MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.
You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
view the rest of the comments
I'm really glad that the digital video era ended the standard fragmentation around the world.
Now if only codec patents could fuck all the way off.
PAL and SECAM could be converted from one to the other pretty much losslessly with a small (but appropriately expensive) piece of industrial-grade equipment, the difference is just the encoding of color into composite (and broadcasters would internally use RGB anyway).
PAL/SECAM and NTSC were way more tricky as the number of lines (576/625 or 480/525) and refresh rate (25 or 29.97) differed. I think they first had to use film to skip/duplicate every 6th/5th frame and blur the lines; since the 1980s expensive and giant 2MB RAM frame buffers were available with logic that would dispatch missing/duplicate lines and fields accordingly. Today, every phone routinely scales and framebuffers video without batting an eye. Neither method is lossless though.
Czechoslovakia's public TV switched from SECAM to PAL in circa 1991. Most old color TVs could have conversion kits installed; post-1985 ones like my family's Tesla Color 462 were already made future-proof by including rudimentary (non-phase-correcting) PAL decoders. Between cca 1995-2010, virtually all TVs had SCART inputs that fully supported RGBA, bidirectional (TV<->VCR) stereo audio and composite PAL, SECAM or NTSC video, as well as control signals such as aspect ratio. (Yes, late 1990s European CRT TVs don't need RGB or NTSC mods, they have it all! Just the cable and connector is bulky and falls out often because we hadn't figured out twisted differential pairs in the 1970s.)
Still, TV here is broadcast at 25 f/s and 576i if in SD because of all the old content in that format. I'm furious YouTube never allowed 576i, scaling everything down to 480p with awful combing. But yeah, I'm glad we've settled on 1080p for modern content; frame rate conversion is less disruptive than scaling.