Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)
Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindseyās video about deaccenting in English language and how āAIā speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, itās usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesnāt use destressing.
It reminded me of a particular line in Portal
spoilers for Portal (2007 puzzle game)
GLaDOS: (with a deeper, more seductive, slightly less monotone voice than unti now) āGood news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin.ā
The words āthe Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxinā are spoken with the exact same intonation both times, which helps maintain the robotic affect in GLaDOSās voice even after it shifts to be slightly more expressive.
Now Iām wondering if people whose native language lacks deaccenting even find the line funny. To me itās hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish itās unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.
It is not lost on me that the fictional evil AI was written with a quirk in its speech to make it sound more alien and unsettling, and real life computer speech has the same quirk, which makes it sound more alien and unsettling.
Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated āwithout changing its stressā.
Thatās interesting. If I werenāt going for a comical effect Iād try and rephrase the sentence, probably with a relative pronoun or something similar, but if unable to do so* Iād probably deemphasize the whole phrase the second time I say it. Though in terms of multi-word phrased, I think intonation would be the more accurate word to use than stress per se.
*āTo do soā would be another way to avoid repetition