#playground software

[ailatestupdate]

Apple AI Vibe Coder

[strange-wanderings]

Maybe getting a job would be a bit easier if that peppy corporate vibe didn't make me want to bite limbs off.

[clonedchaos]

Uhhh Fallen Kingdom Edit/AMV?

Uhhh.... So I made my first edit/amv cuz I was bored.

Does anyone know a better editing software than capcut because it's kinda mid and I want to try more dynamic edits... ;-;

Anyways this took like four hours so... My brain needs rest. Back to my hidey hole.

[nabesimart]

fellow rebelle user!!!!!!!!

Yea!! I grabbed Rebelle 5 on a huge sale last year and it's really fun to work with.

Unfortunately I don't have any clue how to actually use it for anything more than doodles though lmao

[k12academics]

With over 50 years of experience in the park and playground industry, our team takes the guesswork out of meeting ever-changing safety compliance regulations and ADA accessibility standards.

We make parks safer places for children to play by inspecting playground equipment, testing safety surfacing attenuation and helping you maintain your parks.

Playground Guardian is a fully insured, national company, with a team of CPSI Certified Inspectors on staff and ready to help tailor an inspection and maintenance program that best suits your needs.

[daisy-lavender]

BIG MOMMA

[themimicwecallmeg]

🔪🩸Hopeless Organics🩸🔪 SentinelPrime!TFOneOnEarthAU x HumanReader!Hunted

TW‼️: Power inequity, gore, selling humans, killing/torturing humans for fun, “family is dead”, dark thoughts (mention of su!c***)

**Reader is also non-gendered, called you or it since Sentinel thinks of the reader as a thing and not a living being with free will, reader will also be called y/n if necessary**

———

💥: When cybertronians arrived on earth, they weren’t here to help fight the Decepticons or destroy the Autobots and conquer earth… they had… other plans. Cybertronians were all the same, Autobots or Decepticons, both thought of mankind as a nuisance. When they arrived, they had the intention of making earth a “peaceful playground”…

——

💥: They captured us and kept us as pets, like we were animals, vaporizing our bodies to ashes if we weren’t compliant, they used us as preys to a deranged game of recreative hunting. For this, they made a peace act, when on earth, Decepticons and Autobots could only open fire on humans.

——

💥: Too quickly, earth’s population died out, very few remained after almost a year of alien carnage. People managed to survive though, we even fought back, though it only killed more of us. The only place where we were safe was hidden in destroyed buildings to try and find drinkable water and edible food. Fighting back was simply suicidal as food and water started to become rarer and rarer, making us weaker.

——

💥: Today, you were hiding in a high school building, it was falling apart, though it was safe, big, well lit, and you knew this place from when you were yourself in highschool, way before all this. Your family died, unable to flee from the bots as they got captured or killed. You were the last one, on the verge of going insane, your mind telling you to give up…

——

💥: Scavenging for food and shelter was your only way of not losing your grip. You even created a camera system to spot patrolling bots before they spotted you, you built and used hiding spots and to know where they were by heart. Nobody could help you as nobody was left to do so.

——

💥: One day, it was a normal scavenging day, food and water still slowly going out, you heard jet engines above starting to land on the school’s roof. Without hesitation you got into the closest hiding spot you could find, hiding inside and locking the cabinet’s door. You opened your surveillance camera software, where you could have access to all the cameras you had installed.

——

💥: From a hole in the roof, a familiar bot appeared from it, a blue and gold color schemed bot, taller than a truck obviously, You knew him by name; Sentinel Prime, two other bots followed behind him, they were normal guards with a golden armor. Sentinel pointed at two different directions, speaking his gibberish language to his two minions. He then started to walk around the building, his dual-blade sword out by habit, a small container in his other hand.

——

💥: Those containers were specifically built for human capturing, which meant he had no true intention of killing you, maybe harming but that’s it. His loud peds hitting the floor like anvils, his blue optics darting around for any sign of non-cybertronian life… the only thing you had to do was get out of your hiding spot…

——

💥: Will you get out of your perfect spot and risk your life to get out of this place as it’s running out of supplies? Will you simply surrender and accept your fate as a minority, a weakling… a human? Or will you stay hidden, the safest option to use, but the most boring.

——

Oh and don’t even think about trying to fight…

——

You stand no chance against the last living prime himself…

———

TFONE ON EARTH AU I HOPE YOU GUYS LIKE IT

Now I’m making a poll so people can choose what the reader’s gonna do, if you don’t want a part 2 it’s fine :)

Also I need to hear about you guys in the comments if it would be worth it to make an AU lore post… yk what I’m just gonna put the link for a poll riiight there…

[heartlaboratory]

Claudia, one of your friends, invited you to attend to her beach volley match. The match is held indoor so, given the fact that its summer and in this country summer is also very humid, temperatures are going to be torrid. Beside this fact you're still quite surprised to see that the majority of the players are playing naked, females too (in this parallel univers human are not ashamed by their own bodies). After all sweating is the best way to cool down. She's quite skinny but look really good with that blue bikini, you always liked her so, secretely, you're very happy to see her playing covered just with air. Given the fact that the playground is going to be free the whole day, organizers decided to complete the tournament without skippying to next day.

Some hours have passed and she has played for a lot of time now. Room temperature went higher than 36°C for the whole last matches and now Claudia looks pretty torn. She's always been a warrior, someone who don't surrender easily but all that jumping in this particular condition had an effect on her too. She's covered by sweat, her skin has assumed a reddish tone and her panting has become so deep anyone can clearly hear her fast inspirations and exales. The thing that tunrs on a light in your mind though is the fact that her entire upper body is rhythmically shaking like it's thrusted by a sort of internal earthquake. You suddenly realize that you recently activated a medical app on your phone developped at the laboratory where you work that makes possible medical analises through the phone camera thanks to experimental sensors placed in the camera. You activate the app and feel pretty lifted up by the fact you already added her profile. A thin ensamble of laser rays, almost invisible, is projeced towards her and the selected target orgal (obviously Claudia's heart) becomes visible on the screen. Her heart is beating like crazy, not only considering the pace but also the strenght of each beat, the app says her heart is beating at around 195 bpm but it's probably even higher. It's something that is completely out of any safety zone for someone who is 34 years old... and not even a younger person should push its heart like this. The device can also work as a digital stethoscope and by wearing headphones to listen to her you remained schoked. Her blood is pushed so violently that it's making strange wooshing-like noises by rubbing against her heart internal structures, sounds that almost cover up her slamming valves. Suddenly the software gives a diagnosis: High cardiac risk- probability of a sudden cardiac arrest of 89%-potentially lethal arrhythias occurring. By looking at her detected heart electrical activities, her organ is so over-stimulated that PVCs and VTACs burst are already present. You know exactly what to do, Claudia's life has an 89% probability to end in the next few minutes and it's increasing. You decide to get up from your seat and run towards the referee to show him the analysis of your device. One of the players' heart is going to stop very soon.

A second before you move, on the ecg a strange beat appears and suddenly Claudia's heart interrupts any activity, it doesn't even fibrillate, it just ceases to beat as silence arises from your headphones. Terrified you see her taking a couple of deep breath, the ball she was holding fell on the ground and her left hand is placed in between her bare breasts... after a moment she collapses on the ground.

You have always wanted to place your hand on her chest to feel her heartbeat but now you have to do this to make it beat again. CPR has to be started immediately.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Algorithmic feeds are a twiddler’s playground

Next TUESDAY (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on WEDNESDAY (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD with HARRY SHEARER for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.

Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:

https://archive.org/details/decentralizedwebsummit2016-corydoctorow

Famously, Ulysses did this before he sailed into the Sea of Sirens. Rather than stopping his ears with wax to prevent his hearing the sirens' song, which would lure him to his drowning, Ulysses has his sailors tie him to the mast, leaving his ears unplugged. Ulysses became the first person to hear the sirens' song and live to tell the tale.

Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness. Our modern lives are filled with less epic versions of the Ulysses pact: the day you go on a diet, it's a good idea to throw away all your Oreos. That way, when your blood sugar sings its siren song at 2AM, it will be drowned out by the rest of your body's unwillingness to get dressed, find your keys and drive half an hour to the all-night grocery store.

Note that this Ulysses pact isn't perfect. You might drive to the grocery store. It's rare that a Ulysses pact is unbreakable – we bind ourselves to the mast, but we don't chain ourselves to it and slap on a pair of handcuffs for good measure.

People who run institutions can – and should – create Ulysses pacts, too. A company that holds the kind of sensitive data that might be subjected to "sneak-and-peek" warrants by cops or spies can set up a "warrant canary":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

This isn't perfect. A company that stops publishing regular transparency reports might have been compromised by the NSA, but it's also possible that they've had a change in management and the new boss just doesn't give a shit about his users' privacy:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90853794/twitters-transparency-reporting-has-tanked-under-elon-musk

Likewise, a company making software it wants users to trust can release that code under an irrevocable free/open software license, thus guaranteeing that each release under that license will be free and open forever. This is good, but not perfect: the new boss can take that free/open code down a proprietary fork and try to orphan the free version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562

A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders' interests over its shareholders' – but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Ulysses pacts aren't perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better. Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.

Which brings me to enshittification. Enshittification is the process by which platforms betray their users and their customers by siphoning value away from each until the platform is a pile of shit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittification is a spectrum that can be applied to many companies' decay, but in its purest form, enshittification requires:

a) A platform: a two-sided market with business customers and end users who can be played off against each other; b) A digital back-end: a market that can be easily, rapidly and undetectably manipulated by its owners, who can alter search-rankings, prices and costs on a per-user, per-query basis; and c) A lack of constraint: the platform's owners must not fear a consequence for this cheating, be it from competitors, regulators, workforce resignations or rival technologists who use mods, alternative clients, blockers or other "adversarial interoperability" tools to disenshittify your product and sever your relationship with your users.

he founders of tech platforms don't generally set out to enshittify them. Rather, they are constantly seeking some equilibrium between delivering value to their shareholders and turning value over to end users, business customers, and their own workers. Founders are consummate rationalizers; like parenting, founding a company requires continuous, low-grade self-deception about the amount of work involved and the chances of success. A founder, confronted with the likelihood of failure, is absolutely capable of talking themselves into believing that nearly any compromise is superior to shuttering the business: "I'm one of the good guys, so the most important thing is for me to live to fight another day. Thus I can do any number of immoral things to my users, business customers or workers, because I can make it up to them when we survive this crisis. It's for their own good, even if they don't know it. Indeed, I'm doubly moral here, because I'm volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better":

https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/

(En)shit(tification) flows downhill, so tech workers grapple with their own version of this dilemma. Faced with constant pressure to increase the value flowing from their division to the company, they have to balance different, conflicting tactics, like "increasing the number of users or business customers, possibly by shifting value from the company to these stakeholders in the hopes of making it up in volume"; or "locking in my existing stakeholders and squeezing them harder, safe in the knowledge that they can't easily leave the service provided the abuse is subtle enough." The bigger a company gets, the harder it is for it to grow, so the biggest companies realize their gains by locking in and squeezing their users, not by improving their service::

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

That's where "twiddling" comes in. Digital platforms are extremely flexible, which comes with the territory: computers are the most flexible tools we have. This means that companies can automate high-speed, deceptive changes to the "business logic" of their platforms – what end users pay, how much of that goes to business customers, and how offers are presented to both:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

This kind of fraud isn't particularly sophisticated, but it doesn't have to be – it just has to be fast. In any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Under normal circumstances, this twiddling would be constrained by counterforces in society. Changing the business rules like this is fraud, so you'd hope that a regulator would step in and extinguish the conduct, fining the company that engaged in it so hard that they saw a net loss from the conduct. But when a sector gets very concentrated, its mega-firms capture their regulators, becoming "too big to jail":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Thus the tendency among the giant tech companies to practice the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: dismissing your stakeholders' outrage by saying, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Where regulators fail, technology can step in. The flexibility of digital platforms cuts both ways: when the company enshittifies its products, you can disenshittify it with your own countertwiddling: third-party ink-cartridges, alternative app stores and clients, scrapers, browser automation and other forms of high-tech guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But tech giants' regulatory capture have allowed them to expand "IP rights" to prevent this self-help. By carefully layering overlapping IP rights around their products, they can criminalize the technology that lets you wrestle back the value they've claimed for themselves, creating a new offense of "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A world where users must defer to platforms' moment-to-moment decisions about how the service operates, without the protection of rival technology or regulatory oversight is a world where companies face a powerful temptation to enshittify.

That's why we've seen so much enshittification in platforms that algorithmically rank their feeds, from Google and Amazon search to Facebook and Twitter feeds. A search engine is always going to be making a judgment call about what the best result for your search should be. If a search engine is generally good at predicting which results will please you best, you'll return to it, automatically clicking the first result ("I'm feeling lucky").

This means that if a search engine slips in the odd paid result at the top of the results, they can exploit your trusting habits to shift value from you to their investors. The congifurability of a digital service means that they can sprinkle these frauds into their services on a random schedule, making them hard to detect and easy to dismiss as lapses. Gradually, this acquires its own momentum, and the platform becomes addicted to lowering its own quality to raise its profits, and you get modern Google, which cynically lowered search quality to increase search volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

And you get Amazon, which makes $38 billion every year, accepting bribes to replace its best search results with paid results for products that cost more and are of lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order.

This presented few opportunities for enshittification, but it wasn't perfect. For users who were well-established on a platform, a reverse-chrono feed was an ungovernable torrent, where high-frequency trivialities drowned out the important posts from people whose missives were buried ten screens down in the updates since your last login.

For new users who didn't yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.

The answer was the algorithmic feed: a feed of recommendations drawn from both the accounts you followed and strangers alike. Theoretically, this could solve both problems, by surfacing the most important materials from your friends while keeping you abreast of the most important and interesting activity beyond your filter bubble. For many of us, this promise was realized, and algorithmic feeds became a source of novelty and relevance.

But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target. The critique of these algorithms has largely focused on "addictiveness" and the idea that platforms would twiddle the knobs to increase the relevance of material in your feed to "hack your engagement":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

Less noticed – and more important – was how platforms did the opposite: twiddling the knobs to remove things from your feed that you'd asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you'd enjoy, to make room for "boosted" content and advertisements:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/z9j7uy/what_happened_to_instagram_only_ads_and_accounts/

Users were helpless before this kind of twiddling. On the one hand, they were locked into the platform – not because their dopamine had been hacked by evil tech-bro wizards – but because they loved the friends they had there more than they hated the way the service was run:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

On the other hand, the platforms had such an iron grip on their technology, and had deployed IP so cleverly, that any countertwiddling technology was instantaneously incinerated by legal death-rays:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/10/google-removes-the-og-app-from-the-play-store-as-founders-think-about-next-steps/

Newer social media platforms, notably Tiktok, dispensed entirely with deterministic feeds, defaulting every user into a feed that consisted entirely of algorithmic picks; the people you follow on these platforms are treated as mere suggestions by their algorithms. This is a perfect breeding-ground for enshittification: different parts of the business can twiddle the knobs to override the algorithm for their own parochial purposes, shifting the quality:shit ratio by unnoticeable increments, temporarily toggling the quality knob when your engagement drops off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

All social platforms want to be Tiktok: nominally, that's because Tiktok's algorithmic feed is so good at hooking new users and keeping established users hooked. But tech bosses also understand that a purely algorithmic feed is the kind of black box that can be plausibly and subtly enshittified without sparking user revolts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"

Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/

This was a remarkable (and uncharacteristic) self-aware moment from the then-nineteen-year-old Zuck. Of course Zuck couldn't be trusted with that data. Whatever Jiminy Cricket voice told him to safeguard that trust was drowned out by his need to boast to pals, or participate in the creepy nonconsensual rating of the fuckability of their female classmates. Over and over again, Zuckerberg would promise to use his power wisely, then break that promise as soon as he could do so without consequence:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Zuckerberg is a cautionary tale. Aware from the earliest moments that he was amassing power that he couldn't be trusted with, he nevertheless operated with only the weakest of Ulysses pacts, like a nonbinding promise never to spy on his users:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050107221705/http://www.thefacebook.com/policy.php

But the platforms have learned the wrong lesson from Zuckerberg. Rather than treating Facebook's enshittification as a cautionary tale, they've turned it into a roadmap. The Darth Vader MBA rules high-tech boardrooms.

Algorithmic feeds and other forms of "paternalistic" content presentation are necessary and even desirable in an information-rich environment. In many instances, decisions about what you see must be largely controlled by a third party whom you trust. The audience in a comedy club doesn't get to insist on knowing the punchline before the joke is told, just as RPG players don't get to order the Dungeon Master to present their preferred challenges during a campaign.

But this power is balanced against the ease of the players replacing the Dungeon Master or the audience walking out on the comic. When you've got more than a hundred dollars sunk into a video game and an online-only friend-group you raid with, the games company can do a lot of enshittification without losing your business, and they know it:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/10/24153809/ea-in-game-ads-redux

Even if they sometimes overreach and have to retreat:

https://www.eurogamer.net/sony-overturns-helldivers-2-psn-requirement-following-backlash

A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed needs Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:

Not showing you an algorithmic feed at all;

https://joinmastodon.org/

"Composable moderation" that lets multiple parties provide feeds:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

Offering an algorithmic "For You" feed alongside of a reverse-chrono "Friends" feed, defaulting to friends;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

As above, but defaulting to "For You"

Maturity lies in being strong enough to know your weaknesses. Never trust someone who tells you that they will never yield to temptation! Instead, seek out people – and service providers – with the maturity and honesty to know how tempting temptation is, and who act before temptation strikes to make it easier to resist.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[aluviiseo]

Aluvii delivers a complete software solution for the amusement industry—featuring booking systems, analytics, POS, mobile apps, self-service kiosks, and integrated payments. Empower your business with Aluvii’s innovative tools.

[ailatestupdate]

AI Vibe Coder is your go-to digital muse for all things coding and creativity. Blending AI-powered tools with a passion for sleek code and futuristic design, this blog explores the rhythm of modern development—from smart automation to aesthetic programming hacks. Follow for tech vibes, dev tips, and AI-driven inspiration.

[tobyfoxfacts]

How to compose like Toby Fox

I analyzed Toby's music... here's the backbones to his songs, and various Toby techniques! I included ways to get started with recording your music! Read more to see 👀

Battle themes

For the music Toby uses in his battle themes, he starts with a 1-2 measure long riff. He gradually adds in more instruments, looping the original track from the intro. A simple tune you can hum to. After adding in several instruments, he adds the bridge of the song. He removes the beginning melody and lets the background music continue for a measure. Then he slows down the song and keeps one instrument. After that he adds a buildup and changes the octave, or adds harmony to the final chorus. At the very end, he adds a finale that ties the beginning to the end of the song.

Background music

For the background music during exploring, he makes the songs easily "loopable" so the beginning fades into the end. He uses orchestra sound fonts and ambient noise. During emotional short cut scenes he uses faint opera vocals as well. Don't forget the random wind whooshing sounds.

Instruments used

Undertale mostly focused on chiptune synthesizers and 8 bit sounds. Toby branched out to orchestra instruments in chapter 1 of Deltarune, and emphasized his piano skills. In chapter 2, he fell in love with the harpsichord that he'd romanced many years ago in his homestuck side gig. Thank goodness he left the weird overused synth pitch bending in his past. Good grief, that was... creative. Toby's been experimenting with brass instruments, which makes sense. Toby played trumpet in jazz band during high school. After his work on Pokémon, Toby's music has become diverse, and each song has a unique twist. Working with other artists was definitely a great step for him! Don't be afraid to reach out to other beginner musicians and collaborate!

Making music like Toby

To make music like Toby... experiment! Create a long-term relationship with the harpsichord and mash notes together until you find yourself playing them over and over, nodding your head in satisfaction. You gotta quickly record the track and tweak it later so you remember what it sounds like.

Simple ways to record music

Music professionals will K1LL me for this one. Here's some ways to begin recording music without buying that 1999$ springo bingo synth board with the doodoofart pro vst producing sound bit 2000.

Using these tips, you can record and change sound fonts! Once you record your track, you can mess around with the sound on your recording device! That's how Toby has so many instruments 👀

Look up videos on YouTube about converting music into wav and mp3 files. Toby didn't know what a wav file was when he began music production! Don't be scared of all these fancy weird words. You'll catch on! There's no shame in going on the web for help. Music production can get very complicated with random errors and shit. (I have cried over my piano before) That's what reddit is for! Frustration is inevitable. Just take a deep breath and STAY DETERMINED. Even if you can't play piano? Watch tutorials and practice! Toby is self taught and doesn't write sheet music!

If you have an electric piano keyboard, you can hook it up to a computer with a cable that's easily found on Amazon. You can also use an iPad pro, hook THAT up and record it in a program like garage band. I recommend investing in studio one 5 on your computer! If you've got studio one... get a vocaloid software bundle and mess around with piapro studio 👀 add vocals!!! There's some cheap vocaloids out there! Toby's worked with some vocaloid producers in the past! Mess around and have fun!

Get creative!

The keyboard is your playground. Toby says that simplicity is important. He mentioned this in the annotations included on the sheet music that came with the undertale collectors edition. You don't need to go overboard with advanced shit to sound professional. Some of the best songs are simple and catchy!

Toby would want you to be kind to yourself and your hands. Be patient. Music takes time! Make your own songs and follow your own path. Create your own style so when people hear your music they know it's you!

Good luck!

[fluffykiddosstuff]

What is love? (nines X gn Reader)

BABY DON'T HURT ME NO MORE

Hum hum sorry guys, btw happy holidays even if I'm reaaaally late ! It was  sooo nice! There was even snow where I live!

------

You and nines were friends since last month, he came as gavin's partner two months before that, being gavin's best friend, you helped both of them to get along, you took a liking to the android, wondering why he wasn't deviant when every other android did. Connor told you it's because his software is far more advanced than the others androids, for exemple, Amanda wasn't a part of his system unlike connor had, when connor got him out of cyberlife, she instantly got erased by the rk900 software, just like a virus.

It was late in the dpd, everyone was gone, except you, nines, Gavin, hank and connor, you were all teamed on the same case and it was getting frustrating at this point.

"ugh we are not making any progress! At this rate my head will blow up.." Gavin said massaging his temples

"yeah I agree, I'm taking a break, hey, wanna go to the bar to forget this?" hank looked at you and gavin

"heck yes I am old man" Gavin got up and followed the lieutenant when you on the other hand declined politely, still wanting to re-read the reports of your case, connor chased after them, making sure they weren't intoxicated too much. Well that leaved only you and nines in front of the laptop, you readed again everything from the report out loud so nines could hear you.

"a couple was found nearby Detroit playground, an android and a human, both were shot in the chest where the heart is stated, either the killer is a surgeon due to this kind of presision, or it's an android who scanned them"

You massaged your temples just like Gavin did earlier, it was infuriating, no clues, no witnesses, you were to the  point 0 on this case, nines got up without you noticing and got you a cup of your favorite drink. You muttered a "thank you" before drinking it and looking at the screen again.

"detective, if you aren't feeling well you can go home and rest, I can work alone on this, plus, a good rest is essential when you want to achieve something"

You nodded and started to get up and gather your belongings when he stopped you in your track.

"wait I actually have a question before you go detective"

"yes what is it?"

No one spoke for like 5 minutes, he seemed to think before he was gonna ask what he wanted.

"don't you find it weird?"

"what?"

"that the couple was a human and an android?"

You thought a little about it, yeah it was a bit odd because androids didn't got their rights long time ago and still are scared or angry over humans for their loss, same for the other side, but they are exceptions after all.

"well laws are a bit weird recently but nothing state they couldn't be together"

Nines led spinned red and yellow, you looked at him when it hit you.

"you think they got killed because they loved each other?"

"that's a possibility, since the revolution, many people are still hostile on both side"

"yeah.. We should check the road cameras, maybe we could track a vehicle going in this area at the presumed death hour "

"that was what I was thinking, good conclusion detective"

You smiled and rushed a bit to him, he was still on the chair from earlier, you then kissed him on the forehead.

"you are a genius nines! We finally have a lead! I'm gonna send a message to hank and Gavin, I'm gonna go home now, see ya!"

Some blue tinted the android cheeks, he looked at you leaving the pretinct and touched his forehead where you kissed him, a warning going in front of his eyes.

Software instability ⬆️

He texted connor with his system and waited for his response.

"connor what is love?"

[muddyorbsblr]

the evangeline chronicles episode 2: loopholes & mercies

Series Masterlist See my full list of works here!

Placement: 2015

Summary: Evangeline receives a tip of a suspicious character hanging around public parks with a phone pointed at the playground

Word Count: 2k

Warnings: 18+ | mention of pedophilia; mention of CSA; public masturbation; knife use; gun mention; violence [if i missed anything, let me know]

Feedback is greatly appreciated! Remember, likes are great but comments & reblogs are treasured.

There's this man that lurks just outside the park, phone in one hand with the camera pointed at the children playing. His other hand's in his pocket. Just ALWAYS in his pocket. Maybe I'm just paranoid but I could have sworn he took a picture of my 5yo daughter. Posting his picture so other parents are aware in case they see him around.

This wasn't where Evangeline would usually get her intel, scrolling through a thread of posts on a subreddit for the public parks in Anaheim, but there was a tip left on the help line she'd set up from an anonymous source (or at least the young and cautious single father had put in a respectable effort to try and stay anonymous). All it said was "Potential child predator at Betsy Ross Park. I could be wrong, it's probably nothing."

And that had sent the hacker down a digital rabbit hole, trying to see if there were any threads on the surface web that she could follow before dipping into her own resource pool and putting this man's life under her array of increasingly invasive lenses. That led her to this page, multiple entries echoing the same concern of a man hanging around playgrounds. Same below average height man, same hoodie pulled low over his eyes, same phone.

And always with the hand in his pocket.

"I bet you a full stack in Coin there's a hole in that pocket," greywolf chirped up from his end of the call, his voice distortion software making his chuckling a garbled crackling noise. "Fucking creep probably yanking one off in broad daylight."

"Good thing I'm not a betting woman or else I might've just lost near a half mil," she shot back, starting to pace around her study as a mental map started forming in her head, imaginary pins popping up at the parks mentioned throughout the posts.

Willow. Betsy Ross. Modjeska. Walnut Grove.

The pattern gave her just enough to piece together what the routine and rotation pattern seemed to be. And if she was correct, then she would find him at Willow Park this fine Tuesday afternoon.

Evangeline stopped by one of her storage units before heading off to the park, gearing up with leather gloves and pulling her hair back into a slick bun. Next, a balaclava, rash-guard, and leggings made of a special type of fabric that would essentially create a cloaking effect if caught by the stray surveillance camera.

That way, if her hand would be forced to neutralize this threat in a public setting, any camera that might be trained their way wouldn't even register that there was another person with the predatory man. It would simply seem as if he struggled within his own body and dropped dead.

She chose to pack light for this one, declaring the man not much of a physical threat, at least against her. It seemed he didn't much care if a grown woman could fight back, considering that he was targeting a demographic much more helpless. Much more incapable of resisting the moment he chose to escalate his actions.

A pocket knife, brass knuckles, and a two-bullet .22 caliber double derringer just in case. That was all she needed. Hopefully.

It didn't take long for Evangeline to find the man, the triumph she felt for pinning down his routine short-lived the moment she realized that greywolf was also correct. If the unsubtle motions he was making with his arm was any indication.

The fucker really did have a hole in that pocket.

On the first pass through she saw that the phone in his other hand was recording a video. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach that those videos were probably being passed around in shady group chats. These days it didn't even need to be done within the dark corners of her neck of the woods, there were forums on the surface web. Disgusting deplorable excuses for men passing around Mega links and speaking in a code that was so easy to decipher it would have been laughable.

Had it not been for the degenerate nature of the messages.

The second pass through was even more stomach churning than the first. He shuddered where he stood before shaking his leg in what he probably believed was a casual manner. And then he took his hand out of his pocket and shook it at the road, flicking away a thick substance that she didn't need a mass spectrometer to know what it had been made of. Or where it came from.

"Disgusting," she hissed, keeping an inconspicuous distance as she followed him to what seemed like a community of halfway houses. She didn't waste any time and ran the man's face through her facial recognition software, pulling up his record that all but had bile rising up to her throat.

Sexual assault of a minor between the age of 0 and 12. He was already an RSO out on parole and still nobody kept a close enough eye on him. And that level of neglect empowered him to do it again.

Evangeline placed an anonymous tip for his parole officer to find, as well as cloned and forwarded all the footage she'd found when infiltrating the man's cloud storage to the FBI. She had high hopes that at least they would act on that information, and investigate not just the park predator, but also the names of the other RSOs that she'd found within the phone's contact book.

All that was left to do now was deal with the man himself.

The man walked into the labyrinth that was the back alleys of the compound, and Evangeline needed to pull up a live satellite image of the area to guide her through the winding side streets. Luckily she caught up with him before they got too deep into what she could only imagine was the seedy underbelly of the area. The type of place even well-funded and highly-organized raids were wary of touching with a hundred-foot pole.

"I'm pretty sure you violated your parole with what you just did," she told him, making him stop in his tracks.

"Judge only said I wasn't allowed in the public parks, lady. Didn't say shit about the perimeter."

God I hate smart asses, she thought to herself. She slipped the brass knuckles on, readying herself in case the sick fuck decided to attack. "I don't think the judge is gonna agree with that ass backward logic, buddy."

"I'm not going back to jail," he shuddered. "You can make me you little bitch. You're out here worrying about me and you're gonna try sending me back to a place with the actual monsters? You know what they did to my food in there?"

"Oh I can imagine," she told him with a derisive sneer. "They're not monsters until you give them a reason to be. And guys like you give them plenty of reasons to turn into your own personal Boogeyman. You're not gonna get a lick of empathy from me."

"I know," he said, taking a step toward her. "But you sure as shit won't be sending me back there."

"We'll see about that," she mumbled, readying her stance and executing a well-timed punch to his throat, making sure that one of the hard curves of her weapon hit him squarely in the Adam's apple. As he clutched at this neck, she took his free hand and popped the shoulder from its socket before taking out the pocket knife and slashing his calves, immobilizing him.

He dropped to the ground like a bag of wet sand, taking in heaving breaths as he called out to her. "Wait! Just kill me! Don't let me go back there!"

Evangeline didn't turn back, dismissing the man as she made her way out of the back alleys. "Death is a mercy you don't deserve." When she heard the sound of multiple footsteps approaching, she hid in the shadows waiting for the officers to pass her, a smirk pulling at the side of her mouth as the man kept shouting for mercy and for them to just shoot him and have it be done with.

Once she made her way back to her car she placed a call to greywolf's satellite phone. "It's done," she told him. "Anything come in for me while I was gone?"

"Not our purview but there's a…pop star? And she's poking around the gates like a baby giraffe learning how to walk fifty yards away from a den of lions."

He sent her the information, recognition immediately dawning on her when she saw the location pinging off from New York. "Oh, her. I like her music," she mused out loud, and then promptly cringing when a few moments later she'd realized that said pop star had absolutely no measures in place that even attempted masking her IP. "God this is some shoddy work, she's gonna get someone breaking in through her bedroom window if she keeps this up. I'll cover her tracks, make sure nobody's tailing her activity."

While she put in the effort to remotely mask any location metadata that was coming from the morbidly curious artist's exploration of the gateway wiki, greywolf posed a question for her. "Do you ever think about how this all ends?"

"Like what? Retirement?"

"Something like that…" he trailed off. "G, I can't help but wonder what it's like to start a family with someone. I have a sister, and she's settled down, pregnant with her first kid, and it's got me wanting the same thing but--"

"Doing what we do, how can we in good conscience bring another life into this world knowing exactly what kind of evil is lurking in plain sight?" Evangeline finished for him. "I'm never gonna outrun that new moniker, am I?"

"Not a chance," he answered her, his end letting out a distorted laugh. "But yes, exactly that. I can't help but think of what it would take for me to…I don't know, give it all up?"

"And you wanna know if I've ever thought about it?" A beat pass without him saying anything, prompting her to continue. "The answer is yes, I know exactly what would push me to walk away from all this. If I ever meet someone that I want to start a life with, it would scare the loving fuck out of me that I might slip up and somehow everything I've done blows back at him. At my family. In part, that's why I've sworn off relationships altogether."

The other part, of course, being the absolute devastation she'd faced a few years back with a textbook toxic excuse of a man. The farther away she got from the relationship, the more she realized that what they'd had wasn't anything even remotely close to love. She wanted companionship, simple as that.

And now she'd come to the conclusion that companionship didn't necessarily need to involve moving into the same apartment. Or a shallow facade of a commitment that was so easily broken with a few sexy selfies on a messaging app.

"So things didn't work out with hot freaky actor guy?" greywolf quipped at her.

"What the--I never even got with hot freaky actor guy, Grey. I haven't seen him since that day I had you clean out my ex's apartment."

"But I bet you a full stack in Coin that you still have his handkerchief."

"Firstly, I'm not a betting woman. You know this. Secondly, shut up," she laughed in her car, finally breathing a sigh of relief when she saw that the musician's exploration of the wiki had come to an end. A quick tail of the celebrity's IP address showed Evangeline that she was ordering an absurd amount of food that could only be explained by hosting a party. "And thirdly, as far as 'all of this ending' for me? Not to be the dark gloom and doom type, but…it's more likely that this ends with my untimely demise rather than this ends with me settling down with someone and having babies."

A/N: Who's gonna tell her--Wait no I can't laugh yet I gotta hold it in 🥴

Two more episodes on here until I get to reveal who it is. But to those who already know, we can giggle about it in the DMs

'the evangeline chronicles' taglist: @jaidenhawke @holdmytesseract

[long-thread-incoming]

🧵Thread, she/her, demiromantic pan, purpleblooded clown BUT NOT UNAWARE OF MY HIGHBLOOD PRIVILEGE, 10 sweeps, textiles fanatic, not a freak 🤮

🧵Please let me know if I follow/interact/like posts from problematic people!!!

🧵DNI: basic DNI, castists, bigots, ablists, stalkers, criminals, peaked in schoolfeeding, monogamists, problematic people, fandom people (CREEPS), weirdos, freaks, NSFW (including g0r3/v10l3nc3/culling [/Alternian]), agere, sh!pp3rs (go to therapy), coldbloods who don't address their coldblood privilege, tepidbloods who don't address their coldblood privilege, anti-rebels, anti-mutants, anti-mutations (INCLUDING MUTANTS WITH INTERNALIZED MUTINISM), gamers (toxic), streamers (parasocial), anyone with a callout doc on them (IDC IF YOU SAY IT WAS FAKE IT'S STILL SUS), KPop fans, JPop fans, APop fans, FPop fans, any other kind of pop fans, Taylor Swifte fans, Ariana Grande fans, Johjoh Seewaa fans, roblox players (VERY PROBLEMATIC), Project Diva fans, Strawberry redrom shippers (double DNI and also GROSS they're moirails in my HC), stans of any rapper, fish in pfp blogs (unless it's you then you're on thin ice), MeTuber stans (GO TO THERAPY), kin from: DDR, DR, PD, PDRD, HYU, SU, WK, SK, OWPJiL, YLiS, MKDM, HP, EG, EG:RV (not the manga, thin ice if Jyunyn), speak French, questions DNIs, sends anon hate to people who don't deserve it, cultural appropriater, posts aspec discourse, uses "c0rps3" as a word for anything other than murd3r related terms, uses dark web, uses any nonstandard social media, plays any type of games uncritically (INCLUDING BOARD AND PLAYGROUND GAMES), has used Huuluu, supports c0ff3 companies, has a pet reptile, LIKES ANY ANIME NON-CRITICALLY, under 8 sweeps, over 12 sweeps, use AQ, IQ, QH, or any other quirk-assisting software WITHOUT A DISORDER (basically stealing resources), self-shippers, emo/scene/scenemo/punk/etc, shop at H*ll!5t3r (EVEN CRITICALLY), believe "cancel culture" exists AND is bad, shop online, have used a l1brary, support public transport, read comic books, listen to music UNCRITICALLY, support and/or interact with BFRJ, GFRJ, AFRJ, TARJ, TFRJ, RTFRJ, etc., etc., all other basic DNI criteria

🧵I like sewing and social justice! Talk tag is `thread weaves`!