What a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing! As a mechanical engineer with barely any knowledge or inclination towards coding and/or finance you persuaded me to look into the game.
There was a 6 month period in my life where 3 slices a bread per day and cup of tea per day were all I could afford. When that ran out it was cornflakes and tea. Last week in the month was just tea. I had this novel idea of crumbling some bread, mixing it up with water to create a paste and then applying the paste to the 2 remaining slices. That was my Sad Bastard Menu.
I've done this for such a long time, one of the first times was at the eye doctor, when they test your vision with the symbols on the walls. Some of those "E" symbols were pointed in all directions and the hand twitch was so helpful. Thank you for sharing that tidbit!
What I've seen from all the AI lately is a lot of vague uncanny valley images that somehow don't fit. They're too perfect and even when they try to be imperfect it's too intentional.
I have a clear memory of my first word "tractor" that I uttered upon having a green toy tractor, but although the toy and the word are correct per my parents' memory the word I spoke was more like "Tatogli".