Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I was recommended RHVoice, and that seems like the most ethical option for voices.
RHVoice: https://rhvoice.org/

The second most ethical voice option seems to be abandonware SAPI 5 voices on the Internet Archive, virtually all made in 2010 or earlier.

And I can use Balabolka's command line utility, balcon, in both Windows 7 and Wine to make the voices speak plain and SAPI 5 XML text into .wav files.
Balcon: https://cross-plus-a.com/bconsole.htm

I found what appeared to be the perfect tool for my need on GitHub, & the code seemed slightly off but not rancid.

So I checked out the author: The avatar is a floppy disk with two notches near the shutter & barely-Latin letters. Well, crap, so just how slopped is it?

It has a .gitmodules naming a URL. Follow it down: Same author & now claude. It has a casual file committed with the author's home URL: It peddles a Discord with a DALL-E bot. Slop!

I hate that I have to do this now.

@mavica_again oof.

@mavica_again I wonder if cleaning was an extra charge at that service center.

Suddenly remembering that I saved more than one dial-up customer from meeting the same fate with the "as seen on TV" MagicJack devices sold at the nearby Walley World, shortly after Vonage faded from TV screens.

Suddenly remembering that time I had to explain to a customer why their dial-up Internet access quit working.

It wasn't because they got Vonage. Not per se.

Remember those woo-hoo "people do stupid things" commercials? Yeah, them. Vonage is a VoIP service which, like all VoIPs, needs high-speed Internet access to work.

It was because they canceled their expensive telco/DSL bundle in favor of the cheaper Vonage for phone calls and dial-up Internet.

Related forum thread: https://users.bitkeeper.org/t/experimental-bazel-branch/1213

So it turns out BitKeeper is still a thing (yes, Linux greyhairs, _that_ BitKeeper), and Open Slopware lists it as an alternative VCS:
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#user-content-version-control

Even more amazingly, it's still being updated. However, I regret to inform that its lead dev was slop-shotted, its only side branch was slopified last Friday, and PR#15 is open to pull it into main:
https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/commit/0b292334aa83fdb434d84f3e8715a0a43e1fdac1

Some pre-slop forks already exist:
https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/forks?include=active&page=1&period=5y&sort_by=last_updated

Travel Oregon (via YouTube), "Only Slightly Exaggerated" [1:30]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doVV1a7XgyQ