davebarrack
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Grrl Power #1315 - Gotta caption 'em all
🕑 Added 2024-12-23 11:00:10 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys are awesome!
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."
Comments
Reigys
haha, good ol Dabbler
Otoger
so now i also have seen, glasses which transcribe the heard words into subtitles so from that side its already possible for Hearing impeded not sure how good it works in crowds though
Torabi
Max put it very similarly on page #592: "Fortunately, Dabbler is as distractible as you [Sydney] given the right circumstances." The particular circumstances she was referring to was Dabbler seeing herself reflected in Max's boobs...
AlpineBob
@Richard Nah, the surgeon is Frix, who is relatively stable. Dabs is just...holding onto Peggy's leg. [arched brow] The Leg-bearer, if you will. Now, I'm seeing Dabbler wandering towards Mt Doom., wielding a leg to fend off Gollum... "Give it to me! Give me the precious!" "No, Get back! Only I am allowed to stroke the precious!" (Sam is played by Sydney, who has wandered off to look at flowers...)
AlpineBob
I think that works out to a High Eight, when she's celebrating with Cora...
Jon Gibson
Hurry up and make with the Peg leg Dabler
Kevin Wright
I love that Cora manifested an extra pair of arms just for that high five.
eddi_TBH
The ones Dabbler didn't seduce never came back.
eddi_TBH
"It is a mortal sin to allow a fool to keep his money." - W. C. Fields (I think)
eddi_TBH
With this bunch, that was totally predictable. "Oh, I've got friends in weird places...."
eddi_TBH
We will have to settle for simultaneous 'Up Top' and 'Down Below'.
eddi_TBH
She is still sobering up after bed shattering sex.
eddi_TBH
At least a high two.
eddi_TBH
Max and Xuriel have a lot of fun with these conversations. Peggy waving at Dabbler as they finally get her focused on the issue is cute,
Martin Croft
Subtitties!
Sogen
Probably why she's Dabbler, no one subject can keep her interest long enough to attain mastery.
Sogen
Would it be a high 4 in Dabbler's case?
Kevin Wright
Audiophiles are easily the most gullible marks you can find, because so much of what they think they want/hear is completely subjective and literally can't be measures. Famously, an engineer did a double -blind test for speaker cabling and found that none of them could actually distinguish when he was using the expensive snake-oil directional oxygen-free blessed by Allah cables versus same-gauge hardware store lamp cord. Or for that matter, *coat hangers*.
Otoger
for your Audiphile streak i can only recomend, the Sound of Silence cover from Distrubed were the studio is a bit better then the live version due to the Singer to be sick at the time still good though and regarding the subtitles the current Smartphone companions can already after training distinguis rather good between main user and others, and for material not sure what the situation with the, i think OLED, Paper, which is more or less looking like a sheet of Foil which was also meant to be really Flexible
Scott Brown
Throat mic would do it, I'd think (for the shirt)
Terence Bryant-White
Maxima loosing patience: "DABBLER !!!π€¬, tell your shirt to stop talking in stereo !!! π‘" Dabbler & Tshirt: "π Fiiiiiiinnnneee !!!, killjoy...π"
Hugh Eckert
I find subtitles and CC stuff to be super distracting in things like YouTube videos and movies, but much more helpful on news programs and the like (though the errors etc. that the AI or whatever is generating them make are often hilarious).
Richard Riley
I feel a bit sorry for Peggy right here. She just went through a major trauma decision, and the result is getting a clown car surgeon.
Person
Dabbler's expression in panel 8 looks like she's channeling Sydney. Confused Sydney.
JasonAW3
Damn it Dave! Now I've got to start working on a machine washable E-ink shirt for JUST this sort of thing... Have to make the controller wireless, so as not to get damaged in the wash...
Top Cat
A close friend of mine who is a fan of the comic (but, sadly, not a Patreon user) mentioned that this should get some bonus points for Dabbler's PhD, as it's a novel approach to exploiting human perception habits. I *personally* think that you should patent the concept of a microphone + speech-to-text software + bendable screen combo before someone else gets to it.
Person
Calling it a super hi five a seems wrong on a couple levels. 1) 5 x 2 = 10. It's a high ten. 2) any hi five involving Dabbler could be called a high four, because she has 1 less finger on each hand. So.. high 8? Admittedly, that doesn't sound nearly as cool.
Mark Magagna
Distractible in a very specific sense. She will derail from other topics to her favorite one.
Gullindjemprins
No, just a genius nympho troll who loves getting Maxβs goat.
Stephen Gilberg
Dabbler may have an absurdly high IQ, but she's almost as distractible as Halo.
Polysanity
my money for the personal subtitles would lie in a throat mike. literally a microphone taped/glued to the larynx, that you see in movies like Mission Impossible for covert communications. it's possible to sub-vocalize and not make much noise and still have it picked up recognizably by one of those things. i'm pretty sure the "drummer" of a few acapella groups use them for similar audio shenanigans.
Town Crier
I find that, when my ADHD is a bit out of control, I need the subtitles on, as my brain does the one second comprehension delay, which is really annoying.
Town Crier
Peggy's going "Don't bring me in on this! No. Wait! Yes! This is supposed to be about me, isn't it?"
Michael Obert
Not to get technical, but I believe that's called a top, not a shirt. Anyway, having the agility to generate extra arms for the emergency super-high five is totally radical π
Torabi
My own research into audio gear has convinced me that most of the really expensive stuff is a complete ripoff -- not only can I not hear the difference myself, but self-proclaimed audiophiles with golden ears can't reliably distinguish any difference when subjected to A/B testing. The huge markup is just to prey on people with big egos and equally large disposable incomes.
Torabi
I turn on subtitles or closed captions when available to alleviate some kind of undiagnosed audio processing disorder. I'd love to have an option for live speech!
Marc Vun Kannon
Who feigns a pretense? Isn't that just called pretending? Or by feigning a pretense is that a sign you really do care? Or do you really have a totally different pretense that you're covering up by feigning this one?
You_With_The_Face
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, like the sound of millions of HR Managers crying out in anguish, and suddenly being struck silent...
Wyrmhand
Thanks Steveβ’
