“OffVermilion” by Tomás B.

"You heard of musician's dystonia?" OffVermilion - a handle his friends shorten to Vermi - once said to me, as we admired our avatars in a virtual mirror, one of the great amusements in VRChat.

He was wearing an anime fox-girl avatar, female anime avatars being pretty standard in VRChat regardless of gender or orientation, his voice modulated by a neural net he had trained himself after mainlining Jeremy Howard's ML MOOCs - now the distilled essence of anime-girl voice with only the slightest twang of artificiality. Despite the significant technical effort expended in his mimicry, he insists he is a "he" and refers to himself as a "femboy."

"Vaguely," I said.

"So how it works," he said, "is a musician tries to reach a note on their cello or violin or piano or whatever with their index finger, and their middle finger moves too. They find they can't [...]

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First published:

September 6th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JMqHvLCRsChvq6x4m/offvermilion

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.