#never any better at bottom than the signals i'm set up to receive!

[bellshazes]

hi bells hazes! fwiw, guy who read hse here. wanted to ask - what's your bearings on distant stations? i really love that fic, as well as any other bdubs self-reflection and 404 content from you ― are you planning to continue it? (un?)related but do you have any more coherent thoughts about repetition as sufficient for character, your ideas are so interesting and i'd love to see more. although i know it hasn't been 7 years yet

i've worked for 9 days straight and i have been having stilted daydreams of returning to distant stations because it is deeply beloved to me. i have a fair bit more written but not, unfortunately, the part that is troubling me (etho's POV in tfcs2 post-bear incident). just this weekend i was marinating in incandescent ruins as a clay-bdubs going to UHCs in bdubsprime's stead song.

to the second point i'm still invested in player-as-character narratives (e.g. my challenge run syllabus) but also i keep turning over the underlying question of how are characters produced, and by whom or what? are characters produced by authorship (even if unintentional) or by audience engagement? high-minded questions for something that, no joke, is me reflecting on how much i love the microphone test stories and 1 grit in dankpods videos. 1 grit is basically a character to me by virtue of recurringly occupying a specific role with just enough suggestion of personality to make it feel familiar.

there's something in this musing regarding the patterns of responses to yt videos, specifically near-universal comment culture/archetypes of guys commenting vs. more idiosyncratic comment cultures. but it's all very murky. i think the repetition of a bit or pattern can become a launching off point for a lot of crazy divergent things potentially inclusive of audiences treating a thing as character even if it meets no traditional requirements for what we might call a character. i'll probably dramatically change my focus in another few months as well but i'm percolating

[inactivewattpadauthor]

[Old]Skarlet x Reader (Smut)

Warning: Literal lesbian smut. ~~~~~~~~~~~~

Red.

Red. The color. It somewhat fascinates you. The obsession you had with it, you didn't know why.

Perhaps just because it's simply your favorite color? Or maybe what it symbolize? No.

It's the color you see whenever you win a battle against your rivals. As well as any source of pain carved from any situation.

That's why Skarlet's the perfect girlfriend. Her clothes, her hair, definitely her powers. The very first time you spotted her in your presence, you felt the smooth wave take over your body and mind.

To your luck and satisfaction, she had eyes for you too. You two became inseparable. Together, every blood you spilled, you shared. Every pain one of you caused or received, you shared. There was never a better couple.

Presently, you were in the bedroom, resting on the dark, red, silky sheets. The book you read was of course some violent, romantic fantasy. The room temperature was cool, and nothing was heard.

Tonight was a very relaxing mood.

The door to your room opened, but you didn't look up, knowing it was no one other than your precious soulmate, Skarlet.

"Hello, my dear." She greeted you. "Welcome back home." You greeted back, not looking up from your book. The sound of her high heels quietly filled the room.

"I'm surprised you're not asleep. Not like it's a problem." She giggled. "Oh? And why do you s-" You looked at her, only to see her body only covered by a soft, of course, red, towel.

Your e/c eyes widen staring at her body. Hmm. This seems like a nice time. You thought to yourself, biting your bottom lip, looking up at her eyes.

She nodded once at you, signalling that she wasn't playing around and that she wanted to do this. That she wanted you.

A lustful smirk rose on your face, you set your book aside, turning yourself fully towards her. "Thank the gods, I'm not asleep."

Skarlet raised her eyebrows in a flirtatious manner, before removing the towel. The sight made your thirst increased to a specific level. You knew damn well how thirsty you were.

Seductively walking over to you, Skarlet sat beside you, rubbing both of your shoulders, looking deeply at you. You stared back, getting ready to take off your shirt for her.

She allowed you to, only rubbing herself watching you. After you took off your shirt, you hurried to take off your pants, but not too fast to ruin the mood.

A very sexy coincidence, you wore your luxurious, red lingerie to bed. Was this a sign for this to happen? Yes, indeed.

Skarlet found your underclothing appealing. You stripped the rest of them off, finally being nude with your girl.

The cold air hit your skin, but maybe if you weren't hot and bothered, it would've been noticed. You leaned towards Skarlet for a very passionate kiss, and there you two were at the moment. Having a very heated makeout session.

Your tongues were swirling around, and Skarlet wrapped her legs around your torso. You felt the heat of her aroused core grind against you,but you enjoyed it.

Your hands started at her shoulders, slowly towards her breast. You massaged her, knowing you've did the right thing by her increased breathing.

Long seconds went by, she stopped grinding herself against you and you stopped playing with her chest, curious of what's her next move. The naked blood mage gently pushed you down on the bed before flipping herself over, her face to your genital, her genital to your face. You see where she was going at.

You only smiled to yourself, grabbing at her waist before licking what's yours for the night. Her action was like yours, only her hands were grabbing at your thighs.

Her tongue danced around your clit, yours, licking over her hole. Every moan was muffled by obvious reasons. You felt Skarlet's tongue go in you, and you applied the same feeling to her.

Her taste seemed very sweet. Especially for a person who consumes blood most of the time. You were no different. Each climax were building up, a perfect time to get to the exact position.

Skarlet got off you, and rested between your legs, still carrying the same smile since she walked in the room, unclothed to your awareness.

You were only still, laid back, trusting her with all the work. Your girlfriend correctly positioned herself, pressing her womanhood against yours. The friction made you both lose it.

Your stomach was bouncing, and your heart was attempting to remain steady, but with all this pleasure, you were a bit out of control.

The wetness of your cores risen, and your climaxes were right around the corner. The grinding were getting sloppier, but who cares?

"I-I love you so much, Y/n!" Skarlet screamed, having her orgasm. "I love you too!" You breathed roughly, also having yours.

Skarlet fixed herself, where she laid right next to you, cuddling you. You were tired, but you smiled at her, very pleased with the night.

Yeah, perfect girlfriend for me.

[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.