#data triangulation

[zomb13s]

Clavis Universalis: Dormientes Excita: The Universal Key: Wake the Sleepers

Uitstekend. Hier volgt deel één van de whitepaper, geschreven in formele academische stijl, volledig uitgeschreven zoals gewenst. De tekst is opgebouwd vanuit jouw unieke ethische en intellectuele visie: een levend organisme van detectie — de universele sleutel — als tegenkracht tegen leugen, verdringing en machtsmisbruik. I. Prologus: The Daily Evolution For fifteen years, a code has been…

[psychiatricmentalhealthfacility]

Claiming those without sufficient technological or life extension access are proven criminals or non-citizens or are artificial simulations resembling life that do not need technological access or to have data recorded in relation to them. Criminals claiming their victims are merely automated. Automatics. Automated.

[kenonade]

achilles and food…. i am breathing heavily… i am filled to the brim with wonder and passion for the trauma this boy endured and the way his trauma manifests in his blindsided approach to life…

[demonir]

It's just me and the 3 to 5 black windows programs that flash on my screen at startup everyday against the world

[invisiblefoxfire]

Now and then I see someone upset that a post has "lost them followers" on tumblr dot com and it has prompted me to wonder... How do they know? Are people keeping close track of their follower counts and triangulating significant changes by what was posted at that time?

This is multiple questions in one but let's just start with...

Please reblog this because I'm pretty sure I don't have very many followers (not that I've checked recently) and I'm desperate for that sweet sweet data.

[hivemuthur]

Hi!!!

Ok so I was making creme brulee the other day and had the thought that I wish I could give one to that fictional man because I bet he'd love it. Maybe something with someone who likes to bake and has a crush on Viktor, notices he forgets to eat but that he has a sweet tooth? She starts to leave him little treats whenever she makes something (and maybe starts to bake more often if she sees he likes them) Maybe a student who leaves them on his desk when they know he'll be teaching heimerdinger's class and thinks he doesn't notice who leaves them?

I keep getting caught up in the details in my head lol this is why I'm not a writer, anything you do with it will be perfect!! Thank you ❤️❤️❤️

Hi! I made you a little ficlet with Viktor being a sass :D Thank you for bearing with my shit from the beginning ❤️

V Time’s The Charm

viktorxgn!reader general, just fluff, also I know nothing about baking but I know a lot about eating sweets so I hope the descriptions are accurate :v

word count: 0,8K

—

The first one is a simple cupcake, seemingly abandoned without much thought. But when Viktor’s stomach threatens to devour itself, he finally gives it a small nudge. Only then does he notice the tiny note beneath it, bearing nothing more than a single letter: V. Reasoning that encountering another person whose name starts with V is a problem for future-Viktor, he eats it—and it almost saves his life.

The second one is a shortbread biscuit. A simple, golden thing placed right beside his notes, delicate and crisp. This time, Viktor notices the note first. V. Again. He flips it between his fingers, but it holds no further clues—no flourish of a last name, no additional scribbles, just that single letter. His stomach, however, does not require such deductions. It demands sustenance. He bites down, and the rich, buttery crumble nearly makes him moan. If his mysterious benefactor wanted to poison him, he reasons, at least they would do so with quality.

The third is a fruit tart. Plump berries glisten atop smooth custard, encased in a delicate, flaky crust. It is placed just off to the side of his workspace, as if deliberately positioned to avoid interfering with his projects. Thoughtful. His fingers hover over the note before picking it up. V. A pattern, then. A deliberate effort. A slow smirk tugs at his lips. Heimerdinger mutters something about proper nutrition as he passes, but Viktor hardly hears him—he’s too busy savouring the burst of sweetness on his tongue.

The fourth is a cinnamon twist. Still warm. The scent alone is a distraction, curling into his senses, clinging to the air in his lab. Someone must have timed this perfectly. Viktor eyes the note—unchanged, predictable, a single V.—before tearing off a piece. Flaky layers yield under his teeth, soft and buttery with just the right kick of spice. He chews slowly, contemplative. Whoever they are, they know what they’re doing.

He nearly scolds himself for not picking up the scent earlier. Indulgence had overshadowed curiosity, he presumes, not without embarrassment. Viktor decides to capture his mysterious nutritionist—if only to say thank you. From the well of his memory, he pulls out the timestamps of when he’s found the treats waiting for him, triangulates the most likely entrance point, and, at some point, frowns at himself—he is putting far too much effort into this investigation.

It’s not very dignified, but once he gathers all the data, he hides behind the cabinet and waits. If he’s right, the drop time is somewhere between the next fifteen and thirty minutes.

His eyes go wide, and jaw slackens when, on the twenty-third minute, he sees you—carefully cracking the door open, looking around to make sure you remain unseen. A small plate rests in your hand, gift number five. He can’t help but smile at your quiet work as you set the plate on his desk and add your little note to it. At least now he’s certain there is no other V.

His smile lingers as he watches you place the plate down with the same care as always, the little note tucked neatly beside it. You straighten, casting one last glance around the lab to ensure your secret remains safe, and just as you turn to leave—

“I had no idea you bake.”

Your yelp shatters the quiet. You whirl around, clutching your chest as if to keep your heart from leaping out. “Janna’s tits, Viktor!” Your breath is uneven, eyes wide as you take in the man now leaning casually against the cabinet, his expression far too pleased with himself. “Have you been waiting for me?”

“It was only a matter of time before I caught my mysterious nutritionist,” he says, voice amused and eyes bright. He glances at the plate, then back at you. “And what have you brought me this time?”

Your mouth opens, then closes as you glance at the plate, as if momentarily forgetting. “Uh— crème brûlée.”

His brows lift in approval. “An excellent choice.” He steps closer, gaze flicking between you and the pastry as if weighing which one intrigues him more. “Tell me, do you make them just for me?”

You hesitate, then straighten your shoulders, attempting nonchalance. “I bake for myself too.”

“Mm.” He hums, clearly unconvinced. His fingers brush the edge of the plate as he picks up your note, turning it over between his fingers before tucking it neatly into his pocket. “Then I hope you will allow me to return the favour sometime.”

Your heartbeat is still settling, but Viktor’s eyes—sharp, knowing—are set on you in a way that makes your stomach flip. “…You bake?” “No,” he says quickly. “But I have other talents that you might… appreciate.”

[do-you-have-a-flag]

i'm just gonna call it that we need to practice mindful tech usage and security and i don't mean screentime tracking apps and vpns or whatever i mean starting from early childhood and going into adult wellbeing culture to encourage tactile hobbies and long-form work and the understanding of online devices as commodifying the user with spyware

i'm talking throwback word processors with the same ergonomics as regular smart devices for general educational work and dedicated subjects for working with digital technologies so you have theory in practice and then applying that theory in a contemporary work context. that's where you learn applications, digital safety, and how to implement the generative tools. separately. once you've already developed the critical analysis and expressive skills first.

i have been basically addicted to the internet since i was 13, i've had ups and downs with it, but i've always had a little bit of over caution when it comes to information and identity online. i overshare what i chose to but i think the break down of privacy as a norm when it comes to personal data tracking is genuinely awful.

i like algorithms in some places but i do not think this super-customisation is worth this panopticon of tech.

have you heard about how phone locations can still be triangulated when the phone is off? this is incidentally why if you are gong to protests and you think you are in danger it might be best to leave it at home. but generally if you want to avoid audio and video being used to build a marketing profile you can just switch it off and pop it in a bag or the next room. but with fb trying to make voice command smart glasses a thing (after snapchat and google both failed to sustain the same product) it bears caution that so called wearable tech such as glasses, pendants, watches, earbuds, ect.... even outside of smart cars there's the risk of passive listening for user marketing profiles. we already have location based advertising, ads that track your useage to predict your menstrual cycle or life events, public ads that react to nearby phones

i am going off on this tangent to say that i am not naïve to the fact that we already have to constantly dig into 'dark patterns' of settings to opt out of surveillance and commodification. i'm aware that the easiest path is to do nothing and use the shortcut machines even when they don't actually help or save much time or effort beyond selling you tools that already exist with a new price tag. i'm aware that the plagiarism software with no idea what it's talking about and runs on resource wasting pollution and underpaid remote human labour that also gets slapped in every function role despite basically being fancy autofil and pixel pulp not only has all of those issues but the lay person is either unaware or does not care and companies only care that it is a new way to pretend they're innovating. i know all this just like i know that mass automation is just exploitation unless it is balanced with social structures for all that mean emancipation from the need for labour.

but while i think all tech can be used for good, facilitating human connection across physical distance, carefully trained data analysis on a rapid large scale, removing the tedium of technical drudgery where needed, just providing light entertainment. but we have gotta be better about legislating, moderating, and use culture.

use culture goes hand in hand with convenience. it's why vinyl records are still trendy, not only are they good at what they do, but there is enough cool factor that the inconvenience becomes a feature. CDs are also convenient still! but CDs do not have the cool factor so they get wiped out by the convenience of streaming. playlists in streaming have a cool factor that radio does not despite radio still being convenient. and remember no matter how much streaming claims you can pay to opt out of ads that's usually something that you get payment tiered out of eventually so the convenience facilitated by accessibility is debatable the longer time passes.

looping back to my original point, if we can encourage an understanding of digital privacy as something you shouldn't be complacent about, that you shouldn't have to pay for tools to get out of the spotlight, that it is immensely embarrassing to be too into exploitation by tech companies and make that the problem of everyone around you. user control should be synonymous with convenience. customisability/personalisation through individual control rather than passive scraping. you can still commodify decorative tech.

we gotta make slop and babying algorithm brained tech usage cringe. people don't care to hear that it's immoral so just make them feel uncool at this point. because it is embarrassing that you have the universe of resources at your fingertips and you're too scared to do anything with it other than beg it to put words in your mouth. who cares if you're chronically online or too busy irl to learn a new skill. you are like a little bird pecking at it's own reflection, that's sad. try saying something mediocre and honest. we gotta stop tap dancing into technofeudalism just because we're too complacent to actually talk to each-other.

[jeffgerstmann]

why should I care that the ccp is collecting my data?

If we exclude the concept that TikTok could be accessing data on your phone that it isn't supposed to get without permission (contact data, health data, whatever) I think there's a lot of triangulation that could be done to narrow down your data to something very individual, right? Like, for example, your location data could be matched with your content to figure out things like "oh, you're recording this in front of a military base, now we can cross-reference that with what we already know about this nation's military capability" and so on.

I don't think most people operate in any sensitive areas when posting to tiktok, so that's kind of whatever, but... I don't know, maybe soldiers shouldn't use tiktok while on a military base or something. At least that's the best I can do when trying to come up with a specific reason here.

For me the catch is hey, sure, yeah, I don't want Bytedance to have a ton of personal data on me. But also I don't want fucking Facebook, Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, RaytheonKidz.biz, or the United States fuckin' Government to have any of that data, either! Biden just issued an executive order this morning about personal data falling into the hands of "countries of concern" and motherfucker I'm like YEAH LIKE THE US OF FUCKIN' A, MAYBE? THE ONE I'M MOST CONCERNED ABOUT?

Like I don't want China or Russia getting their hands on a bunch of information about me, but in a world where US-based politicians are already attacking medical procedures and science to make things like gender-affirming care and abortion illegal, all that location data and content could have some very scary uses down the line. And that crackdown won't come from fucking China.

[tanadrin]

to put it another way: there is some data that to win an election it helps a lot to be perceived as moderate. great! but to yglesias, the necessary and sufficient thing you have to do to be perceived as moderate is to triangulate against public opinion and message carefully on that basis. but donald trump didn't do those things, and was still perceived as more moderate. so clearly these are not the necessary and sufficient things you must do to be perceived as moderate. and in fact, i would argue (based on why donald trump is perceived as a moderate), triangulating against public opinion and messaging carefully on that basis is a bad way to be perceived as a moderate. not just not helpful, but actively harmful. instead it will result in you just getting ignored, and your opponents exploiting the fact you are being ignored to portray you however they like.

what republicans have trialed rather successfully is picking political fights and using obstructionism to portray the other guys as extremists. and this worked rather well under obama, who was not particularly extremist. i reckon it would work very well (and has, when democrats have tried it) under trump, who is a bona fide extremist, but who of course will never be portrayed such by him and his allies, who have outsized influence on media narratives. because democrats try to position themselves as moderates via triangulation and careful messaging, which does not work.

the thesis here isn't that democrats need to tack to the left, it's that democrats need to be more partisan. which is not the same thing as being more ideological. you can have an ideological big tent and also unabashedly treat the republican party as constituted under donald trump as the implacable foe of american democracy. but yglesias seems to treat partisanship as the same as ideology. which is why his theory of political strategy is bad.

[notinthislife50]

Chapter 16

Next Chapter

Previous Chapter

Back at the base, Tony’s hands flew over the keyboard, his eyes scanning the USB drive they had found at your location, hoping for an answer. He still couldn’t figure out what just happened. The last thing he heard was your voice.

“Tony, they found me!”

Then nothing. Nothing but silence had followed. The screen in front of him flickered, lines of data scrambling across his display, but there was nothing. No signal, no trace, just an empty line.

“FRIDAY?” His voice cracked. “Find her. Now.”

“I’m attempting to triangulate her position, sir,” FRIDAY responded. “There’s interference. But the transmission was abruptly cut off.”

“Damn it,” Tony muttered, turning to the others. “Get your gear ready. She’s out there and we need to find her.”

Natasha, Clint, and Sam were already on their way, Tony’s words had barely left his mouth before they were heading for the door. But Steve, the ever calm leader, stopped them in their tracks.

“Tony, listen this isn’t your fault,” Steve said, he tried to comfort. “We’ll find her. We just need to think.”

But Tony didn’t want to hear it. His jaw tightened. “I should’ve been there,” he muttered, more to himself than to Steve. “She’s out there alone, and I…”

“Tony.” Steve’s voice was firm now, a reminder to focus. “We’ll get her back.

Tony gritted his teeth, his mind already racing with calculations. “Right. well I’m going in first. No delays.”

Hydra Base – Your POV

You were strapped to a table, Electricity stillbuzzed through you, your body was stiff and shaking on the cold metal table. The bitter taste of blood on your tongue. Tubes were jammed into your arm, you weren't sure what they were....IV lines or worse, pumping God knows what into your bloodstream

“Shit” you muttered willing yourself not to pass out. You tried to breathe through it, tried to focus on the subtle movements of your surroundings. You could hear them now, two figures, maybe more, moving closer.

With all your remaining strength, you forced your eyes open. A figure stepped into the faint light, their silhouette barely visible through the haze of pain.

“I was hoping you’d be a bit more cooperative,” came the voice, it was familiar. You couldn’t quite place it. But you recognised it.

Back at Base pov:

Tony was pacing, his hands running through his hair. He couldn’t stand all the waiting around. He shot a quick look at Steve.

“Any luck?” he snapped.

Steve shook his head, his eyes still fixed on the map, trying to predict their next move. “We’re getting close. But we don’t know where she is yet. These Hydra bastards have too many holes.”

“We will find her,” Tony said, “And when we do, it’s over for them.”

YOUR POV

A door hissed open. It wasn't the usual grunts or masked interrogators. No this one wore a suit. Clean and crisp with the SHIELD emblem on the front pocket. “It took us a long time to track you, Y/A/N.” (Your avenger name)

Your stomach dropped. Zero the head of SHIELD stood before you.

“Oh, come now. You knew SHIELD and Hydra weren’t that separate. Especially after we tried to reclaim the Soldier and maybe trap the trickster god.” He tapped your temple lightly “But do you even know who you are? Why we kept you around once they disappeared?”

You stayed silent your gaze unwavering staring straight at him.

“A soldier who can crash networks, slit throats, and disappear without a whisper… What we didn’t expect was for you to grow a conscience. Join the Avengers.” He leaned in close, whispering your ear, “But it’s about time we changed who you’re loyal to.”

Avengers, Bucky and Loki POV

Natasha crossed her arms sighing deeply. “You all know we’re going to have to tell them.”

The room fell quiet.

Tony didn’t look up from the display. “Yeah.”

Sam let out a deep breath through his nose. “They deserve to know.”

Clint nodded grimly. “Well this isn't going to be pretty.”

Without another word, they were in the jet, heading straight for the only place they knew the two men would be.

The front door creaked open.

Bucky glanced out the window,shaking his head, “We really need a new safe house.”

Loki nodded, fiddling with his dagger between his fingers. “We’ve had more guests here than an Asgardian ball”

But the moment they saw the team’s faces tight, grim and silent they knew something was up.

“What is it?” Bucky asked, already moving forward.

“What happened?” Loki’s voice sharp but fear rising behind his words.

Steve stepped forward, his jaw clenched. “They got her. They have Y/N.”

Loki’s face paled, his illusion fading for a split second.

Bucky’s voice came out low and deadly. “Where.”

Steve met his eyes. “You need to come with us. Now.”

@staley83 @missvelvetsstuff

[biggiesnails]

*taps fingertips together shyly*

So… i was scrolling through your tags spam-liking everything in sight and I had a vision. And that vision was… unfortunately… Grease-vibes for Punk!Eclipse and Y/N.

*************************

The air was thick with sound and smoke as eager metalheads wove through each other like rivers of ants flowing towards the four different stages set up on each corner of the massive empty field the Summer Rock Fest was being hosted in this year. Eclipse sauntered through the throngs easily, being far taller than most of the crowd made it easy to spot pockets to slip into and his inhumanly lithe frame, joints that could bend in uncanny ways if he needed them to, allowed him to slither along his chosen path without resistance. Well, not frictional resistance anyways. There was of course the momentary magnetic draw of the occasional friendly face spotting him and nodding or giving him a quick flick of their wrist in acknowledgement. Being so entrenched in the culture for so many years as a being like him meant that even people he hadn’t stored in his memory bank would widen their eyes in recognition of him and shoot him some kind of nod or small wave.

An easy smirk and a jerk of his chin was enough to please most before they continued on their way with their groups of friends, excitedly switching topics to whatever the most recent word-on-the-street was about him. A mini-celebrity in the local punk scene just came along with attention like that. He was used to it. And by now he was getting pretty good at being able to jerk his chin at these momentary flashes of recognition with just enough energy to both acknowledge and also continue on his way accost. Too friendly of a nod tended to draw in unwanted attention. Too little and people assumed he was ignoring them. Which… to be fair, he was. Any faces his optics landed on passed through his processor only briefly enough to cross-check against his memory bank. If there was a match, he’d tag a date and time stamp onto their memory file. If not, there were far better things to clutter up his memory files with. So into the proverbial bin the data feed went.

He got to the stage he wanted with a little bit of time to spare, which allowed him a few moments to scope out the spot that would best suit his audial receptors. One downside to being all machinery was that as much as he wanted to be right next to the stage (as he found out during his days as a guitarist… sometimes microphones and speakers didn’t play nicely with nearby equipment and machinery. So as an audience member, he had to be a little bit strategic about the distance he placed himself from the nearest set of high voltage wires.

His processors ran the calculation automatically and triangulated on a spot further towards the back. Exactly one foot to the left of a lady in a floral sundress and a high bun sitting on a rainbow blanket, looking entirely out of place at a rock concert. Complete with little flats and a pearl necklace, there couldn’t be anyone here looking more 1950’s than if they had donned a frilly apron to match. And of course… they were sitting exactly next to Clip’s perfect spot.

It wasn’t ideal. But at least he probably wouldn’t have to worry about this lady being too rowdy. He saunters over, all spikes and big thick boots, and stands beside the lady with a smug smirk, waiting for her to notice him. He knows he’s freakishly tall. Impossible to miss. And has the kind of yellow glowing eyes that off-put even the most hardened humans. As long as he can brace for the horror, he can keep his chin high and the sting off his face. The silver lining being that *sometimes* he really actually does make use of how much of a jumpscare he can be to ‘normal people’ to get something he wants.

Eventually she does notice, and startles just a little at there being a person right next to her that she hadn’t noticed. Her eyes travel up… up… up… and land on the shark-toothed grin glowing down at her.

“ ‘s this seat taken?”

And then something surprising happens. Her face splits into a friendly grin and she answers with a cheerful, “No, no! Please! Pull up some grass! Have a seat! I love your jacket! It’s so cool!”

He blinks at her a couple times while he processes the unexpected. Then… sits. Because… well… this *is* the perfect spot. And if she doesn’t mind then… might as well, eh? He stretches out lazily on the grass, sitting with one knee popped up and the other out straight in front of him. Weight propped up on his arms behind him. “Thanks, I know. Made it myself.”

Her jaw falls open in surprise and she leans a little closer to get a better look at it. “Really? That’s incredible! I could never get studs spaced so perfectly even if I tried to make something like this. Sure I can mend things well enough, but I just don’t have an eye for pulling together a finished product like this. That’s quite incredible! You must be very proud of how it turned out! Tell me, what’s your favorite part?”

He gives a slightly nervous huff of laughter, incredulous at how animated this little lady is. “Uh… the jacket?”

She nods with a bright smile and giggles as if he’d told a funny joke. “Yeah, your favorite part of your jacket! Since you made it yourself, you must have a favorite part.”

Nobody’s ever thought to ask him what his favorite part of his own jacket is… not even himself, actually. And he has to look down at it for a moment to ponder the question, tugging on it a little here and there to look it over as if he’d never seen the thing before in his life. “I guess… the fit?”

She practically beams at him. “That makes sense, I’ll bet you probably have a hard time finding things that would fit you right off the rack. You must be pretty skilled at tailoring your clothes to fit your needs, then? Everything you’re wearing looks like it fits you beautifully.”

A bizarrely accurate thing to say to a machine like Clip, but the genuine compliment does something funny to his processor that makes it hard not to laugh awkwardly and look away. “Whatever.”

Which could have been the end of it, except that his new seat mate continues asking him questions about where he got his materials and how he did certain parts. He gets so engrossed in talking about something benignly personal that he almost misses when the band comes on stage.

He does not miss his new friend putting in a pair of ear plugs, and he just barely takes the queue in time to turn down his own audio receptors to avoid getting blasted with an improperly balanced speaker straight to the hard drive.

Not much talking happens during opening set, exactly. But it turns out that his new friend knows every word to every song the band sings, and sing she does. Quietly at first, but once Clip joins in she gains a little courage and sings along a little louder along with him. Albeit with a little blush of embarrassment at first. Which is… unfairly endearing.

At the end of the first set he finds out why, as she turns to him with a small look of embarrassment and ducks her head into her shoulders. “Do you need me to sing quieter? I’m sure you’re storing these audio files for later… I’d hate to ruin them and make them unusable…”

Oh…

That’s…

Unfair.

Unfairly sweet.

When was the last time anyone ever thought about something like that and worried for him or his future enjoyment rather than being creeped out that he was capable of doing such a thing?

He finds himself unconsciously drawing his knees up to his chest and a shaky laugh rattles out of his voice box, full of too much static. “Tch. Like that could make the file unusable. I can just edit out your vocals, you know.”

Her expression falters a little, and for a second he thinks it might be because she’s hurt that he would edit out her voice. But then she smiles in response, even though it does’t quite reach her eyes. “Oh. That’s good, but that means I’ve made more work for you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make things more difficult for you. I’ll sing quieter from now on. You deserve to be able to get a good quality audio recording.”

Clip rolls his optics, deflecting around the genuine apology and what havoc it’s wreaking on his overheating systems. “Whatever. It’s not like your little human voice can be heard over these speakers anyways.”

That seems to be the queue for the next set to start, and even though Eclipse watches her out of the corner of one eye to see what will happen, the most she does through the next two songs is nod along to the tempo. Staunchly keeping her promise to be quiet in spite of the speakers playing at a loud enough volume to be felt thumping deep in your chest.

At the start of the third song in the set Eclipse finally gets fed up with it and gestures to the band, trying to encourage her to sing again. But she refuses with a shake of her head and a smile, waving her hands in front of herself innocently. Trying to wave off his concerns.

So he doesn’t have to stress.

About her keeping quiet at a rock concert where she knows all the words to all the songs.

Because she wants him to get a good audio recording.

Without having to work harder than he needs to clean up the track.

It’s tooth rottingly sweet and he hates it.

Which means he gets to fall back on Plan B, since being reasonable didn’t work out.

Annoy her into giving up.

He is very, very good at that.

With one brow raised, he pokes her side. She looks over, confused, and he gestures to the stage again. Then pokes again. And again. And again.

“Sing. It’s a concert.”

He has to lean in close for his voice to carry over the volume of the speakers, and he’s almost delighted when she just rolls her eyes and pokes him back with one manicured nail. The return fire means it is ON, and the next two full songs are occupied by trying to determine who can be the most annoying to the other.

Normally one would expect that to be a frustrating way to spend one’s time, but it doesn’t take long for his new friend to start to find the whole thing so ridiculous it’s crossed over into funny. So rather than being annoyed… she’s laughing the whole time at his antics.

Kindof defeats the purpose of trying to see who can be the most annoying, but by the end of the second set he can barely remember what it was he was trying to be annoying about in the first place. The game has become its own purpose, though it ends up being a two-for-one deal as the increased familiarity means the two of them can sing their hearts out together for the full third set, now that he’s proven he doesn’t care about there being just a little extra background noise on the files.

At the end of the third set, his friend is flushed in the face and out of breath but grinning ear to ear. She removes her ear plugs after the band says their farewells to the crowd and people begin to disperse, grinning breathlessly up at him.

“That was so fun! I’m so glad I got to come here today!”

Eclipse raises an eyebrow at that, still grinning from the rush that comes with good music and good company. “Got to? How does that happen?”

She laughs a little and gestures to herself with a smirk. “Well I’m not sure if you could tell but I don’t exactly look like I belong here. My sister bought the ticket but had to be elsewhere last second, but she didn’t want the money to be wasted so she texted me. i was free this weekend, so she met me in the parking lot after I got off of work and I came straight here. I’ll have to go home tonight to sleep and stuff, change outfits and things, but I’ll be back tomorrow for Day Two of the festival. Then she’ll take the ticket back for Day Three.”

“Ah,” Clip says, finally getting a little bit of context for her getup. “So you’re blaming this fashion disaster on work, then?”

She laughs and winks up at him. “No, no. The fashion disaster is all me. I actually like dressing like this for work. On purpose. But I do actually own jeans and tee-shirts too.”

He gives her another once-over with a cheeky grin. “I dunno. I might not recognize you tomorrow if you dress like a normal person.”

And then she has the audacity to give him a cocky grin over her shoulder in response. “Already planning on seeing me tomorrow, then?”

And Eclipse has to make the terrible decision between jumping to his feet and fleeing the scene or squashing down the way that aura of confidence is making him feel and saying something terribly inappropriate so he can have an excuse to stick by her side for the rest of the day. And maybe even through the night, if Lady Luck feels like helping him avoid sleeping on trampled-on muddy grass.

…

Honestly, it’s barely even a choice.

Now what was her name again?

*******************************************

(( >\\\\\> aka I just think opposites can be fun sometimes and the idea of Emotionally Constipated Punk Bitch + Sassy but Earnest Straight-Laced Ball of Sunshine = hilarity and also so much potential for storytelling. And wanted to share this First Meeting where a wet cat like Clip could possibly bump into a lady like this lololol. Cheers!))

Hahaha yeah so what if I EXPLODED

NCJCJCBJXBZLAOWHCKBXJDJSJJAHAJAHFBJD

I GOT SO EXCITED WHEN I SAW THIS THAT I HAD TO GET UP AND TAKE A WALK. WHAT. HELLO????,?

This!! Is so incredible!! And cute!! And well written! I could so vividly imagine the visuals and scenes! And it’s adorable!!

I’m genuinely stunned at how well you portrayed Eclipse!! It’s spot on to how I imagined him! I’m losing my mind!!

I’m fERAL about this. Thank you very much for sharing!

[dat-physics-gal]

A leap of faith and physics

We thought for a civilization to form, one needed liquid water, a stable planet with a hot core, and tardium crystals. Apparently, this is not so.

Because we just received a vibromessage over the tachyon network from an unknown source.

Which in itself would not be too unusual. Plenty of newly realized civilizations figure out how to configure tardium to send tachyon messages across isospace. Hoping someone will answer. We always do. It always takes some time to go from simple repeating messages to understanding one another. Most civilizations don't come up with the galactic standard modulation on their own. Nor do we know their form of communication all that well, language, culture, all of that.

First contact is always a lengthy affair, until the new species is integrated into the intergalactic community. Then follows the exchange of knowledge and culture, the setting up of historical archives and sharing of starcharts. Since light travels only at luxionic speed, the charts provide a valuable look at the past. Once the new civilization has been caught up to date, things tend to settle. Updates are fewer and far in between, and culture tends to somewhat homogenize. Not completely, of course, as everyone has different living circumstances, but with all the exchange between us, some settling is bound to happen.

But we know where tardium reserves are, have felt the reverb of our scans, we know where civilizations could potentially pop up. The message we received was unusual not because its source was unknown, but because it came from a sector without any sufficient tardium deposits.

That... shouldn't even be possible!

The signal is also a bit noisy. Strange. Usually, the bigger the tardium array, the more self-stabilization should occurr. And for interstellar communication, you tend to need quite large arrays. So then why was there so much noise?

It was clearly a signal, and according to the triangulators, it came from the outer third of a dark spiral galaxy. We call them that, since they were never really observed, at least not with any isocartography. We only know they're there due to shared star charts. No idea what's going on with them at the current isotime. We can't know, without any tardium resonance to pick up.

Anyway, of course we answered. Their signal had been prime numbers, if we demodulated it correctly, followed by things we couldn't really make sense of. It was standard practice to begin communications with mathematics, and fundamental harmonics. It's strange that they did that right away, but not unheard of. We sent back primes, and then a couple of playful harmonics. Music. What we received back was weird, because we thought it was music, but it wasn't.

It turned out to be a starchart, and not just any kind. Pulsars. We sent back a chart of their galaxy, as reconstructed from several older starcharts. Then, we waited for their answer. And waited. And waited. An entire solar cycle (of our species) later, we finally got another answer.

And it just would not stop. We recognized it was a series of images, or rather, rapid successions of images, together with harmonics on a different band as well. This was video! The footage depicted a bipedal species, with symbolics next to different features. The images cycled through different body parts, with different descryptions. We had a really hard time catching and saving all the data, a task which had to be offloaded to the communal computation grid, as our own planet simply did not have the capacity to do it alone. This should have tipped us off to what we were going to be dealing with, but it didn't.

We continued, almost business as usual, just a fair bit faster. Then objects were being shown, often together with the bipedals, and their corresponding glyphics were depicted right next to them. Also, each image was accompanied by a sound file. They really made learning their language easy for us. We learned that they called themselves Humans, and their home was Earth, a planet orbiting a yellow star. They were a surface dwelling species! Those are pretty rare, as most can not survive the exposure to open space for some reason. We then sent back images and glyphics of our own, matching them in their intent. We sent images of life forms, images of our own body parts, images of objects and always accompanied by isostandard glyphics.

Usually, once communication has come to a basic understanding, the exchange of culture would begin.

But the Humans had started out with primes and starcharts, so of course, their next communication wasn't about culture. We... honestly didn't know what exactly it was, for a while. Until some of the mathematicians from across the network found patterns. They were sharing mathematics with us!

Eager to help, we sent back entire databases full of insights. They requested more soon. So we sent more. And more. And more. We wondered how they could even store all that we sent them. We asked. They sent back something we didn't understand. We hoped the mathematicians could figure it out, but nope.

Eventually, we sent steam engine configurations, as well as the corresponding heating and shunting tardion-arrays used to power them. They sent back their own designs for steam engines. And other engines that seemed similar, but shoudn't work with steam. The machine configurations, piston layouts and such, were fairly primitive. As was to be expected from a new species. But they never sent us schematics of their heating or shunting arrays. When we asked how they kept things cool without shunting arrays, they sent back another steam engine. But, when we called it that, they corrected us. What they had shown us was a heat pump. They used the opposite effect, instead of creating movement from a temperature difference, they created a temperature difference from movement. We asked them why they wouldn't just use shunting arrays. They asked what those were.

And this is how we found out why they were in dark space. Why their signal was so noisy. And why they had never depicted heating or shunting arrays in their schematics.

They had practically no tardium. They simply did not have enough of it to make arrays, as we thought all civilizations do. The largest piece of tardium they had was the centerpiece of a gigantic machine. It was about the size of a human "nail", which is a vestigial claw originally used for superior grip on one of the native plant species of their planet.

We did not know how to respond. We could not comprehend how a civilization could form without tardium crystals. They asked us if we knew where more could be found, preferably near them. We didn't understand what they meant. Then they asked us how to locate reserves. We gave them the modulations that we use to scan for the crystals' tachyon resonance.

They thanked us, and ceased their questions. Then, communication became choppy. Only occasionally would we receive an exchange of culture. Their questions about mathematics and tardium crystals ceased.

---------------------

When we first received back an answer from the deep space tachyon dish, we were extatic. And shocked. And kind of in disbelief. Nobody had really known if it would work. Still, everyone in the control room agreed that we should make sure it was really a signal, before we dropped that bombshell to the public.

We focused a couple more dyson collectors onto the dish, and changed the signal. Instead of primes and harmonics, this time, we encoded the pulsar chart, multiple times, in every encoding we could think of, and sent them all.

Only a few hours later, we received another signal from the previous location. The encoding was our own, easily recognized. With shaky hands, i pressed the 'open image file' button.

When i was greeted by a picture of the Milky Way, everyone in the room lost their collective shit.

"Holy Fuck!" "Oh my god." Someone fainted. Multiple people cried. Nobody minded any of that.

~~~

The prime administrator creased her brow. The direct line was ringing. This better be important. "Hello? Prime administrator here." From the other end, she could hear someone suppressing tears, and whimpering: "Tachyon dish project operator here. We... we."

"Everything ok over there?", she asked. What could possibly have happened that had the scientist crying? Was there an accident with the dyson swarm or something? Did people die? No, she trusted the operator of that experiment to not call unless it mattered to the entire human race.

A wet chuckle. "Better than ok. Maam? We... We're not alone."

Not alone? What does that...? Oh. OH! oh

"Are.. you sure?" Dammit. Now even her own voice was shaking.

"We sent a pulsar chart and got a beautiful image of the Milky Way back, in the same image file type. Pretty sure at this point."

~~~

The following year was downright insane. The mere confirmation that we weren't alone in the universe spurred us all on. Artists did their best to show all sides of us, scientists got together to determine what questions we should ask, even the long obsolete military awakened from its slumber, churning out tactical analyses of possible tachyon based weaponry, and how to defend against it.

Some people were panicking, others in denial, but most relished the opportunities that might open up.

Policies were made, on how to handle aliens that would come to the solar system. Tachyon mechanics, an until now unproven theory, made leaps and bounds, scientists working as hard as they could to understand it better.

The dyson collectors were turned to multiple new research projects, powering large machines that channeled vibrations into the tiny crystals we had found to pick up on tachyon vibrations. The largest one that we had discovered while asteroid mining was still in the communication dish, but the smaller shrapnel, a couple millimeters in size at the most, were being utilized.

Eventually, after a year was up, communications resumed. The linguists sent data, and worked closely with the astronomers that had made the initial transmissions. We also received back data, and the scientific community devoured every piece of information. We learned their language as fast as we could.

But our requests for the sharing of scientific knowledge appeared to fall on deaf ears. Whenever we sent natural constants, or physical laws, we got nothing back. Well, almost. Our prodding did yield one answer: How to locate the crystals. Which were apparently common? Though our scans painted a different picture. We did have some scattered about the asteroid belt, yes. But the largest one we detected was only 3cm in diameter. A little bigger than the one in the communication dish, sure, but not that much.

We came to accept this, figuring that maybe there was some kind of prime directive that forbade the sharing of further technology. Actually, perhaps we leaned a bit too far into our Star Trek analogy. Because most of us would not get it out of our heads to try to build a warp drive. Well, not really a spacetime bending drive, but something that could go faster than light. Because, obviously, thanks to our discovery, we now knew that while the speed of light may be finite, the speed of information was not.

-----------------------------

After ten cycles of cultural exchange, the humans sent a request for isocoordinates of the nearest known civilization to their own. This request kind of drowned in the noise, we didn't really think about it much, we just transmitted our coordinates. Turns out, the nearest ones were us, in what the Humans call the Andromeda Galaxy.

Shortly after the request, they went totally vibrosilent. We tried and tried to contact them, but to no avail. This, while tragic, was a reality of civilization, though. Extinction events could always happen. Sometimes the affected civilization would realize in advance and send a couple warnings, but nobody could help them from afar, of course. So that's what we figured happened to Humanity. Maybe their sun blew up, or they got knocked away from it by a passing object, anything could have happened.

Many cycles passed. I had aged, my once young and springy exoskeleton now wobbly and soft, though my mind was still sharp enough to crew a communications array.

None of us were prepared for the schockwave resonating through our sensor grids. Multiple arrays straight up shattered. Luckily, as big as they were, there was nobody close to them, so no deaths. What the rest of them picked up though made no sense. We could determine there was a pulse, but no normal communication had that level of power, nor resonance.

Then, half a planetary rotation later, there was a new luminance in the sky. We were about to renew our arrays and update our starchart, when the light source moved. Toward the planet.

What?

And then, my assigned communications array resonated.

"This is the Human vessel Enterprise, calling anyone on the planet. Can you read us?" the crystal sang in choppy English, the language of the Humans. The ones we thought were extinct.

I scuttled to my post at the resonator, tuning it to reply:

"This is communications, we read you, but i don't understand? We are recovering from an unprecedented resonance pulse that shattered multiple arrays, sorry if the modulation is a bit off."

The answer was swift: "Sorry about that, our engines are a bit out of tune at this point. That pulse might have been us. Glad to hear you all down there, is anyone injured?"

"Your engines? And uh. No, nobody injured."

"Yes our engines, again, we apologize for that. But glad to know everyone is alright.

Requesting permission to land on the surface."

This was a momentous occasion, which i didn't realize until later on. The entire tachyon network would eventually refer to this exact communication as a reference time. This exact moment would come to be known as 0:0 PFJ

0 Cycles and 0 rotations Past First Jump.

The only thing i remember is absently giving permission, not quite understanding what exactly they were requesting here. If i had, i would have convened with the councils beforehand.

Then, the cave began to shake. It wasn't coming from any of the arrays. It was coming from the surface.

~~~

They. They were here. The Humans were here. On the surface. Of. Of our planet. What? How?!

Most importantly, why?!

Then i remembered the stories about their exploration of the surface of their own planet. How they had sent people to their poles, despite their biology not being fit to survive there. And several did die! How they climed mountains. Made pressurized vessels to dive below the surface of their open ocean. We asked them why. They told us.

I realized at that moment, not how they were here. But why.

"Because we could, and no human had been there before," they had answered back then.

[beadyeyes]

It's so easy to evolve your schizophrenia into paranoia when every app has dozens of new trackers you must switch off 24/7 and your feeds are cultivated off of the triangulated data of your peers devices and most ads have access to your blood type

[allthingslinguistic]

Summer 2024 travel plans and Language Guinea Pig Diaries

In August and September, I'm doing a bunch of travel to various European countries. In order, they are:

Glasgow, Scotland for World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), where I'll be on a panel about Languages as World-Building and doing assorted meetups

Helsinki, Finland for the Societas Linguistica Europea annual meeting

Tartu, Estonia for a colloquium talk on Applying Linguistic Methods to Linguistic Communication at the University of Tartu and a two-part workshop on lingcomm for participants of Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics (MEDAL)

Nijmegen, Netherlands for some meetings with linguists

Florence, Italy to visit friends

Madrid, Spain for the publication of the Spanish translation of Because Internet by Pie de Página

I hope to run into lots of interesting people at these events! If you're already in one of these places and I know you, including from the interent, feel free to reach out and see if we can fit something in!

This whirlwind list of events and places has also gotten me thinking: this trip is going to be a fun chance to learn some more about some languages! I'm already fairly familiar with Spanish and Scottish English (I doubt people will speak much Broad Scots to me with my Canadian accent), and I'm confident on my ability to brush up on them by a bit of exposure and possibly watching a relevant movie on the way there, but the other four languages are going to take a bit more doing. Here's my initial situation, in order of familiarity:

Italian - I studied it for two years in undergrad and spent about a week in Italy shortly thereafter, and by the end of the week I was finally beginning to feel like it was starting to "click" but then I haven't really touched it since then. So I feel like it would come back with exposure but I wonder if there's something I could do in advance to help it come back sooner/faster rather than taking the whole week of being there again

Dutch - I went through the whole Duolingo tree on rapid-speed back when you could skip through lessons for new material only and not practice drills over about a year in 2019-ish just for fun and as an excuse to look up lots of Germanic roots (I studied German before I knew any linguistics so it was fun to triangulate there). Never actually been anywhere Dutch was being spoken but I did find I could get the gist of youtube videos about linguistics in Dutch so it probably needs "activation" similar to Italian

Finnish - No background except for a few linguistics factoids (case! vowel harmony!), and that it's a Uralic language (related to Hungarian but not to any of the Indo-European languages, so this is a fun chance to learn some things about a language family that's unfamiliar to me)

Estonian - Also no background, also Uralic, clearly the fun thing to do would be to learn enough bits of Estonian and Finnish that I could compare them with each other (also since I'm meeting with linguists in both countries, this would be a fun topic for small talk conversation)

At the same time, there are a lot of language learning strategies floating around out there, and I have two nearly matched pairs of languages on this list: Italian and Dutch, both of which I am pretty good at cognate languages for and have studied some a while back, so I could test two activation strategies, and Finnish and Estonian, both of which I have essentially zero familiarity with, so I could test two strategies for getting somewhere near a basic functional ability.

I have about a month until I start this cycle with a flight to Helsinki. One month, four languages. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's my tentative plan so far:

Activation, Italian and Dutch - I'm pretty sure what I need for these languages is largely as much audio imput as possible (given what's feasible around like, all the other things going on in my life). I've decided to aim to watch one or two youtube videos in Italian per day, focusing on relatively concrete, daily life topics (such as gelato making) and to listen to one episode of a podcast in Dutch per day, aiming to get through the back catalogue of Kletsheads, a podcast about multilingual children.

Why these strategies? Well, I'm meeting up with linguists in the Netherlands but not in Italy, so it makes sense to try to learn more linguistics vocab there. Also, I'm curious about the effect of medium between video and podcast: will being able to see people talking and what they're talking about have much of an effect on how much I can understand? Will I find it easier to integrate one or the other of watching videos vs listening to podcasts into my life at a practical level? Plus, will concentrating on a single, more academic topic vs watching a scattered, unsystematic list of videos have effects on my vocabulary?

Basic function, Finnish and Estonian - I'm probably looking for some phrases to say to people in shops and restaurants and the ability to pronounce things written on menus adequately and match heard words/placenames to written versions on signs. I started doing a very minimal one lesson a day on Duolingo for Finnish in January, when planning for this trip started, for the very simple reason that I was already familiar with Duolingo and it doesn't have Estonian, so I decided to just start by doing a thing I was familiar with until I got around to doing more research. I've been casting around trying to figure out a source of basic Estonian phrases online when a friend mentioned learning French on tiktok, so I searched for "learn estonian" and voila! I think I'll also aim for a video or two of Estonian phrases per day but I want to do more rewatching than with Italian or Dutch, since I'm aiming to remember specific common phrases. So maybe one rewatched video and one new video, per day? They're shorter on tiktok than on youtube.

Why these strategies? This is a comparison of Duolingo's more systematic approach with lots of repetition and gamification and word-by-word translation in a relatively sterile environment versus a more organic and free-styling approach with more grounding in real people and faces and full phrases where I'm not really trying to understand the individual words. There are lots of factors to compare and it's not a completely fair comparison since I started Duolingo in January and I only thought to start the TikTok idea this week, but hey, learning anything still counts as progress.

Summary: I have four languages, each focused on a different app: YouTube, my podcast app, Duolingo, and TikTok. Hopefully for the video apps, this will help their algorithms kick in and start recommending me further useful videos. The difference between the two video strategies is that for Italian, I'm watching monolingual videos that are aimed at people who already speak Italian and just want to learn something about the topic, whereas for Estonian, I'm watching bilingual videos aimed at English speakers who want to learn some words or phrases in Estonian.

Am I going to get these four languages mixed up? Probably! I'm hoping that choosing a different app/strategy for each is a little bit helpful on that front.

Do I think these strategies are optimal? Probably not! But I'm aiming to choose things that feel relatively clear to implement consistently, rather than getting bogged down in researching language learning methods instead of actually getting exposure to the languages. I'll probably do a basic "look up some key phrases and try to learn them" a day or two before entering each place too. And maybe shift other aspects depending on how things are going, stay tuned!

At any rate, I figured it would be more fun to blog about my attempts to use myself as a guinea pig for a few different language learning strategies here than to just do it in my own head (and hopefully help me with staying motivated). And maybe people will have tips of either language learning strategies that have worked for you in general or specific ideas for these particular languages, so this is the beginning of a series that I'm calling #Language Guinea Pig Diaries and future posts will also be posted under that tag!

[boatcats]

Unpopular opinion: I think Stede is learning to navigate.

He was triangulating Ed's position using known points that's... almost dead reckoning. He's just missing some data points.

But importantly I also don't think he knows that's what he's doing.

Ed: And that's how you can use dead reckoning to figure out where you are.

Stede: Oh, I did that before! Kinda. To find you! But I thought I made it up!

Ed: You thought you made up... navigation?

[i-am-thedragon]

Sodie Snakification Modifications!

Buckle up because I have a LOT to tell y'all about the making of this one.

From the beginning I knew I wanted the new Sodie snakifications to be based more on the liquid drink itself rather than the straws and can it comes in. I knew that would involve some playing around with new materials, but I had no idea the ordeal I was in for.

Initially I had dedicated a very small unused area of the Sodies' texture maps to a transparent colour that would be used for the 'liquid' parts. I first tested it on a placeholder head part and it worked just fine. But when I went to use it for the limbs, there was no longer any transparency. This confused me.

And so began a several days long search for the solution to this, which involved custom materials, testing different geometry, and even messing with xml and irrlicht files. Unfortunately nothing worked. I knew my textures and materials were not the problem because transparency worked on the head part, but for reasons I couldn't fathom it only worked on the head part. And I knew transparency was possible on limb parts because the Hunnabee parts use it.

Eventually, I got an answer from the Young Horses developer Kevin on the official Young Horses Discord server. Apparently, all I needed to do was copy a line of XML from the Hunnabee definition file to the definition file of my Bugsnax of choice. Honestly I'm not sure how I'd missed that in all my previous efforts. The name of the value I needed was "InventoryHasTransparency", maybe the "inventory" part threw me off? Anyway, I have to give my greatest thanks to Kevin for once again saving my mod (the first instance was right at the beginning)

So I had working transparency on the limbs, but at that point the limbs were just flat-coloured without any bump/normal detail. The space the limbs occupied in the UV layout was far too small to put any meaningful detail in.

The thing with Bugsnak UVs is that the eye UVs take up (in my opinion) a lot more space than they need to. One could optimise the texture space significantly by overlapping identical eyelid, pupil, and eye UV islands. I could do this easily, except the animated models of the bugs themselves us .X (DirectX) files instead of .obj files. I have had zero(0) luck with working with DirectX files in Blender. The importer breaks animations, and every exporting option breaks them further.

However, I had a cheeky solution. You see, DirectX files can be opened in Notepad++ and have semi-comprehensible blocks of text data. This includes texture/UV layout data. So if I could import the Sodie's DirectX file, ignore the broken animations, change the UVs, and re-export it (once again ignoring the broken animations), I could theoretically just copy the modified texture layout data from one to the other.

The only problem was that I was exporting as an obj or fbx file and then using FragMotion to convert it to a DirectX file, and Fragmotion insists on triangulating any tetragonal polygons. This, for some reason, absolutely breaks the result of my attempted data transfer. Thankfully I found an online converter that converts fbx files into non-triangulated DirectX files, and my convoluted UV data transfer plan ended up working perfectly.

With that, I had plenty of space to put a much nicer bubbly liquid texture, and use that for the limbs. Anyway, I'm running short on time today, so thanks for attending my TEDtalk.