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[sampleaudiodeals]

Get DEALS Here: http://bit.ly/audioplugins

[krazetv]

Violin Intimate (60% Off) by Inlet Audio | WALKTHROUGH & PLAYTHROUGH

[hellyeahsickaf]

I found an extremely dope disability survival guide for those who are homebound, bedbound, in need of disability accommodations, or would otherwise like resources for how to manage your life as a disabled person. (Link is safe)

It has some great articles and resources and while written by people with ME/CFS, it keeps all disabilities in mind. A lot of it is specific to the USA but even if you're from somewhere else, there are many guides that can still help you. Some really good ones are:

How to live a great disabled life- A guide full of resources to make your life easier and probably the best place to start (including links to some of the below resources). Everything from applying for good quality affordable housing to getting free transportation, affordable medication, how to get enough food stamps, how to get a free phone that doesn't suck, how to find housemates and caregivers, how to be homebound, support groups and Facebook pages (including for specific illnesses), how to help with social change from home, and so many more.

Turning a "no" into a "yes"- A guide on what to say when denied for disability aid/accommodations of many types, particularly over the phone. "Never take no for an answer over the phone. If you have not been turned down in writing, you have not been turned down. Period."

How to be poor in America- A very expansive and helpful guide including things from a directory to find your nearest food bank to resources for getting free home modifications, how to get cheap or free eye and dental care, extremely cheap internet, and financial assistance with vet bills

How to be homebound- This is pretty helpful even if you're not homebound. It includes guides on how to save spoons, getting free and low cost transportation, disability resources in your area, home meals, how to have fun/keep busy while in bed, and a severe bedbound activity master list which includes a link to an audio version of the list on Soundcloud

Master List of Disability Accommodation Letters For Housing- Guides on how to request accommodations and housing as well as your rights, laws, and prewritten sample letters to help you get whatever you need. Includes information on how to request additional bedrooms, stop evictions, request meetings via phone, mail, and email if you can't in person, what you can do if a request is denied, and many other helpful guides

Special Laws to Help Domestic Violence Survivors (Vouchers & Low Income Housing)- Protections, laws, and housing rights for survivors of DV (any gender), and how to get support and protection under the VAWA laws to help you and/or loved ones receive housing and assistance

Dealing With Debt & Disability- Information to assist with debt including student loans, medical debt, how to deal with debt collectors as well as an article with a step by step guide that helped the author cut her overwhelming medical bills by 80%!

There are so many more articles, guides, and tools here that have helped a lot of people. And there are a lot of rights, resources, and protections that people don't know they have and guides that can help you manage your life as a disabled person regardless of income, energy levels, and other factors.

Please boost!

[gallifreyanhotfive]

What Stories Are About the Academy Era? A Guide

@zombies-sold-cheap

Context:

Stories set in the Academy Era/Otherwise Early Days are sparse to say the least (even Divided Loyalties only shows you the Academy through a dream), but you can actually piece together a pretty decent chunk of the Doctor’s early life (while it still remaining very mysterious) using the Expanded Universe. I've done a lot of infodumping in my time, so I'll do my best here by typing up my personal reference guide to this era. Anyway:

Theta Sigma and his friends would attempt to climb Mount Cadon. At the peak, you could apparently see all of time, but they never got to the top because of hallucinogenic snow. While attempting such a climb, Vansell broke his leg, and Theta Sigma fixed it with a time bubble he made from a sonic wrench and some twine. (Audio: Devil in the Mist)

Theta Sigma and Koschei traveled into the past of Gallifrey in search of Valdemar. Theta was horrified by the power that Valdemar represented, but Koschei was intrigued. (Novel: Tomb of Valdemar)

Theta Sigma time-locked his dorm room so thoroughly that even centuries after he graduated they hadn't managed to undo it. (Audio: Time in Office)

Theta Sigma also once used the food machine to get mercury for his own science projects and in doing so almost caused his professor to regenerate. (Audio: Time in Office)

At some point, Theta Sigma and Koschei traveled to the planet Machasma and used sonic agitation to get them out of trouble. (Audio: Darkness and Light)

Theta Sigma, Koschei, and three others were part of a band called the Gallifrey Academy Hot Five (see: my username). Theta Sigma played the perigosto sticks, and Koschei played the drums. (Novel: Deadly Reunion)

Millennia came from a wealthy family and was gifted in temporal engineering. She and Rallon had a "thing" for each other (wink wink) (Novel: Divided Loyalties)

Theta Sigma once made High Tutor Albrecht regenerate in an incident involving a perigosto stick and a temporal feedback loop. He was reprimanded by Borusa for this. (Novel: The Time Lord Letters)

Koschei was obsessed with the Necronomicon. (Short story: The Nameless City)

Runcible was the hall monitor at the Academy and regularly got into conflicts with the Deca because it was his job to make sure students were in bed after dark. They have mutual hatred of each other. (Novel: Divided Loyalties)

Indeed, the Master would one day stab him in the back and kill him. (Television: The Deadly Assassin)

Drax built a skimmer and would sometimes use it to take Jelpax home because they lived close to each other. (Novel: Divided Loyalties)

Theta Sigma attended Ushas's 94th birthday party. (Novel: The Death of Art)

Theta Sigma engineered a dangerous bacteria that rendered all multicellular life that came in contact with it comatose. This was a huge scandal on Gallifrey, and the Academy thoroughly hushed it up and had all samples destroyed. However, Ushas kept a sample and would one day use it in a scheme as the Rani. (Audio: Planet of the Rani)

Koschei taught Theta Sigma hypnosis. He'd also hypnotize others a lot because he thought it was amusing. (Novel: The Dark Path)

Mortimus once asked Ushas out but was so thoroughly rejected that he thought she wasn't interested in dating at all. Unbeknownst to him, Ushas later had a relationship with Magnus. (Novel: Divided Loyalties)

Theta Sigma and Koschei were bullied by Torvic. Theta was eventually forced to kill Torvic to save Koschei's life, but when Death came to offer Theta to be their disciple, he had Koschei take his place. He forgot about this deal and lived for centuries under the impression that their places had been swapped and that it had been Koschei to kill Torvic. (Audio: Master)

Despite this, he apparently drew pictures of Torvic in his diary. (Short story: The Three Paths)

Theta Sigma was also bullied by Anzor at the Academy. Anzor would use a galvanizer to make Theta do his navigational homework. He also turned another student named Cheevah into a crystal and threw him off a bell tower. (Audio/Novel: Mission to Magnus)

Koschei was in charge of organizing the end of term parties, but the Eighth Doctor recalled that they weren’t good. (Comic: The Glorious Dead)

Theta Sigma and Koschei would sneak out of the Capitol and go drinking with the Shobogans. (Novel: The Eight Doctors)

Theta Sigma was given an avatroid named Badger as a young child to act as his friend, protector, and tutor. He apparently gives bone crushing hugs. (Novel: Lungbarrow)

Theta Sigma did not have a good relationship with most of the House of Lungbarrow. Indeed, his first memory is of Satthralope smacking him so hard he could not walk afterwards. (Audio/Novel: Cold Fusion)

Satthralope would also let the drudges attack Theta if he refused to come to dinner. Drudges are basically servants of the Houses, about two and a half meters tall, and strong enough to hold a fully grown Time Lord in one arm. (Novel: Lungbarrow)

One time, those at the House of Lungbarrow wanted Theta Sigma to return home for Otherstide and even sent Badger to collect him. Theta refused, so they contacted his professor Delox, who proceeded to expel him from her classroom after chastising him on his family in front of the entire class. After this, Theta appeared to exhibit many of the signs I associate with a nervous breakdown. Distressed, Theta came up with an idea that would prove he wasn't what they all said he was - he would go after the Toymaker. (Novel: Divided Loyalties)

Millennia and Rallon were the only two to join him on this trip, the rest of the Deca thinking them mad. They stole a Type 18 TARDIS, and after making it to the Toyroom, Rallon's body was basically immediately taken over by the Toymaker. The Toymaker had Theta play a game of Capture the Flag. He turned Millennia into one of his dolls, and Theta returned to Gallifrey, the only survivor. (Novel: Divided Loyalties)

Because of these events, Theta was put on trial. The only two to attend this trial to support Theta were Jelpax and Magnus. Vansell showed up but only to reveal that he had been working with the CIA, having been tasked with watching Theta. Koschei and Ushas had been off working on a research project at the time. (Novel: Divided Loyalties)

While Theta, Rallon, and Millennia were gone, Mortimus ran away from Gallifrey, which made many think he had gone with them, and eventually also ended up in the Toyroom. (Novel: Divided Loyalties) Other accounts suggest Mortimus left Gallifrey later, so perhaps he returned after this trip.

Theta Sigma was on the same zero-grav hyperball team as Padrac, who he called "Paddy." (Audio: The Eleven)

Theta and Koschei's "kindergarten spat" apparently almost destroyed the planet. During this time, Theta used to call Koschei "Scabby Knees." (Audio: Blood of the Time Lords)

Theta Sigma had no friends in his very early life. Instead of creating imaginary friends, he had an imaginary enemy called Mandrake. Mandrake was actually a dead lizard he pinned to an engine part that Theta would defeat using a stick. (Audio: The Widow's Assassin)

There was a Hermit who lived behind the House of Lungbarrow on the mountain. Theta Sigma once went to him, depressed and full of despair, and the Hermit showed him hope in yellow flowers. (Television: The Time Monster)

Shimmerlings live in the time vortex, but after a storm, they were stranded on Gallifrey and dying. A very young Theta Sigma saw the Hermit throwing them into the Untempered Schism to save them. Theta asked him what was the point because he wouldn't be able to save them all before they died, and the Hermit taught him the value in saving who he could, despite not being able to save everyone. (Audio: Crossed Lines)

Theta Sigma was the Time Tot Hide And Seek Champion for 42 years in a row, which apparently drove Ushas nuts. (Comic: Weapons of Past Destruction)

When Maris - a retired CIA agent - was hired to find out where Theta Sigma, now probably the Doctor, had run off to in the TARDIS, Ushas and Koschei kidnapped her, interrogated her in an attempt to find where the Doctor had gone, and eventually almost killed her when she knew nothing (she was extracted from the situation before she could be murdered). (Short story: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)

After graduating, Magnus rose quickly in Time Lord society, which Borusa felt threatened by. Borusa had the CIA manufacture evidence implicating Magnus in treason, leading to him fleeing Gallifrey and becoming a renegade. (Novel: Timewyrm: Exodus)

Koschei befriended a professor at the Academy named Salyavin because he wanted access to the restricted libraries. He wanted to find The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey, an act which was illegal. Salyavin took the blame for this, was sent to Shada, and stole the book (since he was condemned anyway, he might as well). (Short story: The Legacy of Gallifrey)

Theta Sigma and Ruath, another student at the Academy who was obsessed with vampires, once electrified Borusa's perigosto stick. (Novel: Goth Opera)

After the Academy, Koschei attended a ritual with Theta Sigma and Susan, then likely called Arkytior, in Arcadia. Here, he gave her a toy, which was actually a communication node that he planned to use to find Theta and her if they ever left Gallifrey. (Audio: The Toy)

According to one account, Koschei led students at the Academy in a coup against Lord President Pundat the Third and tried to convince Theta Sigma to join. Pundat died of stress soon after the revolt and was replaced with Chancellor Slann. There was a second coup, but they were overheard by the authorities trying to yet again convince Theta to help. After each coup, there were bloody reprisals against the students, but Theta, who was not involved, had his memory wiped. Koschei assassinated Slann, but the students weren't ready for another go. He ended up fleeing Gallifrey. (Short story: Birth of a Renegade) There are, however, many other accounts of him fleeing Gallifrey.

Koschei and a "friend" were locked in a bathroom of a bar in the Tower by the Time Lords after a prank gone wrong. The two fought, and the friend left Koschei behind in the Tower, where he remained locked in for centuries. (Short story: Rebel Rebel)

Theta called Vansell "Nosebung" and continued to do so for centuries. (Audio: Neverland)

Theta Sigma came in fourth place in the Time Lord Academy Sprint Championship. (Comic: Space in Dimension Relative in Time)

Theta Sigma fed a snapping wart fowl to Valyes's summer project, and Valyes still holds a grudge over this. (Audio: The Next Life)

Flubbles are koala-like animals with six legs. Theta Sigma used to keep one under his bed at the Academy as an illegal pet. He almost got caught when she went into heat and started performing her mating call. (Novel: Island of Death)

Theta Sigma used to chase tafelshrews - a species almost like rodents - through the snow of Mount Cadon. (Short story: The Three Paths)

By some accounts, Theta Sigma was loomed, and by some, he had parents. In a version where he had parents, his father and Mr. Saldaamir were once working in the House and were therefore ignoring Theta. Because of this, Theta, at this point a small child, caught a cobblemouse and set it loose in the House, interrupting their plans. (Novel: Unnatural History)

A cousin of Theta's - Glospin - used to bully him quite a lot. He once claimed to find evidence in the Loom pointing to the fact that Theta did not belong in the House of Lungbarrow. If this was believed, Theta Sigma would have been executed. This caused the two to have a physical altercation. (Novel: Lungbarrow)

During this fight, Glospin got a genetic sample from Theta, allowing him to force a regeneration into a Theta lookalike. Then, Glospin murdered Quences, the Kithriarch of the House of Lungbarrow (basically the head of the family), before regenerating again, thus framing Theta for the murder. This was because Glospin wanted to become the next Kithriarch instead of Theta, but because of this, the House of Lungbarrow buried themself (the Houses are sentient, did I mention that?) for centuries. (Novel: Lungbarrow)

Despite doting on Theta (and Theta generally being his favorite), Quences had been convinced by Satthralope to disown him when he announced he didn't want to be a Lord Cardinal. (Novel: Lungbarrow)

Some of Theta's cousins include Quences, Satthralope, Glospin, Innocet, Arkhew, Owis, Salpash, Luton, Rynde, Jobiska, Maljamin, Farg, Celesia, Chovor, DeRoosifa, and Almund. (Novel: Lungbarrow)

Grandfather Paradox was also of the House of Lungbarrow from the same generation as Theta, but of course, he never actually existed. (Novel: Christmas on a Rational Planet)

Pandad VII issued a Burn Edict on Braxiatel, but Braxiatel killed his would be assassin. As punishment, Braxiatel was forced to take up the mantle of Lord Burner for some time, the personal assassin for Lord President Pandad VII. He was ordered to erase an old man and his granddaughter (wink wink) who were fleeing Gallifrey from history but refused to do so and let them go free. That very same day, Pandad died when a power relay that was in his office overloaded, but an inquiry led by Braxiatel found that this was an accident. Just an accident. Nothing shady going on here. (Audio: Disassembled)

Magnus tried to drain the Artron energy from a giant sphere from the time vortex. Theta Sigma opposed him and used the gun of a member of the Chancellery Guard to stop him from draining the energy because he had learned that the energy was alive. This set the energy free. Magnus never forgave him for this, and their friendship ended. (Comic: Flashback)

Theta Sigma had a great aunt lived in a house high in the mountains. She would sing him lullabies. The Eighth Doctor said she was "terrible." (Audio: Together in Eclectic Dreams)

Anyhow, I'm spent, so I'll post this now. Might add on some more later lmaoooo

Don't forget to check out the next part in the reblogs!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’t

TONIGHT (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel (13hPT) and a keynote (18hPT) at the LOCUS AWARDS.

Spotify's relationship to artists can be kind of confusing. On the one hand, they pay a laughably low per-stream rate, as in homeopathic residues of a penny. On the other hand, the Big Three labels get a fortune from Spotify. And on the other other hand, it makes sense that rate for a stream heard by one person should be less than the rate for a song broadcast to thousands or millions of listeners.

But the whole thing makes sense once you understand the corporate history of Spotify. There's a whole chapter about this in Rebecca Giblin's and my 2022 book, Chokepoint Capitalism; we even made the audio for it a "Spotify exclusive" (it's the only part of the audiobook you can hear on Spotify, natch):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Unlike online music predecessors like Napster, Spotify sought licenses from the labels for the music it made available. This gave those labels a lot of power over Spotify, but not all the labels, just three of them. Universal, Warner and Sony, the Big Three, control more than 70% of all music recordings, and more than 60% of all music compositions. These three companies are remarkably inbred. Their execs routine hop from one to the other, and they regularly cross-license samples and other rights to each other.

The Big Three told Spotify that the price of licensing their catalogs would be high. First of all, Spotify had to give significant ownership stakes to all three labels. This put the labels in an unresolvable conflict of interest: as owners of Spotify, it was in their interests for licensing payments for music to be as low as possible. But as labels representing creative workers – musicians – it was in their interests for these payments to be as high as possible.

As it turns out, it wasn't hard to resolve that conflict after all. You see, the money the Big Three got in the form of dividends, stock sales, etc was theirs to spend as they saw fit. They could share some, all, or none of it with musicians. Big the Big Three's contracts with musicians gave those workers a guaranteed share of Spotify's licensing payments.

Accordingly, the Big Three demanded those rock-bottom per-stream rates that Spotify is notorious for. Yeah, it's true that a streaming per-listener payment should be lower than a radio per-play payment (which reaches thousands or millions of listeners), but even accounting for that, the math doesn't add up. Multiply the per-listener stream rate by the number of listeners for, say, a typical satellite radio cast, and Spotify is clearly getting a massive discount relative to other services that didn't make the Big Three into co-owners when they were kicking off.

But there's still something awry: the Big Three take in gigantic fortunes from Spotify in licensing payments. How can the per-stream rate be so low but the licensing payments be so large? And why are artists seeing so little?

Again, it's not hard to understand once you see the structure of Spotify's deal with the Big Three. The Big Three are each guaranteed a monthly minimum payment, irrespective of the number of Spotify streams from their catalog that month. So Sony might be guaranteed, say, $30m a month from Spotify, but the ultra-low per-stream rate Sony insisted on means that all the Sony streams in a typical month add up to $10m. That means that Sony still gets $30m from Spotify, but only $10m is "attributable" to a specific recording artist who can make a claim on it. The rest of the money is Sony's to play with: they can spread it around all their artists, some of their artists, or none of their artists. They can spend it on "artist development" (which might mean sending top execs on luxury junkets to big music festivals). It's theirs. The lower the per-stream rate is, the more of that minimum monthly payment is unattributable, meaning that Sony can line its pockets with it.

But these monthly minimums are just part of the goodies that the Big Three negotiated for themselves when they were designing Spotify. They also get free promo, advertising, and inclusion on Spotify's top playlists. Best (worst!) of all, the Big Three have "most favored nation" status, which means that every other label – the indies that rep the 30% of music not controlled by the Big Three – have to eat shit and take the ultra-low per-stream rate. Only those indies don't get billions in stock, they don't get monthly minimum guarantees, and they have to pay for promo, advertising, and inclusion on hot playlists.

When you understand the business mechanics of Spotify, all the contradictions resolve themselves. It is simultaneously true that Spotify pays a very low per-stream rate, that it pays the Big Three labels gigantic sums every month, and that artists are grotesquely underpaid by this system.

There are many lessons to take from this little scam, but for me, the top takeaway here is that artists are the class enemies of both Big Tech and Big Content. The Napster Wars demanded that artists ally themselves with either the tech sector or the entertainment center, nominating one or the other to be their champion.

But for a creative worker, it doesn't matter who makes a meal out of you, tech or content – all that matters is that you're being devoured.

This brings me to the debate over training AI and copyright. A lot of creative workers are justifiably angry and afraid that the AI companies want to destroy creative jobs. The CTO of Openai literally just said that onstage: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place":

https://bgr.com/tech/openai-cto-thinks-ai-will-kill-some-jobs-that-shouldnt-have-existed-in-the-first-place/

Many of these workers are accordingly cheering on the entertainment industry's lawsuits over AI training. In these lawsuits, companies like the New York Times and Getty Images claim that the steps associated with training an AI model infringe copyright. This isn't a great copyright theory based on current copyright precedents, and if the suits succeed, they'll narrow fair use in ways that will impact all kinds of socially beneficial activities, like scraping the web to make the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

But you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, right? For some creative workers, legal uncertainty for computational linguists, search engines, and archiving projects are a small price to pay if it means keeping AI from destroying their livelihoods.

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.

This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

This is true across the board. The Big Five publishers categorically refuse to include contractual language -romising not to train an LLM with the books they acquire from writers. The game studios require all their voice actors to start every recording session with an on-tape assignment of the training rights to the session:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

And now, with total predictability, Universal – the largest music company in the world – has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/umg-startsai-voice-clone-partnership-with-soundlabs-1235041808/

This comes hot on the heels of a massive blow-up between Universal and Tiktok, in which Universal professed its outrage that Tiktok was going to train voice-clones with the music Universal licensed to it. In other words: Universal's copyright claims over AI training cash out to this: "If anyone is going to profit from immiserating musicians, it's going to be us, not Tiktok."

I understand why Universal would like this idea. I just don't understand why any musician would root for Universal to defeat Tiktok, or Getty Images to trounce Stable Diffusion. Do you really think that Getty Images likes paying photographers and wants to give them a single penny more than they absolutely have to?

As we learned from George Orwell's avant-garde animated agricultural documentary Animal Farm, the problem isn't who holds the whip, the problem is the whip itself:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Entertainment execs and tech execs alike are obsessed with AI because they view the future of "content" as fundamentally passive. Here's Ryan Broderick putting it better than I ever could:

At a certain audience size, you just assume those people are locked in and will consume anything you throw at them. Then it just becomes a game of lowering your production costs and increasing your prices to increase your margins. This is why executives love AI and why the average American can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s anymore.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ceo-passive-content-obsession

Here's a rule of thumb for tech policy prescriptions. Any time you find yourself, as a worker, rooting for the same policy as your boss, you should check and make sure you're on the right side of history. The fact that creative bosses are so obsessed with making copyright cover more kinds of works, restrict more activities, lasting longer and generating higher damages should make creative workers look askance at these proposals.

After 40 years of expanded copyright, we have a creative industry that's larger and more profitable than ever, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has been in steady decline over that entire period. Every year, the share of creative income that creative workers can lay claim to declines, both proportionally and in real terms.

As with the mystery of Spotify's payments, this isn't a mystery at all. You just need to understand that when creators are stuck bargaining with a tiny, powerful cartel of movie, TV, music, publishing, streaming, games or app companies, it doesn't matter how much copyright they have to bargain with. Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch-money. There's no amount of money that will satisfy the bullies and leave enough left over for the kid to buy lunch. They just take everything.

Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are workers at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That's how we lose.

On the other hand, if we address the problems of AI and labor as workers, and insist on labor rights – like the Writers Guild did when it struck last summer – then we ally ourselves with every other worker whose wages and working conditions are being attacked with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.

The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that AI-generated works don't qualify for copyrights, meaning everything AI generated can be freely copied and distributed and the companies that make them can't stop them. This is fantastic news, because the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is not being able to stop other people from copying the things we make for them. We should be shouting this from the rooftops, not demanding more copyright for AI.

Here's a thing: FTC chair Lina Khan recently told an audience that she was thinking of using her Section 5 powers (to regulate "unfair and deceptive" conduct) to go after AI training:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

Khan has already used these Section 5 powers to secure labor rights, for example, by banning noncompetes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Creative workers should be banding together with other labor advocates to propose ways for the FTC to prevent all AI-based labor exploitation, like the "reverse-centaur" arrangement in which a human serves as an AI's body, working at breakneck pace until they are psychologically and physically ruined:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

As workers standing with other workers, we can demand the things that help us, even (especially) when that means less for our bosses. On the other hand, if we confine ourselves to backing our bosses' plays, we only stand to gain whatever crumbs they choose to drop at their feet for us.

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/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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

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

[bobacupcake]

Can you do one about the Sea of Thieves water?

OK

so . there was a biiig long talk about this at siggraph one year!! you can watch that here if you'd like . in the time between me getting this ask and me fully recreating the water, acerola also released a great video about it . the biiig underlying thing they do and the reason why it looks so good is they are making a Really Detailed Ocean Mesh in realtime using something called an FFT (fast fourier transform) to simulate hundreds of thousands of waves, based on a paper by TESSENDORF

WHAT IS AN FFT - we'll get to that. first we have to talk about the DFT - the discreet fourier transform. let's say you have a SOUND. it is a c chord - a C, an E, and a G, being played at the same time. all sounds are waves!!! so when you play multiple sounds at the same time, those waves combine!!! like here: the top is all 3 notes playing together, so they form the waveform at the bottom!!

now if someone handed you the bottom wave, could you figure out each individual note that was being played? how about if someone handed you a wave of One Hundred Notes. you would think it would be very hard. and well, it would be, if not for the Discreet Fourier Transform.

essentially, there is a way to take a bunch of points on a waveform comprised of a bunch of different waves, add them all together, do some messed up stuff with imaginary numbers, that will spit back out at you what individual waves are present. i made a little test program at the start of all this: the left are the waves i am putting into my Big Waveform, the top right is what that ends up looking like, and all the little rainbow points on it are being sampled to spit out the graph at the bottom right: it shows which frequency bands the DFT is finding (here it is animated)

this has enormous use cases in anything that deals with audio and image processing, and also,

THE OCEAN

tessendorf is basically like, hey, People Who Are Good At The Ocean say that a buuuunch of sine waves do a pretty good job of approximating what it looks like. and by a bunch they mean like, hundreds of thousands to millions. oh no.... if only there was a way we could easily deal with millions of sine waves..........

well GREAT news. not only can you do the DFT in one direction, but you can also do it in REVERSE. if you were to be given the frequency graph of a noise for example, you could use an INVERSE DFT to calculate what the combined wave graph looks like at any given time. so if you were to have say, the frequency graph of an oceaaaan, for example, you could calculate what the Ocean wave looks like at any given time. and lucky for us, it works in two dimensions. and thats the foundation of the simulation !!!!!

BUT WAIT

as incredible as the DFT is, it doesn't scale very well. the more times you have to do it, the slower it gets, exponentially, and we are working with potentially millions of sine waves here

THE FAST FOURIER TRANSFORM here we are . the fast fourier transform is a way of doing the discreet fourier transform, except, well, fast. i am Not going to explain the intricacies of it because its very complex, but if you want to learn more there are a ton of good 30 minute long videos on youtube about it . but essentially, due to the nature of sine waves repeating, you can borrow values as you go, and make the calculation Much faster (from exponential growth to logarithmic growth which is much much slower, and scales very well at higher numbers). it's, complicated, but the important part is it's so much faster and the diagram kind of looks like the shadow the hedgehog story plot

so if we use the inverse FFT on a graph of a rough estimate of what frequency of waves in the ocean (called a spectrum, basically tells us things like how many small waves, how many big waves, how different waves follow the wind direction. sea of thieves uses one called the phillips spectrum but there are better ones out there!!) now we have our waves !!!!!!! we can also use another inverse FFT to get the normals of the waves, and horizontal displacement of the waves (sharpening peaks and broadening valleys) through some derivatives . yayy calculus

OK MATH IS OVER. WE HAVE OUR WAVES!!! they are solid pink and look like pepto bismol. WHAT NOW

i cheated a bit here they look better than not being shaded because i am using the normals to reflect a CUBEMAP to make it look shiny. i think sea of thieves does this too but they didnt mention it in their talk. they did mention a FEW THINGS THEY DID THOUGH

FIRST OFF - SUBSURFACE SCATTERING. this is where the sun pokes through since water is translucent. SSS IS REALLY EXPENSIVE !!!!!! so they just faked it. do you remember the wave sharpening displacement i mentioned earlier? they just take the value where the waves are being sharpened and this will pretty naturally show off the areas that should have subsurface scattering (the sides of waves). they make it shine through any time you are looking towards the sun. they also add a bit of specular ! sss here is that nice blue color, and specular is the shiny bits coming off the sun. the rest of the lighting is the cubemap i mentioned earlier, i dont know if thats what they use but it looks nice !!!!!

then the other big thing that they do is the FOAM !! sorry i lied. there's more math. last one. you remember the wave sharpening displacement i Just mentioned. well they used that to find something called the JACOBIAN and well im not even going to begin to try and explain what it means but functionally what it does, is when the jacobian is NEGATIVE it means waves are clipping into eachother. and that means we should draw some foam!!! we can also blur and fade out the foam texture over time and continuously write to it to give it some movement, and bias this value a bit to make more or less foam. they do both of these!!!

YAYYYYY !! OK !! THAT'S SEA OF THIEVES WATER!!!!! THANKS FOR WAITING ALL THIS TIME. you can see my journey here if you would like to i have tagged it all oceanquest2023

thank you everyone for joining me :) i had fun

[toskarin]

»GET://NOISE« WORKING WITH RI47 HEAVY INDUSTRIES FOR PROFIT AND UNPROFIT

so, I do feel like I should clarify my actual policy on using my tracks in projects. I do this every now and again, but to be fair, circumstances change pretty often

these aren't blanket licences or anything because honestly a few of these are like... complicated enough that it's literally easier to just talk to someone after the conditions are met and give them permission in writing. in nearly every single case, the first step is "contact me directly and we'll make things work"

if you're working on a project to raise money for Palestinian aid, I am especially interested in working with you. of course, I will be checking to make sure the money is actually going to help the people it's supposed to, as I'm unfortunately aware of how many people are trying to take advantage of these tragedies for their own benefit

a case-by-case reference with slightly more detail is included below

-

if you want to download Ri47 music to listen to but can't afford it... legally, I care that you pirate my music. personally, never tell me about it. I don't want to see that, I'm not signed to a label that seeks out uses of my music, and I understand that the international economy is in shambles. ideologically, I am pro-piracy. don't do anything that will legally force me to care (using my work in a commercial project without permission, for example) and we'll both keep on living our lives as we were

if you want to remix a Ri47 track and need stems… I don't have the stems either. I'm bad at recordkeeping, tune my samples by ear, and primarily do my own last pass of mixing in audacity. I might have some stems kicking around, but the odds are that I'm as empty-handed as you are. sorry about that lol

if you want to use a Ri47 song in your freeware (read: not for sale) project... that's probably fine. contact me first, not because I'm going to spring a fee on you, but because a few of my songs are already licensed out to projects that make it a little more challenging to hand them out. this is mostly applicable if you're making rpgmaker games you don't intend on selling

if you want to use a Ri47 song in your small-scale commercial project... if you're making a promo video for a stream, need music for a podcast, or anything like that, contact me first. in almost every case, as long as what you're making isn't a persistent standalone work (read: something you are selling directly, with my music as part of the package) the most I'll usually ask is that you buy one copy of the album

if you want to use a Ri47 song in a more serious commercial project... you can contact me directly to get a licence. I usually don't work on royalties unless you are selling a product that I'd consider "reselling" my work (read: an OST album or other primarily audio-based product) and I'm happy to work with people to find a deal that works for them

if you want to use a Ri47 song in a project that is intended to raise funds for a not-for-profit charity, especially in providing aid to Palestine… the freeware conditions apply. let me know about your plans beforehand, because I almost certainly want to be more directly involved, but there are very few cases where I would say no to this sort of thing

if you need original music or sound design done by Ri47... I'm booked out about a year or so in advance, so I can't promise I can actually join a team actively, but this is extremely contextual. if you need some UI sounds or a handful of piano pieces to feature in a project, I'm much more likely to find time for that

if you want me to feature on an album or compilation, whether that be contributing a song or remixing one that you provide… contact me and let's talk. this one's the most complicated conditions-wise, but I don't bite

the bottom line being... I work within all budgets and project scopes. even if you think the answer is no, drop me a line and you might be surprised. if you're unsure, I'll happily help you figure out what exactly you need. it's easier than taxes!

[malevolentcast]

you probably already know about this but an articles been put out about rusty quills shitty business practices and general shady behavior. if you havent already, you might be getting messages about it soon. just wanted to send a heads up in advance

Yes I saw and read it.

I'm choosing to believe the motivations of those involved, in spite the poor optics of them being from another network (and even quoting what "they" pay as an example of "good" companies), were an attempt to be morally just. That is to say, I have no ill will towards the author, their editors and everyone who contributed.

To be clear; if Rusty Quill has treated employees poorly they should be held accountable, I say if not as a way to not believe those affected but because "alleged" is used more than a dozen times in the article.

Additionally, no employer should ever yell at an employee. Again, if that happened, they should apologize and do better.

That being said…

I don't appreciate articles speaking on behalf of me or, frankly, trying to rope me in without my consent or request. I recognize they weren't attempting to give me a voice, just those who are affected, however the author has only now allowed shows to reach out, after the damage has been done and chose to speak for me nonetheless. Additionally, the article says that if I remain silent, it's because I can't speak out - which is just nonsense.

From my experience; I've had nothing but great experiences with Rusty Quill. They're a network. They host my show. What else do I need them for? Contracts, NDA's and all the legal aspects that the article seemed to make such a big deal about… are very normal. I think this is part of not understanding how large companies work.

For example; I saw tweets upset that people shouldn't have to sign an NDA to look over a sample contract which… is exactly what you do when you're looking over a sample contract.

I was a General Manager of a small rental company for 10 years prior to trying my hand at Audio work and renting a water cooler had more stipulations than RQ's agreement. Contracts are meant to be all encompassing. If you don't agree with stuff, you cross it out and ask it to be changed. If you’re upset at the way large companies work, your fight is misdirected with addressing just one company. The article also mentioned something about "Taking Money Upfront" and stuff like that, which failed to mention you don’t HAVE to take money upfront - furthermore - most shows on RQ did not do that.

In any case, this isn't meant to be a dismantling of the article. I don't want to invalidate anyone's experiences or frustrations. Who knows what more may come to light, all I can speak of are my experiences and frustrations.

So why I'm frustrated? Well, I saw a few tweets and posts boycotting RQ shows, which included mine. So that sucked.

Overall however, I think the article was done in poor taste and felt like virtue signaling more than something trying to be helpful. I think, personally - and I say this with all the genuine sincerity - it seemed written from a perspective of inexperience and naivete. It is not the Watergate scandal people think it is.

And for the people who are upset that "peoples lives were ruined" when they were let go… yes I'm sorry people lost their jobs. I lost the aforementioned GM position as well when the owner of the company sold the company out from under me. Not because I did a bad job or because I made a mistake, just bad luck. It sucked, sometimes people lose their jobs. That doesn't mean I can't have an opinion on what I feel is an article meant to stir the pot. After all, shouldn't I express my perspective as a show on RQ (which, like, isn't that what the article was meant to be about?).

Anyway, those are my thoughts. For what it's worth I think you should still read the article! It has some great thoughts…

…but with all things, read it with an informed opinion; remembering that it was written by the Director of Marketing for another Podcast network, who references their own network within their "expose" as an example of a network with "good practices", during a time that they're recruiting for new shows and that every single show on that Network has openly supported the article - retweeting it almost instantly, during the final days of their competitors successful Kickstarter.

The disclaimer on the article about the Authors association with F&F wasn't put until AFTER they were called out. Odd that an expose on uncovering the truth would be less than transparent when posting…

[rachwavs]

Gaming Perfume Allergy (commission)

While window shopping in Liyue Harbor, you run into Gaming, who wants to join you. However he has an unexpected reaction to the free samples in the perfume store....

All Sneezing Characters are assumed to be 18+

CW: Sneezing, sniffling. hitching, stifles, noseblowing, change in audio somewhere in the middle, my nose makes some really weird squeaks my bad

Find the script here.

This was a commission for mochi who wanted a gaming perfume allergy wav!

So a few things: I'm so sorry about the weird change in audio somewhere in the middle, the background buzzing came out of nowhere but I hope you enjoy it regardless. Second I'm really sorry my nose made some really weird sounds? not sure what's the deal with that

Regardless I hope you enjoy and that this is what you were hoping for hehe.

I hope you enjoy, and as always,

‼️‼️DO NOT REBLOG TO NON-KINK BLOGS

[magz]

Humble Bundle have deal for legal FL Studio Basic version, plugins, n samples.

(Read humble bundle details carefully in link. Loops, samples, plugins, 20% off FL Studio coupon.)

$35usd n get everything in bundle. Deal end December 28, 2023.

FreeCodeCamp also make tutorials for " music production with FL Studio" :

[lyingbard]

A Sample for the Knowing Ones

I realized I hadn't posted an audio sample from this version yet so here you go! You can definitely hear some Joshua in there which is promising. Hopefully this encourages you to download LyingBard and give it a shot.

Just to recap for those new around here, this TTS is trained on a much smaller dataset and with a much worse model than LyreBird actually used, so it sounds simliar but differentce. One day I'd like to take another crack at this and see if I can get something that sound just like the real deal, but that'll have to wait.

[sampleaudiodeals]

Get Deal Here: http://bit.ly/vstdeal

[krazetv]

TRAILER BRAAMS 2 (63% OFF) by FALLOUT MUSIC GROUP | WALKTHROUGH

[kiwikiwii]

Very Big and Very Long AI rant.

After the recent OpenAI stuff I'm gonna be here to share my two cents about the whole very realistic AI stuff, from the perspective of a very anxious and very art oriented person who loves techy stuff.

I very much would understand if this isn't your cup of tea so it's all undercut, thank you for your time anyways <3

Now. Onto the AI stuff.

Recently OpenAI has put out some new technology that's showing off some very nearly realistic videos and they're both creepy and very uncanny. About 2 or 3 years ago, the concerns about AI was already rising with deep fakes and the such and is going to start being a lot worse if this technology isn't properly regulated. This is what is prompting my very long and apparently, 927 word rant.

Going to put this in a few parts so it'll be easier to digest I hope.

About the tech.

We are at a point where the lines of AI generated content and real life are starting to blur. It's to a point where a sentence or a prompt could create scenes that look realistic enough that most people wouldn't even suspect that it's AI.

It is such a powerful and interesting technology that's slowly growing out of control. The people who are supposed to regulate the content and lawmakers has no idea what the fuck is going on and how the content is made in the first place, how are they supposed to make a change when they don't even understand what they're supposed to be tackling. The lack of understanding of how AI functions, how it comes to be, where the data was even gotten from in the first place and how it will impact society as a whole will truly be how we'll lose control of it someday. I'm not saying any of this because I want to be a 'hinderance to the future of technology', I'm saying this because the later we try to do something about it, the harder it is to do anything that is useful and effective for safeguarding artists, creators and everyone else who's using the internet. Not to mention the amount of frauds or scams that will skyrocket, children's safety on the internet being compromised, YOUR safety on the internet being compromised, people faking inappropriate images, videos and more will be a nightmare to deal with.

About art.

Many corporate companies unfortunately don't give a fuck about how the art is made and whether it's good or not but how fast it can be made and how much money can be made off of it. In their eyes, the trade off between quantity and quality is worth it. And that to me is extremely frustrating because where the art comes from should also be a part of the story when talking about art. Who the person who made it was like, how they developed a certain style and so on should be cared about and should be appreciated just like the art piece that was created. It shouldn't just be treated as another piece of thing to be fed to the scanner to be spat out as something else.

About creating.

Art is intrinsically a very human thing. People who make the argument "it's letting more people experience how it's like to create art" doesn't understand what it's like to create art. The entire idea of art is the learning, developing and polishing of the skills that you yourself develop. Taking away the steps that it took to get there in the first place diminishes the point of wanting to make art in the first place. It's degrading the time, energy and effort of the people who've already put effort into creating said art to be put out as a cheap and gross mimic of what it came from.

More emotional stuff that doesn't fit in any of the spaces above.

I saw someone use the word 'amalgamation' to describe what AI is today and that about wraps it all up. It's an amalgamation of dots and data skinned off of what there was and chained together to create an image, a video, an audio sample and more without a shred of humanity, love or emotion put into it.

I barely go on twitter nowadays, when I so, I see people sing high praises about the "the amazing advances of AI" and downplay the part of artists that were stolen for to create the technology they love so much in the first place. This whole ordeal makes me sick. It's depressing to see companies laying people off because they're seen as useless or worse than AI. It's disgusting to see the amount of talented people out there stolen from so that people could churn out heartless work at a faster pace to replace you. It's not a stepping stone for humanity, we're stepping over the ledge blindfolded.

I will never stop creating. It's what makes up a big part of me and will continue to be even if AI starts crumbling humanity to ash. One thing they can never take from us is creativity.

To the people who read this far, thank you. Thank you for spending your time to read over my word vomit that has been cooking in my head for the longest time.

To the artist that are still reading this. Remember you are irreplaceable. Without your art, this technology wouldn't have been here in the first place. Your art is invaluable. Never stop creating. Never give up, never give in.

Have a bear <3

[sad-drake-lyrics]

alright, i’m having a lot of feelings™ about giyushino & i have to talk about it because otherwise i will implode. i’ve liked the idea of them together from s1, like most people who ship them seem to; but then i stopped thinking about them much due to obsession with other ships, and also because after their initial altercation on Mount Natagumo they don’t really get much screentime together, so i just lost interest.

but in my modern day obamitsu AU (you can find my ao3 link on my page!), i’m featuring giyushino as a background ship, & i am starting to catch fucking feelings myself from writing them. (if you head off to read the fic, there’s only two chapters posted so far & Giyuu + Shinobu are not in it yet, but will be very soon.)

so, here we go. gimme a moment to ramble about what inspired these HCs / character analyses before i get to the meat & potatoes.

street lights by killedmyself is one of my favourite songs despite the fact it being really more of a piece of audio art than a song - it’s mainly a movie dialogue sample mixed with sad boi lo-fi beats, but i play it all the time because it somehow hurts so good. so i was listening to it when thinking of the aforementioned modern AU, & i had an epiphany like “holy fuck, this is exactly how a giyushino relationship would go down, whether in a canon AU or any other story.”

the sample in the song is from No Strings Attached, a typical romantic comedy/drama about two close friends who have a deep understanding of each other and casually have sex, but the guy catches feelings and the girl wants nothing to do with a relationship.

(honestly, most people would probably find this movie boring - it’s a basic white het ship storyline; i only watched it because of the song, & the conversation in the song is literally the best part - otherwise the movie is hella bland & i wouldn't care if i never saw it again LOL so i’m def. not saying “go watch this” here.)

anyway, i’m listening to this song, and i’m like “omg, i can hear Giyuu & Shinobu saying every fucking line.”

basically, in my mind, Giyuu & Shinobu would start hooking up just for the sake of it - probably as a result of a quiet development of closeness born essentially out of convenience (they are always at the Ubuyashiki Estate together or working together), and then one night boning goes down. they’re attracted to each other; they like each other as people; and then the sex is good, so it keeps happening.

& very quickly, sad boi Giyuu, who is typically self-isolated and depressed, starts crushing hard. he’s alone and he’s desperate for human interaction and affection, even though he doesn’t realize it - and Shinobu is beautiful, and he admires her. plus they’re starting to have a lot of sex; & it’s pretty common for that to bloom some sense of love, ranging from base level attachment to infatuation to real feels - and it gets to the point where Giyuu wants to be with her.

but Shinobu doesn’t want the same thing. she cares about him (more than she can admit), but she’s fiercely independent and immensely dedicated to her work (with all her research and crafting of medicines & poisons). she puts this work above absolutely everything else with self-denying devotion - her happiness doesn’t matter; like she tells Tanjirou, she’s angry, and all that matters is success. a relationship for her would be a distraction, & she doesn’t need it - doesn’t want to deal with it; too many emotional ups & downs; too much drama; too much risk; too much intimacy with someone else, which actually terrifies her. so when Giyuu tells her he wants a relationship, she rejects him.

now let’s take the samples that slap me in the face with giyushino feels from street lights, which i can literally hear coming out of their fucking mouths.

Shinobu: You know me, this stuff freaks me out. It's fake. What’s wrong with what we’re doing? It’s working, we don’t have to fight -

Giyuu: Maybe I wanna fight.

Shinobu: Yeah, well I don’t.

Giyuu: What are you gonna do - you’re just never gonna feel anything? How are you gonna do that?

Shinobu: I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.

^ this exchange already starts murdering me because i feel like once Giyuu realizes he has legitimate feelings for Shinobu, and is wrestling with his own self-denial and inability to accept love from others because of how much he hates himself - he sees that Shinobu does the same thing - she doesn’t want to feel anything too deeply because she’s traumatized from Kanae’s death. she doesn’t want to love anyone else in a way that makes them more important than anything else (though, yes, we have to also acknowledge her love for Kanao here, but i imagine that's it for her - no more), so that she can’t experience loss again. she’s scared; she protects herself by being self-sufficient and dedicating herself to her work.

she's also stubborn asf, and sincerely believes in herself and what she's capable of, and so "I don't know. I'll figure it out." is literally what she would respond to this challenge.

Shinobu: I don’t need you to take care of me. I take care of myself. That’s what I do.

^ destroying me because this is exactly what Shinobu does. this is her MO; her armor.

Shinobu: Why don’t you go find some other girl who’s not gonna hurt you?

Giyuu: Because I love you.

^ help. why are they like this. it’s because Giyuu’s so alone, but when he feels, he feels deeply (seen even in his initially inexplicable sentimentality for Tanjirou & Nezuko from the beginning, all the way to when we finally hear his backstory with Sabito). he’s smart and intuitive, he can see right through Shinobu - right through everything she does to protect herself. he also doesn’t give up on people he cares about, and his sad boi meter is off the charts - he probably thinks he deserves rejection. plus we have Shinobu pushing everyone away so hard because she can’t handle it.

also going off the HC here that they’re casually hooking up throughout this: oh boy is this a mess of confusing emotions for both of them, both struggling to keep it bottled up, and Giyuu is clearly the weaker link. he just would be. he’s too sensitive.

Giyuu: It’s obvious, I completely love you - there. You’re such a wimp.

Shinobu: I am not!

Giyuu: Well then be with me.

^ why is this dialogue like, canon. it’s their personalities to a T - the way they push at each other in a way of making fun of each other; the way Giyuu is honest despite his problems with feelings; the way strong, independent Shinobu would be so offended at him calling her a wimp (which he totally would fucking say) - calling her out on how she blocks out feelings for others to stay focused on her mission so she can protect them, but so she also can’t get heartbroken, because she can’t go through that again.

*cough*

anyway. there’s my roughly 1k word count essay on how i envision a romantic giyushino dynamic. i’ll be trying to work this into my modern AU - but considering Giyuu and Shinobu are secondary characters, i don’t know how much i can explore this; still, i don’t have the full fic planned out, so nothing’s off the table.

but seriously, this shit hits me in my gut so hard i could probably write an entire fic about them just on this premise lol.

anyway, yeah. woke up at 7:30, made a cup of coffee, sat down on the computer and just wrote this essay out of nowhere in an hour because suddenly giyushino is also ruining my life.

[amyfarbright]

Hi, help me make a living (Looking for programming work)

Portfolio Contact Donate

One of the two projects I've been a part of is on a sudden hiatus and it's left my pay hundreds short of what I'd usually make to cover rent and bills. And since my car is currently out of commission preventing me from traveling, I'm looking for dev work I can do remotely for the time being. The lead of the other project I'm on has agreed to pay me more at the end of the month, but it'll start to affect them financially after too long, so I don't want to keep that going.

I have programming experience with many game engines (what I name off is in no particular order); Godot, MonoGame, Unity, and plenty of custom-made solutions. Additionally, I have experience writing C, C++, C#, GDScript, Rust, Lua, and more. The time I've put into engine programming and porting things has helped me become very versatile, and it's gone hand in hand with my strong attention to detail and ability to identify patterns. While I specialize in dealing with graphics and audio programming, I can comfortably and confidently touch most any part of the stack if needed. Check the portfolio link at the top of this post to see a sample of my skills and projects.

If you're a team member or lead looking for someone new to bring on, and think my skill set and experience would benefit your work, don't hesitate to contact me via email with the link at the top of here!

If not, share this post wherever you can, and see if others know anyone that needs a programmer. If you would still like to help me financially in the meantime, I have a PayPal you can donate to, link's at the top.

Thank you for reading this through <3