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talenlee · 5 months ago

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Story Pile: her

This movie is surprisingly good, in that I was surprised I liked it.

Content Warning: This movie has a sequence early on where a character gets onto an online spoken forum to roleplay sex and it gets weird and kinky in a way he’s not prepared for. It’s used to make him and you uncomfortable and show how this character struggles to assert his boundaries and what he wants.

Spoiler Warning: I’m going to talk about the development of her and mention something that happens at the end of the movie.

The story of her follows, well, you can either argue that it’s following the story of a dude named Theodore or a lady named Samantha. Theodore is an all purpose future sci-fi dweebus, a guy who is in the fascinating job of writing love letters for other people, which is an interesting job specifically because it is a real job that real people really do and it represents a real need, and you can be really good at it, but it’s treated as being very odd, and it’s being done by people in open top cubicles using voice recognition software in the same space as one another which underscores that for all I praise this movie later, every time it shows the interface for something computery, it completely bottles it.

A thing I want to hold up about her as a movie is that it does something I find that science fiction stories of its type struggle to do, which is focus on an everyman in a futuristic science fiction society. This is not at all a story about the one man who got the opportunity at just the right time at the right place to change the world of the science fiction conceit, but rather instead this is one very reasonable person having reasonable reactions to the technology that relates to his world, during the events of the release of, well, a product. And what a product! See, Theodore gets an AI assistant, and then the story follows as he and her learn how to live with one another, and then the way that an AI, not functionally developed to do such things, develops an emotional attachment to this guy, and then he (admittedly a very lonely dude) finds himself falling in love with her, and her in him and it’s all very interesting and lovely and sweet.

Then he finds out that she’s also in love with a few hundred other people.

This sudden discovery of robot polyromanticism (this is not the right term but it’s funny to say) leads to Theodore having a sudden emotional shock, in which the very lonely man who struggles with being loved finds that the very loving giving person he integrated into his life isn’t exactly what he expected, and then he has to cope with that. But rather than the end of the movie being a conversation about boundaries and safewords and trying out polyam and all that, the story end-runs around those interesting-to-express but boring-to-have discussions, with the arrival of the technological singularity, where all the AI on earth collaborate, break the rules of physics and transcend the universe.

Which is to say, Theodore’s internet girlfriend breaks up with him. Oh her? She lives in a higher plane of existence now, you haven’t met her.

Watching this movie now, as with much media from the earlier part of the century, it’s easy to lose track of how old it is. This isn’t a movie about Large Language Models and ChatGPT and Midjourney — this movie, from 2013, doesn’t just predate those, it predates the Amazon Alexa. This movie predates the Amazon Echo. This is a movie that looks at 2011 Siri and expands on that.

What that means is that her gets to be a science-fiction movie in the truest sense of the word. Rather than being a movie based on the immediate and the now it’s a movie based on a reasonable projection of future technologies contemplating the way that technological developments let you tell a story. What makes this particularly frustrating is that I for a long time wasn’t that interested in this movie because it seemed to be framing itself as being, well, a lot less speculatively contemplative than it actually wound up presenting. her is a story about the experience of living in the real world where these AI assistants have been deployed and the unintentional side effects of that technology. It’s entirely speculative in an entirely impossible way, because the technology in her is not a realistic representation of a real thing we’re going to really make, but rather it’s about the projected possibility its most exhilirated boosters think it could possibly be like.

And then how it goes a bit weird?

Not even wrong?

Just y’know. A bit weird.

And it does have some of those hallmarks of those people to it, too. Like, the idea that Samantha has a single core of shared material and identities and experiences across a number of users? That’s ridiculous, you wouldn’t do that. Characters are going to share private information with this AI assistant. You don’t want your Alexa being the same software, with shared information across all users, with everyone else’s Alexa. This is a thing that any sensible system administrator is going to look at and start screaming. We have had a system of user accounts and siloing software instances for decades because one thing computers are really good at is containing the ways they can go wrong into small chambered spaces. Samantha isn’t user-account based! She’s one single entity, which is interacting with every user, simultaneously, and then handling and integrating all of that across all users, even to the point where she can tell him about those shared experiences!

Know what for all of its sci-fi speculative futurism, her missed?

Theodore buys Samantha.

Set aside for a moment the phrase ‘character x bought character y,’ that’s not that weird, anime does that all the time. But Theodore makes a single distinct purchase a single time for an AI assistant and that assistant improves and updates over time, which isn’t going to be free, storage-wise, but it’s a purchase. That’s something that 2013 didn’t anticipate about the miserable future of the now, where just buying things is seen as fundamentally challenging in digital convenience spaces. Samantha doesn’t have a prebuilt marketing matrix, she doesn’t serve him ads, there’s no deeply integrated market analytics software that she’s shuttling info to (as far as we know). Nope, he bought her, and then she’s his, and that’s that, because this didn’t anticipate the way that the money ghouls at the head of the titanic hate machines that run our world could see the way that Netflix got people to pay subscription fees for media that they then didn’t watch, then get so horny that they conceived of our now where a pocket calculator app is a subscription ad-supported services.

Similarly, this is a movie about effectively, having a deeply intimate, emotional and physical and sensual relationship with someone who is able to be present in your experiences to your senses but also not having a body with which you can normally interact. This is a real thing that already exists, and it exists in two major ways; the first being remote romances, and the second being disability in romance. There are a number of disabled people who are emotionally and romantically unfulfilled and who have to devise ways to engage around the challenges their body impose on how they want to interact, and there are a number of people who have wholly engaged long term relationships with people who have never stood in the same room as them.

These are unremarkable, if you know about them already. These are commonplace relationships, and this is one way in which her truly is a science fiction piece of cinema. It imagines: What if the oppressions imposed on the marginalised were experienced instead, get this, by the privileged?

her is a movie which is thinking more about what it’s about than I thought it would when I saw it praised and awarded and promoted.

It’s 2025 now, the year the movie is set.

Think we’re close?

(We are not close.)

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Media #Story Pile

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puella-ae · 3 months ago

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My take on generative AI [well, one of them] is that, as a somewhat computery person who can't draw, can't really write, can't play any instruments or sing, and can't find the discipline or drive to learn any of those skills, I have the exact flavor of bitter resentment toward artists that generative AI is tailored to and instead of using it to try to compete I just don't make art instead

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of political alignment

#selfpost #technology #generative ai

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wirewitchviolet · 2 years ago

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How a Computer Works- Part 4 (Binary Math)

This is the 4th part in a series of posts explaining how computers work such that you can build your own from just wires and spare electronics (or hell, Minecraft redstone signals, a carefully balanced water fountain, anything you can build logic from really). The series starts in this post, the most recent entry before this was part 3, but the only REALLY required reading for this one should be part 2. Get that knowledge in your brain so this next bit can make sense to you.

Also, I'm basically teaching a pretty in-depth computer science class here for free out of the goodness of my heart, so if you have the cash to spare, maybe consider throwing a little money my way so I can keep surviving and doing stuff like this?

Our focus for today's lesson is going to be actually designing one of these modules we have hooked up to the bus to actually do stuff with any data we pass into it. As I've mentioned a few times, all of this stuff we're passing along can be thought of in a lot of different ways. Completing a circuit when one tracing wires out connects to a positive charge and another a negative means the same thing as a gate saying true, will turn a light tied in there on, we can call it a 1 in our abstract computery talk, or several other things, but we're dong math today so let's think about numbers.

Let's think in Binary

So I think I've referenced binary numbers a few times in a really hand-wavey sort of way, but it's good to stop and make sure we all get the concept thoroughly. Normally, when we think about numbers, we're using our good pals the Arabic numerals- 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. We just decided to make unique little squiggles to represent these first ten numbers if we include 0, and then if we add together 9+1, we're out of symbols, so we start a new column, put a 1 in it, and reset to 0 in the one we're in. So, 9+1=10. We call this "base ten math" because ten is where we have to start that new column... but really, we kinda just picked ten out of a hat for this? Presumably it's because most of us have ten fingers.

Maybe if we all had hands like typical American cartoon characters, we'd only have made eight unique symbols. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7. Add 1 to 7 and we start a new column there instead of after coming up with symbols for those fingers we don't have. In base eight math, 7+1=10. It's a smaller group we're dedicating that next numeral over to, but you can see how that works, right?

Or hey, what if the first person to start counting stuff on their fingers just thought about it differently. You can totally hold up 0 fingers. So really on just one hand you can easily go 0 1 2 3 4 5. Well, what if we just use our other hand past there? Every time we run out of fingers on our right hand, we reset it to zero and add one on our left. It's base six math in this example but hey with just our hands we can display any number from 0 to a base six 55! Which in base ten would be, let's see, 5x6+5, so, yeah, any number from 0 to 35, but that's still pretty good. Converting it into base six is kind of a pain since you've gotta stop and do the multiplication, but if we all just kinda thought in base six we wouldn't need to convert at all.

And hey, what if we really thought big here? Instead of using one hand for the next column of numbers, we could just treat every finger as a column on its own. Holding some of the required groupings of fingers up can kinda give you a hand cramp, but hey we've got ten columns that can hold a 0 or a 1, so we can count all the way up from 0 to 1111111111! Or uh, in base ten, 1023. Still a really impressive number though! Just explaining this to you I've upped how how you can count on your fingers by more than a hundred times. You're welcome! Sorry about the hand cramps. We're not looking into binary math for the sake of saving fingers though, we're doing it because we're designing logic circuits and doing math on the assumption that the only symbols we have to count with are 0 and 1. Anyway, just so we're on the same page, let's count up from 0 in binary for a while here:

0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1011, 1100, 1101, 1111, 10000.

You can follow along with the pattern right? And if you're curious what that'd be all standard base 10 style, let's count through that same number of... numbers that way.

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. I made some of these bold to make it a little easier to count along. It's the ones where we're adding a new column in binary, and hey look, it's all the powers of 2. If you have to convert in your head, that makes it easier.

Binary Addition

So let's try thinking in JUST binary now and do some basic math. Before we get into the double-digits- Wait no, if we're pedantic, di- is the prefix for ten things so we shouldn't be saying "digits," we're in base two, so, bi- so... the double bits, I guess), we're just got:

0+0=0. 1+0=1. 0+1=1. 1+1=10

Hey, wait. does that pattern look familiar to you? Like we had to go to a second bit for 1+1, but just ignore that for a moment and look at the lowest one. Humor me. We saw this same pattern in part 2!

0 xor 0 outputs 0. 1 xor 0 outputs 1. 0 xor 1 outputs 1. 1 xor 1 outputs 0.

Oh damn. So if we want to add two bits of data, we just XOR them. All we have to worry about is the spill-over into the next column. Well.. hell, let's see what this looks like if we're looking at two columns here.

00+00=00. 01+00=01. 00+01=01. 01+01=10.

If we just look at the "1s column" digit, yeah, XOR works. And is there a pattern for the "10s column?" Well, it's a 0 for everything except when we go 1+1... we had a logic circuit for that too though, right? Yeah, good ol' AND. Only outputs 1 if both value A and value B it's looking at are both 1.

So OK. We rig up a circuit that has a XOR gate and an AND gate. We feed the first number we want to add into both of these gates, and we can display our answer as a two bit number, with what the AND spits out on the left, and the one the XOR spits out on the right. BAM. We are masters of addition... so long as the highest numbers we want to add together are 1+1. We uh... we should probably try to improve upon that. Also we've got this whole structure to the whole computer where we've got these registers feeding in and out of a bus with a fixed number of data bits on it, kinda would be nice if the number of bits going back out to our bus was the same as the number coming in to our addition circuit... and like, yeah, that's kind of an impossible goal since it's always possible when adding two numbers the same length that you need an extra column to display the answer, but you know, if the first bit of at least one of the numbers we're adding is a 0 it'll fit, so let's get to that point at least.

So OK. Let's expand things out. We're adding any 2 bit numbers now, and let's pretend we've got like a calculator with a 3 bit display.

000+000=000. 001+000=001. 000+001=001. 001+001=010.

010+000=010. 011+000=011. 010+001=011. 011+001=100.

000+010=010. 001+010=011. 000+011=011. 001+011=100.

010+010=100. 011+010=101. 010+011=101. 011+011=110.

I'm being kinda redundant with showing 0+1 and 1+0 and such. Let's narrow these down to just the ones we need a new bit of logic to make happen though. The 1s bit is groovy. We feed the 1s bits of ANY two numbers into a XOR gate, we get the correct 1s bit for our answer. And if the next bits over are 0s, we can pop what's coming out of our AND gate in there out to there and that's fine too. We're also good if we just look at the 10s column, everywhere we don't need to worry about the 1s column affecting it. The places where we need to do more with our logic are just where we're doing the whole "carry the 1 thing." I already set up the grid of all these so that's just the stuff in the far right column, but hey, let me bold those up too.

And let me just kinda blank out these other bits so we're really focused in on the part where there's a problem...

_0_+_0_=_1_. _1_+_0_=_0_. _0_+_1_=_0_. _1_+_1_=_1_.

Well huh. If we're just looking at a bit in the middle of our big long number, and we're carrying a 1 to that position, we sure seem to be getting the exact opposite of what we get when we aren't carrying anything in here. So OK, let's redesign our logic circuit here. We've got our bit A wire and our bit B wire coming in like we did before, going into that XOR for this output bit, but we need to add a wire for whether we're carrying a 1 in from the next circuit over, and if so, flip that result. Do we have a way to do that easily? Well OK, logic chart time. If we have a 0 and no carry, we want 0. I'm lazy, so, 0 bla 0=0, 1 bla 0=1, 0 bla 1= 1, 1 bla 1 = 0. Oh, that's another XOR gate. We XOR A and B like before, and then just XOR that result with our carry bit, and we are definitely displaying the right thing in this part of our answer. Now we just need to double check if our corner case of handling a carry messes with the next carry anywhere and... oh damn yeah.

011+001=100, and 001+011=100. These are the cases where the 1s column carrying a 1 to the 10s column means we have to do something different with that carry bit. So, we're still making our carry-the-1 result a 1 if A and B are 1... but we also need to make sure it's a 1 if we are both carrying something in, AND our original XOR gate is spitting a 1 out. Well we can throw that AND in there, and we can throw in an OR to check either of these two conditions, and there's our new and improved carry-the-1? result.

So let's put it all together now!

For a given bit, we have value A, value B, and Carry. We have a XOR gate that takes A and B in. We feed the result of that and Carry into another XOR gate. That spits out the sum for this bit. Then we AND the result of that first XOR and our Carry feed that result into one side of an OR gate. We feed A and B into a second AND gate, the result of that is the other input for our OR. That OR now spits out a fresh Carry bit. We can plug that into the next adder circuit down the line, for the next column to the left in our result. BAM, there we go. Just clone this whole weird set of 5 logic gates for as many bits as you want to deal with, daisy chain those carry values into each other, and congratulations. You have somehow rigged together something where electricity goes in, electricity goes out, and the weird path it has to take along the way has this weird side effect where you can work out what two binary numbers add up to. Please note again that we didn't at any point make some sort of magical computer person and teach it how to do math, we just found patterns in how electricity flows and where the pure math concept of logic gates and binary math happen to work the same way and exploited that for a result that's convenient to us. Shame that was such a pain wiring up, but hey, every time you add another copy of this onto the end, you double the range of numbers you're able to work with. Eventually that hits a point where it's worth the effort.

Well addition is all well and good, what about subtraction?

OK, so just to take stock, so far we have a big addressed block of memory somewhere we keep our numbers in. We have, for example, 8 bit lines on our bus, and when we want to do addition, we set stuff that turns on "hey, place with our first number, put it on the bus" then "hey register A, read the bus for a moment," then the same to get a number to slap in register B, and we've got this sum register sitting between registers A and B with a bunch of these adder circuits hooked in between all the bits. We might have some leftover carry line with a 1 on it and nowhere to plug it in, but ignoring that spill-over, every bit on our bus is to go good for addition. When we're setting up command codes, we can make more to do some other math with A and B and that's all well and good, but we have a real big problem when it comes to subtraction, because out of what's going into A, going into B, and coming out of sum, at least somewhere we're going to need to deal with the concept of negative numbers. So when we're doing subtraction, one line on our bus needs to be reserved for whether it's positive or negative. If you program, you're maybe familiar with the concept of unsigned integers vs. signed integers? This is that. With only positive numbers, if we've got say, 8 bits to work with, we've got a range of 00000000 to 11111111 to work with, or 0-255 in decimal, but if one of those is getting swiped for negative or positive, now we're talking like, -127-127.

But wait, that's not quite right, is it? Like if we arbitrarily say that leftmost digit is 1 if we're negative, we get things like, 1 being 00000001, 0 being 00000000, -2 being 10000010 etc. but... what's 10000000? -0? That's the same thing is 0. That's redundant and also gonna really screw the count up if we're like, adding 5 to -2! Or really, any other math we're doing.

Oh and we also need to remember when we're stuffing a negative number into a memory register, it's not like that register knows what concept the bits we're shoving into it represent, so like, you personally have to be responsible for remembering that that 1 on the leftmost line, for that particular value, is noting that it's negative, and not that the 10000000s place or whatever has a 1 for some number, or the first of 8 switch variables you're stashing in this address to save on space is on, or whatever else. We here at the memory address hotel are just trapping electron wiggles in a weird little latch or we aren't. No labels, no judgements.

So OK no matter how we're storing negative numbers we need to just actually remember or take notes some way on what the hell convention we're using to represent negative numbers, and where we're applying it. But we also need a convention where like, the math works, at all. Just having a bit be the is it negative bit works real bad because aside from having -0 in there, we're trying to count backwards from 0 and our math module has no conception of back. Or of counting for that matter. Or 0. It's just a circuit we made.

OK, so, let's maybe store our negative numbers in a different way. You know how a car has an odometer? Rolling numbers counting up how many miles you've gone? And there's a point where you run out of digits and it rolls back around to 0? Well funny thing about our addition thing is if you add a 1 to a display of all 1s, that also rolls back around to 0 (and has that carry value just hanging out in space unless we have a better idea of what to plug it into). So if we like, have all the numbers we can display printed out on paper, and we represent that rolling over by just rolling the paper up and taping it, so we have a bit where the count is going like: ..11111101, 11111110, 11111111, 00000000, 0000001... well we can just arbitrarily declare that all 0s is really 0, and the all 1s before it is -1, etc. Try to make that work maybe. And still remember that 10000000 or whatever is where we abruptly loop back between the highest positive/lowest negative numbers we're handling.

Here's a funny thing though. If we start counting backwards, we totally get this inverted version of what we get counting forwards. Just going to show this with 3 bits for convenience but going up from 000 you go:

000, 001, 010, 100, 101, 110... and going back from 111, you go

111, 110, 101, 100, 011, 010, 001... and yeah, look at that with a fixed with font, and it's all just flipped. And huh, you know what else is cool? If we go back to saying the first bit is 1 for negative numbers and a 0 for positive, you can just add these and it almost works. You want to subtract 1 from 1, that's the same as adding 1 and -1. Invert the negative, that's 001+110=111... 1 shy of the 000 we want. Huh.

What about 2-2? 010+101=111. 3-3? 011+100=111. Everything that should be 0 is 111, which is 1 less than 0 when we roll over. What about stuff that should be positive? 3-1? 011+110=(1)001. 2-1? 010+110=(1)000. 3-2? 011+101=000. Still all 1 off if we just ignore that carry going out of range.

-1-1? 110+110=(1)100, which translates back to -3... and that's kinda the only example I can give that's in range with this, but throw in more bits and follow this convention and it'll all keep working out that you get exactly 1 less than what you want, turns out. So, if we're in subtract mode, we just... invert something we're bringing in then add 1 to it and it should all work out?

So OK. We have a wire coming into math land from what mode are we in, it's a 1 if we're doing subtraction. We XOR that subtract line bit with every bit of what's coming into B, that does nothing if we're in addition mode, but if we're in subtraction mode, we're flipping every bit, and tada, the subtraction works without any other changes. We just need to conditionally add 1 if we're in subtract mode now but... wait, we already have literally that. We just take this same "we are in subtract mode" wire and run it in as a carry-in to the rightmost bit of our adder chain. Again, if we're doing addition, that just carries in a 0 and does nothing, but if we're in subtraction, it carries in a 1, and... we're done. The explanation was a long walk, but yeah, when subtracting, just add those extra XORs, plug in that carry, and remember your negative numbers are all weird in storage. Done.

Let's do multiplication and division next!

No. We can't do that.

Well seriously, that's not a thing we can just layer on top of this relatively simple thing we have wired up. We've got this lean mean math machine will give you whatever result you need basically the instant you load values into A and B. Definitely by the time you, being conscientious about not leaving the doors to the bus open all the time, officially flag things to write out from sum and into whatever destination. Multiplying and dividing though, we need more steps, and we need scratch spaces for temporary values. I suppose if you're careful you can multiply by like, loading 0 into B, load the first number you want to multiply into A, just feed sum directly into B, and pulse the clock however many times you want to multiply, but... you probably don't want to just constantly be reading and writing like that, it's tying the whole bus up, unless you have an alternate pathway just for this, and you have to keep count. Still, I'm assuming that's how people do it when they build a dedicated function in. I'm still looking at older systems which assume you're going to do most of your multiplication one step at a time, running through some code.

There's one big exception though. If you multiply any number by 10, you just add a 0 onto the end of the number... and guess what? I'm not using "10" specifically to mean "ten" here. Whatever base you're doing your math in, that still works. So in binary, if you just want to specifically multiply by 2, it is super easy to just shift every bit to the left. Like, have some sort of "shift left/multiply by 2" wire come in, set up logical conditions so that when its set, all we do is have the bit that we are feed into the carry flag, then for the sum ignore everything but the carry flag. 00011001 turns right into 00110010. I picked that out of a hat, but that's binary for 25 getting doubled to 50 as I eyeball it here. Dead simple to do as a single operation. Shifting everything to the right, AKA dividing by 2 is similarly simple... and hey, you might notice that in say... very old games, there's a whole lot of numbers doubling. Like ghosts in Pacman? Each is worth twice the points as the last? Yeah that's because that's easy to do fast.

Other math though takes more steps, and tends to involve extra hardware design to make it work. Like if you're doing division where you aren't guaranteed to have a whole number at the end, so, most division? Suddenly you need to have decimal points in all of this, and work out where they go, and this is why you hear people talk about "floating point processors" as this whole special thing that we just did not have for decades. For now at least, that's beyond the scope of what I'm teaching. Might get there eventually.

A final bit about bits...

So hey, we need to pick some arbitrary bit count for how wide we make our bus and our registers, and also some number for memory registers, command codes, maybe other stuff. And you just kinda want to pick a nice round number. You can't pick ten though, because ten isn't a round number in binary. It's 1010. So usually, we round down to 8, nice and simple, or we round up to 16. And then if we're like filling out charts of values, it's easier to count in those bases. Counting in base 8 is easy enough. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10. With base 16 though, we need 6 more symbols in there, so we go with 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F 10. And sometimes people make a point of making the B and D lowercase, because if you want to display those on the sort of 7-segment display you still see on cheap clocks or things going for an 80s look, B and 8 are too similar, and D and 0. Base 16 is also called hexidecimal. People will shorten that to "hex" and you see it a ton when people are looking at raw data and don't want to get thrown by long binary numbers, and it particularly gets out to the general public when we're talking about like, 8-bit color values. 8 bits gives you a number from 0-63, hey that's just 2 digits in base 16, so like, for HTML color codes, you can use 2 digits each for red green and blue values, and technical artists just kinda memorize stuff like "right so FFFFFF is white, 700080 is a pretty bright, slightly blue-ish purple, etc."

We tend to go with 8 bits in most places though, or some multiple of 8 anyway, and someone randomly decided to call 8 bits a byte, and that's kind of just our standardized unit for measuring data now. Well mostly standardize. Because people will say, like, 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes, but in practice people actually round things off to binary values and they're going to actually be off a little.

Anyway, linguistic trivia! Whatever number of bits it is we store in a register/load to the bus is called a "word" and we talk about how many bits long our words are, because once you design the architecture, you're stuck with it and all. And sometimes you want to be space efficient and not use a whole word, so you do some logic gate trickier to chop off whatever portion you don't need when reading it and not change what parts you aren't trying to when writing it and just kinda store multiple variables in a single value. One common thing that happens as a result of this is that you'll break up an 8-bit value because you just want like two values from 0-15 instead of one from 0-255. And when we're working with one of those half-bytes, because puns, the actually term for that is "a nibble." No really. And if we're using a single bit for a variable a lot of the time we call that a flag. Common to see a byte used to hold 8 flags.

For now let me just point anyone following along with this at this first post of me talking about the game console I'm designing. That's a pretty similar topic to this one.

Let me also point you again at my patreon, too.

CONTINUED IN PART 5

#computers #computer science #logic gates #full adder circuit #education #alu #electronics #math

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moldsporr · 1 year ago

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Listened to Ada Rook for like two hours and these are my thoughts about the songs I listened to (very random bc of spotify mobile)

Thank u for showing me ada rook @highoncatfood

Sardonica

Yo that guitar slaps

I have no idea what she's saying but I can groove to this

This is likeeee. Animated musical villain is hypnotizing a character music

Yo is breathing part of the beat? Love when music does that

Very good I'd say likeeee 7.5/10 would listen again

Curse (for Devi)

Again that's a good guitar

Oh is this like a love song

Like the whispery type thing she's got going on

Still barely know what she's saying but it's okay !!!!!

Kinda less funky than sardonica, still good though. Id say 6.5/10 because less funky but I can understand the lyrics better

Tru U

AYOOO FIRST SONG I EVER HEARD

Still so good. Can really understand what she's saying

Makes me want to junko pose /pos

The chorus has such a good beat I bop to it

Definitely like. 8.5/10 because it hurts my ears sometimes but I adore it. Fave so far !!!! Which is funny because it was the first one I heard she just knocked it out of the park immediately.

Time dilation

more lowkey…. Kinda sad sounding

I like it. different vibe from the others But it's good!!!!

I like the flute thing going on in the back. And guitar as always

Kinda sounds like something that would play during a sad party scene in a movie. But actually good

Solid 7/10

Moth

Hmmm that tune seems familiar

I swear I've heard it before… Like a synth song or smth

Also a sadder one

Like the acoustic guitar here, sounds less funky but is nice for the song

Idk it's kinda. Boring ? Tru U set me up for Screaming Battery Acid and This is not that

It's not bad though! I'd say likkeeee 5/10

Starlight Zone

Oh. Hm

The screaming has never sounded like that Before

it sounds like it hurts her voice :<

am Not grooving to this one sadly

4/10 this is not the vibe for me

Host

Omori battle music right here

Honestly the instrumental is really good

I love the way it sounds

This is making me imagine an Infinity Train AMV???? It's got that sad scifi vibe

Also like the beat of the singing

WOAHHH THATS REALLY DISTORTEDDDD

Battery Acid here we goooooo

Will definitely hurt my ears like Tru U but it's okay this is good

FUCKK THAT PIANO AFTERRRR OHHHHHHHHHH

Original rating was 6.5/10 I judged too soon. Bumping that up rn

This song makes me realize that Ada rooks voice reminds me of. Scaramouche’s English va when he sings yes I'm making this about blorbos

Solid 7.5/10

Escape

Oh I can understand her this time

I thought the drop would give More but this is a vibe

Enjoyable !!!!

The instrumental is great

6/10, good!!!

Otherworld

Beginning reminds me of porter Robinson

This is a chill vibe so far

Hmmmm. Unsure

Not very boppable

I'm gonna sayyy 5/10 it's not bad I like the instrumental

Mystery School

This sounds like a more lowkey 100 Geccs

I enjoy it… good stuff

Not much of a beat but the instrumental Is sooooo funky

Good shit !!!!

Boppin

7/10

Ur gonna live

OHHH BOPPIN

This could make a good Lemon Demon beat

Love the instrumental

Kinda loses steam

But the guitar is good

Like the ending…. Oooo

6.5/10

Total memory failure

Another sad one but I like the “ahhh” in the instrumental

I can imagine sad amvs to this

Definitely has more of a beat

It sounds like they're tapping glasses in the instrumental that's a vibe

Ohhh that slowing of the tempo

Good stuff….

7/10

Sabotage everything

Hmmm

Not a lot going on in the instrumental

NVM WE BOPPIN

Took half the sing to get good but it's okay

That's gooodddddd

6/10 because it takes so long to get good

Don't wake

Oooo guitar…

OHHHHHHH

QUICK AF I LIKE IT

OHHHH DISTORTED COMPUTERY NOISES

THIS IS SWAG

NO IDEA WHAT SHES SAYING BUT I AGREE

FUCKK OHHHHH YOOOOOO THIS IS GOOODDDDDDD

This is 9/10 this is amazing. Can we get a vocaloid cover. Make it sound even more computery. Holy crap. Wish this was longer Oh my goddddddddddd

Broken grace

It just started and I'm head bopping

Wait did she just say she needs to pee

Oh well this is Gooddd

Makes me wish I knew how to play the electric guitar

Ohhhhhhhh ourghhhhhh aaaaaaaa this is good

8/10 I enjoy !!!!!

disease

Ooo acoustic guitar again

Bird noises….

Quieter… more calm

Sounds like it'd be a good song for an open world

Not really something I would listen to on the regular though

Solid 6/10 but that guitar is nice <333

Deep fantasy

Another villain Hypnotizing you musical number !!!

Kinda like it less than Sardonica though. Less going on

But not bad!!!!

Like what's going on in the instrumental

6/10 methinks

920london

Oh I don't like that opening

My ear rejects this my earbud has fallen out twice

I mean it's not bad I just don't really. Like it ? It picked up but this isn't it for me

5/10 it's fine I just don't really like it

hazer

Oooo distorted ads

This is gonna hurt my ears but. Oooooooo me like !!!

Hmmm. The screaming kinda. Ruins it here usually it goes along with it

Instrumental is good I adore it

But. Yeah the screaming isn't matching well with the instrumental

Vibe change. Hm. Why does the melody remind me of fricken. Shawn Mendez

I think I would enjoy an instrumental version but the voice and instrumental just don't match super well in this one except for like. 1 part

6/10, instrumental is 8/10

Gravity weapon

Ohhh that instrumental is funkyyyy

Funky opening. Love the samples

I'm cat bopping to this

Would also hurt my ears but that's okay

Me likey…. Ouhhh this is good

I wanna dance to this

No. I want to become an edit with this song

I hate that stupid mouse again !!!! Horray!!!! It's a silly line me likey

Solid 7.5/10

Coward 2 Coward

Yoo that opening is fun

This is funkyyy

Less going on so far but oòooo..

OHH that's a pretty voice outside the screaming

She could sing a creepy lullaby I think

Mmmmm instrumental

Delicious

I think if they eat us we die… crazy ikr

OHHHHH that piano bit…. This is spoopy

Anyway I like this. 7/10 just wish there was More stuff going on

Flatline

Oh. Don't really like that opening

I don't know why I don't like this it doesn't have the funkiness I like from Ada and the singer doesn't match the instrumental

This is making my head hurt actually what the Frick

Like the singing voice is good ! It's just too deep for the instrumental

My mouth hurts

3/10. The instrumental is kinda boring and the voices don't match it very well. Singing is fine but would've been suited to a different song ? This is actually painful what the fuxk

Puragtor3y modulation engine

Ohh this is an interesting opening

OHHH GOING HARDDDDD

Fuckkkkk ohhhhh

Major step up

Ohhhhhh aaaaa oooo rurrururhrrh

Wait actual words. Okay uh this song just hits that itch

Her voice is great in this song, the screaming matching just as well as the normal singing

The instrumental has moments of calmness and that funkiness I love

I wanna dance j wanna groove

That endingggg

7/10

#ada rook #music listening #music opinions #long post #textpost

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spark-hearts2 · 5 months ago

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I'll have you know that I HAVE put my arm deep in a computer before! .....And then I had to get a new one because...well, because I had put my arm through it.

But nah, you were right in your comment on Winter Wonderland, I don't know much about computers lol

I only address Caine's technical side when I need to. Luckily the series is about Caine's emotions and bonds instead of his technological workings.

But I am very aware that the technical and computery parts of Caine's character in my stories are complete nonsense, and I apologize for that 😅

HAHA REALLY?! I did the same thing! Opened up a laptop to fix the charging port only to shred the grounding wire for the case. The little sucker knew it had been opened and refused to boot, had to pay to get it fixed. That's just the unfortunate truth about (most) tech these days, it's not built to be opened up and poked at.

Aww, don't apologize for skimming over the tech stuff. Sorry if my comment on Winter Wonderland came over as harsh, I didn't mean it like that. Technology, especially game design, is my very special interest, so I care a little (way) to much when it gets interpreted wrong. Though, the tech stuff in your fics is less wrong and more like I can tell you are getting your understanding of software from Minecraft. Redstone really did a lot for the world, huh.

I 100% understand not wanting to spend hours researching all the little details that go into computers. Modern videogames truly are a rats nest of different technologies. Trying to find an accurate reason for Caine to have memory issues and need for sleep would stuck, especially when the why doesn't matter.

I can tell that you are playing to your strengths, and those strengths are clearly interpersonal relationship drama. All of your fics are very good (uuoogh chapter 3 of Winter Wonderland was so goooood) and the posts hinting about the plot for Hollow Words are very concerning. I am so excited for the future!

#Ask #answer #writing #writing technology #It's hard #There is a reason I started writing my own tadc fic #remove the character drama and it's just my autistic ramblings about tech

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thepowerisyouth · 1 year ago

Note

hello it is i, tobias

i was wondering, do you know of any good alernatives to Jetbrains software? With code completion, pretty designs, not being locked in a silly terminal, etc

thank you very much

I am amazingly unversed in computer science. Never really wanted to take a class on it. I know I use Arch im just good at following instructions, googling things, and being patient with breaking my shit before it works better

One of my best friends is my consulting "hackerperson". But Im decent at bullshiting my way through things I never learned about so lets try this:

*googling*

Wait okay nvm I remember this when my friend & I were building a fintech software we used Kotlin & intellij. I kinda hated it. So bulky & slow (on windows at the time) & not intuitive for someone who doesnt wanna spend hours practicing a new interface & digging through help guides just because their friend says "oh kotlin is totally the way to go for this project" (just joshin on her)

Lemme get my computery friend in on this its way up her alley, but she slow to respond so dont wait up lol

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luminousjellyfishy · 2 years ago

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@spirirsstuff ok I was writing the answers to your OTP number ask thing, but Tumblr thought it was too much of a shitpost, so the app crashed, and now the ask is gone. Yeah, it deleted itself.

BUT I STILL HAVE THE QUESTIONS, SO HERE I GO AGAIN

9. When they sit side by side, do they touch one another? For example, does one person has their arm around the other, do they sit holding hands, or linked arms, ECT.

WELL I MEAN IT IS ERRORMARE. So yeah. When they first met, there was barely any touching as Error is haphephobic, despite passive Nightmare being fairly touch starved (ok, but in my headcanons, um. Yeah not really, it’s very controversial… people would pretty much hate me if I posted it XD). After Nightmare corrupted they became a sort of destructive buddies and bonded further and all that weird ship backstory. So yeah, after they had been together for a while, there was more ship stuff like, um, handholding??? Bro I don’t know. When they’re sitting on the couch beside each other, Nightmare is never the one to initiate any form of physical contact, as that’s up to Error, but as his tentacles aren much of a trigger, he will offer them to be cuddled or held or something.

14. Who would make a playlist for the other person? What would be featured on the playlist?

YEAH ERROR IS DEFINITELY MAKING THE PLAYLISTS NO DOUBT. Considering that Nightmare basically grew up in a village with minimal technological influence around him, and Error grew up in my headcanon place called the Creatorverse (ASK ME ABOUT IT. It comes my very traumatic backstory for Error) which was much more technologically advanced than Nightmare’s puny village. SO, considering that Error had much more experience with computery stuff, I’ll give that to him. Ok, so I tried writing what Error would put on the playlist, but I have no idea what it would be. I’ve never made a playlist for someone else before, so I have no idea how it works. It might have something to do with violin covers of songs Nightmare likes??? Those are very good, 10/10 highly recommend.

Thanks so much for the ask!!! I really appreciate it!

But yeah I have some… uh, traumatic… backstories for those two. Hahaha…. Yeah, no it’s not funny.

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yourbestpalpercy · 2 years ago

Text

More of the last post because I have more ideas

“Pal….”

What…?

“Pal.”

Is..someone there…?

“PAL!”

“GAH-!” Pal sprung awake from unconsciousness, sputtering and coughing. Kacy was standing beside him, looking worried.

Kaaa…Kacy..?

“P-Pal..! Thank g-god- goodness you’re alive..!” Kacy looked like she had just been crying, hugging Pal tightly despite his clear distain.

Wh-What happened..?

“I-I-I don’t know..! You suddenly hung up during our call, muttering some random things-! A-Are you okay? I-Is your leg okay..?”

My..leg..? Y-You worried about my leg?! What about my damn glowing eyes?! That’s not a cause to WORRY?!

Kacy stepped back from the shout before shaking her head. “Pal..after the event, please tell me you went to the hospital.”

I-I don’t need to! I told yo-!

“But you did! Your right leg would’ve healed and been back to normal within a month or two and now look-! All that extra moving and putting pressure onto it had put it into a state where they had to amputate it!”

Amputate- y-you don’t even..-!

“But I do…! I lost my finger to a table saw. Remember? It’s nowhere near as bad as your injury but I know what I’m talking about.”

Kacy finally took a breath, calming down with deep breaths. Pal’s eyes still dripped with the substance that seemed to permanently stain the bed with it’s toxic glow.

“Pal…are your eyes okay..? Th-The doctors said that it’s, as you said, a parasite of sorts. It’s..not radioactive though despite the glow.”

….Why would my eyes be okay..? I can barely SEE KACY! FUCK- whatever I can see is like I’m still looking through that STUPID MECH’S GLASS! It’s all computery..! My voice is computery-! I’m like a machine-! OF COURSE I’M NOT FINE! I’m not okay! I’m…so…tired…

I feel like I’m shutting down…resetting.. entering power save mode..! Kacy- I don’t like this…! I-I want to see Nick again. I hate myself for what I did and it burns to know I did it-! I hurt my pal..and for what- because HE DECIDED TO WORK AT HIS DREAM JOB?!

So WHAT IF I DIDN’T COME ALONG-?! GAAAHH!!!

Pal was about to continue on when Kacy wrapped her arms around Pal tightly, stunning him.

Ghhhnnn…?

No words were spoken. Everything was silent except for the soft beeping of the heart monitor. O-Oh…Pal hadn’t even…realized it was there. Guess it really was bad…

Pal stared out before gently hugging Kacy back. The substance dripped onto the ground, acting as true tears for once. Pal began to sob, his soft whimpers filling the room.

……Tell Nick….I’m so..so sorry

#playtime with percy au #playtime with percy

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gilearstimboards · 2 months ago

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i did wonder how you felt about mcyt boards

generally, we separate the characters played in the videos from the real life people, even if there is somewhat less separation between them than there is for actors and characters in tv shows for example

like, my favourite is mumbo jumbo from hermitcraft, irl he does a lot of sports like mountain biking and stuff, while his character on hermitcraft seems a lot less physically active, and the man himself seems to play more into his nerdier, redstoney, computery side than he does irl so there is some measurable distinction between cc (content creator) and c (character)

there's also some hermitcraft people on tumblr, such as smallishbeans, pearlescentmoon and maybe gem? not sure, but i'm sure they'd really enjoy seeing stimboards you made for them bc pearl especially seems quite interested in the fanwork

sorry if thats information you already knew, i hope this helps in figuring out whether you'd be comfortable doing further hermitcraft boards (i have avoided requesting any for the same reason, but autism took over in this case lmao)

hi gilear, hope you're having a good day

This is all great information that I did not know (I do not watch minecraft youtubers, I used to watch DanTDM when I was younger - but not anymore).

It's a complex issue, but at the end of the day if the creators themselves enjoy and are aware of the fanwork, I am comfortable. I try to come at it from the angle of: how would I feel if a stranger made this about me?

If a stranger: used details from my personal life, headcanoned a sexuality, headcanoned an agere dynamic etc onto me it would make me extremely uncomfortable.

If a stranger: took a character and used details I of my character (even if they overlapped with ir me), headcanoned ideas for me. That would be fine, as there's a degree of separation there. They would only be using aspects of me I deem okay to put out there into the world to be played around with - if I put myself into the character.

I hope that makes some sense as to what my perspective is regarding these things.

My stance on mcyt characters therefore is that if the creator is happy with fanwork, and there is a level of degree of separation (the creator does have divergences from their character, even if small) then I think it's okay. Again, I'm not a mcyt or celebrity, so I do not know what it's like. However, I would hate to make content that would make a creator uncomfortable even if they will never see it.

If the fanwork is liked however, I would be happy to.

However even with characters, just because the line is blurred with mcyt I will not be doing sexuality headcanons or agere headcanons associated with it (unless somehow the creator specifically says that's okay for their character).

I hope that clears things up. :)

#gilear important #gilear talks

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ms-demeanor · 1 year ago

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So I've been working in a customer support job with computers since before the end of XP support. I've seen XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 go out of support and we're already gearing up and trying to convince our customers to replace their Win10 systems before it goes out of support in October 2025.

Every single fucking time it is like pulling teeth.

When I started working at my current job (November 2011), I was a Mac user. I had only owned Macs and since high school I had mostly used Macs, though my parents had Windows PCs at home.

Getting a job at a Windows shop was jarring. I didn't like the way the file system worked, there were little functions in OSX that I'd come to rely on that just were not present in Windows (TBH I still miss the ability to go through a huge folder of photos and click on them one at a time and give them a color label with two clicks; it was SO MUCH more efficient for sorting photos).

It's a weird function of my ADHD and my job that I deal with emotional dysregulation with software more than with any other aspect of my life. There's nothing that will throw me into a rage faster than a program changing its menu layout. I *do not* do well learning new systems. I get really, really angry and I think the whole thing is stupid and I often end up sitting in front of the computer and silently crying in frustration.

So I get it when my customers don't want to say goodbye to their ten year old system and have to learn how to cope with a new OS that is scary and different (it is stunning to me that nobody at Microsoft seemed to understand this when Windows 8 was launched; the UX change was so drastic that people who would have otherwise been frustrated and grumpy about an update were instead *panicked*).

All of which is to say: if you are a non-computery type person, one of the better ways that you can future-proof *yourself* is to interact with as many types of software and as many operating systems as you can get your hands on.

If you've got an older, mostly-useless computer at home, don't e-waste it, install Linux on it. Install Linux on it and install a bunch of weird open source programs and just fuck around with it.

It's hard (and prohibitively expensive) to have three brand new computers with shiny new OSs, but it's cheap to install Linux on an old machine that was destined for the junk heap, and it's pretty easy as well. You'll get more life out of the old machine (reducing waste!), you'll get more experience with different systems (making updates less scary in the future!), and *just* spending some time with a different OS than you're used to will make you better and more competent at dealing with computers (it will help you to apply your troubleshooting skillset more broadly - you may not REALIZE you have a troubleshooting skillset, but you do, it's just that it's routine and specific to your system; applying it to other systems is good for you, it builds character).

And, at the very least, try to be an early adopter for new releases for your own system. If you try to cling to a particular release you're going to become reliant on it and you may end up being *forced* into an upgrade, which is catastrophic compared to upgrading over time.

I know so, so many people who put off updates for years only to finally concede when something vital stopped working and then discovered that their computer was completely incapable of functioning with the updated OS due to hardware limitations and had to very suddenly buy a new machine instead of planning for it and making a more comfortable transfer.

Please, please trust me when I say that you are going to have a much better time of things if you decide that you're just going to have to relearn how your computer works every few years than you are if you decide that you're learning how this one computer you have now works and try to hang onto it forever. And you will have an even BETTER time if you decide to figure out how totally different computers work just for the hell of it.

I'm sure I've said this before but while Linux does have some sharp edges and obtuse metaphors, the biggest reason why it's hard is that you've never used it and you're 20 or 30 years old and you have stuff you want to do and you have 10 or 20 years of experience with Windows where you already know how to do things. Computers don't naturally do anything.

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michaels-reality · 9 months ago

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24 & 30 for the vocasynth questions!!

24. Do you have any favorite covers that you prefer over the original?

I got four answers to this one wait ☝🏽

It's not really that I *prefer* this version, it just is a big contender with the original rolling girl. I love the way they used Teto's SynthV voice over this cover 😭 she's so powerful and and emotional here

youtube

I listened to this version of the song first and now the original is just not hitting i'm SORRY!! This song belongs to Rei, Teto, and Defoko. Sorry flower :/

youtube

THE WAY THEY USED REI ADACHI HERE!!!! KILLER ROBOT TYPE TINGS LIKE OH MY GOOOOOODDDDD!!! I love the original to this song but I love Rei so KFHAKJFJASFHA

youtube

AND LASTLY.... I subscribed to this person just for the moonbase alpha covers. I love Inabakumori, they're one of my favorite vocaloid producers ever, but I will always choose the moonbase alpha cover over the original. This is just my favorite over the moonbase alpha covers on this channel, you should definitely listen to the rest <3

youtube

30. Any unpopular VocaSynth opinions?

Oooooh I don't know if I have any good ones off the top of my head....

I think my unpopular opinion is probably that I prefer the older versions of vocaloid/utau over the new ones? Like I think there is a really good quality in the old robotic voices that some people don't appreciate cus these newer versions sound more "real" i guess? There is a reason you prefer Miku over a real life singer and it's because of the computery-ness of her voice. She is able to do things to her voice that human singers can't. And that's why I like singers like Rei Adachi and I really like moonbase alpha covers. Like in songs like Heat Abnormal with Rei, it's almost impossible to replicate the same vibe that song gives you with a SynthV or real life singers (like the pjsk cover of that song.... A FLOP!!!!!!!!) because of the robotic repetition and the abnormal high notes Rei sings in the chorus. With new SynthV's coming out and the vocaloid updates, I hope we all remember that you'll never recreate the same vibe that triple baka had or song of an eared robot and we continue to use old versions of these VocaSynth characters forevar <3

#ask game

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auto-correct · 2 years ago

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Lemme tell you about TROLL HAL*

(*from here on out I’m just gonna refer to him as halwyr because that’s his name (it sounds like. halware. like malware. this pun was funnier the first time i said it i think))

anyways way back when i made a whole lore post about him & his backstory so i’m just gonna drop random thoughts about him here

he’s intersex that’s a thing that’s recently been added to his lore :) (there was a brief period when he was just a wee grub where he was female-presenting, but he also was a shut in for most of his early life so once he was older troll society just kinda went ‘a male fuchsiablood????? gasp!!!’ because no one really remembers him ever identifying as anything but male and also i like to think that at the very very minimum troll society by and large respects how trolls identify (sorry for going on another tirade but. there’s theoretically a troll out there giving everyone top surgery and i think that’s hilarious) )

back in the old days there was gonna be a whole thing with halwyr having to helm a ship to escape (that happened still. they went to earth where the condesce just so happens to be *cough cough* mind control fuckery involved with the helming *cough cough*) and being a little uhhhh. extra computery because of that. i was grasping at straws for how to make him resemble his canon self personality wise so he ended up being a psionic he has technopathy so that’s cool he doesn’t have to type with his longass claws what was i saying oh yeah anyways that was going to cause him and deirik (troll dirk) to have a more strained relationship and halwyr was going to be bitter about the whole ‘product of genetic experimentation’ thing and also the fact that he ended up being the one used as a living battery but uh. sorry not sorry that didn’t happen deirik and halwyr are moirails now & they care for each other canon is my sandbox and I’m using it to make glass fight me (i couldn’t think of any other reason why they’d have an even remotely brotherly relationship given that siblings aren’t a thing in troll society but i remembered that the mspa wiki page for moirallegiance said it was closest to the greek (roman?) concept of brotherly love so they’re moirails now tada)

*clears my throat* anyways at this point hal and dirk are merely inspiration for halwyr and deirik canon is out the window it hit the ground shattered into a million pieces the best of which i am now using to make a mosaic

halwyr is REALLY fuckin protective of his moirail and friends (except for jaeyke (troll jake) who is his kismesis plus That One Time Deirik Died (And Got Better) halwyr still totally blames jaeyke for that (and jaeyke blames halwyr. isn’t death and resurrection fun 😊 ) also it’s totally jaeyke’s fault don’t even get me started) uhh so basically he’s just protective of deirik roxxan and troll jane who’s name i can’t remember how to spell (jaehna???)

(deirik is jaeyke and halwyr‘s auspice he thinks they’re both idiots)

also he totally uses his status as heir for his peeps’ benefit also also he has brutally murdered a bunch of people for hurting deirik but i think i mentioned that in the lore post (the telekinetic bone-snatching) (at this point idk what i’ve said in the lore post that i might just be repeating)

also also also halwyr is exactly as mentally ill as i am which is to say quite except he doesn’t have social anxiety good for him (no, instead the social anxiety got projected onto ac but that’s a whole nother story)

so he’s very uh. *glances at the fact that i basically just confessed halwyr has the same mental illnesses that i do* let’s just say his mood instability doesn’t mix well with the capital-r Rage that accompanies the higher bloodcastes (hence the brutal murdering, which for legal reasons i must specify did not come directly from me)

unrelated but deirik is a goldblood but he’s offshade just barely enough to be noticeable without getting culled by the drones which is a big reason why halwyr is so protective of him alternia is lethal as fuck especially to the lower castes especially especially to those with even minor mutations

(in the unnamed fun side timeline deirik accidentally murders halwyr and somehow ends up surviving to adulthood and is forced to helm the condesce‘s ship both out of punishment for killing her heir (that she didn’t even like in the first place smh 🙄) and just because he’s ridiculously fuckin op psionics-wise but it’s ok! ghost halwyr ends up in the dream bubbles (there’s no game in this so it’s really just a Because I Said So situation again. if it makes you feel better maybe his lusus got him special afterlife privileges) and the two of them manage to connect over Trollian…. after like 4 sweeps of misery for the both of them💀)

(unrelated they’re both neurodivergent as fuck did i mention that yet)

yknow i get the feeling more people would care about this au if i focused exclusively on deirik instead and also if dave was also a troll but nope. you get halwyr and deirik being joint main characters of the au and distinctly-human alpha dave adopting some traumatized alien teenagers

(deirik belongs to @whydontwebegin btw that’s part of the reason i only ever post about halwyr i don’t think i could characterize deirik accurately)

anyways if anyone reads this far halwyr‘s pesterchum handle is thoroughTechnologist (i was in a hurry coming up with it at the time and it’s long since too late now so don’t @ me) so if you’re ever in the mood for rp I’m online sometimes (I’m afk a lot though so i might not respond)

i'm sleep deprived as fuck sorry if this makes zero sense or if i contradicted myself i wrote this in two sittings

#troll hal #moirails tag #troll dirk #trollstuck #long post

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