If you go to "trending" or "recently added" it will say "scope : federated" near the top of the page. If you go to "local videos" it will only show local videos sorted by default by upload date. If you go to any of these pages and click "more filters" you can choose under "scope" whether it shows federated videos, whether to sort by popularity or upload date etc, which languages or categories to display, etc.
Still, it is difficult to find good content on PeerTube in my experience. Your best hope is probably using sepiasearch.org rather than the search feature of your own instance.
If you're curious about the actual historical reasons:
The consensus is that は{行|ぎょう} was originally pronounced with a P sound in Old Japanese. So, {花|はな} was originally pronounced pana. The P sound involves pressing one's lips tightly together to abrupt the airflow, without the vocal folds vibrating.
But with time Japanese people increasingly started pronouncing the P sound with the lips slightly parted, such that the airflow was not blocked completely. This produces a sound kind of like blowing out a candle, it's a bit F-like which is why it's usually represented with that letter in romanizations. This sound change was often blocked by ん and little っ, which is why aside from onomatopoeia and foreign loan words, one only really finds ぱ{行|ぎょう} after ん and little っ in words like {散歩|さんぽ} or {切腹|せっぷく}. In fact this is also why ぱ{行|ぎょう} has that unique ring diacritic: the {半濁点|はんだくてん} was invented by Portuguese missionaries because Japanese people themselves did not distinguish between は/ぱ in writing, and this made it more difficult for the missionaries to learn Japanese. That's the story I remember, at least.
Incidentally, changing a P sound to an F or otherwise F-like sound is a fairly common sound change across languages. That's why it's "father" in English but "padre" in Spanish, and that's also why the word "philosophy" is spelled with P's, too.
So our situation is now that we have a sound which is pronounced as F in most situations, and as P in a handful of places where the old pronunciation sort of fossilized. This is when we encounter another sound change, which is that often times between vowels, the F sound would become more V-like — which is to say that the vibration of the vocal folds from the immediately preceding and following vowels started to "bleed into" the F sound, that the vibration would stop too late or start too early relative to the movement of the lips, and this gave the F sound this more V like quality. And due to the acoustic similarity of this V-like pronunciation to the Japanese W sound, it ended up being conflated with the W sound and merging with it. But the old spelling stuck, which led to a situation prior to the postwar spelling reform, where は{行|ぎょう} and わ{行|ぎょう} could both be used to represent the W sound, depending entirely on the historical pronunciation of the word.
And indeed, the は particle, and for that matter the へ particle, were often reduced/slurred in such a way that they were basically treated like the ending of the previous word, and so these words were in fact often affected by this F-to-W sound change despite nominally being their own separate words which on their own wouldn't be affected. And this happened so often that は and へ ended up being pronounced as wa and we always. A similar shift in pronunciation happened to a lot of English-language function words that we spell with TH — the magic word in linguistics is "sandhi". So this is why "thy" and "thigh" are not pronounced the same, for instance.
And yeah, another sound change ended up merging the syllables wi, we, and wo with i, e, and o, so this is why へ is today pronounced as e rather than we. And then when the postwar spelling reform rolled in, it was decided that は/へ/を were particles used so frequently that they should just be left alone despite their historical spelling; otherwise, をゐゑ were respelled as おいえ, and every はひふへほ pronounced with a W sound was respelled as わいうえお, leaving the particle は as the absolute last and only remaining example of は{行|ぎょう} being read with a W sound. This spelling reform is incidentally also why there are no Japanese verbs ending in ふ, and why the Japanese verbs ending in う have わ as their {未然形|みぜんけい} rather than あ: the Japanese verbs ending in う historically ended in ふ prior to the spelling reforms.
But yeah. Not too long after the F-to-W sound change, most of the remaining examples of the Japanese F sound went through a different sound change, as the lips became less and less rounded, which gradually changed the blowing-out-a-candle F-like sound to a more simple exhaling H-like sound. This sound change was blocked whenever the Japanese F sound was immediately followed by a U, because that vowel also involves rounded lips, so that sort of reinforced the rounded lips of the F sound. And that's why はひふへほ is ha-hi-fu-he-ho instead of ha-hi-hu-he-ho. Badabing badaboom!
※ Note: the H sound before the vowel I ended up being palatalized, similarly to how we say the H in "huge". So while Hepburn romanization spells ひ as hi, the pronunciation of the H is a little different from the H in はへほ.
All this being said, is this actually useful information? Honestly, probably not super useful for most people, no. It might come a bit in handy if you ever try learning Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Uchinaaguchi, though, because memorizing sound changes can help you identify, remember, or even to some extent predict the forms of the shared vocabulary between these languages. Otherwise equipping yourself with some knowledge of other historical Japanese sound changes or knowledge of phonetics can help make sense of some other oddities you will inevitably or potentially run into while learning Japanese, like why the volitional form of verbs might be described as sticking ～う to the end of a verb's {未然形|みぜんけい} form even though it just plainly isn't (spoiler: it was prior to the spelling reforms!); and why especially older people might say the particle が as "nga", and why {東北弁|とうほくべん} is Like That; why words might change their last vowel or first consonant when used in compounds and why the {濁点|だくてん} turns those specific consonants into those specific other consonants; why i/u are so often silent; why pitch accent patterns include the particles after a word; why the word です sounds almost like the English word "this" at 1:20 in the song ｢アイドル｣ by YOASOBI; and all sorts of other fun things like that.
Not that one couldn't learn through simple memorization and exposure, but I just think it's fun to know, and I think that having actual scientific or historical explanations helps the new information stick.
I did not mean f###ot in a bad way I just mean you gay people have a lot of drama.
Makes me think of The Boondocks: "[It's] n###a technology — technology for n###as. Only don't start trippin' and shit, callin' me a racist, 'cause I don't mean n###a in a disrespectful way — I mean it as a general term for ignorant motherfucker."
Ayy, I knew Dr. Geoff Lindsey had made a video about this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2X1pKEHIYw
Long story short, yes, this is a very common way to pronounce the clusters /tr/ and /dr/. The reason why is that alveolar /t/ and /d/ tend to get retracted before postalveolar /r/ so that everything's in the same place of articulation; then because these retracted /ṯ/ and /ḏ/ sounds end up sounding like they're sort of "in between" alveolar /t/ and postalveolar /t͡ʃ/, many speakers will end up hearing them as /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/.
Fun fact: the opposite of estrogenize is in fact to androgenize. No relation to androgynize with a Y, they're just one letter apart and for many speakers 100% homophonic, but they're very different in meaning, if we're talking about men's sex hormone intake.
I should've gone into detail, but I'm just not in the mood to argue sometimes. I'll get back to you if I do.
That's the Republican strategy when they're in the minority and the legislation in question is stuff that actually helps people. Real POSIWID hours
Honestly sometimes I think every country should have its own Sinn Féin of sorts. Just a party that never takes its seats. Yeah, try calling it the "same thing" when you can't pass any legislation or form coalitions or get anything done because a third of the seats in the national legislature are literally left empty on purpose. Don't like it? Well, it's your problem that your party is literally less electable than No Representation!
Hogwarts Legacy? Wasn't that the game with, like, the plot that was suspiciously similar to blood libel, especially considering how similar goblins are to certain stereotypes and caricatures to begin with? The game where early access players found a horn that looked suspiciously similar to a shofar being described as some sort of annoying goblin instrument? The game where, even setting Rowling aside, several of the staff behind it had some very gross political views? The one where they named the one transfem character "Sirona Ryan" and had her voiced by a cis woman with her voice pitched-down in post to sound more masculine?
I mean, I never played Hogwarts Legacy, so that could all be wrong, but that is nevertheless what I remember people talking about... People have a right to play games even if they have problematic content, sure, but I also have a right to hear "yeah I just had to play the Blood Libel Game because it's just so nostalgic" and think "wtf"
LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don't know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It's by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.
I'm kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a "terk er jerbs" thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a "procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend" hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.
Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to "dub" shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.
There's also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven't had much success with this, personally.
The jokester in me wants to say TARDIS → TARDES by analogy of penis → penes but the fact of the matter is that Time and Relative Dimensions in Space doesn't really pluralize even when it isn't abbreviated
'he' pronounced with a length, loudness, emphasis, and tone of voice which together make it obvious that the pronoun is in fact referring to a feminine trans person, and makes the speaker look like a raging transphobe
/qj
This post should take about two minutes for most screenreaders to get through. If you feel like that's too long, you can just skip the post's body and only answer the question in the title. I'm not your mom.
Introductory section
I was recently daydreaming some more about an idea for a single-player first-person shooter game that's been bouncing around in my head for the past three years, and I was struck with the thought that blind and visually impaired folks don't have many accessible games. So I wrote down a few ideas for how this daydream game could be accessible, and then I shared these thoughts on social media... And then somebody replied that "my heart was in a good place" but that it was "impossible" to make blind-accessible first-person shooters in any way that would be "fun" and allow people to "play well".
And it's like... I had tried to do my research on how blind and visually impaired folks already play video games today, what the community wants, and what accessibility features are already possible. The gold standard of gaming accessibility seems to be The Last of Us Part II, which you can play start-to-finish without any sort of sighted assistance — so if a third-person shooter can do it, then why can't a first-person one? Blind and visually impaired people already do play first-person shooters sometimes; any accessibility will be useful to somebody; and if people dismiss the idea of blind gaming as "impossible" out-of-hand, then very few people will even attempt to develop the technologies to prove the contrary, right?
So that comment I got seemed honestly pretty ignorant, like the type of thing where some sighted person maybe wears a blindfold for half an hour, and then assumes that actual blind people are exactly as helpless and clumsy as that.
In any case, the particular things I'd written down as accessibility features for specifically a first-person shooter were as follows:
Controller vibrations as a "virtual white cane".
This is to say vibrations of increasing intensity when approaching obstacles. As controllers have two independent motors for vibration, it should be possible to create some impression of the direction of the obstacle as well. Other forms of "haptic feedback", as it's apparently known, have been used in accessible gaming before — I'm assuming in order to distribute information among the available senses or to create redundancies. Nice idea!
Audio descriptions provided in-game.
This would be done by a figure similar to Cortana from Halo or the Hazardous Environments suit from Half-Life, and there would be some button combination for "read heads-up display". AudioQuake seems to be an early example of a first-person shooter game with audio descriptions. That game also seems to restrict the direction a player can look to just the sixteen points on a compass, which might be useful if mouse or joystick movement results in the player turning more or less quickly than thon expected.
Focusing on naturalistic binaural auditory cues.
This would include a glossary of the important cues. For the most part, though, if a game has good sound design, then the ambience and the volume and location of sound effects should be enough for one's orientation in the map and figuring out where the baddies are. The game Lost in Hound allows the player to pick up small objects, which make a ticking sound, and place them around anywhere on the map, as a custom sort of "beacon" for orientation. I think that's pretty neat.
Color contrast, simple textures, enlarged text with simple fonts
These are all such simple things to implement that it's just kinda gross that more games don't have them. I had also written down with a question mark, "Heads-up display connects to a Braille display?", since I'm not sure about that one. It would probably be mildly convenient compared to the screenreader, and there's nothing wrong with having options, right?
Sixteen clicks
This was an idea that didn't seem to have any basis in what I found when reading web articles or watching YouTube videos by blind gamers, so this is probably a nonsensical bad idea. I had just imagined that there would be some button combination which creates a series of sixteen clicks, starting north and going clockwise, with their volume indicating the distance to the nearest obstacle in that direction. Sort of like echolocation with a built-in compass, for use when the more naturalistic auditory cues have failed. It could also be that the click nearest to the intended direction would be of a lower pitch, though that might make things too easy for a lot of players.
Edit: I'm now imagining a game where the player character has a hat with a "panoramic paintball gun" on it, so instead of nondescript clicks, you get spatial information from the distinctive sound of a paintball spattering against grass, glass, concrete, wood, cloth, et cetera. That sounds kind of fun!
Aim assist and other difficulty-reducing features
The benefits of aim assist, already used by a good number of visually impaired gamers, should be readily apparent. The other difficulty-reducing features I had written down were "invisible walls mode", which prevents the player from accidentally walking off cliffs; and "superhot mode", where, much like in the popular game SUPERHOT, time only moves when the player moves, allowing the player more time to orient thonself. For a lot of players these things would probably make the game too easy, but obviously like many accessibility features, the point is that you can turn it on only if you want or need it, rather than just having some one-size-fits-all solution for the whole spectrum of disability.
Conclusion
So those were all the things that I managed to think of. Are there any ideas here that you think don't work or should be different? Are there any ideas that I missed? What have your experiences been with gaming as a blind or visually impaired person, and what would you like to see from games in the future?
The lethal parasites are responsible for up to 30% of moose deaths in Minnesota.
/j The moose and deer of Minnesota had to get their brainworms from somewhere!
Erika2rsis @lemmy.blahaj.zone I like languages. Alt accounts Erika3sis@hexbear.net Erika4sis@lemmygrad.ml
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