#WHAT IF I COULDN'T BE PRODUCTIVE BECAUSE OF ADDED DISABILITIES

[system-of-a-feather]

Man I am going to vent a little bit here real quick but honestly my fiance's struggles with mental health is just - kind of annoying and bringing me down a bit I guess. I'm not sure if those are the right "emotion words" for it because they don't feel like the right words for it - perhaps "exhausting" added to the mix might help make it feel more right - but it's been like four or five months since he took a plummet and its hardly gotten better and everytime it flares up I really gotta keep batting down the "Dude just stop thinking about it and just do it and take care of yourself - DO somethign for yourself and FIX it and do more than just self sooth in less productive ways" cause 1) he is doing things about it - it just me projecting my standards that are ingrained in our trauma onto it and 2) he is a freeze fawner and I really have to be careful about applying my fight, flighter perspectives onto him like mine are any more "correct" than his and all of this is valid and takes time and yada yada cognitive empathy stuff I'm aware of

But considering I'm in a place where I'm now technically physically disabled and forced off work for 3 weeks - I'm just like OK well I am trying to keep us sane and grounded and moving forward and not getting depressed (which while rare for our system is dangerous) because we are stuck in doors and unable to do half of our usual coping because we have to stay out of work and not-active - and you are just there still 1) barely being able to help us with the few limitations we have without looking like you are about to pass out from anxiety / depression and 2) are making an atmosphere of garbage misery and mopiness

And this is all REALLY mean to be saying because I know for a fact hes genuine, I know he isn't being a "whiny bitch" or trying to milk it or anything - I am saying it here because I have been doing the obligatory socially right and empathetic / caring thing to do and acknowledging that stating how difficult "his depression is on me" and how it - to my horrifically avoidant attachment hyper independent self - feels like dead weight cause it absolutely would not help the situation

But god is it frustrating me how little is progressing and more so how I have to keep booting up my Empathy TM Generator and Patience and Understanding so much at home. Like I'm just going to my room and sitting with my birds while he does his work stuff because honestly I couldn't deal with the atmosphere, but ugh.

If anyone has any pointers on how to deal with this that is better than my current "be patient, help serve as a buffer for when he is down, listen, and let him know its a process and it takes time and that its fine because I'm genuinely capable of taking care of myself and that hes doing what he can and I appreciate that" but ugh.

I don't really know how to navigate freeze fawners and how to help them out of their spiral / rut. Specially when the guy literally looks like he will pass out of anxiety half the time.

Advice again is welcome.

[theimaginatrix27]

A blind person talks about Audiobooks for a minute

I grew up on story tapes.

Yes, that's where this essay is going to start. When I was a small child, story tapes were my jam. I loved getting new ones, but I listened to the ones I already had whenever I felt like it. There was a collection of fairy tale tapes my Grandma had, that eventually got given to my dad so I could access them more easily, that I never got tired of listening to.

And this was in part because they were well-produced, and the readers put their all into it, which made them enjoyable.

When I first joined Vision Australia's Library, I got a mixed bag of professionally made audiobooks the library had acquired for its collection, some very good volunteer narrators, and some less good ones.

Then they switched to DAISY, a fancy MP3 format with extra bits of code so you could, theoretically, page through the book and move by phrase as well as by chapter. They were not always formatted well, but that's not what I'm here to discuss.

It was about this time that I started getting books narrated by people who would either sound disinterested when reading (never good ever) or not do the story they were reading justice with their narration because their voices simply weren't that flexible.

One of these series was Sevenwaters. You probably have heard me natter on about how much I love Sevenwaters, and I absolutely do! But the narrator I first heard these books read to me by was ... she put more emotion into her reading than some others, but she was not well-suited to this series. She couldn't, and didn't, do an Irish accent for the Irish characters, she pronounced all the Gaelic names wrong except the ones that were blindingly obvious like Finbar or Conor, all her characters sounded so similar you really had to be paying attention to keep track. She did somewhat better with the fifth Obernewtyn book, but she didn't get the last two (maybe people complained, maybe nobody wanted to read Obernewtyn's last two books because of their length, I don't know). I'll tell you this much about those two books, the narration done by the people who read them was so dispassionate that I was bored. By Obernewtyn. I should not have been fucking bored by Obernewtyn.

Vision Australia also got some books added to the collection from a place in Tasmania who recorded their stuff on tapes which were then digitised, and again, they were hit and miss in quality, but the sound quality was so obviously taped on basic recorders like the ones I used to have that it kept distracting me.

And there were also a few instances in which the Brits, in all their wisdom, had several people, in one case maybe five, in the others (all part of a series) perhaps a dozen, narrate a single book, switching every fifteen-twenty minutes with no rhyme or reason, often in the middle of scenes, always mid-chapter, and the narrations varied wildly in quality! It pissed me off so much! I had a few I liked that I wished had taken the reins and read the whole book because they were genuinely amazing, but noooo, twenty minutes later, I'd get Substandard Narrator No. 4 again for an arduous quarter of an hour!

This lack of care stems, I suspect, from these particular productions being made for the exclusive use of blind people ("No unauthorised copying, broadcasting or public performance of this recording is permitted." was the warning typically given at the beginning of each in-house production), and the justification that blind people would be happy to be able to read the book at all.

Yeah, I'm calling fucking bullshit. If you wouldn't buy an audiobook whose narrator has less enthusiasm than a primary school teacher reading today's chapter of Charlotte's Web, then blind listeners shouldn't have to settle for it.

Besides, I listened to the RPH network growing up as well (Radio for the Print Handicapped, which means blind/visually impaired, though there are probably some other disabilities like dyslexia bundled in there), and they had book readings broken up into episodes, and most of them were done by volunteers for the network specifically, and they were nearly always good enough to stick around for (I can count on one hand the times a book read by someone there was genuinely unlistenable), so Vision Australia has no fucking excuse. The RNIB or whoever approved those haphazard multiple-narrator fiction books has no fucking excuse!

Why have I gone off like this about stuff that only affects a small population of listeners? Oh, honey, I am getting to that.

I have heard AI/synthetic voices read a handful of documents. All of them were fine to have been read by synthetic voices, specifically because they were:

Two separate user's manuals for two Daisy players I was sent by Vision Australia before they went totally digital.

A couple of lists of books added to the Vision Australia Library within the preceding six months (I don't think they make these any more because again, they went fully digital and people go to their website to download library books now).

Newsletters from the library/Vision Australia as a whole.

A very long recipe book.

These are acceptable uses of the technology. I preferred it when people read those, but I could accept the task being passed to a robot for reasons of it being more efficient.

Anything else read by an AI? Fuck no. It would be worse than the dispassionate human people reading books because they felt obligated to do something for the poor deprived blind people, but who didn't care enough to make it good.

As a screen-reader user, I know the limits of synthetic voices. Most of the TTS synths I can use with my screen-reader cannot have their inflection adjusted, and do not inflect to differentiate between sentences ending in periods, question marks or exclamation points. The synth I use, Espeak NG, has this capability, but many of its voices don't inflect as much as I'd like, so for eleven years I've stuck primarily with one voice variant, Linda. Some find her harsh on their ears, and she sounds worse with the English-US accent, but I use the default English Great Britain one (there are more region-specific English accents but I don't use those), so she's plenty tolerable for me. Most synthetic voices purporting to be more humanlike sound more robotic to me because they do not inflect, or if they do inflect, they always sound happy! This is not conducive to a good reading experience! Linda, at max inflection, is a far cry from a human person reading things to me, but she's still a lot better than those human narrators I mentioned above about injecting some level of emotion into what she's reading to me, and I've been using her to read fanfiction for almost as long as I've been using NVDA!

That being said, I wouldn't pay for her to read me a book. Unless I was buying the ebook, but we're talking about audiobooks here.

I am now a member of Audible. Yes, I know it's an Amazon company. I know more about how little it pays authors now than I did when I joined. But I am a member of Audible because it is the best place I currently know of to get good-quality audiobooks. Their collection is extensive, and although the public domain books are prone to the bad narrator problem (probably because they don't have to pay anyone for it because public domain), I've been able to read a lot more books that Vision Australia simply does not have. There are still books Audible doesn't have, like those whose authors kept them off that site for reasons of not wanting to sell their rights to Amazon, or books that simply were not deemed popular enough to get their own audiobooks (still sad about the second half of the Roddaverse being stuck in audiobookless purgatory), but even knowing this, I would never, and I mean never, buy versions of these audiobooks read to me by a fucking robot.

I joined archive.org a few days ago, because I heard they had some books I wanted to read. I couldn't read the borrowed books with my screen-reader because they were one-hour loans, and I couldn't listen to them being read by the TTS voice because it was awful.

I would never fucking pay a company to sell me that as an audiobook.

And yet some places are trying this out. I read in another Tumblr post that a bunch of professional audiobook narrators (angels, saints, precious gems that they are) were protesting because Apple was going to produce some audiobooks with AI so they didn't have to pay them to do it, and synthetic voices cannot intonate. This absolutely boils my blood.

I have ranted about bad narrators and bad productions for the majority of this post, but I have to tell you, when I have come across good narrators, it has in some cases been transcendant. Two of my favourites are sadly no longer with us, but they were both so good that even if they could not finish the series they read which introduced me to their talent, I could never fail to enjoy those books. Frank Muller, Katherine Kellgren, thank you for the work with which you blessed us while you were able.

I also know a lot of audiobook readers are voice-actors, and anyone paying attention would know they've gotten the short end of the stick for a long time, but I love and value them, because they are part of my childhood. They introduced me to characters I would never have known otherwise.

And I would not want their jobs stolen by mindless robots run by heartless companies whose greed and gluttony for wealth overwhelms any sense of morality or good will to their workers or customers.

I don't know what else I can do except write this post and hope someone sees it who can do something. I'm poor and blind and have no connections, and most people online don't know I exist. But I am here, and I value every human audiobook narrator who has ever taken the time to read a book aloud for the benefit of anyone who enjoys listening to a very long, complex, and perhaps soon to be beloved story tape. And I hope the robots lose this battle, and that the capitalists lose their power over this industry that is crushing so many artists right now.

[coleoffduty]

I was initially guilty about spamming you so I'm really glad to see the asks cheered you up!! I'm trying not to abuse the functionality but the universe you created in legacies is really interesting with so many complex dynamics. Can you talk more (if you want) about

- the relationship between viserys I and rhaenyra

- how all the kids see daemon (couldn't gauge how baela felt about the custody battle but she seems unsettled by the nettles thing)

- the closest real life voice/music/face claim for lucerys (and others if possible, i know that you said daeron ~~ damon albarn)

- was rhaenyra's rebellious youth a product of her upbringing (tumltuous as drew barrymore's was) or an idolising of notorious troublemaker daemon or because of her mother's loss

- what are the worst targaryen scandals in this universe? (Assuming maegor exists)

-where laena & laenor specifically stand with everything going on (the abuse lucerys suffered from his mother seemed like something laenor wouldn't accept unless he went through the same and thinks of it as normal)

oh em gee hi—welcome back <3 i rlly do wanna preface this by saying if you have questions and interests about something: flood my inbox as much as you want! i love interacting and getting to go back and forth about my fics, especially legacies since it’s so intricate and very slowly being unraveled due to slow updates (i’ve got like 6k words written up for this current chapter and i’m not even halfway so…).

but with that being said; change my first name to yip and last name to yap because boy do i have a lot to say.

viserys and rhaenyra’s relationship.

there’s a lot to cover on her story and perspective in this universe, but one of the main ideas i tried hammering in when it came to ‘you turn me inside out’’s first chapter is her only child syndrome. she’s very lonely but still incredibly doted on. growing up, i feel viserys made certain to tell everyone how much he expects of rhaenyra solely because that’s his only child. not because of what she can do or who she is as an individual away from him. i’ve always really liked the idea of how viserys names her his heir or focuses on how rhaenyra will take on his role in the family as the next generations successor is not because he actually believes in her, but because he’s already talked it into existence. it’s why he doesn’t really prep her or genuinely take the time to spend time with her. if he says it will be, then it must because the whole world’s watching and he can’t look like an idiot if rhaenyra fails. very much more of that in the prequel and impending sequels…

daemon and his relationship with the kids.

jace understands that daemon is his stepfather, the person who his mother chose to be with after harwin and eventually got cheated on, but he ultimately holds his tongue because he understands that he is baela’s father. she’s the one allowed to be mad and angry while he takes the more adult approach. luke was away at driftmark when rhaenyra and dameon married so, he doesn’t hold a really weighted opinion on him other than he was a great paternal figure with how he gifted him his cello and treats the littles, especially with visenya and her disability. joff is just angry about how daemon was the main father figure he grew up with even if he’s laenor’s favorite and then all the things coming to light. definitely one of those ‘i used to idolize you and you let me down’ moments aemond and lucerys talk about when it comes to their family. all the littles (aegon iii, viserys ii, and visenya) just know their parents love each other still but can’t stand one another anymore. when i was editing legacies, i forgot that in the scene for chapter 5 when aemond and luke start speaking in high valryian in front of visenya, she becomes immediately curious and luke alludes to how she’ll become angry if she doesn’t know what’s being said. i added that detail because i feel like rhaenyra and daemon would argue in high valyrian so the kids don’t understand/can't keep up with what’s being said, even though they can clearly see the tension. as for baela and rhaena, it is similar but different. both are very unsettled and repulsed by their father being with nettles because maybe i’m the only one who thought it was weird but: nettles is their age, with their similar phenotypes, and is a dragon rider so most likely related to them. i'm not saying in this fic that nettles is daemon's daughter, but there are clear parallels between his children with laena and her. i also feel the twins have become women who have grown out of that similar idolization period with their father to notice his patterns of getting with a young girl, having kids with her, and when times get too tough— leaves her to then repeat the process. baela is more outward and direct with her disdain about it while rhaena internalizes it. more of that will be covered in the legacies sequels, since the rhaenicent continuation will be in rhaenyra’s pov following that whole ordeal.

face and voice claims.

for lucerys, i mostly reference kurt cobain’s style of singing and combine that with his face claim, timothée chalamet. i’ve always felt luke has a deep voice even from what the actor portrays on screen, so something that sounds very low but can pitch high if strained. so yeah, kurt ('been a son' is lucerys writing about rhaenyra but anyways). daeron’s voice claim is indeed damon albarn’s and i felt this direction was kind of funny to have. damon's accent really comes through so daeron being the only singer with a thick brit voice i felt could tie back to how he studied music in oldtown and the technique taught there is also another thing that differs him from his family. in legacies i envision daeron as the ever popular face claim lucas lynggaard tønnesen. rhaena’s face claim is taylor russell (my love) and her voice claim is Beatrice Laus (beabadoobee, my other love). cregan was written before the actor was introduced so i said his face claim was jaime flatters which i still feel fits right with legacies. dalton greyjoy is young aaron paul and i feel with his voice claim, i could get away with some gerard way. for rhaenyra and alicent’s voice claims though, i always felt like fiona apple fit rhae and mitski for alicent. again though, we’ll have more of that in the future. 

rhaenyra’s upbringing.

a lot of the ideas you listed actually all factor into why rhaenyra was pretty wild during her teenage to young adult years. she grew up in the scene, at clubs, surrounded by adults smoking and drinking and partying and being this little kid who is essentially her parents’ party trick. like ‘oh look at little rhaenyra pretending she’s doing shots’ kind of thing when she should’ve been at home in bed. it’s what she’s used to and feel like she’s born for. daemon is also another addition to it as he only encourages her, which is one of my favorite key points in the prequel. and of course, with aemma’s death, rhaenyra goes off the deep end. she’s surrounded by the same people her father is, which are yes-men who will feed into anything she wants. i’ve always liked how rhaenyra antis are like ‘she was so entitled’. it’s like yeah, any 15 year old with the world at their fingertips, surrounded by people her entire life who make her feel she can do no wrong as ’the realm’s delight’ would probably be a spoiled diva. targs have done worse.

the worst legacies universe targaryen scandals.

honestly, i’ve only barely started making a dent into world-building before the young rhaenicent period as i’m writing rhaenys/corlys’ little story so i haven’t given it much thought. i feel like though in the previous periods, since social media wasn’t around and especially with jaehaerys and alysanne’s children, not a lot of them became musicians and their dirty laundry wasn’t aired out. i have aemon written as holding an army job which i feel also allows for the family to have larger ties to political aspects of westeros in the same way some actual celebrities do. hence if maegor did do all the things we know he does also in this timeline, the targs are probably well connected enough to have it forgotten about/utilize public stunts to move on. i feel like legacies really embodies the idea of a modern take of ‘the dance’ without the aegon vs rhaenyra succession plot since even though there’s so many musicians in the family and they should be at their peak, there’s all this internal affair happening with scandal and wondering who the leak is.

laena & laenor.

oh, how i think about those two. in ‘all apologies’ i wrote about how they’re basically ghosts in the house, just shells of themselves. they still reside on driftmark and live with their parents and teach music, but are incredibly burnt out. laena is sober and constantly battling addiction after overdosing and nearly dying + other things while laenor is trying to lead a quiet life after being married to rhaenyra. i don’t know if i mentioned it in the actual fics, but with how everyone knows laenor is gay, it wasn’t on his terms. he was outed and harassed on a national level which does a lot to a person, especially one without a clear support system. so when it comes to trying to intervene with the cycle of things (lucerys’ treatment) they’re pretty much rendered powerless. they know baela and lucerys are the substitutes of what their parents wanted them to become, which also adds another level of fuckery to their dynamics. but what i want to highlight is that a lot of the direct and seen abuse is mental (the physicality comes from how the kids' bodies sort of break down after practicing for so long or being neglected in order to prioritize perfection), and the person it's normalized from would be corlys (as it happens to be with baela). so rhaenys being how she is with luke is almost seen as a lesser pain and uncharted territory since she’s laenor and laena’s safer option. she's never been that way with anyone and so they don't see it as concerning as it actually is. they especially don't say anything since what happens is behind closed doors and not for long since rhaenys teaches luke when he’s 15-19, as well as because he’s corlys’ heir. he’s fitting into the mold fine, so they see stepping in as possibly messing up lucerys’ future the way they did to their own (for now at least). 

hope i covered most of the questions without veering off too much!

[p-taryn-dactyl]

rant!

ok so basically

my roommate told me that she and her summer bridge roommate are thinking about moving into a dorm together this semester, bc the summer roommate is having problems with her current roommate. now normally, i would be fine bc i think myself a nice person, however... this just brings up all my complaints that i had tried to keep quiet about

one, she is the one who insisted on bringing the fridge and microwave from her home so we wouldnt have to rent it (she'll be taking those with her and btw we're only allowed one fridge and microwave per room)

this really isn't a major complaint but she's a recent turned vegan and makes it seem like such a disability and that she's 'helping the world' by being vegan. i get it if it's a health thing or religious but just because you chose to not have the joy of real cheese doesn't mean you're oppressed bbg

adding on to the previous point, ig since she brought the fridge she thinks that she needs to use every. inch. of space of it. like this girl buys entire shelves of food from the store and gets confused when i say i couldn't fit my lunch for the next day in there. like yes, you did bring the fridge (bc you insisted) but these things are supposed to be 50/50 arrangments

she also takes up like 75% of the room. im glad i chose to loft my bed bc now my desk in under there and my drawers but if i hadn't, we would have a major problem. she brought what feels like her whole room plus a few items. i thought i had overpacked but guys, she has so much shit. her desk is covered in things bc she doesn't have a place to put them after already using most of the "shared" storage she brought (and told me not to worry about bc before move in i had expressed just normally fears of moving in)

she has a giant fucking scooter that takes up even more space, keep in mind our room isn't exactly the biggest. and i already have a vendetta againts people who ride bikes and scooters around campus. i do understand that it's easier and for some, a stressless way of getting to class, but when the sidewalk is packed with students walking and you push through on your bike or scooter i want to scream.

she's also like never in the room bc of being with her bf so im stuck in the room cleaning everything that SHE BROUGHT and when she is in the room, she makes offhanded comments about where i put my stuff (i keep everything i own in my little area, and yes sometimes it gets messy but i literally have no space)

and she never really uses all these things she brought??

this is just me lol but im super sensitive to smell and her food, when she makes microwave food, smells horrible and lingers. you might think im being dramatic but guys ive literally thrown up bc of the smell

this is weird: she firmly believes that catholics aren't christian? that led to me trying to explain the history behind abrahamic reglions and the different secs of christianity but she just brushed me off with a "i know an ex-catholic who said they're not christian"

has severe only child syndrome

now, if (probably when) she moves out, she'll be taking everything she brought with her

since she moved in before me bc of her summer program, idk how much space she truly takes up but ik that she's taking the fridge, the dehumidifier, the microwave, the 'shared' storage drawers, the filtered shower head (i bought the sink one), a lot of the cleaning supplies that she insisted on bringing bc she only uses 'sustainable' products, the big trash can that i said i would buy but when i was at the store she texted me and said she already bought one, and our 'shared' water filter

side note: she was always comparing me to her summer roommate, sometimes to the point that one of my friends had to tell her to stop bc i was visibly uncomfortable

and ik it sounds like i hate her and that im just being bitchy, but we are friendly it's just i don't think she's self-aware of a lot of things.

also, last thing: she makes being from texas her entire personality. i genuinely believe she doesn't know that texas is bigger than most european countries with how much she generalizes it's population

i lied, this is the last thing: she mentions a lot how "she's not like the basic girls" which irks me

ok 'rant' over! ik i sound like a bitch and im sorry but i wanted to get this all off my chest.

idk if anyone will have questions but if you do, i'll answer them lol

<3

[firespirited]

Daft Punk's near entire body of work is generative art, mostly paid for not in royalties but in small, one time payments for sample use.

A few pieces are lazy and should have probably been released as remixes crediting the original IMHO and to be fair they have given royalty payment to some of the recognizable samples on later albums.

but a large proportion of their songs are extremely clever, intricate sound collages that we're still reverse engineering.

AI art is being used in three main ways:

putting complex ideas into a generative blender based on human imagination

enhancing your own art: being able to translate a static style into a video based on AI modelling for example

and the big no no that tech bros are using as a selling point: copying an expensive artist for cheap or bypassing paying any artists.

What it will break down to is whether an artwork is a stolen song with a beat thrown on it or a near unrecognizable retrofuturistic song that uses a tiny sample as part of it's big collage.

I personally really enjoy this era of 23 songwriter credits for samples and interpolations while also seeing how Daft Punk couldn't have launched without sampling (or a massive pay cut). Defining fair use and what counts as recognizable "style" is a massive issue for the music industry and there's no reason we can't translate what we're learning to digital art.

What is transformative, what is derivative, what is coasting on someone else's work, at what point does an artist go from small to a powerhouse built on other people's work?

AI art works exist in the shades of grey of the fan art, the remix, the parody, the inspiration and the collage.

Theft is real, but it's not your art you should be worried about, it's your personal information. They haven't found a sellable use for your art and writing yet.

Download Firefox and ublock origin, use O&O shutup on windows, find any other search engine than google, don't use meta products, click the tumblr button that disables harvesting.

We'll worry about AI art *if* they can find a sellable use for it because right now it's mostly a mass of junk websites, stock images and videos trying to get google/youtube ad revenue and making the web less usable and interesting to humans because it's bots exploiting other bots.

More likely than not the bubble will pop: it'll become a niche area for image remixers, speciality production companies that help speed up movie production and a few photoshop filters. The jackasses that are doing deepfakes will still do it on their own dime with their own stolen datasets: we might get laws about ownership of your personal image for money but probably not about the CIA using it to find "dissidents" in a crowd from CCTV.

enjoy

why do people keep saying 'enthusiast' like this with air quotes. this is like the fifth person that's accused me of being an ai 'enthusiast'. the term you're looking for is 'ai researcher' or maybe 'ai engineer', given that the latter is my actual job title. i do this shit for a living! i am not some linkedin frat boy in san francisco, i actually build shit and i have been building shit since before anyone on this godforsaken site has even heard the word 'GPT-2'. really weird!

[kodiescove]

Been working on this commission today! It's a Buffalo Bill's scarf for my friends cousin in-law.

Even though my friends aunt had to cancel, I still ended up working today. But! My friends list of chores was much smaller than my aunts and it went by quickly.

Between my scarves and cleaning for loved ones, I'm happy to have the work that I do have. Truly, I miss having a job and working. Even the job where all I did was sit on a stool and occasionally cash people out. I couldn't tell you how much of it's motivated by money, because I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some monetary incentive, but for me I am happiest when I am productive.

Over the past year and a half of being out of traditional work, I've really had to figure out what productivity looks like for me and how I can be productive in my day to day life without exacerbating my disabilities. It's almost funny to look back and think about the person I used to be, who would through themselves into traditional jobs, accepting hours and work they could not keep up with. To now, where I struggle to work one hour a week doing chores for a physically disabled old lady.

I find myself quite happy, working an hour a week, though struggling, and making my scarves. Helping my friends who have full time jobs and disabled partners keep up with chores as well has been added to the To Do list. It's not work in the traditional sense, but it's work I know that is appreciated. It's work that has created some rather fond memories for me.

I wonder what work I will be able to do in the future. Will I be able to do more physical work? I'm not entirely worried about that. Though, I do wonder and wish. I know that I'd like to start making educational content, but the time for that is not here yet.

For now, I have my scarves and my cleaning. For now, I help people within my current limitations. And that is enough for me.

[quirkcodes]

Weekly Progress Update #3

26 July 2022 - 1 August 2022

Surprise, I'm still motivated. The first day of this week, I said I'd take a break after getting overwhelmed. I sort of took a break, but I mostly just took things slow. I kept working on the project in ways that I could: developing ideas and cleaning up some of my code. It gave me a chance to work on my coding readability and it looks more attractive than ever.

Reformatted my code to be more readable

Finally figured out Singleton's and Godot Auto load. I implemented something similar to global variables to store stage data.

Rewrote Customer code. Tapper customers had a clunky back slide, and my customers were even worse. They had to slide past and behind other customers to the end of the line. All of the collisions and areas disabling and re-enabling was complicated, especially once they had to get back in line. This version of customer movement and behavior was just asking to be buggy. I couldn't implement it properly, and it didn't make any sense from a realism or game design perspective, so I dropped it. Customers now behave more realistically, and in a way that won't introduce bugs so easily. They move, get a product, stop and wait for their final product, and walk out once they get it. It's simple and easier to keep track of from a player perspective.

Implemented a Timer. As previously mentioned, when a customer receives a product, they stop moving and wait for the next product. If the player leaves them, or the customer's patience timer ends, the customer begins moving again. Its more complicated than what I just explained in my last bullet point, but not complicated enough to be confusing. They behave similarly to how a real customer would behave.

Customers now have a linear movement pattern instead of a modified exponential one like the player

Added 2 new customer variants. Patient customers wait no matter what , and oblivious customers can't take product and must make contact with the player to come to their senses. Patient and basic customer have a random demand of 1 to 4 products (accidentally 0 to 4). This has since been changed so that basic customers demand 3 products while patient customers demand 4.

FINALLY added random customer type picker and random lane picker. Spawner code still needs work and I can't show it because it is broken right now. I'm also not sure if the lane spawn pick-rate is functioning correctly.

What's next?

Checks for open spawn spots

Adjust lane randomizer to only allow open spots

Disabling monitoring for served customers (still haven't solved it)

Level specific spawn data

Connecting customer instance signals to score board

[inkspill-nebula]

A vague and probably inaccurate timeline of the future assuming we survive the climate crisis

2100

30-50% workforce automation

Severe overcrowding in developed areas will probably drive out personal transportation

Early stages of space colonialism

Almost everyone has joined the UN, which is closer to being a global meta-government

High taxes on waste products due to lack of space for landfill and global resource shortages finally push sustainable production into a necessity rather than a luxury

Lack of space and resources drives rapid development of supercrops

Home automation is standard for the middle-class reducing time spent cleaning the home to 2 -3 hours a week

Countries are losing land mass to rising seas

Humans are more interconnected than ever as the internet continues to explode. Nationalism and racism continue to break down

machine parts supplementing human abilities among the disabled and the elite

weird space where companies own space stations that people live on, making corporate city-states, and also corporate development of mars

Lifespan of 120 years

2200

Total workforce automation. Jobs, as we know them, will cease to exist. I'm not qualified to predict what will happen as a result of this.

No more human military. If war is fought at all, it is fought between machines.

AI designed to emulate the human likeness becomes comparable enough to the human likeness that we now have an issue requiring some sort of legislation

machines that interface to the human brain directly via neural signals are feasible and common among the elite, assuming there's still an elite

At this point, people are mixed enough in ethnicity that it's becoming irrelevant

Beginnings of a mass exodus of people from overcrowded cities towards developed other worlds (No real viable interstellar travel yet)

Most of earth's plant life is probably in vaults to be resurrected later as we frantically build tech to reverse climate change

We probably know what the big bang looked like and have a new primary model of physics

Livestock animals are probably mostly gone because they take up too much space and fuck up the climate. Meat is grown synthetically. I assume we've found a way to mass-produce stem cells.

2300

Terraforming of planets and moons in our solar system evolves from tech we used to end Earth's climate crisis.

AI is probably taking over the government, either because we asked it to or by force, or because humans and machines are now completely indistinct. Maybe humans and our machines are now a giant hivemind. I genuinely have no idea. I genuinely don't understand how we could have survived to this point.

We're probably experiencing genetic diversity caused by living on different planets from one another and the gravitational implications of that.

We probably still don't have artificial gravity yet, but we do have shit that scientists today couldn't explain the mechanism of.

Instant quantum communication between worlds

We probably have a crisper descendant pill to completely prevent cancer, can change the color of our hair and skin to suit our personal aesthetic, have slightly denser brains, can treat degenerative diseases, and various neurodivergence, but we're also probably taking traits from various genetic outliers and adding them to the regular human genome to enhance sensory perception and whatnot. The fight/flight/freeze/fawn instinct is probably being actively removed because it no longer serves us. Human lifespan approaches whatever its next limitation after biological aging is.

2500

Dyson sphere, artificial gravity, still no FTL. The illusion of individuality has been completely shattered, society is unrecognizable.

3000

If we haven't ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe at this point, I have no idea

[the-firebird69]

Welcome To Zero Motorcycles

They came up with this idea sometime ago is to have people running around saying zero electric motorcycles are great like we don't like them and to sell them and because it's like they're childish animal dream they went ahead and started making them even though their sales are abysmal and they're behind making them already they sold 100 nonillion today, but will produce only half that in a week and they're far behind production and that shows it and we're wondering what you're thinking why are you sitting there mocking us we can crush you in whatever you attempt you just keep doing it and you are doing it when you had stuff and I'll lend you a hand here helping us out by getting rid of yourselves especially this doork who keeps blabbing. And it's really obvious why he wants to stop for favino from intercepting his skulls. So watch out Dan... Your dad is an awful person hahaha my son says let's see why don't you keep it straight once like one encounter keep it straight or half but how about a teanse now well you're just about to see reality.

Today is finally the Bronx tale cuz the ship is moving I don't know it will be momentarily it's almost full everyone can see it so they're mobilizing to up there and Trump wants to know wants you to know that he is after you and that the show's real and that you should watch out because your mouth is open all the time

Dan says back no. Well I'm a moron then I told her to knock it off and you won't everyone hates you for what you're doing you're such a b**** your pill go around getting every angry it's like a dog s*** job for back nobody can think straight and you're adding to it along with Jesus Christ John and AKA bja what a hunk of shit. How's it supposed to work for any of us if it's not working at all.

We don't know Papa but we can't stand it we see it coming and it's coming towards our areas we have to get out of there

You stupid f***** you got to learn you jew bags that your jews now

We got to go to this place I'm going to make fun of us including him, Dan says. yeah yeah make fun of you. You get all the math backwards it's incredible it's like a backwards math machine CAA says

I've had enough dan says

Why don't you get out I'm going to kick you out you piece of s***

Trump

Well laughing because he's sitting here d****** with everyone more specifically you for the stupid key and you wouldn't let him out of here and we're trying to get him out and you won't get him out it's the dumbest thing we've ever seen we can't figure out what your angle is he's going to go mess around with everything so here it is the last day and the last hour and he's willing to fuck everything up it really is

Justin

Your friend a lot of things from a lot of people I tell you what though dan I think you mess things up more than me.

Bja

Not really I seen out there messing it up on purpose use your hands but I guess they do the groundwork which is more important

Dan

You too do the work that disabling and stopping the empire and your slaves to foreigners and you don't admit it all just sit there all night laughing at me because you're stupid as hell I want you out of my face what you've done to yourselves and to your father's despicable it's because of what you're doing here you can be found out sooner or later I'm being complete failures and assholes here it's causation it is worth it other people will know you don't have to know anything stupid so caustic and mean and nasty I'll try to my face

CAA Hera

You don't have anything to say about that except we do it because we try to get ahead and that's what we're doing and find out it's not working for us we go out and break this stuff

Bja

What cowards is this true but this system doesn't work for anything it's been putting it out and we've been hearing and not listening it doesn't do anything for us either and we won't stop doing it

Dan

No I heard this before we are trying to duck stuff but he says he's sort of another f*** ups but they won't stop doing it they won't leave me alone about it they've got other idiotic plans to go along with that stupid crap that's why I'm hearing you hear these morons who have this piss boy plan and I want you out of there but you need to come out of there and handcuffs a body bag or concrete anything

Trump

It was so bad we don't deserve to live our own people possibly but he says is you stop the empire The towers are coming down and it was a great feat and that everybody needed it done although we've been sitting here bothering him and doesn't do a damn thing except make him an enemy of ours because we are jerks and assholes so did you do the job and we did do the right job for our people who couldn't stop them and couldn't infiltrate and tried to use force in the end didn't work

Dan

Okay so that's what we did as a team what he's saying is we carry on like we were for years and do nothing to him but bother him and piss him off and now he's got nobody went foreigners to depend on because of us and what the max are doing and yeah it's stupid but that's what we're doing

Trump

Let's see what's happening here where's my next meal going to come from stupid s*** heads who are fighting each other and standing in my way every week for like 4 months was standing in his way I swear I was going to chop someone in half without even having a blade I've never seen so much hatred in my life and we're the ones generated and we know we are and we won't stop what kind of nonsense is this is one person is an inventor I'll tell you what we're doing it and we don't know why we keep doing it and make it worse

Dan

There's some truth to it they just keep doing it because they think it's right for them you'll work for them and all the stuff so I can attempt at Stockholm but without any savvy so I'm sitting there ready to kill your ass cuz it'll get rid of you and positive cleansing of the area and you don't even know it it's actually ready to kill your ass you think it's fake it's going to say self-defense stupid if he gets caught dumbass we'll see you just has to move and move fast out the door 10 miles away in 20 minutes is pretty fast fast enough everybody would die so he's threatening you it is threatening everybody else here with your petty f****** b*******

Thor Freya

All day all night he's doing it threatening you you coming to my room I'm going to kill you and flatten your f****** head so using it because he's threatening and he's going to force us to cleanse we have to be ready to stupid f*** that's how smart you are you pieces are s***

Olympus