Holy crap, was this a lot of work to make.
Sometimes I wonder why I ever listen to myself.
Actually, the amount of work it took – almost two hours’ worth – wasn’t a complete surprise to me. When I decided that this would be the time I would put the lyrics on the screen, I knew it would be a lot of work and that I would probably hate myself for starting the stupid project somewhere along the line.
But I was thinking an hour, tops. Yikes.
Oh well, it’s good for me to occasionally get in way over my head with a task. It’s one of the only ways to fool myself into doing more than the bare minimum in life and that’s good for expressing way more of my personal energies than my usual low yield life.
If I do more, I’ll be much happier. I have to keep telling myself that. I have suffered under the tyranny of depression’s soul destroying anti-action bias for far too long. I need to wake the hell up and get involved in life.
If ya know what I mean.
And yeah, I know I’m not a great singer. I think maybe I could be a decent singer if I had the focus and self-discipline to practice and do vocal exercises and such.
Maybe then I could hit those low notes, like the word “sun” on “running naked in the sun”. My voice just disappears there.
Anyhow, my main reason to make karaoke videos is to stretch myself not just vocally but creatively. It’s something unlike my usual talking head stuff and it feels good to expand my capacities that way.
As well as learning what NOT to do.
I originally tried making today’s vid in Descript but it is NOT suited to that task. Sure, the whole “edit the transcript to edit the video” thing is impressive and very cool, but it’s useless for, for instance, trimming the ends of a video or doing any of the other usual video editing things like rearranging clips, fixing audio levels, and so on.
So it’s pretty much only good for talking head videos. Fair enough.
One of these day, my video might just be one of their AI talking heads reading out something I wrote for the occasion.
That could be quite amusing.
I did make this little thing.
Oh that reminds me. Check out the sample text from this voice changer app :
Discover a world where innovation meets elegance. Introducing the Aurora Series – our most advanced collection yet. With cutting-edge technology wrapped in sleek, sustainable design, these devices don’t just perform, they inspire. Aurora – illuminating the path to tomorrow, available worldwide this Friday.
Sample text from elevenlabs.io
Their technology is very impressive but who the hell wrote that text? It’s so pretentiously corporate it makes me want to hurt somebody.
I mean, nobody expects sample text to be Shakespeare, but oy.
I am so very, very sick of bland, bloodless, mindlessly voracious corporations all trying to seem like brilliant forward-seeing creative geniuses, like they just came down the mountain from Palo Alto to share their lofty and advanced vision with us mere mortals.
You’re a bunch of sociopaths in Armani. Get the fuck over yourself.
Been doing OK, mood-wise. My inner world is rather unstable and unsettled, which is to be expected when you’re trying to change very deep, fundamental things about yourself, like your entire attitude toward living.
I’m working on it. Pouring tons of energy and mental might into opening myself up to the world like I am throwing open the drapes and opening the windows in my soul after a long dark musty winter and finally getting some good clean air in here.
Turns out the world is a much happier place when you’re not drowning within yourself.
Who’da thunk it?
More after the break.
Something has to give
I know that there is a limit to gradualism.
Eventually, something more dramatic is going to need to happen within my psyche. Even if that just means that incrementally I reached a tipping point and the scale flips to the other side because of that, it’s going to have to happen.
Fine. I am willing to continue to consciously devalue stability in favor of long overdue change. Stability is great and all but not when you’re stifling everything inside of you in pursuit of it
And I definitely do not feel as stable as I used to. There is an undercurrent of anxiety in everything I do now. I have these terrible moments where I feel confused and scared and like everything is slipping away from me.
And that’s fine. I know that if I just hang in there, the moment will pass, I will be able to remember that everything is fine, actually, and then I am back in the real world.
Call them growing pains. Or maybe growing pangs.
The real issue is that I don’t know what form this sudden action will take. Obviously I don’t want it to land me in jail, or ruin my relationship with my three friends.
That would be a wee bit too high a price to pay for personal growth.
I suppose I am hoping that it will be something relatively calm and consequence free. I’ll just be laying in bed one day and have some kind of psychological crisis where I feel absolutely awful and freak way the hell out, but then it will pass and I will feel one hell of a lot better because I just processed a whole lot of backed up emotion.
Kind of like having a touch of food poisoning.
But nothing is entirely off the table, legal entanglements aside. I may need to become pushy and irritable just like my late father in order to get to a saner place. I might have to go deeper into outright insanity and stare at the wall a while, or even, god forbid, be a tad psychotic for a bit.
I’ll do what I can to keep things from being too disruptive.
But if I have to lose my mind to find myself, so be it.