Did you guys ghost one another or just lose contact? Because I think those are different.

Well if we’re here seeing the post and responding…guess

That was interesting, it was quite a bit more boring than I expected, I know that sounds glib and immature but it’s just when I hear about figures like that whipping people in to a frenzy I kind of assumed there’d be a bit more emotional appeal and a lot more peaks and valleys to the emotional affect. There’s definitely times where I see it working, at the very beginning of the clip shortly after the original audio sample it seemed compelling, it’s a bit more theory dense than I’d have expected but I guess I tend to forget that that was what he was selling, not just the warmongering he’s famous for in English speaking countries.

I think this offered a bit of a window in to what it must have been like, but unfortunately the AI seemed to suffer a bit as time went on, especially accent wise. He started out sounding like a particular variety of English, as in from England in the UK, but with an oddly Australian lilt then briefly dipped in to just Australian without the English then a very long section of being an American which also corresponded to a change in the vocal quality to being more hoarse and broken. I don’t know a lot about AI tools but I would wager this might have had to do with limited training data, maybe only that speech itself was used, in fact given the pretty short section at the beginning that said “original audio sample”, maybe just that snippet was used to extrapolate the rest of the AI rendition of the rest of the transcribed and translated speech. That would explain why it seems so emotionally homogeneous throughout which probably lessens the charisma that’s supposed to have been so famous. Judging by his physicality in that original sample I get the impression that even within the context of raving anger and self righteousness that in reality he imbued his speeches with more variety of tone than we’re getting here. It feels like the AI had to do the best it could over a pretty long and dense text of the speech from an audio sample smaller than the resulting output, that might explain the meandering accent too. Also worthy of mention is the part where there’s a particularly hard to parse and pretty long sentence that bafflingly leads directly in to a verbatim repetition of that exact same sentence, which definitely sounds like a glitch, I feel possibly like the confusingness of the sentence itself might perhaps be a translation issue as well.

An interesting aspect to me is how the tone and style of the speech, especially in the early section before things start going off the rails feel really reminiscent of an Australian politician called Malcolm Roberts and lo and behold if Hitler had to pick favourites from Australia’s current political landscape, I think he’d be making his top ten.

I had one once, here in Australia, in a house my family lived in for a few years. It was novelty as I’d never seen one before or since.I seem to recall thinking it was very useful but for some reason, even though there’s really no chance of it happening, I always had like intrusive thoughts of sticking my fingers in there. Also my grandpa stayed with us for a little while and he kept throwing nectarine cores in there which it really couldn’t handle even though we asked him not to. It also used to make a deafening noise like the awakening of Cthulhu at rhe best of times, hearing it sound like it was about to spectacularly break was really distressing. I don’t know how legal it was to have that thing, they just don’t seem to exist here in Australia so it was very odd that this place had it.

I’m from Australia, I haven’t seen them for a long time but around the mid 2000s to early 2010s we had products that were like set-top boxes that were variously referred to as PVRs (personal video recorder) and DVRs (digital video recorder). They had digital TV tuners in them and hard drives and would prebuffer paused TV up to a set amount of time allowing you to skip through ads and pause a show as you describe and they usually had more than one TV tuner in them so you could go through the Electronic Program Guide menu and set it to record another show while you watched or recorded a different one. My parents had one and it was great. I guess growing up with Free to Air TV, the novelty and unusualness of consuming media this way and not having to miss the show to get up for tea or not having to suffer the ads and just hitting fast forward still resonates with me even though now the idea of having to watch stuff on a schedule is becoming a weird and alien limitation that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Ironically though now you’d have a tougher time evading the ads in some contexts despite watching almost whatever you want whenever you want.

DVRs are great. I don’t think they’re really a thing much anymore, I guess because of the declining popularity of FTA TV. Is this a feature that’s built in to your TV or is it a separate DVR? How long have you had it?

In circa 2001 we were supposed to visit the website for channel 10, the broadcaster as part of an assignment. I can’t actually remember what the assignment was that involved going to this commercial broadcaster’s website but I think it was supposed to help learn internet research skills. They took us all up to the library so we could use their computers.

This took place in Australia. Everyone assumed the website was www.ten.com, but at the time it was www.ten.com.au. Also at that time, www.ten.com was a porn site. Godamn that was funny. Cracked me up hearing the librarians hurriedly telling everyone in the rows of computers not to visit that site so of course the few people who typed the correct site to begin with or found it through Google immediately went to www.ten.com to check it out because now if anyone saw them they could just claim to have gotten there via the same honest mistake as everyone else.

Oh I forgot about those switches. I think that means I probably don’t really miss them, I mean, it’s not like putting something on it necessarily deletes what’s on there and it’s kind of hard to accidentally write to one.

I have a peacoat that I just really love, it’s super warm and comfy and it makes me feel like a ship’s captain. In fact, before I knew that sort of thing was called a peacoat I just referred to it as my captain’s jacket.

I still have to put up with it a little bit but I made it my life’s mission to avoid it as much as possible whilst still being part of mainstream society. I’m so glad that this meme indicates that FINALLY other people are not only not doing it but also denouncing it as much as I have. I’ve had to hold back on bitching about how stupid and irritating it is because it was always something everyone else seemed to have viewed as a mundane, at worst neutral and at best good aspect of everyday life that wasn’t that hard and gave you nice looking clothes. You can’t complain at length about something that is considered in those terms because you just come off as a boring crank. But now finally, if only for a moment I can still feel normal whilst embracing my abiding hatred of the pointless and time wasting practice.

FUCK ironing, and especially fuck whatever dipshit came up with it. Before this was invented wrinkled clothes would have to have been but a fact of life. I’m near certain whoever did come up with this was someone who knew they personally would never have had to do it. For centuries it would have been palmed off on the usual people that had to carry out the shitwork and now, in modern times, we didn’t jettison the practice along with the sexism and classism that forced some to have to do it and not others, we just made it so that now we all have to do it. It delivers no benefit, it’s so fucking stupid aaagghh! Because of the conventions and expectations that formed around it, I’m unfortunately forced to participate in it despite my misgivings, even if only on the bare minimum of occasions. If I have a job interview, or I’m going to a fancy event I have play in to this ridiculous farce that is noticeable only from its absence and help perpetuate it. I sincerely hope this generation really has managed to abolish it and it’s only the remnants of my own upbringing and peers that mean I still have to occasionally do it because the world will be objectively better off if no one ever does this again.

yeh top shot. Though it’s a moot point now because I’ve since discovered Top Shot is not just a burst mode with the images packaged in to one file like I thought.