On the cassette tape version of The Wall I had if you flipped the cassette over during this phone call sequence it would end up being right in the middle of another song (can't remember which one) which has this recording playing as part of the background. I feel like it couldn't have been intentional but who knows.
I’m betting subconscious but intentional. I’ve heard a couple artists talk about how they organize an album and there’s a vibe they’re going for but I didn’t get the impression any of them had it down to anything like a science.
Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz. It’s just two artists putting a story arc together by feel and getting the same shape. A bit birthday paradox, but a bit shared vibe.
In the case of The Wall, I would bet a certain degree of symmetry was being reached for. Few artists want to leave or start an album on a sour note, but there will be songs in the middle that are.
One of the things I miss from the pre-streaming era is that “nobody” listens to whole albums at a time anymore, and I find that a shame. I used to start humming the next song on the album when I would hear things on the radio. Makes it worse when they trim the intro or outro for radio play though. I prefer the album version of Wish You Were Here, for instance.
My then-15 year old daughter surprised me a few years ago. We had just pulled up to the house. Instead of opening the car door, she put on Led Zeppelin I and we sat in the car listening to the entire album together. I honestly think that was the first time in her life that she put on an entire album to listen to.
And she did appreciate what an experience it was - like watching a movie when all you've ever seen were Youtube Shorts, or like reading a novel when all you've ever read were memes.
Most good albums have one song that was never released as a single, that’s just for the fans. So even beyond the “story” the album contaminates, they miss important chapters.
Anyone who talks about Tears for Fears, a side conversation about The Working Hour will start. Throwing Copper had five or six singles released over almost three years, but Pillar of Davidson is still my favorite song from that album, and one of my favorites overall. I could listen to Kashmir or PoD in much the same mood. They just build and build.
It would be similar to Patreon content today (though writers with Patreon or magazine articles often release collections later that have all of the rarer content. Martha Wells is the first to spring to my mind, and Naomi Novik for another)
Wow, I remember noticing this same thing back when I was exploring a lot of different artists. On streaming sites often a bands top songs will be ones that came out recently, or a collab they did with a more popular band, or a track that for whatever reason appealed to a wider audience. But those aren’t what you really want to hear if you’re trying to decide if you like that band. My strategy would instead be to go find either the bands earliest studio album or the oldest album that is well represented in their top tracks and skip to track 7. I never thought about why, but it definitely works.
> One of the things I miss from the pre-streaming era is that “nobody” listens to whole albums at a time anymore
I’ve been looking forward to finding out how Aphex Twin has built projects around the streaming format. It may take many more years and releases until someone finds out something like the ten seconds from 0:30-0:40 on all his tracks work when randomly played together in any order, or something along those line.
Alphaville's second album Afternoons in Utopia starts with quiet muffled word "night", then followed by few seconds of silence and then first song called IAO starts. The last song on that album is about Lady Bright:
There was a young lady named Bright
Who's speed was much faster, much faster than light
She departed one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous...
Dream Theater has a string of 4 albums (over 6 years) in which each album starts with the soundscape from the end of the previous album. The last album in the cycle, Octavarium, musically and thematically finishes in a loop, connecting the end of the last song to the beginning of the first.
If memory serves, I believe record players that could flip the records were contemporary to the release of The Wall. My parents didn’t have a flipper but they had a player that could play a stack of records and The Wall was the first or second LP try bought to play on it.
That definitely works on an auto reversing tape deck, which it looks like existed for fifteen years prior.
Sharp made an auto-reversing turntable, it played both sides, front-loaded like a CD player. I have never seen one, despite being an old guy who is of that era. There were but a handful of turntables that could do this, so that’s a lot of production effort for a joke but a few were equipped to get.
There were a lot of eight tracks during that time, though, so sibling comment is more likely correct.
It's a nice coincidence but I doubt it was intentional or even subconscious - The Wall was released in 1979, when casette tapes were only just starting to become popular (it was the same year as the first Walkman was released, which contributed hugely to their growth). The vast majority of record sales were vinyl and most bands would be concentrating on that format.
The ultimate (and often overlooked) failure mode for using your own domain name is death. You will die and at that point unless you have set up and funded a process to renew the domain name perpetually after your death then after some period of time it will expire. Anyone can then register "your" domain name and start using it which includes receiving all the email addressed to it. If your bank happens to send 2FA emails to this account then the new owner will then have access to your bank account. Personally I want my heirs to own my bank account after I'm dead, not whatever random person happens to register a domain name that I was using.
This sounds extreme but it's only the most dramatic example. This scenario can happen any time during your life if your domain is not renewed for any number of other reasons.
So for me I've had to accept the risk which comes from keeping my most important emails on a large free email provider. At least if they ban me they aren't going to let someone else access my email either. For everything else - the less important accounts - I do use a domain name that I "own".
More like “Dad I’m calling you from prison and I don’t trust that I’m actually talking to you and not a deepfake so can you tell me that password we talked about?” Then dad gives not you the password. There are infinite ways to socially engineer people.
So you have an "older" and "younger" password. If you are the younger person (ie child) in the conversation you tell them the "younger" password, and if you are the older you tell them the "older" password.
or something like that. Remember this is mostly to defeat casual one-off scams.
I don't know the answer to your question but tangentially, many human concepts related to time definitely do not exist in a purely physical sense. Like being "late" or "early", things "taking too long" or "being slow". Being "out of time" or "just in time". These are all human concepts. Physically speaking (classically anyway), things all happen right when they are supposed to.
I find a lot of interesting links between spirituality and physics like this. One idea or message in spirituality is that everything happens exactly as as "the universe" intends it to. It's meant to be a comforting thought as events (good and bad) occur in one's life and to encourage one to detach from outcomes. Yet, it's more or less parallel to classical determinism as you mentioned.
> Physically speaking (classically anyway), things all happen right when they are supposed to.
>The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War,[3][4] was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering.[5] Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young.[5] The Kasakela was left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young.
> It is used by hundreds of people daily, who by all reports absolutely hate it.
This made me chuckle because as a software development intern in 1988 (being paid like $8 an hour) I wrote a giant monstrosity of a time tracking program for a local CAD company in an Empress database using its forms builder interface. It was in use for far longer than anyone ever intended and whenever I ran into someone from that company years later they would tell me how bad it was. Sorry guys!
I have thought for a long time someone needs to make a system where 200 kids can show up at their local theater and play multiplayer games on the big screen using their phones as input devices. The games would have to be custom made for this system and you’d need a local server and network. But you could license it to theaters and they would make a killing getting kids into the theaters on Saturday morning.
Yeah I feel like this article would benefit from some concrete examples of what it is the author is actually envisioning. Products that truly benefit humanity in the strict sense are few and far between.
