you look close enough, the image is actually a matrix of red green and blue rather than a "perfect" reproduction. but even then, is an old school superhero comic not "in color" if it uses the Ben Day process? are human beings not really "made of matter" because matter's actually just a collection of atoms?

you get my point. but if that were my only complaint, i wouldn't be writing this review. bold assertions aside, his explanation of how technicolor works is generally pretty good. he even reproduces the process through still photography, then later again in CRT video to believably insert himself into an episode of The Brady Bunch. this is cool! i like it when essayists do this! there is a level of technical knowledge here that's impressive and effective. but his faulty thesis carries water for dozens of tiny generalizations that range from odd to annoying to revisionist to outright falsehood. for example, early on he confidently says "you probably think The Wizard of Oz was hand-painted frame by frame to be in color," thus setting up this video as debunking a "popular misconception" that i've never heard anyone say in my entire life, and on this particular subject i've been paying attention for a long time. this moment has the air to me of a formative personal experience from one's youth (ie thinking Oz's color was hand-painted before learning about Technicolor) being misconstrued as an obvious universal experience. could be wrong, but that's my gloss. this is something everyone does sometimes, but your writing is stronger when you pause to reflect on these personal connections any time one makes it into a script to make sure it actually holds up to scrutiny. consider that a running theme of this review.

before we even hit the one minute mark, NationSquid bafflingly states that "no matter how immersive [B&W films] were, absolute suspension of disbelief was never possible. there was always one thing missing… color." it's an easy enough statement to let roll over you when you're still trying to get your bearings through the introduction. it feels like a dangerously impetuous way to start, but lord knows sometimes you gotta oversimplify to write through the opening minutes efficiently. hell, sometimes you even put such flags in as a deliberate trap-- you know, play towards an easy conventional conclusion only to critically re-evaluate it with a more nuanced one later on. i did as much in my recent video about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials, where i spent significant time praising the show's practical effects before circling back around later to highlight the essential role that digital effects play even in practical effects-heavy productions, and how often we throw digital effects workers under the bus in our haste to praise practicals. now, i personally find the idea that color or lack thereof has any bearing on "suspension of disbelief" to be totally nonsensical, but whatever, sometimes you say wack shit to get where you want to go, and that's probably not even really what the video is about anyway… is certainly what i hoped. but after about thirteen minutes of generally pretty good technical process explanation, the video then jumps into a crash course on early film history which, uh, leaves some things to be desired.

he talks about B&W film as possessing a "degree of separation" which allows viewers to console themselves that everything on screen is make-believe. by lacking the color dimension, you see, B&W denaturalizes its subject and makes it feel less real. perhaps there's an argument to be made there, except NationSquid frames it as though the B&W film experience is inherently less affective due to the absence of color. he never says as much directly, but his conclusion sure seems to be that our experience of media today is qualitatively more nuanced and sophisticated than it was 50 years ago, that people today feel more deeply, experience more vividly the contours of a film's world when it is in color. consider the following paragraph:

It's much easier to watch footage of the Vietnam War in black and white, because it makes the events feel further away. "This is a whole other world, it couldn't happen to me." if you met Elvis in person, you'd probably faint. I would probably faint. But instead, you can watch him in the comfort of your own home. Film and television allow you to feed into your curiosity of what is being shown on screen without the consequences, and with black and white it was even moreso. And it's this exact frame of thinking that allowed black and white pictures to serve as their own form of art in the film world, which prolonged its dominance over color.

citation needed. citation needed. citation needed. if B&W footage of the Vietnam War made it feel further away, how do you explain the massive student protest movements that helped get the draft rescinded and end the war? do people today seem any less prone to distancing themselves from contemporary wars now that their coverage is in color? what "consequences" are we avoiding by watching film and television-- as opposed to what, literally meeting Elvis Presley the man in real life? where's the relevant profundity in pointing out that these are different experiences? is media duplicitous for not bombing us in real life when we watch footage of a bombing? and how is B&W "even moreso" prone to this consequence-free affect when it comes from a time when virtually all film and television was B&W, including all the same kinds of essential journalism we have today? i just want to take a big red pen to that last sentence. what do you mean by "frame of thinking"? what do you mean by "form of art"? what mechanism, precisely, do you think allowed B&W to "prolong" its dominance?

elsewhere there is a discussion of how silent film evolved towards sound and color. nominally this is meant as a comparison point for how other major technological transitions were received, opening the door for what should be an interesting discussion of artistic epistemology. i know that it should be interesting because this era is a special interest of mine, which is why i can't let it slide that NationSquid namedrops Cecil B. Demill and DW Griffith as "innovating the landscapes" of silent cinema (????) and then moves on as if the matter is settled. here's a protip for all you aspiring video essayists out there: if your essay is all about correcting a "popular misconception," make sure you do at least a cursory investigation of all your other inherited conceptions first just in case you're missing an opportunity to add more nuance and context to your discussion. it's not even that Demill and Griffith are unimportant figures, but rather that saying their names alone in 2024 without mentioning, say, Mary Pickford, Dorothy Arzner, Alice Guy Blaché, or any one of the hundreds of women who dominated and defined silent cinema betrays a shallow wikipedia-level understanding of the history at best. you only bring those two up when they're the only two you know about, and at that point you should probably just gloss over the subject entirely for both our sakes.

when discussing the problems of phonograph records desyncing from silent films, NaionSquid hits you with a one-two punch that made me shout out loud in the privacy of my own office:

phonograph records were already popular when silent films were a thing. hell, the technology itself even predates film. i mean, technically, silent film should've never existed in the first place.

what's he saying here? is he saying that because records were a popular media format, no other formats should've emerged? is he saying that it's weird B&W film became popular since records already existed? or is he saying that film should've never been silent because we could have just used records to add sound? the chain of logic he lays out here is strained and confusing, and the succeeding lines provide little clarity. it's weak argumentative writing, a basic undergrad-level "many people say" type approach that permeates this whole middle portion of the essay. on its own, if you lack domain knowledge, you might be able to accept this chain of logic. but me, the special interest haver, the film school goer, i hear all this and i can't help but wonder why he's neglected to mention that silent films usually shipped with bespoke sheet music, and that movie houses employed dedicated musicians to perform them? anyone with more than a few hours of knowledge on silent film will tell you that "silent" is a misnomer, as it was rarely if ever experienced "silently" by the audience. one could, if they were in the mood, connect this to the monochromatic nature of Technicolor and explore how our experience of media is historically contingent to the material reality of extant transformative processes. instead, NationSquid leaves this context out, and the absence screams of well-intentioned ignorance. it indicates a narrow engagement with history that contradicts his philosophical confidence, which is nominally what English classes exist to beat out of you. these are the sorts of over-generalizations that are acceptable in a classroom where you're meant to be learning how to argue, but quickly become dangerous and misleading when they're confidently presented without review to a large audience for profit.

this is not a problem specific to NationSquid, and indeed, many in his comments share my criticisms. i picked this video because i think it's an excellent example of a broader problem that is by no means new, but certainly made worse by contemporary technology and economics. it is extraordinarily easy to presume yourself an expert, and there's only money to be made in pushing forward as fast and as often as possible. my videos take forever to make because i spend a lot of time fine-tuning the script, which is admittedly disastrous for my bottom line and certainly i could stand to speed things up in that regard, be a little less perfectionist, but the fact remains: in the current political economy of digital media, ignorance is profitable because it's easy and there's no one whose job is to say "now hold on, can you elaborate on this point please?"

there are just so many frustrating, unqualified assertions. he comes around to talking about nostalgia for B&W film and people's experiences of it, saying "The printing process, projectors, and screens that were used at the time just weren't as good as they are now." citation needed! "Black and white was just tolerated because of its cost effectiveness." citation needed!! "In other words Technicolor "looks older" because you were watching it on older technology back then" BUT I'M WATCHING IT ON MODERN TECHNOLOGY NOW AND IT STILL LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT! CITATION NEEDED!!!

he talks about people "tolerating" B&W film, as if everyone was just sitting around like "yeah Casablanca is cool and all, but it'd be better if it was in color." what is this technological determinist nonsense? who in their own time gets hung up on the absence of a technology that doesn't exist? what do you say of Civil War photography, WWI newsreels, the liberation of fucking Dachau, that it's experientially lesser for being B&W? imagine someone saying 2D film is less "immersive" than 3D and that people merely "tolerated" 2D because it was more cost effective. they'd be laughed out of the room! (unless they're James Cameron in 2007, but none of us are or ever will be again.) people use the technology available to them based on the economic and political conditions of the moment in which they're available. yes, B&W was dominant because it was exceedingly inexpensive compared to color film, but what filmmaker saw that as an abject hindrance? the canvas is your canvas, you work with what you have. yes, theorists argued B&W's superiority over color on aesthetic grounds, just as they argued that silent film was superior to the talkies. but such theorizing was secondary, it was a reaction to and commentary on extant conditions over which they had little to no control. people rationalize the times they find themselves in. we tell stories, and then we tell stories about how we told those stories, and then other people interpret what the stories about our stories tell us about the stories that we told. we are human beings and our experience of art runs soul-deep no matter the medium, no matter the spectrum of senses it encompasses-- if the art hits, it hits. we did not "tolerate" the absence of color, nor was B&W "less immersive" or less friendly to "suspension of disbelief." if it seems so today, that's only because color film has been naturalized and B&W made the novelty. by such ham-fisted terms, you shouldn't be able to suspend your disbelief reading a book because words imperfectly recreate the experience they're meant to evoke. no, see, The Wizard of Oz isn't actually in color, because at one point the film stock was B&W. what do you MEAN this map isn't the territory?! manager, i've been duped!!

and perhaps none of this is intentional. if i were to ask NationSquid if he believes in any of the conclusions i've extrapolated here, chances are he'd give an emphatic no. this is what i mean by "well-intentioned ignorance." it's the easiest thing in the world to skate by on an argument that feels sound to you because it maps to your own understanding of the subject. "it doesn't sound wrong to me, so it's probably not wrong, yeah?" you include single-sentence generalizations that are "basically true" because you read them or heard them somewhere at some point, and you know your source is good so if anyone calls you on it you can be like "well here's what i meant." but the more you rely on these half-remembered quasi-truths, the more your rhetorical scaffolding reveals itself to be unfit for the job of supporting your argument. at that point, all the plausible deniability in the world can't save you from yourself. it stops being about whether you're "right" or "wrong," and becomes something far more elemental and difficult to prove: did you do the work? did you sit with your script and scrutinize it, line by line and without ego, even for just a few minutes? a good essayist knows what they don't know, and educates themself when the opportunity arises (or otherwise omits the topic entirely to avoid looking like an ass to someone with actual domain knowledge). it's impossible to avoid making mistakes in this free-for-all media landscape where editors and peer review are a thing of the past. but this does not abdicate you of the responsibility you have to perform due diligence for the sake of not misinforming your audience, nor does it give you an excuse to presume that you in this moment already know everything you need to know. you don't need to be trying to deceive someone in order to be deceptive. it can just as easily happen as the result of laziness.

anyway, that's this review.

[tvpromopod]

Phosphor Dot Fossils: Frenzy (arcade, 1981)

The robots are less chatty and more shooty, and even Evil Otto is somehow more evil. Join us for 20 very short rounds of the arcade sequel to Berzerk, Frenzy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpI8-FrdhZ8 Read the full article

[tanjirou-no-au]

RWBY/BNHA AU: Class 1A

MLIT

Izuku Midoriya-Deku

Weapon: Rubrum Orthos - Gun gauntlets and shotgun boots

Semblance: N/A (For the moment)

Emblem: Angular light green rabbit head, similar to his first costume’s hood.

Lujayne Astilbe-Ochako

Weapon: Event Horizon - A fusion of a Brute Shot and a Gravity Hammer from Halo

Semblance: Orbit - Alter the gravitational pull of objects she touches

Emblem: Black dots orbiting a planet

Injigo Kohara-Shinso

Weapon: Ivory Ribbons-Twin Whip swords

Semblance: Overmind-Compelling Voice, the more effective the more it’s responded to.

Emblem: Indigo hypnotic spiral

Tsuyu Aquamarine-Tsuyu

Weapon: Hopper-Harpoon shotgun/spear

Semblance: Disruptive Colouration-Can shift to blend into surroundings

Emblem: Aquamarine Lilypad

Trivia

Izuku’s a Hare Faunus, while Tsuyu is a Bullfrog Faunus

Lujayne is a SEW. And if we’re playing this something like RWBY Canon, Izuku’s the new wizard.

Injigo replaced their original fourth (The Mineta equivalent) after he dropped out.

In this reality, Izuku is black, Miruko’s cousin, and Lady Nagant is his other mother.

ASPN

Orion Aetherfield-Iida

Weapon: Recripro-Flamethrower boots

Semblance: Overclock-A period of brief superspeed and nigh invulnerability in exchange for a high aura cost and a slow recharge rate.

Emblem: Blue winged helmet

Tariq Searing-Shoji

Weapon: Panopticon-Sniper Rifle/longsword

Semblance: Sensorium-Manifest astral sensory organs

Emblem: Eight spiked star with an eye in the middle.

Solstice Phosphor-Shoto

Weapon: Heatwave & Flashfreeze-Revolver shotgun kama

Semblance: Thermoberic-Manipulate extreme variances in temperature (ie: fire & ice)

Emblem: Flame and ice split in half

Nyxia Darkholme-Tokoyami

Weapon: Umbral Revelry-Twin hand cannons/scythe

Semblance: Dark Shadow-Same as canon, a sentient aura construct that’s stronger in the dark.

Emblem: A yellow eyed raven’s head.

Trivia

Shoji is a Mimic Octopus faunus, while Nyxia is of course a Raven Faunus.

‘Nyx’ is transfem and nonbinary.

RUST

Tiger Radcliffe-Kirishima

Weapon: Red Riot-Chainsword

Semblance: Unbreakable-Creation of a forcefield that’s stronger the slower he moves, allowing him to shiekd allies.

Emblem: Red megalodon jaws.

Nitro Urquhart-Bakugo

Weapon: Explodikills-Twin Grenade launcher gauntlets.

Semblance: Dynamight-Detach pieces of his Aura and detonate them.

Emblem: An orange grenade surrounded by a burst pattern

Mina Silkwing-Mina

Weapon: Alma-Dust Whip/Baton, and skates

Semblance: Corrosive-Generation and limited manipulation of an acid she can wield as in canon.

Emblem: Pink moth in a hexagon.

Scotford Taupe-Sero

Weapon: Quick Retort-Twin pistols that combine into a sniper rifle

Semblance: Tape-Dust ribbons he can use to move & tangle.

Emblem: Twin golden pistols wrapped in bandages.

Trivia

Tama’s a Great White Shark (teeth), while Mina is a Rosy Maple Moth (antennae).

Mina is Blasian.

MYZU

Momo Kashikiku-Momo

Weapon: Summoned weaponry, supplemented by a dust containers woven into her bodysuit.

Semblance: Fabricate-summon copies of objects whose construction she knows about.

Emblem: Spear materializing from a portal.

Yarrow Hadad-Kaminari

Weapon: Thunderbolt-Dart launcher Crossbow/Bat hybrid

Semblance: Stormchain-Direct lightning through designated targets (like darts or discuses)

Emblem: Three lightning bolts arranged in a triangle.

Zelda Eminence-Jirou

Weapon: Lucy-A Guitar/Greataxe, combined with Dust picks.

Semblance: Sonar-Sound detection through surfaces

Emblem: An earjack with sound waves coming out.

Kodiak Urbane-Koji

Weapon: Hitchcock-Hammer/Flail

Semblance: Nature’s Call-Command and communicate with animals.

Emblem: Pan Pipes

Trivia

Kodi is a Brown Bear Faunus (ears)

Yarrow is the little brother of this AU’s Yuyu Haya.

Zelda is the daughter of two rock stars, and is kind of embarrassed that they legally changed their names to ‘Eminence’.

Sato is a civilian here, while Aoyama, Ojiro & Toru have their...own roles to play.

[literaturereviewhelp]

The Experiment of Western blotting analysis for the samples of NIH/3T3 cells, whether having been treated in PDGF or not, uses the Phospho-Akt (Ser473) for the preparation of the upper blotting and Akt 9272 for the lower blotting. It has to present the results in a tabular form, the first column being PGDF, the second being AKT, and the third column being Phospho-Akt. This experiment was meant to investigate the sensitivity of antibodies to sense the presence of and the levels of Phospho-Akt (Ser473) and Akt1 Ser473. Hypothesis It worked with the hypothesis that the antibodies can identify Akt2 as well as Akt3 after they phosphorylate in various residues. Procedure This was a time series practical activity to stimulate the cells at various durations from 0 to 120 minutes. Its independent variable was the PGDF. There are two blots to analyze, Ser473 of Akt as the upper blot (using phospho-Akt antibody) and phosphor-Akt (using Akt antibody) as the lower blot. It also involved using gels to conduct the molecular weight marker. The top band corresponded to the measurement of 76 kDa, while the middle band corresponded to 57 kDa. The lowest band thus corresponded to 47 kDa. Findings This experiment requires the analysis of the localization of protein for the EGFR factor with the green label as shown below: Green label of the EGFR Factor The experiment also requires the red labeling of endocytosis markers, which apply fluorescence microscopy as shown below: Red label of Endocytosis Marker The growth factor analysis shows that proteins facilitate growth at different rates under different conditions. The most relevant protein analysis procedure in this kind of experiment is fluorescent microscopy. Hypothesis This experiment expects that there will be less growth in Caveolin than in Clathrin. Even so, both of the experiments use the same procedure of fluorescent microscopy. Findings The scattered dots observed in the first EGFR factor were more in number and larger in size than in the second experiment, with the endocytosis factor. Task 5 Flow Cytometry From the principles of cytometry, this experiment conducts the flow cytometry experiment with the labeling of Jurkat cells and the labeling of Phospho-Akt ser 473 antibodies. It uses three categories of cells, untreated, treated cells, and control experiments (Burgering and Coffer 1995, p54). All the cells are labeled in three different colors as they appear in the graph above. The red line is the control experiment, green is treated and blue is untreated. Read the full article

[cozeecritter]

critter goes thrifting #6

I’ve been held up in my house for the past three days because of Holidays and finals, so a trip to the outside world was well-needed. My mom and I got some Christmas stuff and dropped into my local Goodwill for a gander. I took the Lindorf with me because I wanted to look at ribbons for him and for luck. He’s a magic bunny after all. We picked up a few new friends!

I found this beautiful Toys R Us Animal Alley Leopard. I’ve been nostalgic for my old Animal Alley plushes lately so finding him was a wonderful surprise. He’s got the bappiest paws ever (with wonderfully stitched beans!!) and I already adore him. I’m considering filling him with pellets so he can be a weighted plush, but I’m still undecided. Lindorf already enjoys his company a great deal.

Then I found these guys! I like Beanie Babies a bit. I have a few, mostly those I’ve had since childhood and those I’ve bought simply because I like them. These guys were just funky enough to catch my eye. They are the errored Iggy and Rainbow, which I had no idea was a thing until I looked them up once I got home. They’re pretty neat! Definitely going to change their names, because I already have an Iggy and I’m not vibing with Rainbow at the moment.

[weepingkittyfun]

Amber of Time in the Folds of the Irtysh River The motorcycle’s tremor splits the northern edge of the Junggar Basin. In the rearview mirror, ripples on Lake Ulungur evaporate into salt stains from the Shan Hai Jing. Heading west along the Altai Mountains’ folds, my steel steed crushes the Triassic strata’s still-unfrozen gasps—a collision of geological and human chronologies, where turbocharged breaths mingle with Devonian crinoid whispers. Morning mist in Keketuohai seeps from the Irtysh’s source. When the first sunlight pierces the crevices of the Koksuk Glacier Cirque, the entire river valley abruptly awakes as a vast palette. Frost from ancient glaciers condenses on my helmet’s visor, yet reflects kaleidoscopic blues and greens: Celadon flakes from mica schist peeling in dawn light, peacock-blue lithium veins breathing at fault lines, jade-green Siberian fir combing its tresses by the shore. Herders call it Nuwa’s celestial repair leftovers; geologists term it pegmatite’s neon spectrum. But when I dip my hand into the Irtysh’s current, Cambrian seawater’s saltiness seeps into my palm lines. The cliffs of Shenzhongshan host a mass of light. Noonday sun melts the granite monolith into a bronze bell, while wind through honeycomb caves hums like chime bells. My bike carves broken contour lines on switchbacks, its gas tank reflecting 12th-century Naiman tribe sacrificial fires. At a hairpin turn, tire tracks suddenly overlap with Genghis Khan’s scouts’ hoofprints—1204 snowmelt trickles from modern asphalt cracks. Dusk at Mine No.3 is a fossilized industrial epic. Spiral mine shafts slice the sunset into geological rings, exposed lepidolite layers glowing eerie phosphor in twilight. My windproof gloves brush Soviet-era beneficiation plant ruins, and suddenly 1958 snowstorms erupt from my fingers—the sheepskin-clad prospectors who once measured the republic’s spine with compasses and picks. On abandoned rail tracks, wild poppies push scarlet heads through railroad ties, blooming as surrogates for youth lost forever in the pit. Birch forests along the Irtysh materialize under moonlight. Headlights startle ibex roosting for the night, their horns piercing star clusters suspended between trees. River water spills over a natural dam formed by Jurassic coal seams, shattering my reflection into aquamarine shards. A dombra’s vibrato floats from the opposite bank—Kazakh yurts resemble unopened snow lotuses, their collected starlight pouring through circular skylights. Dawn on Lake Yilim is liquid time amber. As motorcycle tires crush glacial till pebbles on the shore, the water’s mirror cracks to reveal a 1949 Soviet heavy truck wreck. Blue-green algae floating in morning mist materialize as Cold War ciphertext. In a derelict miners’ club, I find half a Russian diary—yellowed pages still clinging to spodumene crystals. Engineer Andrei’s blizzard-night love poem, written half a century ago, completes pollination with lakeside wild tulips. Poplar forests at Old Bridge stage an autumn ritual. Golden leaf waves churn with salt residue from ancient Tethys Sea retreats, my riding suit dusted with hieroglyphs beyond geologic hammers’ decoding. Camel herders ignite campfires with red willow branches, flames flickering with Cambrian stromatolite patterns. As we share kumis, his wrinkles suddenly emit beryllium ore fluorescence—these Altai descendants carry rare metal codes in their blood. Returning through the Karaxenger Earthquake Fault Zone, dark clouds roll in from Kazakhstan’s border. The motorcycle’s roar jolts the 1931 magnitude-8 earthquake’s remaining dream, exposed fault scarps still oozing Late Jurassic sandstone “blood.” As raindrops splatter the dashboard, I finally read Earth’s palm lines—those 16-kilometer-deep lithospheric fractures are time’s sonnets to the planet. In the rearview mirror, Keketuohai shrinks back into a ink dot on geological maps, my tire tracks mere punctuation marks from Paleo-Asian Ocean closure.

[sngl-led-auto-lights]

How can drivers identify high-quality aftermarket LED headlights?

The following is a practical method to identify high-quality aftermarket LED headlights, which is compiled based on technical parameters and market research:

Core performance indicator verification

Cooling system design

Prefer active cooling + passive cooling combination (such as fan + aviation aluminum lamp body + copper substrate) to ensure that the heat from long-term work can be quickly derived from the LED lamp beads to avoid overheating of the lamp beads.

Avoid pure passive cooling products, which are prone to overheating in a closed lampshade and cause light decay.

Light effect and light type

The brightness must reach more than 2500 lumens, the projection distance must exceed 90 meters, and the light spot must be uniform without dark areas. This can be verified by comparing the projection effect of the original car halogen lamp on the wall.

Check whether there is a clear light and dark cutoff line to avoid glare affecting oncoming vehicles (it is recommended to calibrate the height of the low beam light to comply with traffic regulations).

Color temperature and color rendering

Choose products with a color temperature between 4300K-6000K, taking into account brightness and rain and fog penetration. Lamps above 7000K with too high a proportion of blue light should be selected with caution.

The color rendering index should be ≥80Ra to ensure accurate identification of road color details.

Hardware and process identification

Lamp bead quality

Prioritize the use of branded wicks, lamp bead base and substrate, chip bracket, phosphor, encapsulation colloid and other materials, etc. The quality determines the quality of LED lamp beads.

Use the mobile phone camera to point to the lit headlights and observe whether there is flicker (high-quality products should be free of flicker).

Circuit protection

Check whether there is a built-in constant current drive circuit to prevent voltage fluctuations from damaging the lamp beads. Temperature control chips, ICs, capacitors, etc., whether they are equipped.

Confirm that an independent fuse is equipped (recommended to be above 15A) and the wiring harness has a waterproof connector design.

Brand and certification reference

Authoritative brand recommendation

International brands: Philips (Starlight Series), Osram (Night Breaker Series), Hella (Dynamic Light Series) have excellent performance in heat dissipation efficiency and light type control.

China's preferred: SNGL, Shellite, Foshan Lighting, Xingyu Car Lights, etc. have better adaptability and comprehensive performance.

Compliance certification

Must comply with SAE/DOT or ECE R112 or QC standards, and the packaging should have clear certification marks. Be wary of "three-no" products without certification.

Some regions limit the color temperature range (such as the EU requirement of ≤6500K), and must be selected according to local regulations.

IV. Installation adaptability test

Physical compatibility

Measure whether the length of the lamp body matches the original car dust cover (some models such as Toyota Highlander require a short design).

Confirm the interface type (H4/H7/9005, etc.), and preferably plug-in products without wire modification.

System compatibility

Volkswagen/Audi and other models need to choose products with CAN bus decoding function to avoid instrument errors.

Test whether there is a current shock at startup that causes the light to flicker.

V. Additional verification methods

Warranty and testing

Regular brands provide ≥1.5 years of warranty, ensuring that the light decay is ≤5% for 3000 hours.

Use a multimeter to detect the working current, and the total current of the dual lamp group should be between 5-10A (too high may be false power).

User review screening

Focus on follow-up reviews 6 months after installation, and observe long-term feedback such as light decay and fan noise.

Summary and suggestions: Choose models and brands that have passed automotive regulations certification, and use simple test methods to verify heat dissipation and light type before installation.

[howzitsa]

Hisense 40'' Full HD TV 40A5200F Specifications Hardware Processor / Cores MSD3666 USB Media Player DMP – Digital media player content Music, Photos, Text, Video Image processing Local dimming / controllable zones No HDR – High Dynamic Range for luminance No HDR system No HLG No MEMC No Smart TV Ethernet RJ45 port No Anyview Cast No Installed Apps No Web browser No Eco & Power Supply Power Supply 120V-240V Energy Efficiency Class A+ Power Consumption (Stand-by) 0.5W Power Off 65% Lead Content Yes – This television contains lead only in certain parts or components , in accordance with existing exemption clauses under the RoHS Directive. DMP Formats Container Format .AVI, .DAT, .MKV, .MOV, .MP4, .MPG, .TS, .VOB Video .MPEG-1, .MPEG-2, H.263 / H.264, HEVC, MJPEG, MPEG-4 SP / ASP, RV30 / RV40, Xvid Audio .MP3 Picture .BMP, .JPEG, .jpg Accessories Stand Material / Colour Plastic / Black Stand (L x W) 194 x 40mm VESA Wall Mount Compatible 100 x 200mm Remote control (Number of Keys / Model number) ER-22601 Second Remote Control (Model number) No Remote Batteries AAA x 2 Adapter No User Manual Yes Quick Start Page Yes Power Cable Yes Weight & Dimensions Weight of Carton Box (Kg) 1.7Kg Package (Horizontal / Vertical) Vertical Gross Dimensions (LxDxH) 1008 x 132 x 610mm Dimensions with stand (W x H x D) 893 × 182 × 559mm Dimensions without stand (W x H x D) 893 × 86 × 513mm Net weight (with stand / without stand) 5.5Kg / 5.4Kg Maximum distance between two stand (L) 806mm Minimum distance between the stands N/A Bezel Width (Top / Left & Right / Bottom) 5.7 x 7.3 x 7.3 x 15.4 Single Stand No Adjustable Stand No Cable Management No Connectivity Common Interface (CI+) Yes (V1.4) HDMI inputs 2 HDMI1 ARC, HDMI 1.4 HDMI2 HDMI 1.4 AV Input 1 USB (2.0) 1 USB (3.0) 0 S/PDIF Output 1 (optical) Audio (L/R) Input 1 Headphone Output 1 RF Tuner 2 Component YPb (Cb) / Pr(Cr) Input 0 SCART No Subwoofer No Ethernet RJ45 port No Wireless LAN adapter Support No WiFi technology No Bluetooth Support and profiles No Light sensor No VGA Input No PC Audio Input (3.5mm) No Internet Installed Apps No Country-specific apps No Web browser No HbbTV No MHEG support No Anyview Cast No Anyview Stream No Smartphone App No Convenience Multi-Language OSD Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, Français, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian language, Lithuanian, Polish, Português, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish Hotel TV Yes Sound Sound output power 7W + 7W Sound Technology DD+ NICAM / A2 Stereo NICAM Stereo User Equalizer No Sound – Special No AC-4 No MPEG-H No Technical Details Static Contrast >1000：1 Resolution (DPI) 1920 x 1080 4K Upscaling No HDR10 No Dolby Vision No Wide Colour Gamut No MEMC No Decoder Yes Input Lag in Game Mode No 3D Digital Comb Filter Yes MPEG noise reduction Yes Mosquito noise reduction Yes HLG No Basic Information Resolution (Quality) 4K Resolution (DPI) 1920 x 1080 Aspect Ratio 16:9 Display Surface Flat Screen size (rounded to nearest integer) 100 cm, 39.6 " Backlight source DLED Display Colour depth 8bit TCON Colour Depth 8bits Vsync Frequency 60Hz Native contrast ratio 5000 : 1 TV Brightness (nits) (Typical Value) 200 TV Peak Brightness (nits) and Duration No Viewing Angle (Horiz / Vert) 178 / 178 Degrees Quantum dot No Wide Colour Gamut No KSF phosphor No Colour Gamut Range BT.2020 (1976) 52% (BT.2020) Front Cover Material / Colour Plastic / Black Back Cover Material / Colour Plastic / Black 3D Technology No 2D to 3D No PCI (Picture Criteria Index) 400

[hackernewsrobot]

M4 MacBook Pros use a quantum dot (QD) film rather than a red KSF phosphor film

https://twitter.com/DSCCRoss/status/1857208745014776215