The Procrastinator's Project

Tumbling down Tumblr on a little experimetal romp :] I run the Mapping La Sirena project where I write about the main starship from Star Trek: Picard Find me on AO3

[flamingwell]

Making Your Podfic (especially with Music and/or Sound Effects) More Accessible and Listener Friendly

So you're planning to make a podfic with music and/or sound effects, and you want to think about ways to make it more accessible? Awesome!! This will guide you through some steps you can take to make your podfic more accessible, some of which will also make for a more pleasant listening experience for listeners without accessibility needs, but the focus will primarily be on accessibility. Some of this will also be applicable to podfics with multiple recording sessions without music or sound effects, but again, that's not the focus.

What's the number one thing you can do to make your podfic with music and/or sound effects more accessible to those with noise sensitivity, auditory processing conditions, who are somewhat hard of hearing, or other auditory accessibility needs?

MAKE A CLEAN VERSION, with NO music or sound effects! This can be a very easy change to your process for most people! After editing out mistakes and doing your audio clean up but before you add music or sound effects, simply export your audio. Upload it wherever you upload your final version, drop in a second link to the no music/sound effects version, and that's it! Of course, this may not be trivial for some people, depending on your individual process or other factors. I hope you will decide that it's worth doing anyway. As someone with audio accessibility needs myself, I can tell you it makes a HUGE difference. There are podficcers I love who I can't listen to some of what they've recorded because there's no version without music/sound effects, or sometimes I can only listen on a good day. There are fics I love where there's a podfic version, but I will never be able to listen to it because there's more music/sounds effects than I can handle. This one change will make people like me VERY happy and will expand your audience!

Secondly, especially if you've got a lot of audio dynamics (really quiet whispery bits and also really loud shouty bits), be sure to use the Compressor tool. Long story short, the compressor makes the actual noise level of the quiet bits louder and the loud bits quieter, while still leaving the impression of whispering or shouting. In other words, keep the emotion, but don't force your listeners to keep changing the volume on their headphones/speakers/hearing aid to be able to hear what you're saying or avoid getting their ears blown out (very useful for other listeners too, especially people listening on headphones or in the car). A quick overview of how to use the Compressor settings (this is for Audacity, which is what I'm most familiar with, but most audio editing tools will have something similar):

Threshold: how loud do you want to go before starting to make things quieter?

Make-up gain: after compressing the loud bits down, how much do you want to make everything louder to make up for it?

Knee width: how quickly and starkly do you want the compression to apply? At 0db, this will be a very sharp change. Lower levels will lead to less sharp changes

Ratio: for the loud bits that are getting compressed, how much compression should be applied? The higher the Ratio the more the loud parts of the audio will be compressed.

Okay, but maybe you want to ALSO make the version with music and/or sound effects more accessible, since that's your vision for the podfic and you want as many people as possible to be able to experience it? Great! PLEASE still make a version without music/sound effects as noted above, because even doing everything you can won't be enough for everyone. But it's also great to do what you can to make your music/sound effects version accessible for those that are able to enjoy it with some changes. So….what are some things you can do?

As much as possible, avoid putting music or Foley over your words. For people with audio processing issues especially, it can be very difficult to parse words when there's background music (and especially background music that itself has words).

If you're going to have music or Foley over words, make sure the words are significantly louder than the music. You can use the Analyze Contrast tool (in the Analyze menu in Audacity) to compare the relative loudness of two selections.

For music or Foley between words (like in a section break), make sure it's not too much louder or softer than the sections that come before and after. Again, use that Analyze Contrast tool to compare selections.

You can also use Analyze Contrast to even out the sound between recording sessions!

For sound effects that modify your voice, go only to the point where your voice still sounds very intelligible to you. Someone with auditory accessibility needs will likely struggle with intelligibility well before someone without those needs.

Hope this was helpful!

(This is written from my perspective as someone who has audio accessibility needs, as well as being a podficcer myself. Beta help and additional thoughts from @writerproblem193 @keriarentikai @xiaokuer-schmetterling and others not on Tumblr. But this is not The Definitive Guide To Accessibility or anything, so please add your perspective!)

[rubyjones]

Create your own book cover - without generative 'AI' | Ruby Jones

Get more from Ruby Jones on Patreon

Too many writers are using generative 'AI' to make their book covers, so I've written a guide on how to make your own cover for free or cheap without turning to a machine.

If you can't afford to pay an artist, you CAN make your own!

I hope this is a helpful overview that covers the basics and points to some free resources.

[rhube]

I annoyed my cat by writing this and not playing with her; you might find it useful?

[copperbadge]

This is a fantastic guide not only to the technical aspect of cover design but the aesthetic aspect as well!

[naamahdarling]

This is GREAT STUFF. Highly recommend! Exactly the techniques I have used on covers in the past, and they look great!

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[superficialdomina]

You can read the full paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

[rhube]

Thank you for adding this. While what's under the cut sounds plausible and meets my biases, there were no sources and that made me concerned.

[telomeke]

On Shmargaret Shmitchell, co-author of the publicly-available version of the paper: 😆

[arctic-hands]

When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".

So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.

[evilsoup]

[gilliagandy]

Truly thrilled to finally find this post on my dash.

[dyk-this-musical-song]

Visit Original Link

Do you know this TV Show Song? #16

I know the song and the show

I know the song but not the show

I know the show but not the song

I may know this

I have never heard this

Voting ended onJun 2

[pollsforadults]

You get transported into the universe of the last media you consumed. How are you doing?

This is better than my real life

I'm doing well

I'm doing fine

I'm not having a good time

I'm absolutely cooked

There is nothing different about this universe and my own

Voting ended onMay 29

[rollercoasterwords]

*giving you a tour of my tumblr dashboard* well that’s my mutual who posts beatles rpf and that’s my mutual who posts gifs of tv shows i haven’t watched and that’s my mutual who posts pictures of animals frolicking in fields or cool buildings or things like that and that’s my mutual who posts various images of men having sex. sometimes women too

[hano-dakukita]

Played with the star trek title generator

[crocincrocsart]

unpopular opinion: Vimes is kind of drama queen

[mangaluva-deactivated20220930]

Sam “held a burning hot coal until it nearly took the skin off his hand while maintaining perfect calm and eye contact with the asshole in need of intimidation Just Because” Vimes? Sam “sitting on the stoop with a mug of cocoa and a cigar, cautiously aware of every inch of the scene he’s building” Vimes? Sam “could just tear his sleeve to show the mark of the Summoning Dark but instead tears off his whole goddamn shirt” Vimes? A drama queen? Reaching a bit don’t you think

[thestuffedalligator]

Yep, certainly doesn’t seem to describe Sam “pretends to eat poison as a power move” Vimes. Not Sam “buries an axe in the table in the Rats Chamber” Vimes.

[mangaluva-deactivated20220930]

I mean are we really talking about Sam “yes a whole room full of candles with wicks dipped in holy water is the best way to beat this vampire” Vimes, here? Sam “has fought bad guys on top of a speeding train AND a riverboat during a flood” Vimes, really? Definitely Sam “nearly gets shot in the head by a crossbow bolt that shatters his shaving mirror and then uses the bolt to prop up a shard of said mirror to finish shaving” Vimes we’re discussing here?

[davetheshady]

excuse me?????

vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork 

vimes is a drama public employee

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

"Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm being helpful" is a vastly underrated thought process that I strongly encourage others to get comfortable with

[whatbigotspost]

Hey op thanks for fundamentally rearranging my molecules in some helpful way this fine evening

[thatdisasterauthor]

I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

[thatdisasterauthor]

"Use Libre Office."

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.

[thatdisasterauthor]

:| :| :|

Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I am going to light something on fire.

[thatdisasterauthor]

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

[made-in-manetheren]

I was frustrated with the state of grammar checkers ~10 years ago! I can't even imagine having to wade through Word's suggestions now that they've introduced AI to it. I switched to Scrivener and I have never looked back.

And while I don't want to pile on with the "just use X alternative!" suggestions, I will say Scrivener does make it pretty easy to import other file types to work on in Scrivener, and its compile and export functions are phenomenal tools that give you full formatting control and let you output in basically any format you need. No AI shit clogging up its grammar and spell checker either, just a writing processor built by a writer for writers.

[scienceandfandoms]

Visit Original Link

My friend was messing with Never Gonna Give You Up on her record player and she sped it up. It beCAME A FREAKING MAGICAL GIRL THEME.

[swedebeast]

[dicktator-cain-deactivated20181]

Reminds me of a late 80s or early 90s anime ending theme.

[patrickat]

[failsnail]

God his voice is so deep even this fast he hasn’t hit ‘chipmunk’ vocals

[the-skeletons-tattoo-deactivate]

I regret many things.

[daughter-of-rowan]

This is the tone people expected to hear from him at 20.

[nitashinori]

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?

[jockinit]

having friends is important because otherwise you’ll stay convinced your parents are normal

[facepalmmylifeu]

I need this on a plaque

[unamccormack]

Fill yer boots, pals.

Star Trek Title Card Generator

Make your own era-accurate Star Trek episode title cards in seconds. Boldly go!

[unamccormack]

[unamccormack]

[unamccormack]

[unamccormack]

[unamccormack]

[unamccormack]

[unamccormack]

[unamccormack]

[voidandradiance]

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

[booksandchainmail]

#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

[issela-santina]

it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers

[lierdumoa]

Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.

[pacificnorthwhore]

[i-wear-the-cheese]

when I was in university one of my modules was about internet slang and for our grades project we had to compile and analyse a small database of 100 words used by a specific community of our choice. I chose tumblr and that's how I stumbled across Gretchen McCulloch's research and discovered that yes not only did tumblr have its own vernacular and syntax (as @lierdumoa demonstrates), it was at the time a crucible of slang and memes probably unrivalled by any other part of the internet. and it's stayed that way! even the very title is McCulloch's book because internet is an example of this specific phraseology.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought

I am holding the side of your face and looking deep in your eyes and telling you that love is stored in the syntax, and that we are rotating words together all at once as we all nod at their new and baffling meanings. if the devils sacrament be tumblr then the devils gospel is our collective voice. thanks for coming to my tedtalk

[weirdchristmas]

I am being perceived.

[scorchroots]

I've never loved anyone as much as I love Ursula Le Guin