#signal and the noise

[unsolicited-opinions]

Signal > Noise

(Bite-sized topics in media and information literacy)

Here's a great example of how amazingly sloppy professional western media has become.

This New York Magazine article came out four days ago. Check out the caption on this photo.

"Damage from Israel’s strike on Ramat Gan in Iran"

Here's the thing: Israel didn't strike Ramat Gan in Iran.

Ramat Gan is a city of ~170,000 people to the east of Tel Aviv, in Israel.

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information-getting the facts wrong.

Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead- intentionally misstating the facts.

If this had just been posted today, I'd assume it's a mistake and call it misinformation.

After four days uncorrected, though, this stops being misinformation and becomes disinformation.

Why? After four days, they unquestionably know it's wrong...and have not bothered to correct it.

What does that tell you about New York Magazine (or parent company Vox Media)? How important are things like journalistic ethics and integrity to them?

[ronthedunedain]

25AF/ZQ 25th Air Force

OL-WP Operating Location Wright Patterson

Special Analysis Branch SIGINT/NSA/Crypto Air Force Patch

[rabbit-rays]

the mad stone!

let it control you!

[vren-diagram]

Democrats could've won if both Joe and Kamala had committed ritual suicide in April. They still can.

[saltynsassy31]

Okay, so while going over MTMTE and stories related to it, one thing that became apperantly clear to me was how not many people knew of the text stories that followed it.

And I don't blame them, because I also didn't know about them, they don't seem to be included in places like RAC (where I assume most go to read the comics). And trying to find these text stories can be a little bit hard for most.

So with the help of my friend @aelyxiae we collected all the pages of the text stories for MTMTE, and have decided to make one post where people can refer back to instead of having to hop around in search of them.

Note: I will be including "Bullets" in here, even though it was part of the Wreckers saga, it has some relevancy to MTMTE in big ways.

Click for better quality

Bullets - The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers

Signal to Noise - Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #13

The Sound of Breaking Glass - Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #21

[saturnniidae]

I like to think Hiccup has whole 'conversations' with Toothless that are essentially incomprehensible to anyone but them (they consist of little human language–mostly draconic noises and body language as well as signals/cues specific to Hiccup and Toothless) the other riders are used to it at this point, but a lot of people are very much not and find it incredibly confusing.

Its started a lot of rumors of Hiccup being some 'dragon whisperer' that can actually speak to and command them and the other riders tease him about it relentlessly because he despises the rumors and always tries to correct them. Like every time they're brought up he'll say something along the lines of "No. If u actually pay attention to and connect with them, adapting to their way of communication isn't hard. I don't actually speak with them ur just not observant enough" and is constantly ignored

(This is kind of a follow-up to another post but I didn't want to tack it onto a rb)

[everwalldigan]

Ok so the popular consensus is that the bat brood will absolutely terrorise any guests any of them have over but what if we take that concept and tweak it a little bit.

Instead of them doing weird shit openly, how about they act totally normal HOWEVER they do weird little unsettling things that suddenly disappear if you do a double take. The guest leaves really unsettled but with no tangible reason they can name to explain it. Allow me to provide some examples:

Dick: has spent an obscene amount of hours practicing “delayed speech glitch” where his mouth moves, sounding out words before he vocalises them.

Duke: manipulates the lights to shine like a stage light on whoever is speaking at that moment, sometimes douses any family member who has pissed him off in darkness until the guest notices and immediately retracts it when they look back. (This backfires sometimes cause they enjoy pretending to brood in the shadows. Its genetic)

Damian: makes his animals appear in random corners and then disappear just as quickly. (His best feat was when he successfully pulled it off with the batcow and Wally left so fucking confused)

Cass: utilises her body language reading skills to give the guest what they want before they have the chance to ask for it. They spend the entire evening carefully monitoring their thoughts cause they’re 100% convinced she’s a mind reader

[omnifuneral]

vibes are data btw

[summer-oil]

had such a terribly awful day from start to finish yesterday but i am snuggling my sugu plushie and drinking warm milk like a domesticated cat and the sun is shining ……. today will be a little better

[zytes]

9.16.24 / 9.17.24 - september supermoon

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played SIGNAL TO NOISE ?

By Craig Duffy

Signal to Noise is a bittersweet interstellar epistolary game for 2 players, played out one message at a time over email.

One player takes on the role of the Explorer, one of the lucky few chosen to join the generation ship while the other takes on the role of the Earther, forced to stay behind as their companion departs the solar system. Play each round is driven by a series of prompts, a combination of mundane everyday occurrences and life-changing events that develop over time. Sending messages back and forth to one another the players must try to maintain a connection in the face of an ever-increasing time lag and the creeping distortion of the messages as the signal becomes distorted during its transmission over interstellar distances. Eventually, the unfolding events or slow loss of connection will force one to break contact, forever severing the bond between the characters that they have struggled to maintain for so long.

[unsolicited-opinions]

The faster something makes you angry, the more likely it is to be misinformation.

Your brain bypasses your skepticism when you feel righteous.

[shaych03]

Signal to Noise

So it's been a very long time since I've done something like this. I'm bound to make some mistakes somewhere along the way, so I hope y'all will be patient with me. What am I talking about, you ask? I'm going to post a brand new, multi-chapter fanfic. It will be CW Supergirl in genre, Supercorp in pairing, and AU in nature. There are twenty chapters and an epilogue, each of which I will post at least once a week on A03, but there may be some variance in posting days due to real life things. The story is complete and edited, though I am working on the formatting since posting to AO3 is a new thing for me. (I still remember LiveJournal and Geocities, y'all. Yes, I am fandom old.)

The content of the story is what I would consider "explicit-lite" as there will be lady lovin' to enjoy, but the story isn't just sex. I've tried to put what I feel are the most relevant tags on the fic, but please, if there needs to be other tags, let me know. I'm kind of new to the whole tag game.

Without further ado, I present to you "Signal to Noise" a story straight from my wild imaginings.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/62826493/chapters/160856881

[spaciebabie]

discord vcs are so much fun for me as an autistic person b/c i dont hafta worry about making eye contact or accidentally looking somewhere i shouldnt or configuring my facial features so that i look Correct the whole time. its feckin awesomeeee

[elf-trash]

You seem to be a bisexual!Johnny Silverhand truther. But this is an honest question, what do you make of Johnny saying he wasn't interested in Kerry because he had a dick? I think the exact line is something like "he had a dick, so I wasn't interested". He says that in the convo outside his mansion while he explains why the hell he dragged you out there lol. But I'm curious how you interpret that line while also thinking Johnny is bi. I took it as confirmation of him being straight but I am open to having my mind changed

there's dialogue in the game that is either cut or really hard to get at dicky twister where he directly says he's into men. also, there are tabletop materials that heavily imply he's bi and had a sexual relationship with kerry. so that's how i personally chose to interpret the character, because that was the story i wanted to tell. but he's also not a real person so ultimately you can interpret or headcanon him however you want.

edited to add a clip of the dialogue i'm referring to:

[inbabylontheywept]

A Short Essay on Signal Reflections

The essay nobody asked for, but I've been reading about for around a week, and now can explain very easily and intuitively.

When electricity flows from a region with low impedance to a region with high impedance, a reflection of the signal passes back up the cable towards the source. This tends to make the most intuitive sense to people - after all, the high impedance region is easy to imagine as a traffic jam, and the ripple going up the line is just all the electrons having to slam their brakes. We've seen this before.

However, you get an identical ripple when going from a region with high impedance to a region with low impedance, which kind of mangles that analogy. You don't see traffic jams in regions where the speed limit goes up, just in places where it goes down.

And so for that, we're going to have to break the signal into two parts.

V=IR is bread and butter, but nobody accounts for those in time. Everyone does DC steady state analysis, and this is slightly weirder. So in a line with low impedance to high, you just look at how much V (voltage) you need to push the same amount of current (I). Since R is getting bigger, you now run out of voltage before you run out of current. So all the voltage gets used up, some of the current gets used up, and the current that no longer has enough voltage to get pushed forward can't enter the new material and thus bounces backwards up the line. The reverse happens with high to low. You now run out of current (I) before you run out of voltage (V) because R got smaller and energy must be conserved, so you get a voltage wave that bounces up the line. So any time R changes you have too much of either current or voltage and the extra gets sent back.

There are some weird implications to this! For example, a zero impedance ground would actually be hella noisy because it would accept 100% of the current into it, but reflect the entire voltage signal back. And an infinite impedance ground would eat the entire voltage field, but reflect 100% of the current back. An ideal ground for low noise needs to have the same impedance as the node its attached to.