Well at least I am feeling more awake now.
I’m certainly never going to let THAT happen again.
What I should have done is just taken a nap and pushed the video making to later in the day, when I could do it properly.
But that’s exactly the sort of thing that doesn’t occur to me when I am sleepy.
Ah well, it’s water under the bridge now. It’s not like I have disappointed my legions of followers or anything.
My just under 200 subscribers will just have to deal with it.
Were I a far more organized and ambitious type, I would be working my ass off to try to get that up to at least 500 subscribers because then I could start making money from the videos I post.
At least, in theory. People would still have to watch the dang things, too.
And you know, maybe one day I will have my excrement concentrated to that point. I can certainly envision that possibility. I can see myself busting my butt to make high quality videos with mass appeal and really making a go of this whole thing.
But um, not yet. I would need to be considerably more awake first. I am still in the process of exiting my long lonely state of stupefaction and so being able to summon that kind of energy and enthusiasm and confidence is still a tad beyond me.
But there’s still that idea for a satirical news program to ponder.
I could really make something like that work, ya know?
So who knows, maybe today’s sad little video will serve a purpose. Maybe this near-failure will give me a kick in the rear and get me to try harder.
But man do I miss caffeine sometimes.
I’ve been playing around with a rather extraordinary website/app called Descript, trying to get it to work for me, because it could save me a heck of a lot of effort.
The idea is that you feed your video to Descript and it generates a transcript of it and then you can edit the video by editing the transcript.
And it has the ability to automatically detect and delete your ums, ahs, stutters, and so on, and that’s basically all I am doing when I edit my vids.
So in theory it could almost automate the whole deal, leaving me to concentrate on improving the content in other ways.
Which would be rad.
It does a whole lot of other amazing stuff too, like AI video and speech generation. meaning I could write a script and it would generate a talking head video complete with a presented and their voice for me.
That’s not how I roll but I can see possibilities for that. Like using that capacity to generate “actors” for my skits.
I could write stuff that’s just me communicating with other talking heads, like we’re on a Zoom call or the like.
For now, though, I am just messing around with Descript’s video editing function. Editing the transcript is a lot less mental work than editing the video itself, and it makes it easier to get all of my little stutters and such.
We are gradually getting to the point where I could just give an AI a screenplay and it would spit out a movie.
The acting might not be great, though. It would be pretty hard to train an AI to get that right given it’s not easy to get people to do it right.
It could probably make intelligent guesses as to the proper emotion based on context clues, but of course, acting is all about the subtle nuances.
Just like with reading faces, we human beings can detect the tiniest of variances in how something is said in order to pick up on the emotional content of our speech.
It’ll be a long time before an AI can do that.
More after the break.
Not frigging bad
I decided to try out Descript’s AI talking head feature.
And I have got to admit, my dude there sounds a lot more human and natural than I thought he would.
I can see uses for this.
One odd but not dealbreaking thing : it took a weirdly long time to generate that little vid.
As in, it’s only a paragraph and a half long yet it took ten minutes plus to generate it, and I can’t see why. It’s a pretty simple thing.
My dude doesn’t even move much.
But it could be like with image generation, where in order to get high quality results, you have to let the computer make a LOT of passes at rendering the result, each pass refining it a little bit more.
Or it could be that because I am using a free account, their system ain’t exactly in a hurry to process my request, and if I want quicker results, I should pay up.
Or it could be both, I suppose.
Whatever. At minimum, I have a way fun new toy to poke around with for a while. One that I might conceivably have a use for in the future.
Not today though. Today has been sleepy. As seen in today’s rather minimalist vid.
I don’t think I’m sick. Other than the sleepiness, I feel fine. I have a little bit of a runny nose from seasonal allergies but that’s about it.
But I will keep an eye on the situation. While making sure to keep up the hydration, even when I don’t feel like it, to avoid feelings like I need a trip to the ER when all I really need is a tall glass of water from the Brita filter jug.
I wonder if I could get one of those Brita filters that attach to the sink to work with the sink in my bathroom.
I bet that would improve my urinary health. Keep me truly flushed out.
Something to think about re : birthday presents.
I should write about what I want for my birthday soon, in case it matters.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.