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I ate the Board and replaced them with cardboard cutouts of 1980s horror movie villains. Daryl Revok always has the best ideas but never fucking talks. Why can't you just talk, Revok!? Tell me your evil plans you motherfucker, I need them!

The factory sector is more common than you'd think in the US. A lot of raw material gets produced here -- when I buy steel rods or pipes or angles, it usually comes from Florida or NJ. PVC pipe is largely a US product too -- that's what the vinyl chloride that spilled in Ohio was going to end up as, most likely. Most machine tools in the US are made in the US. We still do manufacture cars here, believe it or not. There are boatloads of arms and ammunition manufacturers. We just don't produce finished mass-market products that aren't automobiles anymore.

When it's word salad AND it's long, there's not much else to say.

Thanks. It's not enough to know your enemy these days, because they're willing to tell you all about themselves. You have to make sure they know you know.

As I described a few years back, exploring my personal association with monstrosity:

"You're a baby lost in a hostile environment of soft meat beasts and labyrinthine tunnels, all trying to kill you. You have acid blood and teeth and claws but they have assault rifles and hate. Your life will be brutish and short if you don't do unto them first."

We're the xenomorphs in the vents.

Give them nothing.

Dig the bullets back out of them when they fall. Burn the bridges behind you, and tear the roads up while you're at it. Make your cuts artless and unconvincing. Do not smile.

Erase names. Erase histories. Become mythical, because they deserve no truth and are incapable of recognizing it. Do not leave a ghost to question.

Do not leave fire: drown the flames and wet the fuel. Salt the earth and foul the water. Take even the air, if you can.

No matter how petty and miniscule, let spite drive you. Deny them everything, even the satisfaction of achieving a goal.

Let them claim the ashes, the mudpits, the steaming bones. Let them hold only ruins. Let them win only desolation.

It suits them.

Makes me wonder about those voice-copying AIs. Like the Biden/Trump memes going around now.

Honestly, reminds me more of the Borg than of SHODAN. SHODAN is all about florid monologues, emotionally charged rhetoric, and tortured metaphors.

ETA: Also, the real giveaway is that it doesn't call you "insect" even once.

Nothing to add.

Welcome to the Outer Dark.

THERE ARE DREADFUL THINGS 14: strike one
In honor of Brianna Ghey.
---
When the small people breathe hate, hyperventilate in it, they are preparing for petty wars. They will target militaries with no weapons, attack installations that contain nothing but medical supplies.

They are preparing to attack those who cannot hit back. They are preparing to take the lives of us who have not yet grown our irradiant teeth, learned to think collapsar thoughts.

They know if they aim too high, they will never be found. Excised from the skein of history like a splinter extracted from a sleeve. No gravestone to mark them. Nothing but an uneasy feeling where memory should lie.

But these are soft human fates. We are the hungry grin of emptiness. We will not forget. Our names will be engraved in eschatological portents.

Our blood will stain the seas. First red, then black with the thickness of it, then silver as it turns toxic, turns alive, as the vapor pressure swells out to reclaim all they have taken.

The headstones of their futures are engraved in the hate they murmur nervously. Their crypts are dug piecemeal, a shovelful flung for every crude knife wielded against innocents.

There are three strikes allowed. The first may be in error. The second may be from foolishness. The third will bring the ending of endings. Every mandible will snap shut.

Strike one.

For the first video or two it might not get you anything, but you can also ask other content creators if they'd like to pitch in to do bits and pieces for e.g. sight gags. If you get lucky and get someone with an established audience interested early, it can get you a big boost in terms of initial viewership, which is critical to growing further. Lots of content creators fucking suck, but there's enough good ones out there.

So the new project has us counting lost man-years due to the pandemic (We're just past 19,000,000 man-years of knowledge/production, and we've really only done the simple stuff), but the really NEAT part is that between that and working with <gubmint org>, I am ALSO developing a real idea of how much actual communication occurs.

The answer, you may have guessed, is "Jack Shit."

This has sort of split me and my group off onto a tangent, and we have proven there was more information moved between government and NGO departments prior to email than there is today...When measured as "useful, actionable information."  And just like all the plebs, the decision-makers have to sort out the non-information/disinformation before they can make a decision, and that sorting is impossible in practice.

Nobody run Bartertown.  Bartertown functions in the same way a SCADA-operated system does if the front end crashes; it just keeps doing the same thing regardless of any changes to the situation.  Errors begin to multiply, and since nobody can do anything about those errors, everyone just pretends that the situation is normal and has always been like this; where "this" means "the current buggy situation with today's error values added".

Think of it as an anthill with a disabled queen, except ants don't bitch as much.  They just mindlessly keep doing whatever they were last instructed to do.

The best part of this is when I fuck off and visit debatepolitics.com and listen to fucking waterheads explain that some large, shadowy cabal controls society. 

No, you fucking morons, nobody controls society.  Some people THINK they do, but even they can't get anything done.

Nobody is driving the train, everyone's drunk in the club car.

https://twitter.com/NotBrunoAgain/status/1622349196006129664

Saw this Twitter thread, and I thought of the quoted post. Seems like the awareness that shit is not getting done is leaking, because of shitty AI. I imagine Howl horse-laughing.

Oh, it's not you. Voice software actually sucks.

If you want some quick and dirty voice hacks:

In your regular speaking voice, hold a note like you're singing. It will be off key, it doesn't matter.

Move your tongue around while holding the note. You can hear the sound change, and you can feel the place where the air is vibrating most in your airway move around -- that's where the vocal resonance is. If you can't feel it, drop the pitch some until you can.

Now, instead of using your tongue (you need that to talk), move the resonance with your throat, lips and cheeks. You want to place the resonance at the center of the roof of your mouth, right at the back of the hard palate. It'll take a little work, but it's not impossible to figure it out.

Hold the resonance there and begin talking normally. Talk a LOT. Check the resonance every so often because early on it'll wander around. You'll have a strange monotone at this time, but you're just getting used to keeping your vocal resonance placed where you want it to be.

When you think you've got it down naturally, raise the pitch range of your voice just a bit, and then try bringing in your natural pitch changes and tone with it. You want a balance -- if you end up falling out of the desired pitch range, dial back your pitch changes and tone. If you start sounding like Microsoft Sam, play with the pitch range you want to be in until you sound natural again. If you ever lose the resonance, you have to find it again before you can continue.

When ready, record.

First time I did this took me about 3 hours, and I could keep it going for about a half hour before I'd lose the resonance and have to go through the process of finding it again. It's second nature now, entirely unconscious.

A couple hours of work was put into this data visualization shit, trying to hand-build a map again. The idea was, if I just find a set of equations to plug numbers into, I can shut up and calculate everything. I knew one of the hazards of this would be a lot of blank space, but NOTHING prepared me for this bullshit.

Behold: ONE subsystem. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1002305555207041065/1063126320491528293/FmR9ZJNXwAEzNGw.png

How many do we have? Why, 7! 8 if you count the exoselves and 9 if you count the Pathways. Kill me. I crave release.

Of those very tiny circles in the group of seven, one reads "Dulug-3". Another reads "Adrusu". Can you tell which goes where? This is, admittedly, heavily zoomed out, but the zoom was needed to have any fucking hope of showing the whole thing. Why? 10000 pixels wide. It's impossible to make this usable as a reference to this fucking system.

So I'm down to trying to figure out how to make something interactive, because if it ain't interactive it ain't fucking happening. Good fucking god.

I finally completed just the interactive map part of this. I have yet to figure out how the hell to do the rest, and this is honestly just whatever draw.io belched out when I was done exporting the workbook as HTML, but it works! It looks okay! You can kind of read it! It's not a complete disaster!

https://decayingorbit.neocities.org/roughmap

I wouldn't dare open Max Tegmark's box. I'd get hit in the face by mathematical ghosts.