I’m fairly confident espeak is all you’re going to get that’s FOSS, local, and with any non English support. Yes every espeak language sounds like a Brittish guy badly pronouncing that language, and this includes the American English voice as well.

How’s this for an “I’m getting old” moment: sonic 1 was released on the Genesis in 1991. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle was released on the GameCube in 2001. Sonic has been on Nintendo consoles for over twice the time he’s been a Sega exclusive.

If you haven’t already done so, check out [email protected]. I enjoy conlanging and worldbuilding for similar reasons. One thing I miss from Reddit is the worldbuilding sub. It was orders of magnitude more active so there was always something to dig into.

j sGJ GJrJhGHMr smsMlrK!
j       sGJ      GJrJhGH-Mr    smsMlr-K
and strong conlanging-3D inexpensive-DOG
And conlanging is really cheap

I don’t think you would melt, considering your own mouth is full of saliva and does fine. You would be at huge risk of infection though.

Shmups are fun and should be revived as a genre. I’ve been saying for years that Nintendo should make Star Fox into a 2D scrolling shooter.

Though playing Megabonk earlier today made me realize that it and other clones of Vampire Survivors are like shmups in many ways. You gain powerups that you lose when you die, you have little to do other than move, and maneuvering around the level is a big part of the gameplay.

This is going to get buried, but I miss Bill Cosby, or rather my mental model of him before all that nastiness came out.

Mega man is comfort food. I don’t expect it to do anything new. I just want it to be decent.

I blame Minecraft for the lack of tutorials in survival games. Notch never added one before the game got popular enough to generate clones.

Try viewing it locally. It does appear empty from your instance.

[email protected]. I want other people besides me to post there more often.

[email protected] Me krog want more cave man make cave painting there!

Lemmy is ephemeral in part because the redditlike format is designed to be ephemeral. You have a topic, you discuss it for a few days, then it drops off the front page never to be seen again.

Then you layer on all the issues listed in the OP and they combine to make something very impermanent indeed. Server flakiness in particular is something I don’t see ever going away. It’s part and parcel of the fediverse. The folks hosting the server aren’t a big company, they’re a small group of volunteers running off donations. They don’t have the means to guarantee five nines of uptime in the same way a big corporation can.

None of this may be relevant, but I’m curious what your use case is. I use TTS very extensively to consume media and have my preferences. None of them are open source, but as far as I know all operate locally, though they’re baked into other programs like screen readers and ebook readers.

I prefer older more robotic voices because they remain intelligible at high speed. Eloquence is a favorite, as are the older Apple voices like Fred and Ralph. I think it has gone by other names but TruVoice (spacing and capitalization may vary) is also up there. It was semi popular during the surreal meme era. Another memetic synth that’s a little before my time but I quite enjoy is DECTalk (AKA the Moonbase Alpha voice). I believe Vocalizer was responsible for the OG Siri voice Samantha and that one’s a more human voice that’s still serviceable at high speeds.

I saw it when it first aired. Like Spielberg’s other cartoons a lot of the humor went over my head as a kid and isn’t quite my preferred style of humor as an adult, but I nevertheless remember it fondly simply for the childhood nostalgia.

Push it back a few years and he would just be trollface

How much traffic before the sales team comes knocking?

In my experience even a site with low legitimate traffic will eventually buckle under the torrent of bots and scrapers if it’s up long enough to get indexed by search engines, so the longer my stuff is out there the more I anticipate I will need DDoS protection.

Because I’ll never keep it up to date. I’ll be in a hurry or something and just measure it without recording.

Ah I didn’t realize it went beyond the devs being tankies. Yeah if they won’t take feedback that will just cause things to stagnate. Maybe I should check out Piefed.

EDIT: as a non developer what’s the deal with rust and those who use it?

Personally I don’t care what the devs think as long as it doesn’t trickle down into the software itself. If they somehow hardcoded censorship of things critical of China and Russia then I’d be worried. But I can see your point. Commie devs attract more Commies which leads to a Commie echo chamber where non Commies don’t feel welcome.

I know I’ve said this multiple times but a fanatic is someone who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject, and there are a lot of fanatics here. To me, there is inherent value in attempting to create a neutral space where people who otherwise may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum can talk about shared interests.

To drag out my tired example, say Alice is a gun nut and Bob wants to seize the means of production. But both of them like vintage computers. They talk on the vintage computers community about their mutual love of vintage computers, and they realize that the “other side” is also a human being with hobbies and interests and thoughts and feelings. Alice may not put on the hammer and sickle and bob might not go out and buy an AR-15, but they both realize that the other isn’t a monster. Surely there’s value in that.