Messages

I definitely infinitely prefer forums for information and the like.  Finding information here is a stack easier than facebook.

However, the instant gratification for a build report doesn't happen here.  I'm as guilty as anyone in that I rarely comment on a build, but it does feel a bit like that the bar is massively so high that the build has to be polished in tears of nubile virgins without a micrometer of wasted wire in order to get any feedback sometimes.

It also depends on who posts the build report. Some people are more popular then others and their build reports will get more oh's and ah's then others. That's just the way it is. With FB it matters less who posts the pretty pictures, as long as your pictures are pretty. If only you get to see the pretty pictures from the get go. No need to click on a link first.

Nostalgia always lasts longer then the (supposed) golden age. There are Iranians who still mourn the fall of the Achaemanid empire. Greece and Macedonia argue over the name Macedonia. Mussolini wanted to revive the Roman empire. Nostalgia is a powerful motivator.

It's not a plot hole, it's people misunderstanding or misapplying the lore of the world. Tolkien addresses the eagles in letters, though you can work it out with nothing more than what's in The Hobbit and LotR.

Destroying the ring is a stealth mission. The least powerful people carry out a plan that Sauron can't even imagine they would think of, because he can't imagine people throwing away power like that, and the weakness of hobbits makes them virtually invisible to him. This is discussed at the Council of Elrond.

Beings in middle earth have a body that exists in the corporeal realm and another that exists in the spiritual realm. The nazgul can't even manage to be visible in the corporeal realm but they are easily seen in the spritual realm, because they're really powerful (because Sauron put some of his considerable spiritual power into them). To creatures like Sauron that see the spiritual nature of things in Middle Earth, someone like Gandalf probably looks like a fireworks display. This is talked about when Frodo is stabbed with the Nazgul's knife and he starts becoming a wraith -- he can see their true forms.

Eagles are the same way. They're either maiar and air spirits (in the Silmarilion) or higher level animals (in later stuff), and they're servants of the king of the gods. They don't fly anywhere with any sort of stealth as far as Sauron and his most powerful servants are concerned. They can be shot down by bows just like any bird (they're worried about humans' bows in The Hobbit). They can be destroyed by the Nazgul's vulture thingies. They're not invincible by any stretch of the imagination. It's even possible that at the time of writing LotR, since Tolkien was considering them maiar at the time, that they would have taken the ring from Frodo and used it.

Basically you need a couple quiet commandos to complete the mission and everyone's who says the plan has a flaw is wondering why you don't roll up in a loud helicopter. Any plan in which you include someone more powerful than a hobbit is going to fail, because even a hobbit fails at the end, despite making it farther than anyone else could have. (It's actually destiny, to the point where there's literal deus ex machina at the end -- Eru pushes Gollum into the volcano.)

Now you're just trying to reason away a plothole. Just like Star Wars tried to reason away why the Death Star had this stupid vulnerability with Rogue One. If Gandalf was this shining beacon to Sauron, why was he still included in the original plan to travel with the Fellowship into Mordor? If anything then he should have been going the complete other way to distract him. The Eagles are a plothole. Not that it bothers me in the least because in the end every story is about the journey and I enjoy this journey immensely, but I acknowledge that it is a plothole.

Absolutely loved LOTR when I first read it many years ago.
My only 2 gripes are:
1. Frodo was just plain annoying.

That's because Sam is the real hero of the story.  If LOTR was a sarcastic comedy then Frodo would be the Prince of Wales, a blithering idiot, and Sam be his sarcastic servant. And Gollum his disgusting stupid sidekick with a turnip fixation.

Seriously though. The ring corrupts whoever carries it. And the book and the movie does a great job showing us how it turns Frodo from a happy go lucky young Hobbit into a pale gaunt former shadow of its former self. Who becomes a dick and ultimately falls to its corrupting influence.

2. No battle of Hobbiton in the last movie. That was a friggin ripoff. And the fact those 2 hobbits that got into the Entwine didn't come back a bit taller.

You can't do everything in a movie. Everybody was already bitching and moaning about the 'many endings' as it was already. I think in the books Tolkien got away with it, but from a story point telling it made no sense to have an additional story climax after the main ending. If anything it helped to show us the feeling of alienation that Frodo and his friends experienced when they returned home and found that nothing had happened there and they were seen as odd and crazy. To know that outside of the Shire people would bow to their sacrifices, whereas in the Shire they were seen as 'odd fellows'. I love that part. It also draws comparisons to the experiences of modern day military veterans who return back to civil society.

Tom Bombadil was another interesting character who never made the films

He really was a story stopper. Another crime against conventional story telling that Tolkien committed. Did it work in the books? Some loved Tom, I hated him, as to me it was a full on hitting the breaks on the main story. I can only surmise that in the movies it would have been even worse. Hey, here's a character on which the Ring has no influence and to whom they could have given it. Potential end of story right here. But lets not do it. Yeah, it would have confused the hell out of people not familiar with the books. Could they have shot Tom Bombadil for the extended version? I reckon they could. But it makes no sense to shoot scenes that you know will not end up in a theatrical release.

I'm not sure if this is regarding a comment I made earlier or not. I think that the critical mass aspect is certainly true and may account for the lack of engagement with anything but specific questions. However, The basic questions—even if in the archives—are valuable to have asked since it starts dialogues. People can find new ways of doing things, beginners feel involved, and teaching is a great way to hone skills. If people are simply searching for answers instead of asking questions, there's no new dialogue, and others don't get the benefit of teaching. There is, of course, the risk of having the same few common questions come up over and over again—that would get tiring and I'm sure would result in ignoring things—but, new folks should definitely ask their questions. It's pretty vital to a community.

If everything's already been traced, there are no new ODs/distortions/fuzzes, everyone has built everything already, there's a boutique industry of building even more boutique versions of boutique versions of classic circuits—is that the end of enjoyment? Sure, a lot of mystery is gone, components are going extinct, and things aren't super cheap: it's not the wild west anymore. Though, look at the wave of 'retirements'—the consensus seems to be around the community. So, maybe some aspects have changed and a 'golden age' might be gone. But that doesn't diminish the other good things that have come from that age. As long as there are curious people that like discovering how things work and gain satisfaction from making something with their own hands, building will be around.

I like the Wild West analogy. Sure, the period that came after the Wild West was probably better and more prosperous in any conceivable way, it was the very nature of anything can happen and the freedom that made it so alluring. Anyone could take a piece of land, murder or deport the natives and now claim it as his own. As long as they could hold it against their competitors and/or the robber barons. It's the old dichotomy between freedom and security.

As for the forum I reckon its also the old internet forum culture thing vs. the new social media thing. Fractal has both an internet forum as a social media presence, and I've noticed that the people who post on the facebook groups rarely if ever post on the internet forum and vice versa. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was a thriving DIY pedal community on social media that doesn't bother with forums like these. Except for maybe finding reference material and schematics.

Fuzz Faces are annoying finicky beasts, especially the germanium ones. Which is highly ironic considering they are simple parts wise. Which is why I stuck to silicon versions. If it was good enough for David Gilmour its good enough for me.

So: it feels like nearly EVERY time I try to build a tremolo, the thing just won't work. It's maddening.

I have the same thing with flangers. Can't get any of them to work. Tremelo's in contrast always fire up first time without a hitch. It's the Universe having a perverse sense of humor.

Two things, empires in decline do stupid things that usually play no small part in furthering their decline. And Gibson is pretty much a business empire in decline. And secondly Gibson has developed a business culture that loves to make stupid decisions, and this one seems pretty much in character.

I can't understand most dislike of Tolkien's writing, even if I can accept that it's not everyone's cup of tea. I feel like some of them are just received wisdom. Tolkein is a damn good writer.

LOTR doesn't take 100 pages for the action to start. The action becomes progressively more sinister as the hobbits get further from their home, until they are literally trudging through hell on earth. The first chapter's like 30 pages in small paperback pages and it's the only mostly frivolous part of the book (even though some important things about the ring's effect on people are shown at that point), but necessary because it bookends the Scouring of the Shire, and shows what actually got damaged in the war.

The prose is often beautiful, despite its actual simplicity. The dialog is consistent with the tone of the rest of the book, which is more than can be said about most fantasy writers. The book is thematically consistent not just with itself but with another thousand pages of legendarium, and its level of detail rewards casual reading as well as the deepest possible probing. It's one of the most popular books on earth, and we can't all be wrong. It's also the subject of a great deal of serious literary criticism.

I agree with what you are saying, but playing devil's advocate here, saying that because something is popular it can't be wrong can mean that by that same yard stick the Kardashians should be high culture as well.

There aren't plot holes.

I can think of at least one. If the Eagles could fly into Mordor to rescue Frodo and Sam, why not fly the whole Fellowship into Mordor from the start. This has always been a source of great debate. Where were the damn Eagles and why couldn't they be arsed until the very last second when Middle Earth was already plunged into total war?

There aren't characters just going around doing nonsensical things against their nature because a plot demands it. There are shades of gray (people often ignore them), even among the main characters, and even in a world with actual, literal embodiments of evil and good walking around.

Tolkien mentions the lineage of ONE horse. People still keep track of stuff like that, you know, and I'm not even talking about people whose military culture depends on horses ...

Also, lol at the idea of Tolkien not being a professional writer. The dude published quite a bit during his life and it was still only a fraction of the stuff Christopher dug up after his passing.

I've once read that his son Christopher deserves to be right up there next to his father for his contribution to literature. Because indeed most of Middle Earth's history has been edited and published by the son, a labor of love for the father. And if anything we shouldn't be talking about Tolkien, but the Tolkiens.

They're bloody hard going, and that's coming from someone who read Battlefield Earth as a 13yo.  I tried multiple times in the late 80s to try and get interested in it, but bugger me, Tolkien couldn't write action to save his life, and there's far too many songs about trees and grass.  IIRC, I finally decided to do the hard slog and get through them in time for the movies.

I appreciate the effort he went through to create genealogies of people's horses but all that is meaningless if the rest of it is a sludge to get through...  I don't think it's about a lack of patience, it's more that they're bloody boring for the most part.

Everyone's experiences are obviously different. But this is how they wrote novels back then. They took their sweet time setting things up and getting going. And we do live in a time where people have zero patience for everything. If there is no instant gratification or sweet action coming we get bored and tune out. How many classic movies do they still air on TV? It's only recent blockbusters whenever I switch on the TV, barely anything black and white to be seen. Even in music the hook, the thing that grabs you and which used to be the chorus, now comes sooner and sooner. Nowadays it even seems that most songs start with the chorus.

And yes, Tolkien was no professional writer, but an university professor. Who wanted to write an epic myth in the classical styles of millennia ago. Which includes lots of songs. It just so happened that what he also created was the modern fantasy genre. I reckon that in this overstimulated day and age his work would not received as well but back then it was as groundbreaking as Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced. And if you think LOTR is slow and bad, you should try the Silmarillion, cause that is probably everything you dislike about LOTR on steroids. That is the work that Tolkien really wanted to create and from which he drew inspiration when he was asked to write a sequel to The Hobbit.

I think that most of that is because Tolkien was an academic, an Oxford Don -- he broke one of the cardinal rules when he started writing The Hobbit, and Fellowship of the Ring. He literally just sat down, and started writing, with the very first line of the book. No outline, no summary, just start writing from the beginning, proceed through the middle, and stop when you reach the end. He had to start all over again several times, when he painted himself into a corner.

So, with a combination of that, plus an academic tendency to get side-tracked...

Lots of people work that way. *cough* Jar Jar Abrams *cough* I don't think Tolkien did it that way. That is no way any academic works. If anything academics pay incredible attention to detail. Way too much attention then most. And the War of the Rings books that his son Christopher released showed us the early drafts for the books. In the end LOTR went through the same process as any novel, it got written, then rewritten, rearranged and rewritten endless amounts of times before it got released. Where Tolkien differs is in his style and pacing, which is more abstract, with more attention to detail and the worldbuilding then the characters themselves. If anything Middle Earth is a character in itself, and the best developed of them all. You really get a mind's eye feel for Middle Earth, way more then for any of the characters themselves. And the pacing differs because once the Hobbits finally get going it comes to a full stop again with Tom Bombadil, then picks up, only to split into two different narratives as the Fellowship breaks up. Most writers would adopt a leap over style where they would devote one chapter to Aragorn and Friends, then one to Frodo and Sam, and alternate all the way to the end. Yet Tolkien commits the cardinal sin of completely splitting up their adventures into separate books. The fact that he made it work is testament that the dude could write to keep his readers engaged. Although it remains to be seen if that remains to be case in our over stimulated times.

Having read this thread, and some of the others, I wonder how many of the regular posters here actually still build pedals? Sometimes it feels more like a retirement community in this regard. And mea culpa in this regard as well.

Bearing in mind I'm heavily entrenched in the world of fantasy fiction and always have been; Lord of the Rings is bloody awful to read. Tolkien was an intellectual who thought it'd be fun to create an alternate history and a fictional language to go along with that, and it reads like a book written by someone who'd really like doing that sort of thing. The ideas within spawned a genre, same with Lovecraft, which can rightfully elevate them to legendary status. But that doesn't stop them being subjectively not very good...

They are good! It's just that our culture has changed in that we no longer have the patience to sit down for a piece of fiction that takes its sweet time. In a time where we judge persons instantly by swiping either right or left how much patience do we have for a book that takes at least a 100 pages for the action to even start?

And let us not forget that in a time where we have literally been SWAMPED by their copy cats its easy to forget how refreshing and revolutionary there were in their time. Personally I can't stand the Beatles and I find Jimi Hendrix to be a rather meh guitar player (sans his live antics), as I've grown up long after them and experienced whole generations who took what they did and built upon them. And also did great things with them. But if I had lived at the times they lived in I would probably have been MIND BLOWN!

I always found soldering to be incredible relaxing. Maybe it was inhaling the soldering fumes, but if it weren't for the changing background noises of the TV somewhere in the room I could completely forget time when I was soldering.

The moment you fire up a new build was also an incredible rush. Too bad it was often countered by the dreaded no sound at all moment.

But one of the most fun things was planning a new build. As in playing with my ordering spreadsheet. Adding in the number of components I would, seeing if there was room in the order for another build, and if so which one. I have whole spreadsheets full of planned pedal builds that never happened, and yet they still give me great pleasure compiling them.

For me building pedals was a way to get expensive vintage or boutique pedals on the cheap. As I didn't have a whole lot of money back then. For a while it became a fun hobby, building stuff just for the sake of building stuff. And I really do like to build stuff. It's primal, the feel is great, it's relaxing, it SO beats working in an office. I think we humans are meant to build things as a species, not shuffle paper or bytes around. That stuff just kills the human soul.

But after a while there's only so many pedals you really need, so many overdrives or fuzzes you can build before they all start to sound the same. It's good that there are more and more PCB's being sold, great for you guys selling them. It's good that more and more parts are being sold, great for you vendors, especially you, Chromesphere. I always enjoyed ordering from you. But you can still move more volume and no longer be in a golden age. Maybe the golden age was one of creativity, when people came together and tried build something together. And now that something is flourishing, but that creative spark is no longer there? Like a startup that was new and exciting in the beginning, and now has become a business, that makes more money then ever, but the creatives have moved on, or settled in a business hierarchy and it just became a company like all the others?

I also think that SMD will be a major game changer. Being able to get started with through holes was easy for me, but it still terrified most people that I know. I can't imagine this hurdle becoming any easier when all the through holes have been replaced with SMD. Quite the opposite in fact. It might be that DIY pedal building will change from what we do now, assembling everything onto a pcb and then into a pedal, into installing pre soldered SMD pcb's into a pedals, or multi FX pedals. That would make things easier for newbies, turning it from full DIY pedal building into more IKEAing your own pedal.

It usually never mattered as unlike a fuzz face the muff has always been quite forgiving as to what transistors you put into them. That has usually been the strength of the design as EHX has literally shoved any tranny that was available at the time into them. All the sonic changes that come with the various models usually come from differing resistor and cap values. That being said, if memory serves me right there is a difference between BC239B's or BC239C's, and the latter seems to be the one that gets used in muffs.

I can't remember the last time I built a pedal, I have no plans to built anything other then guitars, but I still got all my supplies stashed somewhere. The biggest mistake that people make when they quit something is to get rid of everything. Only to suffer regret later on and having to spend a lot of $$$$ to require it again. Stash it, out of sight, out of mind. And no regrets later. And who knows, maybe one day your kids may come across it and think its very cool? And take it up themselves?