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He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Apoptygma Bezerk "Kathy's Song" ::
I've been watching reruns of the television programme NCIS lately. This has caused me to realize two things: One, Abby is one sexy beast. Seriously, that is one hot character they have there (but that isn't really relevant right now, but I thought I should say something, but I'll shut up on that for the moment). Two, I hate when there are crime investigations on television and the computers make stupid noises.
NCIS has made me notice that every television drama that involves solving crimes, be it Law & Order or CSI, whenever they are using their computers, it makes all of these blippy and bloopy sound effects for every little thing. This drives me nuts.
"I'm running the prints through the system right now." Cut to the monitor cycling through the finger print registry. Every finger print on record goes by on the screen, accompanied by a "deet" sound effect, so the computer is going "deetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeet" while it does this a million times. I seriously doubt that the program to search for finger print matches would want to slow itself down by adding sound effects to it.
You know, I could almost let that slide. I mean, I don't have access to any sort of software like that. My only basis for comparison is when I want to search my PC for something, and that doesn't have any sound effects. It's just that those shows don't stop there with the computer sounds; it's every little action done on the computer has a cool-sounding sound to go with it, when it's really just rubbish. I mean, I've seen them MINIMIZE a browser window with a sound effect! I've seen them use an application like Google Earth and as the image de-pixelizes it makes noises! REALLY? Why would they do that? That's not how NORMAL computers, run by normal people tend to operate.
I'm guessing that they show people using the computer so often that they are afraid that this action my seem boring, so they add sound effects to make it a little more interesting. Well, here's a tip for you: if you think watching someone use a computer will be boring, then stop doing it! We don't need to actually SEE the results on the computer screen, you know! There are LOADS of other ways to tell the audience this same information! Through DIALOGUE, for example?
Please, stop adding all this bullshit beeps and boops to everything a computer does. We, your audience, probably use computers ourselves and KNOW that's not normal! Most people's systems don't make a "ding" noise when toggling in between windows, so why do those depicted on TV? Wouldn't that get annoying after a while, also? If every time I opened or closed or changed a window my computer when "bleep!" I think I would want to throw it out of a window. Just sayin'.
William the Bloody (nit-picker)
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