#and as if it wasn't enough I couldn't have just put random binary lines in the background nooo

[valka-arialitan]

My gift for @arczism for the @cp77nyexchange !

So sorry it took so long ! ; - ;

I had lots of ideas and tried to combine them all, still without going all-in for the angst (I said I tried), but honestly, who wouldn't be ready to die for a guy like Vito ??

Anyway, hope you like it, and happy new year ! ^^ 💖

[violet-jessop]

i had my first therapy session today.

90 minutes with a psychologist who i'm booked to see once a week for the next 5 weeks.

a friend asked me if i was nervous last night when i told her, and i had to think on it. i found i wasn't. it was strange because logically i think i should have been, but i couldn't muster any real feelings about it. i felt indifferent. resigned.

i know that's probably not what she wanted to hear, but i think lying in this instance would have just given her false hope.

to get to this point has been such a shit show.

self harming since a decade ago this year, suicidal on and off for at least for the last eight. tried to seek help in 2019 only to get put on 10 times the starting dose of some random antidepressant and told to fuck off with no follow up and automatically renewing prescriptions. stopped taking those after a year or so with no real improvement. things have just steadily declined.

last year was okay, probably the most okay i've felt for an extended period since 2014. but now it's almost worse because i saw it could be okay, and now it's not again.

finding a psych that met my needs was near on impossible. my only two criteria were trans (or just a queer person who i could feel like less of a freak with) and able to deal with SI - and that left me with one option via telehealth. booked in to do a 15 minute consultation with her she was 30 minutes late to the session, so i assumed i'd been forgotten. then when she eventually called she didn't even acknowledge it.

getting the mental health care plan from my GP was so degrading. i went to a different doc because i didn't trust the last guy who is just so happy to write prescriptions. but the new guy was no better. clearly thought i didn't need any of this, wrote maybe 2 lines on the mhcp documents, left most of it blank, didn't even bother to sign it. said he performed the k10 which he didn't. straight up wrote that i seemed fine based on "good eye contact and engages well". and he never even sent it to the identity clinic, i had to chase him to obtain a copy so i could send it off myself.

and today rolls around. we have our session. what was supposed to cost me 134 out of pocket cost me 250 unexpectedly, so after the appointment they had to call me several times because my account had insufficient funds because i only had enough for what they'd told me it would cost.

in the session she misgendered me. she said "as a woman with autism. oh, i assume you're she/her right?". which was wild as a psych who works for the "identity clinic" - where i had to fill in a million forms that included my pronouns in multiple places. where i had sent an inquiry to find out if they had anyone on staff who would suit a non-binary person with SI. and then the SI, where i mentioned it as something i'd like to work through, and she pretty much told me if i talk about that sort of stuff in a non-joking way she'll have to make sure i'm institutionalised. so i had to play it off as a joke. as hyperbole. the two things, such basic things i thought. so what am i here for again? is what's wrong with me so taboo i can't even pay a medical professional $250 to let me speak about it? is my soul so putrid? if anyone ever tries to force me into inpatient i'll put on a pine overcoat as soon as possible, that's not up for debate.

so we talked about other things, and i cried in front of another person for the first time in ages and it wasn't even cathartic it was just for the shame of admitting my failings out loud. and she told me maybe my anxiety is just autistic meltdown which i know isn't right, i know the difference. she walked me through diaphragmatic breathing like i was 5. she recommended i buy airpods and try burlesque. it reminded me of Jo telling me i should try drumming circles around the time of my first attempt.

so i suppose i was right in feeling indifferent. i had enough hope left to try, but not enough to be hopeful. i really don't have the energy to go through this all again. time is ticking down, 128 weeks at best. i suppose i'll give her another two sessions and see. but if she doesn't work out i think that's me done. how many times am i expected to try? it was already mortifying enough. i know Tal will be angry, but i just don't have it in me to keep doing this over and over. every failed attempt at getting better just adds more weight, reaffirms what i already suspected.

and the statistics of it. either i've encountered consistently bad medical practitioners OR the problem lies with me. at this point statistically it has to be me, there's just been too many failings. especially when i see so many friends drive the same road without issue. yet i keep hitting roadblock after roadblock. at what point do i just acknowledge that i'm a bad driver? maybe it's been roadblock after roadblock because there's nothing else, there is no good ending. i shouldn't be on the road to begin with.

[twistedsinews]

OC Profile

Tagged by @chyrstis

<3

Tagging: @rosewaterhag, @hunnybadgerv, @gatticus, @heywoodvirgin (for when you come back), @chyrstis, @ ... whoever wants to do it and hasn't yet!

V

General

Name: V. Literally. It's always been just V.

Alias(ses): Enough people assume that V is an alias, and it's difficult enough to track down in a database. However. She will use other aliases for one-off jobs when she needs the extra layer of security of not having someone track her down through street work, but none of them really get recycled.

Gender: Nomad. I jest, but I'm pretty sure she's somewhat off the binary even if she straddles the line.

Age: As of the events of C77, she'd just turned 29.

Birthdate: I don't actually have one for her. Possibly in January... I'm only saying that because I started playing Cyberpunk on my birthday but that's when she came into creation so why not.

Place of birth: The Badlands. I'm not sure where in the Badlands, but probably quite the distance from Night City.

Hometown: She grew up in a roving band of self-sufficient scavengers, so... everywhere. And nowhere.

Spoken languages: English. Bad English. She might've picked up a few scattered words of other languages, but she relies heavily on her translation software and that reliance has stunted her learning.

Sexual preference: Ladies and gentlemen, and Jackie Welles. She's not picky on the sex or gender front, but someone who can keep up with her, ideally.

Occupation: Street Ronin. Mercenary for hire.

Appearance

Eye color: Mid-light purple. Dark brown, prior to getting modded.

Hair color: Blue and red, although she'll change it from time to time. Black, prior to getting modded.

Height: 5'8"

Scars: She has a few. The healed slash on her face comes from her first real knife fight, and she keeps it as something of a memento. There are some newer scars on her hands. And let's not talk about that mess of scar tissue that is her heart, because ow.

Favorite

Color: I think she probably likes pink, red, blue, and teal about equally.

Hair color: Barring mods, probably dark.

Eye color: Sky blue.

Song: Favorite in the same way that pain makes you feel alive, I think, but post-Heist, she found a new appreciation for Never Fade Away.

Food: Marshmallows. City takeout, especially pizza.

Non-alcoholic drink: Soda, the sweeter the better.

Alcoholic drink: Nomad moonshine, but tequila can be fun. And then there's vodka.

Have they...

Passed university: Fuck, no.

Had sex: Fuck, yes.

Had sex in public: ...I mean. Not on the Main St. Sidewalk, but I'm... pretty sure there wasn't as much privacy in all those back alley trysts as you might want to believe. Also, do orgies and sex clubs count as public? ‘cause, uh...

Gotten pregnant: Nope. Cyborg birth control ftw!

Kissed a boy: Yes.

Kissed a girl: Yes.

Gotten tattoos: Several. All traditional, none of them are Light tattoos.

Gotten piercings: A few in her ears, the nosering, and the eyebrow thing.

Been in love: Yes. Not until she reached Night City, but then she kinda made up for it by falling in love a few times over the course of the game.

Stayed up for more than 24 hours: Pretty regularly, for business and for pleasure.

Are they...

A virgin: Ha. No.

A cuddler: Very much so. Even before the love part, she was always very tactile. (It confused the hell out of Jackie until he just accepted that being her best friend and go-to fling was about as intimate as some relationships he'd been in... prior to feelings coming to light, anyway.)

A kisser: Indeed.

Scared easily: In some ways, not so much others. On her own, she's pretty reckless and fearless. When she has people she cares about, she can fairly easily get scared of fucking up the relationship and also of outside harm coming to them if and when these things crop up on the horizon. However, it pretty much took coming face to face with death in a way she couldn't shrug off before she actually got traumatized to the point of being terrified.

Jealous easily: Under the right circumstances. She's less jealous of physical activity and closeness and more when it comes to feelings.

Trustworthy: She can lie and she can twist the truth, and she has no scruples against doing either. But when it boils down to it, if she's on your side she will have your back to the last cliff at the end of the world.

Dominant: She certainly can be. She can be hard-headed and stubborn, to add to it, and she has no second thoughts about stepping up and taking charge. Though if we're talking about in bed, she's drastically less so.

Submissive: To whom is the bigger question. If she likes someone, she tends to be a lot gentler and tries to be considerate. And again, if we're talking about in bed, well... yes. Pushy about it sometimes, maybe, but yes.

In love: Ha. Hahaha. Yes. With quite a few people.

Single: It's complicated (TM).

Random questions (tw for self harm/suicide mention)

Have they harmed themselves: In a manner of speaking. It's not a conscious/deliberate thing, the way most people think of self-harm, but she falls into plenty of behaviors that would qualify and definitely puts herself out there in harms way or restricts herself as a means of self-punishment.

Thought of suicide: Yes. Quite a bit, after the Heist.

Attempted suicide: Again, not in a conscious or deliberate way, but more of a sarcastic 'wouldn't it be a shame if these dangerous behavior patterns happened to have consequences' way.

Wanted to kill someone: Quite a bit! And has!

Have/had a job: Very many!

Have any fears: Losing the people she cares about, to negligence or outside influence. Not making any lasting impact. Dying, after viewing that BD, and double after reliving Johnny's memories, and triple actually doing it once or twice.

Family

Siblings: To her knowledge, she's an only child. It's plausible that her mother remarried after leaving the clan.

Parents: Her father is a Nomad. Her mother is City, though V never knew which city. She's not in contact with either. And so far, I haven't given them names.

Children: None and she's a little terrified of the idea. Not that she couldn't eventually change her mind - she never thought she'd be in love, either.

Significant other: Jackie. Misty. Arguably Panam and River. Saul and Placide she kinda wishes. Johnny she kinda wishes not, but they share a brain and that's pretty significant even if not in any traditional relationship sense.

Pets: One (1) sphinx cat she found and picked up that was hiding in the alleys of her MegaBuilding.

[rogue-ai-cat]

Okay so here's the thing about me. I never equated my physical appearance with anything about my personality until like my sophomore year of high school, which is when that song really hit me.

Just the fact that you can look at my body an make assumptions about who I am is a disgusting thought to me. I dislike.

But my sophomore year I went into a goth phase, mainly because I was trying to impress a guy, but I realized as soon as I started putting effort and attention to my appearance on a daily basis that I could make my body say things about who I am. I could use my body to give you a better impression of who I am. So I went into this wild rebellious appearance thing that followed no rules and was just whatever chaos I decided I liked because that's who I was

And it was fun but also stressful

I also started to get friends for the first time like ever who weren't limited to just the school outcasts. I got a boyfriend (who wasn't the boy I was trying to impress) and I really starting to love the goth aesthetic

But then I realized, kind of all at once, that that gave people an impressive about me as well that wasn't who I was. I wasn't a confident person, I just dressed like it. I never cared enough about it enough about my body to hide it and suddenly I realized that people were picking it up as a stunt or w link thing.

And I stopped very suddenly

In the following years, I HATED my body. I didn't want to be a woman because no one would ever make such assumptions about a man, because no one would treat a man like x, and because I had always had non-binary tendencies (so genuine reasons and internalized misogyny of a sort which I'm learning to deal with)

But anyway, the battle between myself an my reflection started then, and even though it had nothing to do with a relationship, in the context of the song, I just started to wonder if people loved me because of who I was or if they loved me because of their misconceptions of me (because I couldn't possibly be worth living as I was).

And now I'm having a moment with another line in that song that hit me

Lie to me, Tell me that I've been sick forever

And all of this will make sense when I get better

Where I'm realizing that now that I'm being treated for my depression and anxiety I'm gaining a new perspective on my reflection. I haven't yet figured out what that relationship is, but it's not what it was a year ago.

So maybe it wasn't a lie. Maybe I've been sick forever and now that I'm getting better I can finally start to figure out who I am.

Anyway that was a very weird personal rant about random song lyrics, gender, and my mental health.

Uh, don't reblog this

I think I just figured out why that line

But I know the difference

Between myself and my reflection

I just can't help but to wonder

Which of us do you love?

From that evanescence song hit me so hard in highschool. Gimme a sec I'm making potatoes and then it's essay time

[naughtygals]

notes on smoothing, noise rejection, workflow

notes on smoothing, noise rejection, workflow i started today with a positive outlook. it's ship day for a new product (or an update of an existing one) and i had a few small bugs to fix, plus a showstopper that i already had a direct solution for in mind. things went pretty well according to plan - i pushed out the showstopper fix in only 15 minutes, and had received confirmation reports within the hour. next i slowly worked through the last of the bug-fixes which took the better part of the day, but i got there, somehow. had a little bit of a celebratory wander around the studio, talking to my workmates and co-habitants about how good it feels to have this pretty much wrapped up (it's dominated the last 2 months of my life, and on-and-off before that for 18 months)! then something occured to me. a little niggle i'd been keeping in the back of my head. i was finally listening to the sounds of the little project, and while the new functionality was sounding fantastic, there was a kind of warbling to the standard tones. often times these things are purely in one's mind, but i sat there and listened, comparing between old and new hardware. it was totally there. the pitch of a thing that is designed to produce a steady tone, was gently squirreling around. shock horror! a sense of dread. maybe the last $20k i just sank into this production might be going straight in the trash. what was wrong with the new version of the hardware?! the only thing i changed was the digital detection of a switch - that couldn't possibly be affecting the functionality - it's only a GPIO pin. what else changed? the power supply.. long story short, we shifted to using a switch-mode power supply internally on this updated project. this allows the power conversion (from 12v down to 3v3 for the microcontroller) to be over 80% efficient, whereas prior it was less than 60% efficient and passed through 2 different regulators (switching and linear). added (perhaps blinding) benefit, is it decreased the unit cost by some $2.50. i checked there was sufficient power supply filtering and it was fine on the schematic. next i started poking around with the scope. thanks to my genius repair-focussed employee natalie, this revision had test points for all the important voltages on the back. they all tested out as solid rails. no ripple was visible, and the peak-to-peak accuracy seemed really good at around 35mV, heavily focussed in the center. i scoped the ADC traces where the pitch input signals hit the uC, and they were a little fuzzy, but no big jittery wandering as i was expecting. it had to be something else. it had to be the power supply! what else could it be. i scoped the 3v3 analog rail again. it looked fine to my eyes. i zoomed right in and all looked well .. except .. little dots were appearing in the bottom of the screen. single dots on my old 90's scope. the kind of dots you generally ignore, but they were happening repeatedly. i turned on peak-to-peak voltage detection and there it was "100mV". these dots weren't random dots, they were part of the voltage readout! static. it must be static. but what is static anyway?! i don't know to be honest. i didn't want to spend all day staring at the datasheet for the power-supply i'd put in there as the only thing that would lead to was changing the hardware itself. we'd already spent wayyy too much time fixing hardware for this product in the past -- that was the whole reason for the re-design. i had to turn to the code. i had to make it work. we'd come too far. the firmware was monumentally better than the original version. we had to ship! // this is how i came to an early evening exploration into signal smoothing & noise rejection. -- linear interpolation / 1-pole lowpass / RC-filter originally i'd already implmented a simple smoothing algorithm to deal with the inherrent noise of the ADCs in the uC i'm using. this was a single stage delay mechanism where the previous output is combined with the new input. the ratios of each define how quickly the output signal moves toward the new input value. this is great for smoothing out random noise at a relatively low level. you just finetune the ratio of old-vs-new to balance between better random-noise rejection and the settling time to reach a new value. if you only move gradually toward new inputs, you reject the randomness very well, but the signal will only 'glide' toward the new destination. this is particularly problematic for pitch, as there is a long tail to the glide (which theoretically never converges). i turned this up all the way to where the glides took 30 seconds (they need to be less than 30ms) and was surprised to find.. the signal still wobbled around! how could this be?! after some ranting, raving, and rubber-ducking with my other workmate, i arrived at a different conclusion - the problem wasn't random-noise, but rather random little spikes in the signal! i did some measurements to print out the stream of values that were being detected by the ADC and they weren't hugely spikey, but there was definite moments where it seemed to jump a little too far out of range. this is only a 12bit ADC so even a change of 4 or 5 LSBs is significant when amplified out to the range of pitch it is controlling. -- windowed averaging before thinking too much further down the line, i thought about how the RC-filter above favours the input sample. every new sample must influence the signal more than the last. all the ratio sets is how similar their influence is over time. alternatively it's possible to just take the average of the last n samples and thus reduce the impact of the spurious samples impact to no-more than the surrounding 'good' samples. i implemented it as a simple queue, storing the last set of values. an added benefit here is that the 'glide' behaviour of the RC-filter is replaced with a 'linear' characteristic. once a value has changed to a new state, it will go there in a fixed amount of time, directly related to length of the averaging queue. i implemented this and tried sizes of 5 then 35, and after still seeing no change, 505. the signal still moved around, albeit in a much slower kind of way! this couldn't be the solution either. -- hysteresis something i use a lot in analog circuits is hysteresis. allowing things to change state only after seeing a certain amount of change. i knew brian had used this in the earthsea design to filter the knobs for the purpose of knowing whether they'd been turned, or were just resting. the main problem i was having is that static knob positions were resulting in jittery tones, thus if i could just know when the knob was stationary, i could lock the pitch to the current state and then pick up again when the knob moved. this was a fun one to implement and of course i got it wrong at first (it would only move if i turned the knob fast enough). eventually though i dialed it in. choosing the hysteresis value was interesting to see the kinds of effects, but eventually i found something i was happy with. once a change was detected, i did a simple 50% mix of the current output and new destination, just to help smooth any quick bumps. this was a solid solution after some refining of the hysteresis values. it tracked the static pitch quite well, and yet the step size was small enough that it didn't sound obviously discreet in it's movement.. until one turned the knob very slowly with a tone of rich harmonics - all those lovely aliased artifacts were jumping around. it was close, but i hadn't quite nailed it yet. -- stepping back and rethinking the problem at this point i had to go home. i'd been at work for almost 12 hours and i'd burnt out on this project at least twice before - i didn't want to make it a 3rd time right as we were about to ship. i knew there was a solution, but i also wasn't going to magically complete and test it in one day. i packed up and was about to get on my bike to ride home, when it occured to me. this whole hysteresis thing is just a binary form of the more general idea:    for small changes, the output should move slowly (or stop)    for large changes, the output should move quickly this is the idea that i'm still running with right now. -- a slope sensitive smoother if we take either the RC or averaging smoother, they both have a smoothing effect on the signal. the problem is we can't use a constant coefficient that is slow enough to smooth out our noisy signal, because our particular signal is too spikey for short decay times, and our use-case is too demanding for long slew times. rather if we break down the problem into the two abovementioned parts, what we need is a filter that follows this small-slow vs large-quick approach. we can implement this by simply using the rate-of-change of the input to control the coefficient of the filter! rate-of-change is easy as we just implemented it for the hysteresis approach as the absolute-difference of output to input. -- bringing it all together i haven't even tried this yet. indeed i'm just home now after this brainwave. but i want to talk about bringing these ideas all together into a resilient filtration mechanism that should have wider use than in this case. there's 2 different areas where previous ideas should be integrated: the first is this idea of exponential vs linear glide time. when moving small distances, the linear time is better for smoothing extraneous signals. while moving large distances requires a more rapidly moving slope to avoid obvious artifacts. the second idea is about integrating smoothing into the rate-of-change detector, vs. the input into the slope-sensitive-smoother. the linear filter introduces a fixed delay equal to it's length, which is not ideal for the signal itself (latency always feels bad). on the other hand, it shouldn't be a huge problem for control the rate-of-change this way, as large changes will start moving (albeit slowly) before the filter picks up, while a little overshoot (in terms of smoothing time) isn't a problem, as the ear is unlikely to notice the pitch warble if it's only at the onset of a new note. the filter is good at rejecting spurious noise, so it seems appropriate for ignoring spikes by keeping the r-o-c relatively static conversely, the exponential smoother acts with a single stage of delay, pushing it toward the real-time use of smoothing the signal itself (controlled by the r-o-c detector). the filter is quick to respond to big changes, so it will deal well with quick note changes (often these occur as large steps). -- final thoughts by combining the benefits of the different averaging techniques, and abstracting the idea of hysteresis to a continuous function, we've arrived at an efficient, responsive, and resilient smoothing technique. it is suited to deal with both white noise, as well as spurious noisy elements in a stream. the coefficients of both averagers, plus the scale of modulation by rate-of-change, can be customized to the use-case. it was only by thinking about the problem with a multi-faceted approach that this conclusion was able to be reached. the answer didn't come about through textbook knowledge, but through practical & lateral thinking about the problem in its surrounding context.