SolarMonkey

In no particular order, here are my thoughts:

• most languages need to reform in large ways due to being at least partially tonal/inflection based (such as a rise in inflection to indicate a question). All languages need to add an additional conveyance mechanism to account for the loss of tone and inflection to indicate feeling, and anything else speech patterns normally convey, as suddenly all language works like texting
• people suddenly suck at talking in exactly the same ways they suck at writing, because they have to pick the right conjunction or homophone. Good luck two us all
• directional blinder hats would be a thing almost immediately (something that shields the light but has a covered hole in front to selectively open however wide you need, probably with hand controls and color filters and shit)
• light pollution dies down to facilitate conversation, but dark sky areas have to shutter their projects due to conversational twinkling (sad outcome :( )
• indoor light gets dimmer to facilitate conversation. 60 more stubbed toes happen every month
• sunglasses become the new unplugged headphones
• someone develops filtering goggles that cut the specific human communication wavelengths for people with epilepsy. They are a big hit with commuters and parents
• since people can no longer talk but it sounds like all else remains the same, someone would develop a translation device that does “blinks to speech” for blind and epileptic people, who could maintain use of the auditory old language and still function fine in society (good outcome, yay!) (I considered how they communicate back, but there’s no reason their light thing wouldn’t work so this is fine)
• more people opt to have their outer eyelids removed so they can eavesdrop on conversation while looking like they are sleeping (weird outcome, but it is a surgery that exists and divers sometimes elect to get it done to avoid wearing a mask. Inner eyelid is left in place, can’t tell from outside, but you can see through it apparently)
• private conversations become much more difficult, which forces everyone to act nicer in public, which reduces the amount of time people can be shitty, which in turn makes everyone nicer (yay happy outcomes!)
• it gets a lot harder to hide that you are watching porn or kinky boning when the blinking light gives away the… dialogue. Blackout curtain and door light stopper sales skyrocket literally overnight
• people rarely go missing in the woods or in wrecks. Everyone has a beacon every night, and there are huge social awareness campaigns to use your light this way. An international help pulse is developed so no matter where a person gets lost, they can blink for aid. 1km is quite far, meaning they would light up the area around them, especially multiple people blinking in unison. A project is launched to have satellites scan the night-facing surface looking for the pulse pattern, and is wildly successful. There is a brief trend among young teens to cry wolf, until the bills for wasting global resources start rolling in
• lots of famous people suddenly find themselves jobless, as singing is no longer a career. Since light pulses are completely sensually unrelated to music, instrumental music makes a big comeback, as do poetry recitations and stage plays. All the weirdo instruments from over the course of history are resurrected (best attempt) to add variety to the cultural landscape once filled with voices
• television and movies lose cultural significance as they lose the ability to tell many of the stories they do now (blinky light gives away your location in horror, ruins ambiance for romance, interrupts action sequences, etc. it’s just not amazing for the current form of visual entertainment)
• translation becomes a lot easier, as the effects of accents and dialects diminish. The light pulses can easily be read by software and translated to a different pattern (human speech sounds are so so much harder to parse)
• people have an easier time learning other languages now that everyone shares the same blinks framework; no pronunciation difficulties, just new patterns
• animals mostly very much dislike humans, and find us quite alarming. The blinking doesn’t help. Animals trained to respond to verbal cues have to be retrained to understand the blinks are an attempt to communicate something to them. Many animals now have problems in their homes due to the change (very sad outcome :( )

I think they already do that with the corpse tour, no?

I’ve met a couple of cyborgs (assuming we don’t count birth control/hormone regulation implants as technology, which we should do because they are). One was thrilled to be categorized that way (she has a pacemaker) the other was not (nerve inhibitor for pain, doesn’t work very well).

So yeah I suppose it also depends on the goal and if the tech is friendly enough to achieve it. In the latter case, it doesn’t work because it’s very difficult to charge the battery. What a dumb reason to be crap implanted tech.

Caution is very much warranted.

Depends if your union is regional or just your workplace.

Most of the manufacturing unions in my area are just that, the area. All the trade unions are as well, and probably the teachers union too.

Thanks for taking the time to write all that out for me! I appreciate it and I’ll look into some of those!

Have a great day, friend!

There are therapeutic vaccines, like for rabies, which you only get after you have been exposed to the thing to be treated (in this case, cancer).

Preventative vaccinations are for sure the ones we are most familiar with, but they aren’t the only kind :)

Out of those I’ve devoted a ton of time to rimworld and oxygen not included, are any of the others on your list similar, or others you’d recommend for someone who likes them? I tried dwarf fortress but I found it to be… not my bag. I didn’t get very far into it tho.

(I do like mods, so that’s an ok requirement)

They make noise, but it’s a verrry different sort of noise.

The third pandemic is a good book about a variety of diseases, including bird flu, mingling in a host (bird) body, morphing into a superbug, and wiping out huge swaths of the population.

If you like to read, it’s quite good, if a bit long. (but notably I read it in 5th grade and hauled around a dictionary for a lot of it.. it sticks hard in my memory, because my step dad gave it to me after finishing it himself, and it was a challenge. One of our few shared positive things from the era where he almost killed me multiple times.. but I haven’t read it in a hot minute; just shy of 30 years..)

I’ve been doing these for years.. they don’t work as intended for more than a year or two, and then become pretty unstable. Even the lady who created it went back to low-maintenance (as opposed to zero input) systems after a few years. Still with the dirt and all but not without water movement and stuff.

I had a similar problem with ocarina of time (and lemme tell you having to run around in not one but multiple times was a… blast…)

It was the first Gannon fight where you shoot the paintings.. I’d never played a Zelda game before and it took me ages to give up and look it up (thankfully this was after the internet was born, and walkthrough sites were all over)

I tried to clean the filter in my dishwasher after having had it for a year or so.. unscrewed a bunch of stuff trying to find it.. ultimately turned to the internet for answers. Like why is this so goddamned difficult?

Turns out, some of them now (I bought this one about 10 years ago, it’s midrange at best) don’t have them, they have macerators, sort of like a tiny garbage disposal inside the dishwasher.

So that question isn’t always wrong.