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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
Admin
completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@dodecahedron Yeah, the actual gender someone identifies as doesn't matter to me. It's the sound of the voice. Soft spoken and higher pitched does it to me every single time. But if they're speaking English, I can't relax enough to get the ASMR because I'm too focused on what they're saying. Similarly, if it gets into my head that they wish I could understand them, it won't happen. Like if I land on a livestream where I suddenly realize I'm one of three viewers or something. I need to not understand, and...have permission to not try and understand? If that makes sense.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@dodecahedron Yup. If you were female-sounding I'd offer some kind of ASMR exchange LOL. But if I recall correctly I don't think you are haha. And soft speaking male sounding voices don't work for me. I don't know why. Probably some sort of deeply instilled gender roles based trauma somewhere there.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@dodecahedron Eleven Labs is getting close. Just gotta find a prompt that works regularly, have it generate 30 second chunks, and stick them together with a script. Depending on what your ASMR actually is of course.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@dodecahedron Yup. There are some audiobook channels that upload foreign selfhelp books that work pretty well. Also a couple Korean artists who produce what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, most European creators seem to whisper all the time. And I loathe whispering. The only situations where I whisper or hear whispering are stressful situations where something bad will happen if we get caught. So someone whispering in a video just spikes my heart rate.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
This might be the only ethical use for AI voice cloning once it improves a bit: I could just train a voice I like and have it babble endlessly soothing gibberish for hours. I'm not hurting the artist, because I wasn't engaging with her content anyway; I can't, and don't want to, understand a word she's saying. So this is the one case AI would actually be less objectifying.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
To clarify, I have no problem with any of these things. If the sexy pseudo-Japanese shark girl is doing non-English ASMR, that's fine with me. But she never is. And I also don't want them on my front page when I launch the YouTube app on Apple TV to show my teenaged relative something, and now he believes that I, too, want to talk endlessly about his favourite vtuber/e-girl/perversion. Anyway, shared pain is lessened, right? So that means you must all click like on this YouTube video in order to trash your recommendations in support of my struggle. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zWz92f_HGs
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
I am really starting to hate that the only thing that gives me is soft female voices speaking a language other than English. Capitalism plus the Algorithm of the hellsite means the robots just toss me into the softcore hole or the hole and call it a day. Or sometimes the porn vtuber hole, if they're feeling frisky. And then I just have to live with my YouTube front page being filled with a mix of techmoan and girlfriend roleplays for months because I fell asleep while listening, forgot to turn off autoplay, and didn't wake up when I got tossed into the pit of sexy pseudo-Japanese shark vtuber furries and booby clickbait thumbnails. And I just know AI Girlfriend apps are the only ads I'm going to see for a month.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@SeveraSnape Maybe a mono to stereo? Does the bookport support stereo audio at all? If not, that'd be it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@JamminJerry And then they stopped making the sound right away and I giggled.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@JamminJerry When you started talking, my first thought was "Sshhhh! He should be whispering; he's gonna wake them up!"
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
If you haven't yet archived any from fanfiction.net that you still want, I'd recommend doing that now. The website is more broken than it's ever been: page 2 of search results doesn't load, author profiles don't load, on top of all the other issues with emails not sending, the total lack of moderation, etc.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@lynessence We absolutely should! My Wednesday afternoon is pretty open :-)
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Android Days Five and Six: let's get appy!
Probably the final entry in this particular series.
stuff.interfree.ca/2025/06/01/android56.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@xogium It’s a subscription. But like 50 bucks for four years.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@xogium So I'm holding off on publishing for a few days, but I think I found the solution. There's a permission called "allow app to modify system settings" in the app info under see all permissions. Once I found and enabled that, it doesn't seem to be losing full control anymore. If it's still stable on Sunday, I'll call it solved. Unfortunately, TalkBack is just so laggy and mushy and annoying that it's worth it to me. Jieshuo is easily five times faster, maybe more, and doesn't crash like TalkBack sometimes does.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
What screen readers do you use regularly on your Android device? I’m looking for an anecdotal idea of how popular alternative apps on really are. Please boost! Thanks so much for your help.
Talkback 29 votes33%Prudence 2 votes2%Jieshuo 6 votes6%Other, please say what in a reply 0 votes0%I don’t use a screen reader 37 votes42%I don’t have an android 13 votes14%
Multiple choice - 80 users voted - Ended
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@quanin @lynessence maybe because I liv in a house not an apartment? Even uber eats brings my food to one of my neighbors half the time.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@quanin @lynessence I have! Multiple times. That’s why I switched to cabs in the first place.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@quanin @lynessence with the many issues around public transport, most of the time my flight or train gets rerouted and that happens to me anyway. Or the human cab driver drops me somewhere random and leaves. At least a self driving car would take me to the wrong place in comfort.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@JamminJerry Well, now you need another job so you can get another iphone rofl