
Streaky vinyl records are the Dum Dums mystery flavor of the music world
It comes out every day, and they typically interview an interesting person to talk about their media diet or special interest. In today's issue, they spoke to Todd Osborn, a US Air Force weapons systems veteran who is building a flight school. He talked about why vinyl records are usually black.
- ▪It comes out every day, and they typically interview an interesting person to talk about their media diet or special interest.
- ▪In today's issue, they spoke to Todd Osborn, a US Air Force weapons systems veteran who is building a flight school.
- ▪He talked about why vinyl records are usually black.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/09/29/fountain-pen-streaky-vinyl-transition-records.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:56:49 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T20:42:33.835Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T20:42:33.835Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JoUJyXtflii- · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Streaky vinyl records are the Dum Dums mystery flavor of the music world Mark Frauenfelder 11:56 am Tue Sep 29, 2026 Image: James_Seattle / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) One of my favorite newsletters is called Why Is This Interesting? It comes out every day, and they typically interview an interesting person to talk about their media diet or special interest. In today's issue, they spoke to Todd Osborn, a US Air Force weapons systems veteran who is building a flight school. He talked about why vinyl records are usually black. They're black because they are tinted with carbon powder, which makes the plastic tougher and less likely to attract dust because it doesn't hold a static charge as well.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.