About one of Shadow's vocal techniques/styles

About one of Shadow's vocal techniques/styles

I hadn't thought about it or noticed it in a while, but there was a technique or sound that Shadows used to do. I don't know how to put it into words. It's like a twangy technique or sound, reminiscent of Axl Rose, which he especially used to do around the City of Evil and self titled era. Timestamps included, check out the live performances Scream in the LBC or Trashed and Scattered (which is still one of my favorite live performances). He still used to do it as far out as the Hail to the King era, like the end of Shepherd of Fire chorus. From what the internet says, he had the same vocal coach as Axl at one point, so that would make sense.

But anyway, I really liked that sound and I thought he used it very well. What do you all think? And from a vocal perspective, I wonder if it's more straining to use that technique or if he intentionally decided to do it less. Or at least I think he does it less.

This came to mind because I was watching their recent performance of Seize the Day in Montreal, and I thought I was hearing a bit more of that technique.

u/kenshinx9 — 6 days ago

HSN item has wrong details, but don't want to lose out on 88x points back offer.

I recently saw an HSN 88x offer some may have heard about. It was literally my first time using the Capital One Offers and was my Venture X offer. HSN has a MacBook Neo listing and it said it was the 512GB with Touch ID. It says it in multiple places. Once I got the order confirmation in my email, I noticed the item link title mentioned something about it being the 256GB bundle, but it links to the page with the 512GB specs. Either the title was wrong, or the listing was wrong.

In the end, I got it today and they sent me the 256GB version. I'm not sure what to do here because I don't want to jeopardize my points if they mess with the order in some way. It's not what I wanted, but I'll still take the laptop for about $110. Has anyone ever done an exchange with HSN? I'm more inclined to just suck it up, but if they're able to rectify something without altering the order, then I'd be interested in exploring that option.

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u/kenshinx9 — 10 days ago

Droning, humming, or vibration noise after blower motor replacement.

My blower motor in the air handler died last week, so I called a company that was authorized to handle Lennox warranties. I don't actually know much about AC units and haven't had to deal with AC issues before, so I couldn't tell if the technician was being honest with me or not. But I live in Florida and it was getting to 85F in the house, and while I wasn't desperate, I did want this fixed.

Ever since this was replaced, there's this sort of low hum or droning sound that wasn't there before. I hear it anytime the AC starts up and it's not intermittent. I hear it from anywhere in the house. It's kind of driving me nuts. It's hard to describe accurately. Maybe like if you were slowly accelerating and then cruising in a car with a really low sounding exhaust, but of course not as loud as a car.

What could the issue be and should I expect the company to come back and fix this sound? Like I said, it wasn't like that before. The part is an OEM replacement since it was under warranty, but he only replaced the motor and reused everything else.

On a side note, even though the part was covered under warranty, they still charged me $1,350 and I'm not sure if that's typical. They say it's a flat rate sort of job thing, but it still seemed quite high. If anyone has any input, that'd be great so I know for the future.

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u/kenshinx9 — 12 days ago

Capital One Offers - Venture X

I ran into an 88x back for HSN and saw a post somewhere about a hidden cap of $1,000 over three quarters. But I can't find any documentation about that. This would literally be my first time using Capital One Offers, as I normally use something like Rakuten. But this offer would have been too good to pass up.

Are there any gotchas that I should be aware of here?

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u/kenshinx9 — 18 days ago

Galaxy Book6 Pro Discount - Worth it?

It looks like the Galaxy Book6 Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage is marked down in the Shop app and with an EDU account. It's a huge discount, but I'm wondering if it's still worth the price. The MSRP seems like it's inflated, but I haven't actually used the laptop before.

What do you all think?

u/kenshinx9 — 1 month ago

Fake Buds4 Pros on eBay?

I got the Galaxy Buds4 Pros as part of a deal, but don't particularly need them since I have the 3 Pros and I'm still happy with them. So I've been trying to sell them on eBay and I think they're priced to sell, but I'm not getting any views.

I've noticed that there are a lot of listings that are selling these new for like $60. But surely these are fake ones or something right? Has anyone ever used these? It's just kind of annoying because now I can't sell mine if people are finding these cheap ones and don't know any better.

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u/kenshinx9 — 1 month ago
▲ 3 r/aws

Prompt caching for Bedrock Agents

I'm trying to find ways to optimize our agents built using Bedrock Agents. Prompt caching in general sounds like a good feature for us to utilize. After each deployment, the orchestration prompt, the agent instructions, and things like the action group schema are good candidates to cache. But I don't see a way to enable it or utilize it for Bedrock Agents. Does anyone have any experience or insight to this?

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u/kenshinx9 — 3 months ago

Sales Channel Confusion - 3rd Party Payment Processing

We've been building an app which seems to fall in line with what would be classified as a sales channel within Shopify:

  • We have our own platform to drive customers to buy products there.
  • We have our own checkout process and payment processor, which is Stripe.
  • We have an integration with Shopify that will let users sync their products to our platform.

We mostly needed OAuth for the syncing and then the ability to push orders back into their system.

I didn't actually know about sales channels at the time, and so submitted the app for approval a while back, with the intent of being a public unlisted app. We don't care about being the app store, but this was the closest option I thought at the time. We got a pause on the approval since we use Stripe, and they said we are bypassing Shopify Checkout, which is true, but that's just because we have our own checkout. Now I'm trying to figure out if our plan to accept payments is not going to be possible at all. I think it's confusing, and even LLMs can't help me answer the question. They all provide different answers.

Reading over the sales channel docs, they make it sound like our use case is fine because there is the channel config that indicates if we're the merchant of record, which we are. We are "the external platform handles checkout and payment (marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart)."

But then they have requirements listed out here: https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/launch/shopify-app-store/app-store-requirements#sales-channel

One of the requirements says we "take customers to Shopify's Checkout". But isn't that contradicting us being a sales channel and merchant of record? That requirement list is kind of like a nail in the coffin, but I hope that isn't the case.

I'd appreciate any insights on this. Thanks in advance!

u/kenshinx9 — 3 months ago