Grrl Power #1315 – Gotta caption ’em all
Happy almost Xmas! For those of you who partake.
I guess I jumped the gun talking about subtitles under the last page. Oh well. I do personally find it almost impossible not to read subtitles… or just captioning really, when they’re on the screen. When I’m at my parent’s house, the captioning is always on, cause my dad had a cochlear implant, and my mom needs hearing aids now too. So does my sister. I seemed to dodge the worst of it. My hearing seems to be about average for my age, with one or two frequencies being weaker than others. I kind of want to go get hearing aids though. I’ve been wearing glasses since early high school, so why not add to my gear. Plus I’m an audiophile in the sense that I appreciate really good audio, but refuse to be a twat about the supposed superiority of vinyl and am also unwilling to spend proper audiophile money on gear. The problem with audio gear, and probably literally any gear oriented hobby is that there’s cheap gear that gets the job done but is obviously inferior but costs like $8-20, good gear that lacks any obvious drawbacks that usually lands in the $40-$90 range, “pro” gear that’s quite good and jumps up to the $250-400 area, and then there’s a vast gulf to the “phile” gear, that starts costing like $8,000 up to, and let’s be honest, there’s virtually no upper limit. I saw an audio setup for listening to computer audio that was around $45,000 dollars. The thing is, most people can tell the difference between the $40 pair of headphones and the $250. Fewer people can tell the difference between the $250 and the $400. Sure, maybe the build quality is nicer, but I’m talking about just the audio. Above that, you have to spend excessively to really, actually tell the difference, and some of that is just going to be placebo. Diminishing returns and all that. I once got a subscription to Tidal, which is basically Spotify, but they offer studio master quality uncompressed audio, and whether it was my admittedly quite nice gaming headphones (but not $4,000 headphones running through a $10,000 DAC) or my Mark 1 earballs, I just couldn’t hear the difference.
What the hell was I talking about. Oh, hearing aids. I might look into a pair, because honestly it’s hard to know what you’re missing.
I’m positive you could make a shirt with modern doodads that did what Dabbler’s do. They’ve invented pretty flexible screens. I don’t think it’d look like fabric, but maybe some ziplock pouch on the front of the shirt with a removable screen for easy washing? Hook that up to a smartphone listening and doing text to speech? I’ve also seen hats and shirts that have led lights on them. I don’t mean flashlights, but low res screens. Or just general illumination, like this. Easy. The trick would be making it only TtS the person wearing the shirt, so you don’t have a jumble of overlapping nonsense on the shirt or people sneaking up behind the person and saying stuff like “I planned 9/11.” or “My dad can molest your dad.” or whatever. Restricting it to the wearer probably wouldn’t be too hard, really. If they have AI that can kind of blandly imitate voices, someone should be able to rig up an AI that can filter and identify voices pretty well. Failing that, some sort of mouth bilocation tracking could work. I think most smartphones only have one mic, but speakers and mics are basically the same thing. I’d be surprised if someone couldn’t figure out a way to use the speakers and mic in concert to echolocate. And failing that, the shirt could have a built in lavalier mic that plugs into the phone via the same cable that runs the screen. It’d be great if you had a friend who was hard of hearing and always forgot to put in his hearing aids. But then you could much more easily just have a hand gesture that meant “Put in your ears, Steve.”
The new vote incentive is up!
Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
I am not the slightest bit surprised that Dabbler has that shirt. I would also not be surprised if the shirt can auto-translate as it would provide another reason for people to stare at her boobs.
I want one- no two, one white and one black. But not as a top, a regular T-shirt… or maybe as boxers… hmmm.
More like subtities….
She seems a bit more dommy than subby to me honestly.
Subtittles. Subtle subtittles.
Subtitties
You beat me to it!!! At first glance I thought that was what it said.
Gotta admit, first thing I saw when the page loaded was “on my shirt, no one needs an excuse to stare at my boobs!”, phone screen perfectly positioned to show me THAT panel and little of the rest. My first thought?
“……Now what is Dabbler doing?….”
The answer doesn’t surprise me one bit….
lmao kinda got sidetracked here
All “…phile” gear is priced to take money from stupid people.
One “advantage” of hearing aids is being able to listen to other things. My sister in law says that whenever my brother has a vague faraway look on his face it is because he is listening to sport on his hearing aids.
The old advantage was that you could not hear the person speaking to you but could hear 2 conversations away perfectly.
Has this persuaded you?
You can tell Maxima’s been hanging out with Sydney a lot. She jumps straight to “Just make with the leg.” without explaining why or what leg.
hearing aids are way better now then they were even only 10 years ago.
able to filter or enhance sounds very specific to the users exact needs.
to bad thier very expensive.
Right. I got hearing aids a couple of years ago, and they’re really good at amplifying background noise… They were $5000, but the noise-cancelling ones were about twice that!
“Restricting it to the wearer probably wouldn’t be too hard, really.”
Any voice assistant that can place calls on a locked phone already restricts it to the owners voice.
And I am not sure AI voice cloning can beat it – it is there to trick human listeners, not AI listeners.
You don’t need AI voice cloning to beat it.
Recording the owner’s voice is sufficient.
You’d need a whole lot of recordings of the owner’s voice to train the AI anyway, if you had that you could just pick particular segments of the recordings to play in sequence and use those.
I wasn’t listening… but I know EXACTLY what you’re saying!
Since when does Cora have four arms?
Since Panel #2, you can see her holo-materializing them.
Since page #699.
Her limbs count changes by chosen program. Some of her adaptations probably don’t even count as limbs.
Panel 6 – Dabbler whenever any camera zooms in on her chest.
Hey, Dave? I have a question based on the last panel, By the time I figured this out, I figured it would just be easier to wait & post the question here.
You said that you hadn’t originally wanted Peggy to get her leg back, but you didn’t think it made sense for her to refuse the advantage of advanced technology replacing it.
My question is, why didn’t Cora do the same thing?
I’ll admit that I’m no scientist or biologist, but as I understand it, Humans born with defects like malformed or missing limbs still HAVE the DNA-coding for that limb fully intact in their genome, it simply does not ‘cut/paste’ correctly in certain people.
If they can clone a perfectly-identical leg for Peggy to be grafted to her body, they SHOULD be able to do the same with Cora, growing her cloned limbs & grafting them in place.
I assume that her Parents didn’t do this when she was a baby due to either moral or financial reasons (or possibly legal, depending on the world she grew up on), but why didn’t she do it herself when she got access to the funds, tech &/or travel arrangements herself, or when she met Dabbler?
It could be s simple as “she doesn’t want to”. I’m assuming that by this point Cora has gotten used to her artificial limbs, and since they’re currently generated by a hard-light projector (forecfields and holograms combined), that gives her significantly more flexibility in her arrangement of limbs than somebody with physical prosthetics. We’ve already seen that she can give herself parts that her genes DON’T code for (extra arms, snake tail instead of legs), and the ability to mix-and-match on the fly makes them even more useful.
To paraphrase the great and late Whitney Houston, what good is an arm if an arm can be broken?
Her virtual prosthetics are getting it done.
There’s actually an episode or two where Cora explains this to Sydney. Somewhere on the space station, with…. a nice cloting demonstration mishap…
Cora’s Hard Light getup is actually *better* than re-attaching limbs she never had to begin with. She’s used to them, it’s much more versatile, and makes her much more effective as a Space Mercenary.
“I’ll admit that I’m no scientist or biologist, but as I understand it, Humans born with defects like malformed or missing limbs still HAVE the DNA-coding for that limb fully intact in their genome, it simply does not ‘cut/paste’ correctly in certain people.”
Speaking as a failed biologist, I didn’t finish my education, there is no such thing as a “leg” gene. Genes only code for protein and literally nothing else. Anything else living stuff does is because the proteins the genes code for in certain contexts behaves in a way to change the probability of specific chemical reactions to happen. For example, there is a gene that codes for polymerase, which is a class of proteins that sticks similar molecules together into long chain, polymers, for example DNA polymerase sticks the technically more than four DNA component molecules together into DNA.
The way genes create limbs is by a really really really REALLY complex interaction between the production of a ridiculous amount of different proteins, the timing and volume of protein production, mediated by production of other proteins, and where that protein production takes place, also mediated by protein production. The only non-genetic component in gene expression is called epigenetic, which is a collection of structural proteins all created by genes by the way, whose configuration can be modified by environmental factors. This is called epigenetics and is why extreme hunger can have an effect on the height of multiple generations.
Anyway, there’s this massive list of genes that combine to code for the development of legs, and a massive list of genes that combine to code for the maintenance of legs, and a massive list of genes that combine to code for the function of legs, and there is a lot of overlapt between not only those but also other genes. For example, imagine you’re lacking a muscle function gene, in that case the baby is not even stillborn because your heart is a muscle, that potential foetus is never going to be more than a late period. Lack a structural bone gene and you might be a viable foetus, but you would be stillborn. So the combination of genetic failures that would result in a living baby without limbs is going to have to be a very very specific failure of a very specific gene or combination of genes that leads to all the overlapping component proteins working but development not taking place in the correct way because a developmental timing or volume protein producing gene isn’t functioning in exactly the correct way. So in a sense your knowledge is wrong only in unimportant ways, but it is also entirely wrong in that “legs” isn’t a thing genes can code for.
Cora’s situation is possible, depending on the level of biotech. It needs to be a combination of genetic failures that isn’t modifiable in a way that won’t kill the patient but also isn’t instantly deadly to be born with. She basically won several genetic failure lotteries in a row, which isn’t unlikely if the number of players is big enough, and an entire universe full of players is definitely enough for some very rare genetic issues to pop up.
FYI if you want to learn more about the genes specifically involved with limbs and such, look into the hox genes, they’re fascinating. The hox genes are basically the developmental genes that determine how many copies of each body part animals have. There have been some fascinating experiments with insects where they, for example, managed to increase the number of winged thorax segments flies had. If you’re susceptible to body horror you might want to avoid the subject, but that’s true for most of biology.
Yeah, I get that my statement was wrong. As I said, not a biologist.
I knew that growing a people from a single pair of cells is riDICULOUSLY complicated, & the explanation of how DNA & chromosomes & such grows such a people from those cells is even more complicated. But I don’t know or understand all of those micro-processes, so I break it down to a very basic, very simplified explanation.
Obviously what you said is much more accurate than my explanation, but at a very basic level, which is where my understanding of molecular biology resides, I believe my rudimentary question was at least in the right ballpark.
Having said that, thank you for explaining that DNA doesn’t actually dictate the species’ form.
Doesn’t Cora have some sort of genetic issue, born without them? Peggy’s disability was caused by traumatic amputation combined with the usual human genetics.
If you have good hearing and get better audio gear, it becomes your new normal and you start hearing the problems with the lesser gear.
In panel 5: Is Max saying Whyyy.. with a rising tone or a falling one?
A rising tone would indicate she’s puzzled, while a falling one would say she doesn’t know what’s going on but she just knows she’s not going to like it when she does.
Honestly, I can’t tell which one.
My mother uses hearing aids, which are controlled via a phone app. But she also has memory problems, so remembering that she can control the various options e.g. watching a movie vs. having a conversation in a restaurant, is a challenge. Not to mention “How do I do this again?”
The first story I read where there was a shirt that is a display screen was a short story by Walter Jon Williams (he wrote Hardwired among other things). I think it was in the late 80s. Cyberpunk of course. The “subtitles” idea for the shirt is something I haven’t seen before though.
Y’know, speaking of the previous page I did have one comment- in the last panel I thought Dabbler looked too wholesome; more like “someone who just woke up from a very comfy nap” and not “someone who just had their bell punched in the broom closet”. Glad we’re back to the usual shenanigans.
>but refuse to be a twat about the supposed superiority of vinyl
Based. The only reason I’ve started collecting vinyl is because I like the aesthetics and there’s something about the physical process of putting on a record that’s more satisfying than just pressing play on a digital device. I guess that’s two reasons. Also the ritual of putting on the record helps focus me on the listening experience more. Three. Our three chief reasons are aesthetics, physicality, ritual, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…wait no, that’s something else. Erm…anyway!
The good news about “audiophile gear” these days is that there has been an influx of Chinese and other east/southeast Asian manufacturers over the past few years who are offering headphones at the $20-50 price point which sound like $100-500 headphones used to. Of course, one might have concerns about the sourcing of their components and labor, but it’s been shown in many cases that the more expensive “Western” brands are actually the same headphones just with different casings. If you’re interested, check out brands like Moondrop and Anker for starters. There are other brands that are even newer and even cheaper, but I haven’t been in the market recently to know which ones are good.
This reminds me when my wife and I were married, she was complaining that everyone kept staring at her boobs. Well yeah, at 19 she was sporting a pair of C cups at 99lbs, who wouldn’t? So I ran across a t-shirt that read: “If you can read this, mind your own business, PERVERT!” which led to me teasing her and making a point of saying, “hold still, I can’t read” and her calling me a perv lol. She grew up in Kentucky, and was fond of tub-tops and Daisy-dukes, ALSO very distracting :D
TUBE-tops… where did I leave my coffee?
tub tops, when your tits somehow look like they’re scrubbing each other in a thin film of soap, and just…gleam
Yes, this shirt is possible and would possibly sell.
No, I’m not a fan of it.
It’s still just as socially acceptable to stare at that body area if there’s flashing text and it truly is hard to not read even non-flashing text when presented.
You could being a shirt include acceleration sensors to measure when the wearer is speaking.
Directional microphones could require the voice to come from the head area.
Voice recognition software could filter on tune.
One could even try to match the vibrations in the chest with those in the air.
The easiest way to display would probably just a screen mounted on the shirt with premium options available like bending screens.
Power storage is kind of hard, but I’m young and optimistic.
It’s not that intense, so maybe you could power it with on the spot harvesting and a small accu.
Body movement, surrounding radio waves, solar energy, etc.
The biggest obstacles I can see would be making it comfortable and washable. (By “washable” I mean both “actually gets clean when you wash it” and “washing it doesn’t destroy its functionality”.)
I want to say voice recognition is older than voice reproduction, and it’s probably only gotten better with adversarial training.
a. Washability and comfort is optional for expensive clothing(ask any owner of colbert)
b. You’re totally right: I’m tempted to wrap the circuits it in plastic, but the sensors need access to the surrounding air movement and plastic isn’t actually that good against washing machines or comfortable.
One could mount the sensoric apparatus and most of the processing in seperate jewelry and use shielded flexible displays(luckily the chest area is not one of the more moving areas of the body) and send this information through the air, but it’s a reliability nightmare.
Also I think I underestimated the power requirements.
We’re trying to do 2 AI tasks here voice recognition and text-to-speech.
As far as the hearing aids go, I had an inner ear infection almost 2 years ago that cost me my hearing in my left ear. I’m retired and Medicare sux when it comes to hearing aids, so I bought a $30 set from Amazon. It works ok, but even with it on, everything sounds tiny with no real quality.
The only reason I bothered is because everyone forgets to talk to my good ear, so I am always saying “HUH?” followed by my having to turn around and make a point to leaning in with my good ear to remind them. Biggest down-side is it’s an over-the-ear model, and tends to pull out if I take my glasses off.
no one *Does* need an excuse
feels like a weird sentence?.
There were shirts with scrolling LED text displays back in the 1990’s for a few years. The LED block was attached to a T-shirt, a wire ran down inside to a contoller/battery box on a waist belt. The display was 2-3 inches (50-75mm) high and 4-6 inches (100-150mm) wide, so you only got a few letters at a time – which would probably have been even better for making people stare at the wearer’s chest.
Also similar displays on ‘cowboy’ style belt buckles showed up on the same stands.
Eventually they seem to have disappeared, the displays probably couldn’t handle sweat and spilt drinks, or accidentally getting tossed in the washing machine.
When I read “H.R. videos”, I thought of high-resolution videos instead of human resources videos. My head is too much into the techie side of things. When Dabbler is watching the video on dealing with sexual harassment, she would be thinking of something along the lines of, “So is that why nobody wants to do those things with me? But it would not be unwanted.”
Running a hr department for any super hero team seems to me to be a special kind of hell.
They all get in super intense situations all the time rendering them emotionally unstable.
They get reminded all the time that they’re untouchable.
There’re huge power unbalances in the team.
Generalized training is basically unachievable.
You caught me, I was totally trying to read her shirt in the first panel.
When TVs were going from Standard Def to High Def, I couldn’t convince my brother to consider them because in his words, “I only have standard definition eyes, so what would be the point.”
ETA to a song and dance?
Boobs glorious boobs! to the tune of Food glorious food!
something something covered in mustard…
I have learned to ASK before I read a t-shirt. Most people forget what their chest is saying, which can lead to some embarrassing exchanges. I almost got slapped by a young lady who had major portions of Hamlet’s soliloquy on her front. For a while I owned a lapel button that said “If you don’t want me to stare at them, don’t print on them.”
I must say that, in that regard, I would find Dabbler’s,attitude refreshing.
lol, my dyslexia + Dabbler read that as “subtitties” instead of “subtitles”.
thats probly an option on her shirt XD
And on the back….. Ads.
Read up on audiophile stuff back in the 90s when I was looking to upgrade from 1980s high school stereo stuff to something a bit more sophisticated. Ultimate takeaway was, at some point, even the best audio equipment can’t overcome the deficiencies of the room the equipment’s being used in. A 100% true audiophile listening space needs to be constructed and outfitted to give the equipment the best chance to fill the space… for one listener, who is positioned at the optimal location for the sound.
So there’s that.
*puts current projects hat on* Running “faster-whisper” STT (speech to text) still takes a decent amount of CPU. A Raspberry Pi (4) can keep up, but real-time transcription is a bit off. You’d be one comic panel behind with current tech. The AI voice discrimination is athing already, but requires a ton of CPU.
GPU based approaches are better, but use electrical power. Nvidia is working on a local AI processor that can be stuffed into a smartphone or is standalone the sizer one.
Flexible screens are *that* flexible, but: They don’t have a ton of “stretch”, so don’t take kindly to being pulled onto a sphere.
On “I forgot my hearing aids” Your limitation is always going to bebattery. You can set a decent gaming laptop up to do your faster-whisper STT and AI voice discrimination for about a grand (Nvidia RTX 3060 mobile GPU) and a day of work setting it up.
But you’ll be tethered to a wall outlet (or a backpack with a couple dozen amp hours worth of LFP 12v batteries and an inverter) to run the laptop.
Sidney’s augmented realty glasses are also “near-future”. STT output onto the glasses with translation is close to doable, again, with a gaming laptop worth of CPU/GPU driving them.
One could outsource most CPU/GPU tasks to a plugged device nearby.
The wireless sending of audio data is cracked tech(calling).
company statik(.com) target aktive earbuds/headphones.
Are bone conductive so bypass hearing issues and great for the whole family.
On the plus side modern hearing aides have Bluetooth, and Sony makes some really nice ones with high def output
I’ve called it the “Audiophile Rule” for years. Once things reach a point where I cant tell the difference, it isn’t worth spending more money to get there. I find that it applies to lots of things I enjoy. Some things go farther than others. I can distinguish a really good trigger but I don’t shoot competition so decent is good enough. I’ve only come across one sound system that blew me away with it’s crispness. It was all matched components that cost more than I’ve spent on all of my hobbies. For me, most of the time it’s just louder, not better. I suppose my audiophile moment comes with tools. For a lot of things Hobo freight is good enough but I have a few things where I dropped the cash for something really good and consider it money well spent.
…but that was a high ten…..
It actually wasn’t, since Dabbler only has eight fingers in it. But Cora has ten. Usually a high five means five fingers from each participant, but interspecies high fives throw off that reckoning. I think the best option is just to add up all fingers, divide by the number of participants, and declare this a high nine.
*passes you some Dad Gum, the only bubblegum that pops with puns
Shirts would be nice but I want fully flexible clocks so I can hang Dali Clocks in my house
That’s absolutely a thing. I saw them for sale at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL. It’s just a flexible digital screen rather than physical hands, of course, but it does get the point across.
Maxima is just trying to get a leg up on the conversation.
I know Zach Freedman on YouTube built roughly what you’re describing. The video name is “Read My Chest: This Hoodie Subtitles Everything I Say”
Frankly, this is a technology whose time has come and is a worthy direction for AI augmentation to become integrated.
That top would make a great Christmas gift. >>