Mr. Talking Machine

My addiction is making things.

[mistertalkingmachine]

Uploaded to Web Archive: This manual for an old german hemometer I found between the pages of an old medical book. Interestingly, this manual is in German, English, French and Spanish.

Assistent Doppelfarbstab Haemometer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Manual for an antique hemometer, found inside an old medical book

[mistertalkingmachine]

This little drawing I made a few years ago is a functional 4 bit DAC (digital to analog converter) of the binary weighted resistor type.

The horizontal lines of graphite form resistors, carefully tuned so their resistances are scaled by powers of 2 (for example, 1000, 2000, 4000 and 8000 ohms).

They share a common connection (the vertical bar joining them) and the drawing was connected up like so:

This configuration effectively computes a weighted average by analog means, with the most significant bit having the largest weight and viceversa.

(In light of recent developments and my use of an Arduino board, i will clarify that these photos are from 2023).

The paper is mounted on a plank, with sewing pins bent into arches so their heads press onto the ends of the resistors, making an electrical connection to four GPIO pins of the microcontroller.

The common terminal gets a sheet metal spring contacting all along the vertical line.

Above is a sawtooth wave synthesized by the DAC, not perfect but pretty good for what it is, I'd say.

This was part of a prototype I built as part of an internship while in university, two of these DACs were used to control a tip-tilt mirror, using an experimental carbon fiber mirror.

In the following video, a laser beam is reflected off the mirror and steered in a square path under control of the DACs.

Here's a detail of the mirror mechanism's construction for the curious.

[mistertalkingmachine]

Crude little gas discharge tube I finished today (actually started way long ago) It started as a completely blackened fluorescent glow starter that was cut open and cleaned, then resealed and pumped (with a syringe) through a thin glass stem I attached.

Mainly wanted to test if my glassworking skills are up to the task, one day I hope to be able to make my own vacuum tubes and other things.

[mistertalkingmachine]

In 2022 I briefly had the chance of searching for the location of this meme in person, and I nailed it. All while only having about an hour to do so and having to move pretty slowly 'cause, fun fact, Putre is 3370 meters above sea level, and I was having altitude sickness.

[mistertalkingmachine]

My girlfriend loved these when she saw them in Genshin so I requested screenshots from a few angles and made one

[mistertalkingmachine]

A pile of little lampworked glass pumpkins in a jar, a gift for @kittypuppet

Some of them have very wonky faces on them (still getting the hang of it)

[mistertalkingmachine]

Figure I may as well use this account to post about my projects and other things that aren't about Dr. Stone (those go in @senkusphone)

[relaxxattack]

“oh they’re not taking away chronological dashboard, well everything’s okay then” they also said in the post they’re making reblogs collapsed (like comments on twitter) so you won’t see the full conversation in a post. they also won’t get rid of tumblr live despite it being an annoying and cancerous data-miner that isn’t legal in much of the world. they won’t even let you opt out of tumblr live for more than seven days. they implemented a terrible photo viewer that mimics tiktok and makes it so you can’t zoom in on images. they took away the ability to view prev tags. they’re making it so you have to sign in with your email to view almost any thing on tumblr. they’ve already made it so you have to sign in to send asks, even on anon. they’re slowly phasing out custom blog themes.

the things that make tumblr at all usable and favored by us– the older web blog features, the anonymity– that is still being taken away. it HAS been being taken away for some time now. i am urging you people to reveiwbomb the tumblr app. force them to acknowledge that users do not like these changes.

[mistertalkingmachine]

I genuinely doubt any amount of backlash will do anything in this day and age Everyone knows this, you can't join the big tech club unless you have earned your anti consumer practices badge.

[tropiyas]

i love when a playerbase is over a decade old and is starting to lose it

[mistertalkingmachine]

"lose it" as if we ever had it

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[foone]

Space Command remotes! These are fucking brilliant. They're not infrared or radio frequency, like modern remotes. They don't even take batteries. They're actually basically a toy piano, similar to a glockenspiel! There's four tuned metal bars inside, and the buttons just strike them, making different notes.

Here's the inside of one of them:

The TV has a microphone and a clever circuit to figure out what note is being played, and activates the appropriate function. This sort of remote is why some old people call remotes "clickers", as the main thing you hear is the click of the button press, as they tuned them to play notes outside the normal human range of hearing.

Fun fact: at least one person has claimed that they had a parrot who could hear and imitate the notes the remote makes, so the parrot would turn the TV on and off when they felt like it.

[mistertalkingmachine]

I have also heard an anecdote of an actual glockenspiel being able to trigger the channel selector. It's definitely possible due to the higher order harmonics that these sounds have.

[deactivated-12555673]

"is post apocalypse fiction a form of isekai?" <- argument i want to start

[mistertalkingmachine]

I would say it depends on whether the main characters have always existed in the context of post apocalype or they were suddenly transported to it one way or another, and also if they are somehow distinct from everyone else/unaccustomed to the new setting.

I say this from the persective that the theme of isekai is not only the other-worldlyness of the setting but also the incongruence of the protagonist within it. You could plunge the entirety of society into a post apocalyptic setting but then any person would be on the same boat as everyone else, so you wouldn't have the sense of the character having dropped in from a different reality; they came from the same place as everyone. I would bring forth the Fallout games as a sort of edge case. I could count these as isekai solely because the player character comes from a vault. Even though outside the world is destroyed, it has been for centuries and it's the normal setting everyone lives in. Should you embody any character from the outside, the whole isekai thing falls apart, because it's their own world and they are accustomed to it.

[deactivated-12555673]

Oh yeah 100% on for post apocalypse fiction only being able to slightly qualify as isekai if the protag(s) started out in a pre apocalypse world

The *amount* of characters shifted from world one to world two is more nuanced bc bc it also brings up the argument if a more traditionally isekai world is only populated by people teleported in, does it stop being an isekai?

Sword art online, for example, is considered not only an isekai but *the* isekai that kickstarted the modern interation of the genre, and its world is entirely populated by people from the normal world trapped inside the fantasy setting via the VR game that traps and kills you.

[jessica-problems]

You know what else is isekai?

pulp adventure stories like John Carter of Mars, or basically any serial about a guy crashing his spaceship on a primitive alien world.

They've got a normal guy in another world.

They've got hot girls put in compromising situations to motivate the hero. They've got totally overpowered protagonists.

They've got a normal modern protagonist(or, modern for the time they were written) so that the readers don't have to even imagine empathizing with someone unlike them. They're aimed at teenage boys.

They've got frankly alarming sexual politics.

Aside from the aesthetics, they're the SAME GENRE.

I dunno the exact history but I am certain that somehow this stuff is a direct ancestor to modern isekai light novels.

[deactivated-12555673]

Portal fantasy has existed for a very long time in various forms. Narnia and Alice in wonderland are also portal fantasy.

"Isekai" as used currently at least in English speaking circles primarily is a lone word referring to a specific form of portal fantasy thats gained a lot of popularity recently

John Carter of Mars however is a historically significant example of portal fantasy that i dont doubt has had some influence.

[mistertalkingmachine]

I think the similarities between works such as John Carter of Mars and the modern isekai in its own cultural context is that they share, not a common audience, but roughly equivalent audiences. You could say that teenage boys are a common audience but boys of 1910's America are simply not the same individuals as contemporary japan and neighboring countries. They are alike groups but still separate. Under those conditions it's not hard to imagine that there could be a convergence in the form of fiction aimed at these groups without them sharing a common influence in a specific work, rather than just the similar conditions of their independent creations. You could even flip things backwards and say something like Dr. Stone is really just a modern take and deconstruction of the edisonades of the second industrial revolution, sharing a number of themes and aesthetic elements albeit used differently.

The edisonades circulated on the same pulp magazines and cheap novel prints as John Carter by the way.

[deactivated-12555673]

"is post apocalypse fiction a form of isekai?" <- argument i want to start

[mistertalkingmachine]

I would say it depends on whether the main characters have always existed in the context of post apocalype or they were suddenly transported to it one way or another, and also if they are somehow distinct from everyone else/unaccustomed to the new setting.

I say this from the persective that the theme of isekai is not only the other-worldlyness of the setting but also the incongruence of the protagonist within it. You could plunge the entirety of society into a post apocalyptic setting but then any person would be on the same boat as everyone else, so you wouldn't have the sense of the character having dropped in from a different reality; they came from the same place as everyone. I would bring forth the Fallout games as a sort of edge case. I could count these as isekai solely because the player character comes from a vault. Even though outside the world is destroyed, it has been for centuries and it's the normal setting everyone lives in. Should you embody any character from the outside, the whole isekai thing falls apart, because it's their own world and they are accustomed to it.

[goodnighthorses]

List put together by a complete psycho. "Cheerful paint color picks" you are insane

[skyline-sunset-in-my-veins]

Depression: The Color Palette

[mistertalkingmachine]

Cue that other post where someone argued bland minimalism has only stuck for so long because intrusive advertising has literally ruined color

[meyhew]

ghosts 👻

they're real. for sure 100% they're real i know from experience

i haven't personally Experienced anything paranormal but they've gotta be real

possibly real but i'm not entirely convinced

there's no way ghosts are real u guys are lying

i Dont know and i Dont want to find out

some other opinion/explanation (pls share)

Voting ended onMar 3, 2023

[mistertalkingmachine]

I've experienced ghosts but I'm still not convinced

[hugsohugs-side]

body horror in robots is a concept that needs to be explored more i think. there's a lot of potential there

here's an example

so imagine you're a robot that works at a grocery store. your life is pretty standard, not much different from any other grocery store robot

but one day you're restored from a backup and now everyone's acting a little weird and sad around you. you have no idea why because your backup was made yesterday morning

eventually you find out that your old body was found laying in a river with its hard drive and motherboard and a bunch of other stuff removed

you were essentially killed and your corpse desecrated and you will probably never find out what happened

now that's bad enough right? but THEN

a whole year later, you've mostly gotten over this whole thing, and you approach a customer who is a fellow robot

you scan them as a Standard Robot Greeting and

they have the same type of hard drive as you

same serial number

you realize that that's YOUR hard drive in the other robot

they have your brain

they have your old brain, and they are using it

WHY do they have your old brain.

and then suddenly the other robot drops everything and BOLTS it out of the grocery store and you never see them again

that would fuck you up a little i think

[mistertalkingmachine]

Not exactly a match but I remember once reading this essay or maybe it was a thesis, that went on about how the appeal of Steampunk could be interpreted as stemming from, basically, tech gore, or the grotesque as they put it. I went to search it, here it is:

"Breathing Machines, Patchwork Monsters and Mechanical Limbs: Steampunk and the Grotesque" by Angela C. Santoro

One quote from the text goes as follows: "Just as readers express horror at H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau and his cruel vivisections, so too do readers find themselves emotionally involved in the manipulation of other living forms, even forms that do not involve living flesh."

[galacticonejos]

Kohaku + bonus Suika 🐾 beans! part 2

[latinotiktok]

Ese anon no entendió nada, claramente goku ES latino porque 1)pertenece al latina belt y 2)se nos cantó el culo que es latino y punto, goku es 138402 veces más latino que cualquier personaje de disney que tira tres palabras en español y come un tamal en una escena, dejen de vender a la patria

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAA

[mistertalkingmachine]

Hace unas semanas fui a la casa de un conocido y en un álbum de fotos apareció esta torta con vela de Gokú, en un cumpleaños de los años '90 en Chile.

De alguna manera ocurrió que dragon ball y otros animes entraron mucho y muy temprano a latinoamerica. Acá desde que tengo memoria siempre ha habido anime en la tele y ha sido normal verlo. En la universidad incluso tuve un profe, de cálculo 2, que iba a clases con polera de dragon ball z. Mientras tanto incluso hoy en día veo gente de otras partes (gringos principalmente) quejándose del carácter de subcultura que el anime tiene aún por esos lados, lástima por ellos. Cuando Disney ambienta en cualquier cultura, puede ser simplemente por tener un contexto o ambiente novedoso (como las locuras del emperador), pero hoy en día parece que principalmente es en busca de manipular a la gente de esas culturas pa que compren la wea.

Cuento corto es que Gokú tiene una presencia cultural que llega incluso varias generaciones hacia atrás, y que no fue realmente forzada de ninguna manera más que la presencia en los medios porque los canales tenían acceso a las series (yo supongo). Si Disney hace Coco y mete la chancla entremedio con harto show, es porque quiere entrar a nosotros como un mercado, es como un caballo de Troya que usa algo familiar para inyectar algo ajeno.