#but i love this story

[bookshelf-in-progress]

I want you guys to read this retelling so bad.

But first I gotta write it. And that takes so long.

[yelenablshop]

Yooo everyone!!! If you want a really cute Miranda fic with a interesting and unique story (plus the reader is so real lmao 💀) definitely go check out

She's a Murder-er.

By OG_Coffeestains

on ao3!!!

@macnbriee mvp for recommending it to me

[lordkingsmith]

@augment-techs @skyland2703

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[crow-caller]

as a child there's nothing cooler than a kid who gets subjected to evil experiments and gains special abilities. it's even cooler if these abilities also cause unfathomable suffering to use/against others. children love stories like this.

[thothxv]

I'm going to hijack this thread slightly to talk about another one of Miku's forefathers.

Dennis Klatt was an early speech synthesis researcher at MIT. He did a lot of important things, but the one that's really recognizable is KlattTalk, better known as DECTalk. It sounds noticeably better and clearer than just about everything that came before it. It's still stiff and clipped, don't get me wrong, but it's really, genuinely better. If you want a sense of how much better, here's an audio recording of Dennis basically going through the evolution of speech synthesis, synthesizer by synthesizer. Dennis introduces each synthesizer, so you can get a sense of what his voice sounds like.

DECTalk's default voice, "Perfect Paul", was based on Dennis's voice directly. And while early units were expensive (one is pictured below with a cat for scale), later incarnations of DECTalk were more affordable, and the synthesizer snuck into all manner of places (you may know it as the voice from Moonbase Alpha, for example).

Dennis Klatt died in 1988 from thyroid cancer at the age of 50. In a cruel twist of fate, he began to lose his voice as the cancer developed.

But of course, in a way his voice lived on. One of the things Dennis had been interested in the accessibility applications of speech synthesis: creating ways for the blind to interact with the world, quite literally giving voice to the voiceless. And that's exactly what happened. The clipped, stiff, awkward, computer-generated rendition of Dennis Klatt's voice became someone else's.

This is the part I was omitting for dramatic reasons and that everyone who knows this story is probably screaming. A version of DECTalk's Perfect Paul served as Stephen Hawking's voice. And it was his voice. He went to such great lengths to keep it that when the original synthesizer was breaking down, an expert in hardware emulation was brought in to help develop a software version that would behave identically (the person in question was near, who you may know as the original developer of bsnes, although that is another, much more tragic story).

A dying man gave the very voice he was losing to a man who could no longer speak. There's something sad and bizarrely poetic about that.

whoever decided to turn daisy bell into a spooky dookie creepypasta song is fucking evil. that computer was brave enough to sing us a delightful little song and you do THIS to him? thats hatsune mikus grandpa dude. fuck you

[great-and-small]

Apparently the local university’s undergraduate entomology course sends students to catch insect specimens at the same place I like to go birdwatching, which explains why I saw three enormous frat looking dudes with tiny bug nets and overheard one emphatically say “bro BRO I told you we already have enough lepidopterans”

[autumnleaves1991-blog]

This is why writers abandon stories. It’s not that we don’t love them, it’s because we don’t want to love them alone.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

License to Kitty.

[elcias-diary]

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip

[palukoo]

three hearts that beat as one | old hollywood throuples anyone???

[jesncin]

"Who Is Superman? A Private Interview with Lois Lane" a fancomic about hope and connection. I've had this story in mind for so long and I'm very excited to be able to share it at last. Thank you for reading, and happy Lunar New Year!

[moomoorare]

I love nautical and seaside town horror stories. Tell me more about the fog and water that eats people

[asturlavi]

a hell of your own making

[creekfiend]

what's my biggest pet peeve well it's when someone makes a text post on tumblr dot com in which they are trying to romanticize the notion of the livestock guardian dog but they don't know the distinction between a livestock guardian dog and a herding dog and also they've never met a livestock guardian dog and do not realize what their attitudes towards the sheep that they protect actually are