Audio, Video And The Boy From Brazil

Can't help but feel like I've written a lot of words this week so I'm going to keep this short. Well, we can hope...

I wanted to do a music post yesterday but I wanted to vent about Supergirl S6 more so I thought okay, Saturday is always good for tunes. But then I looked at what I have waiting and blimey charlie! 

I scrapped all the old stuff after last time because it was getting on top of me and I haven't built up that much of a stock since, not on this PC at least. This is where the sensible stuff I cull from feeds goes. On my laptop though... oh boy...

Since I stopped using my Kindle Fire to watch tv and switched to my ancient Dell XPS laptop, I've taken to ending most evenings with a quick trawl through YouTube, the way I used to do. That way randomness lies. Over the last couple of weeks I've mostly been listening to French Yeye, Japanese punk, glitchcore, hyperpop covers and most recently of all, mash-ups.

Remember mash-ups? I'd almost forgotten they existed but apparently people still make them. Like this.

HOT TO GO  x  MICKEY - Chappell Roan, Tony Basil

I seriously thinks that's a work of art! It's long but it just gets better and better the longer it goes on. I have no idea how anyone would go about putting something like this together. It seems like magic to me.

I remember when mashups were a big thing but I'd kind of forgotten about them. It's great to see the art form is still in such robust good health. I'm gonna be looking out for more if that's the standard now.

Anyway, this isn't specifically a music post, although it's going to have some more music in it. Quite a lot more, really, so maybe it is a music post after all. If those don't interest you, don't tab away quite yet, though. I have a couple other topics that might interest you.

Although not if you're also one of my readers (Ha! "My readers". Listen to him! Who does he think he is? Will fekkin' Self?) who can't stand to hear anything good about AI. I suspect there may be a few of you out there.

But It All Seemed So Real!

You can blame UltrViolet at Endgame Viable for this next bit. Or at least send some of that blame his way. I would never have known about it at all if he hadn't posted about it yesterday.

You can read his post and follow his links for the full skinny but the takeaway is that there's now a way to have your content rendered into a scarily authentic two-person AI podcast. Not only is it possible, it's easy. In fact, it takes almost no effort at all.

After I listened to the podcast UltrViolet generated from a video on his YouTube channel, which I one hundred per cent would have believed was created by two actual humans just sitting there, riffing off each other, I jumped through the necessary hoops to give it a go myself. (For some reason NotebookLM absolutely would not accept the Google account I wanted to use - the one I made specifically for AI experiments - even though it was happy with every other one I tried. They know when you try to trick them...)

Once I'd gotten that sorted, I picked a recent post pretty much at random and fed the url into the AI maw. It took maybe five minutes to process, then this is what came out:

Comparing the "podcast" to the original post is a very weird experience, although not nearly as weird as hearing two apparently real people discussing what I wrote and using my name to do it. That is really quite disturbing. 

Leaving aside how terrifyingly well the AI does at pretending to be two freaking people chatting - it makes them sound like they both have history together and play the damn game themselves, which is just too Philip K Dick to process - they do get most of what I was saying about right. There's one bit where they conflate two things I said and turn them into a third that's just plain wrong, and they have an annoying tendency to make the actual negatives sound more like positives than the positives, sometimes, but overall it's not a bad precis.

I wouldn't want to use this exact format to turn every post into a podcast. I'd want a lot more control over both the voices and the editing than there is at present. Actually, any control would be good. At present there is literally none. It is still beta, though.

The software (Ooh! He called AI "software"! I bet an alarm just went off at Google.) isn't actually intended for that, though. NotebookLM is Google's stab at something I've been saying I wanted out of AI almost since the start - a Research Assistant. 

I've been using Gemini in that role and it's been useful but this (Which is powered by Gemini.) is different. It acts like the kind of research assistant you send away to look stuff up then give you a summary. The talking heads version is just one of the options available to make that information easier to assimilate.

What it mainly did for me was make me realize how much more negative my post came across than I'd intended. Hearing the two voices point out, unnervingly accurately, to each other how critical the post they were discussing was about so many things made me hear my own words in a very different way. I might use it in future to make sure I'm hitting the tone I think I am.

I also might just use it for the fun of hearing people talk about my stuff. Even if they're not real. I always did have a thing for imaginary friends.

Time for another tune, I think.

I Used To Be Lou Reed - Vamberator

This one came right out of left field. It turned up in a squib on Stereogum and naturally I scanned it because of the provocative title, which is when I learned Vamberator is a duo featuring the Cure's ex-drummer Boris and a guy out of one of my favorite bands from the '80s, about whom I'd heard nothing for decades and who I'd pretty much forgotten all about: Shelleyan Orphan.

And stap me if it doesn't sound like Shelleyan Orphan, too, which nothing ever does. It looks like Vamberator have only just started but now I'm wondering what Jemaur Tayle has been doing all these years. I might have to look into that. Caroline Crawley too, for that matter.

File under "Old but still got it". It's getting to be quite the fat folder these days.

Talkin' 'Bout An Evolution

Now for a couple of things I really have nothing to say about other than "Here's a thing that happened." Or in the case of the first, is going to happen, some day.

I played ArcheAge for a while. There are posts here about that. I liked it but not as much as some and I always felt other games ended up doing what AA wanted to do a lot better. 

Still, I don't think it's unreasonable to say it was innovative, even somewhat ground-breaking in its day, so maybe when the team behind the sequel, now named ArcheAge Chronicles, claim it's going to be the "next evolution of the MMORPG genre", we ought not to laugh out loud. 

Curious, if so, that they also choose to describe it as an "online action RPG" but I think in doing so Jake Song is just making my point from a couple of days ago. Thanks, Jake!

Brazil 1- USA 0

Remember old whatsisname? The guy who plowed the fortune he made playing baseball into building his dream MMO and nearly bankrupted the state of Rhode Island in the process? Curt Schilling! That was him. (Had to look it up. It's been a while.)

Apparently he's not the only retired professional sportsman to take the notion to get involved in making the games he loves to play, only someone else has made rather a better job of it. Matheus Vivian, a not particularly famous footballer is now CEO of "one of Brazil's largest games studios", Hermit Crab, which he also started.

Brazil is also tipped as the next breakout country for gaming development so that's actually quite a big deal. Nice to see someone get the difficult transition from hobbyist to pro right for a change.

Couple more tunes and one more item and I'm out of here. I've got more but you know what they say about more. That less is it, I mean.

Trust Nothing But Love - Haru Nemuri

Despite what you might imagine, given what I said earlier, I didn't find this one late at night. I discovered Haru Nemuri via New York hyperpop sibling duo Frost Children, with whom she just released a collab called Daijoubou Desu. 

That one's fine but this is better. Mostly I love the video, which proves you can make a great promo for no money. Okay, I suppose she had to pay for the roses...

Quiet Please! I'm Trying To Watch This!

And since we're on the topic of promo videos, there's something Beyoncé said that I've meaning to comment on for a while. I hadn't actually noticed but it seems Queen B hasn't made any videos to support her recent album, Cowboy Carter. She has a very convincing explanation for that. As she told GQ:

“I thought it was important that during a time where all we see is visuals, that the world can focus on the voice. The music is so rich in history and instrumentation. It takes months to digest, research, and understand. The music needed space to breathe on its own. Sometimes a visual can be a distraction from the quality of the voice and the music. The years of hard work and detail put into an album that takes over four years! The music is enough."

She really has a point. I discover most of my music through my PC or laptop these days and have done for more than a decade. The great majority of new tunes I hear come with visuals of some kind, either a proper video or a visualizer. 

It's not uncommon for me to find myself watching the video and not really paying attention to the music. Ironically, the better the video is, the less likely I am to remember the song afterwards. Of course, the flip is I will remember the video and very likely watch it again, so I guess the marketing department is happy either way.

Cheer Up Bob! It Might Never Happen!

And at this point it would make sense to have one of Beyoncé's tunes, only since she hasn't made videos for any of them, we're not going to. Instead, it's back to the "Old duffers that can still do it" file for the first new Cure song in sixteen years. 

I confess I had no idea it had been that long but then Mrs Bhagpuss is the big Cure fan in this house, not me. I do like them, though, and I like this, although not as much as the guy at Stereogum, who seemed to think he'd seen the second coming. Or heard it, rather. It's not like this is a video that's going to keep your mind off the song.

Suffice it to say, those sixteen years haven't left Laughing Bob feeling any more cheerful than he used to be. Luckily for us.

Alone - The Cure

The Lovecats it is not.