Audio engineer and composer. I do music for a lot of little indie games and short films, etc. and then I also mix music, and edit audio for corporate earnings calls.

So, your first thought might be for enhancing clarity using techniques like compression and limiting to give the calls a consistent volume and avoid spikes that might bust an ear drum.

This is partially true; I run all these calls through a compressor and limiter for that reason, though I am not encouraged by my employer to be obsessed with making the calls pristine...after all they are done on regular phone lines over regular phones (viz., not on nice microphone) and as such you can't exactly get Hollywood sound; you actually rarely useful data below 175 hrz and what is audible above 2500 us usually very useful when boosted (it becomes very essy, harsh, and hissy)

As a second consideration, many publicly traded companies, needing to carefully word their situations to their shareholders, will record two versions of their call and which one gets aired is dependent on news or other factors that come between the call and the airing of the call (could be a matter of hours, or a matter of days). This is also true to an extent and happens from time to time.

A third consideration you might have is, throat clearing, coughing, rummaging of papers. I'll tell you....the MFS have the driest mouths and lip smack louder than a firecracker. They also don't seem to realize if they shuffle papers next to the phone it will pick it up.

But no, even that is not the main reason.

The main reason they need to pre-record is because they can't read. They can't read simple sentences. I've picked a sentence out at random, and knowing nothing about their insane vernacular (we had fantastic EBITDA margins that gross outstanding for the coming tailwinds that outshine our core foundation pillars and drivers of growth) I was able to read them without messing up.

And yet they....will frequently have to read the same sentence 2-10 times. I'm not kidding. Most of these CEOs are fucking imbeciles and mean ones at that. They can barely read a sentence without fucking up. It sometimes takes me an hour to edit together a 15 min call.

On rare occasions it's because they care. I'm under NDA but I'll just say I have worked with a certain publicly traded meat-alternative company that has a lot of re-recording and edits but it's because their CEO (seems to me) very passionate about what he's doing and agonizes over the right word choices even up until the moment of recording. Props to him. He's taking pride in what he does and can actually read a full sentence.

Other people on the other side of the spectrum can't even be bothered to read their script before they show up and don't know how to pronounce their own product names.

TL;DR: I am mostly there to make sure I have a clear pronunciation of every line of the script, take notes on where there are errors, and edit the script together to make a coherent whole at the end without any gross factual error. I do a little bit of processing to get rid of throat clearing, make the volume consistent.

Boiled peanuts!

It's crazy to think scribes would have still been learning Sumerian at the time; the wiki page says it was found around mid 1st century BC and at this point the Assyrians and Babylonians had shifted to almost all Akkadian and Aramaic (iirc) and Sumerian would have been a rare thing to study (Ashurbanipal had bragged about having studied the language as if it was a rarity for anything other than perhaps royal priests) but maybe it was still being used in the South even that late?

Thanks for sharing, very cool!

Edit: If it matters, I may have misattributed the linguistic boasting to Ashurbanipal; in hindsight I think it was his father Esarhaddon...I feel like I recall reading that he may have been educated in priestly duties and letters because he wasn't expected to have succeeded his father Sennacherib.

Only if it somehow increases profit. FTFY

I just wrapped up a deep dive into Mesopotamia myself and man it was fucking fascinating. Hadn't heard this one before, so thanks

Another fun one from Mari was how Shamshi-adad berated his son via correspondence by saying he was too busy womanizing and partying to be a good leader and should be more like his older brother 😂.

There are so many cool stories. I have moved on for now to study some Greek and Egyptian history because I want to have a nice background for when I get to Roman history but one day I wanna grab a book specifically on Assyrian history.

Anyway I am around if you ever want to talk Mesopotamian history haha

No! It's much better to face these enemies with legionnaires and auxiliaries!

Noticed this too and it's annoying as ferk. It's messed up many a queue between my wife and i

Same. The prepper and some of my local subs are the only thing i still check reddit for and I'm looking to get off there entirely.

Mf wizards never die

I've been using it for probably 5+ years and it's been great. I wish I could port forward to incoming 80 in my server so I could run a site while it's up, but at the end of the day I can always run a site elsewhere.

That aside, it's never gone down on me, the speeds are fast, it auto-connects to the best server available, and they run lots of promos.

• Melinda's ghost pepper sauce (kinda my default)
• Tobasco scorpion (another default)
• yuca tecca reserve (for tacos usually with another sauce for more heat)
• trappey's tobacco peppers (for hot dogs, eggs, and chili)
• Melinda's ghost pepper wing sauce (for nuggies)

Yea! I've skimmed through a cuneiform dictionary and saw so many words that made me wonder how anyone could possibly sight-read it without accidentally mistaking things haha.

Syncthing!

I do mean it in an American way but also boiled peanuts masala salad sounds right the fuck up my alley.

The newly inspired Roman fan in me wants to say 'no you filthy Carthaginian scum!' but the guy who just read about Dido in a Greek mythology book says he needs to learn more about it because it seems really interesting

One of my favorite songs of all time. I revisit it once a year or so but have to be careful because as much as I love it, it can put me in a dark place. I've urged a lot of friends to give it a listen while paying attention to the lyrics but that seems to be quite a commitment for most people 😂

In the Golden Dawn tradition (if I read and recall correctly) you start with 1 to 2 if invoking and 2 to 1 if banishing (which is probably the more common of the two)! Yay knowledge no one asked for 🤣

Yea I just saw that in my feed. I've never seen them live (though I hear they suck live 😜) so I should def try.

Like as in you traveled across the country to see them? If so, that sounds fun. I've driven across 3-4 times (assuming you mean the US) and it's been a lot of fun each time.

It would be really great to see them for me this time since they are playing with the Descendants (the two were my introduction into punk music)!