Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

Line in a book which was probably supposed to be a metaphor but was phrased weirdly got me thinking; wouldn't it be useful if phones really did ring louder if the call was more important?

 

Depends on the person. Someone who has to be on call for work, probably, but given how I jump out of my skin when my phone makes any noise at all (eternal vibrate squad) let alone if it's louder than two clicks of volume, I would probably just have a panic attack for anything louder than normal.

 

True. Maybe if instead there were different ringtones for different levels of importance?

 

Many phones will let you set different ringtones for different people. You could have the same sound at different volumes for different ringtones.

 

My favorite thing with phones and volume is this one iPhone tone that seems to be exclusive to the bedtime feature only. It's called Springtide. It starts off extremely quiet with very gentle high pitched tones and gradually gets louder and adds a piano. It wakes me up for sure, usually very quickly, but it has never jolted me awake. I've been using it for years and I don't even hate it. It doesn't make me want to slaughter everything in a ten meter radius at all. I rather like it, actually. I think it's very nice. I've never thought anything that woke me up sounded nice in my whole life besides this thing. And it turns out it's actually easier for me to avoid accidentally falling back asleep if I wasn't scared rudely awake in an instant.

I think I'd really like to try a ringtone for calls that does something similar. No sudden loudness, just something that fades in quickly but gently so it doesn't startle me, then gradually gets louder and more insistent so I don't miss it if I accidentally left my phone in the other room or under a memory foam pillow. I think I'd resent phone calls much less if they didn't startle me.

 

Has anyone played Spellbreak? I love the idea of what's basically magical battle royale, but I don't want to spend $49.99 on a game if it's not any good.

 

Lockdown is the worst time to discover that local city has two cat cafés, one called Catpawcino and the other, the most wonderfully-named Mog On The Tyne <3

 

Kindle's Delete function needs to be changed to show the book going up in animated flames. It'd be very satisfying with some books.

 

Kindle's kindling

 

hey yall Drawful 2 is free on steam rn

 

we watched His Dark Materials and i'm hollering because he keeps a running commentary in this vein and accidentally predicting all plot points so well i'm certain he has read the book and just forgotten that he did

 

I've quoted "it's very slowly coming this way" a few times at meme-appropriate moments. On rereading The Enigma of Amigara Fault, I realised I'd accidentally merged the "it's slowly coming this way" meme with the Simpsons one of "they're very slowly getting away". I still like my version better.

 

Today i learned that Girl Scout Cookies are different depending on where you live. I just thought they renamed samoas to caramel delites......

 

If you wanna watch someone try the different girl scout cookie variants based on the diff locations, this is a fun video

 

Because I'm curious: has anyone else noticed any drastic behavioral changes from covid 19 stuff in yourselves? If so, what are they? Things I've noticed about myself have been the common "homebody to desperate for the outside world" and an unusual change in patience wrt long videos/stories/other media, even ones I wouldn't consume before, in that I could probably sit through a half hour video on slightly different ant species and it would have my whole attention. Which is extremely weird to me??? Anyways, while I'm here check out this cool vid on game "speech" (aka how they make different jibberish for games, the history behind it, and the linguistics of it. It's rad af)

 

Spoiler: talking about The Thing

I'm having a lot of trouble focusing on SF/F genre fiction, which is usually the majority of my entertainment media. Random bouts of stress-cleaning; mostly not, like, sanitizing, just putting away junk that's sitting around my apartment, breaking down old cardboard boxes, vacuuming dusty corners, that kind of thing. Anxiety-fueled desire to do volunteer work to Help (not the best crisis for that, brain). Mildly neurotic meal planning, which I suspect has a lot to do with the previous, because keeping Sibling well-fed and posting advice on social media when I feel like I have advice to give are the closest things I have available to active tasks that would Help People. I'm sure if I had a sewing machine, spare cloth, and the knowledge to use those things I'd be sewing masks just to feel like I was Doing Something, but instead I'm 300 pages deep into The Count of Monte Cristo and keep getting distracted by worrying about whether we'll be able to get more vegetables to put in curry. Executive dysfunction still in full force in between fits of nervous energy. Considering binging Bon Appetit videos to see if that makes my brain shut up about food.

 

That video makes me think of Howard Jones' "Things Can Only Get Better" on Sims 2 radio. He makes it sound like Simlish is a real language in which he's fluent. It's really impressive in a way I never expected to be impressed until I heard it.

 

i mean by now simlish. is a fully developed language actually. i'm p sure the songs they covered/remade for sims 2 were like actually translated properly. it's a bit of a meme in simmer circles but yeah there's dictionaries out there i'm like 90% positive

 

speaking of Simlish, i learned recently there's like a bunch of Simlish covers of modern songs in The Sims 4, i only found them by digging through settings

or maybe i didn't know they exist bc i rarely play actually listening to the game's music

 

(linguist pedant hat) simlish is not technically a full language-- it doesn't have a grammar or anything, it just has a bunch of phrases whose use we can pick up through context clues. it's really a fascinating thing actually, because it was specifically created to be untranslatable gibberish-- it's made of chopped and screwed bits of a couple people improving nonsense. but what it REALLY uses is tone! sims speak with really exaggerated tones, sentences rising and falling way more than they do in real life, but it makes the intent behind the phrase come through. and then paired with context-- when a sim says "soo soo" or whatever it is when they answer the phone for example-- you can pick up what they're saying. it's a really cool, like, hack almost of how human communication works! through tone, body language, and context we can make communication happen even if the words themselves have no underlying structure.

(eta: god sorry about all the em dashes, i wrote that between getting up to cook and i didn't realize how many i was using)