not a headline you see every day

new favorite buddy

topped my Spotify Wrapped this year. Wish the LP was still in stock but highly recommend buying this however you can.

A good primer for learning about this whole Fediverse thing

tenth album and, from the first two singles, a nice return to form. can't wait to hear more.

look, I don't claim to know a damn thing about Stable Diffusion or AI generation or any of that world. What I do know is that there are some very impressive enhancements here; particularly the Super-resolution Upscaler. Wild.

Just in time for the holidays (and, more specifically, Cyber Monday - my favorite of holidays), there's a new season of shirts over at Nashville Galaxy. If you're not familiar, NG is a storefront selling shirts that harken back to some favorite Nashville locations that have gone the way of the dodo. All of these establishments have closed but every single one was a meaningful destination to someone at some point.

If you're not a Nashville resident, these tees may not mean much of anything but that's okay! Nothing stopping you from owning a Twitty City or Video Culture tee, they'll get you some looks no matter where you're from.

If you do live in the Nashville area, take some time to read the descriptions of each of the tees. I put a decent amount of time into researching each one and I hope it shows in the write-ups. Enjoy!

273 players simultaneously gather on Matryomin; a theremin nested inside of a Russian doll. Hop to 5m15s for the unworldly performance.

David Lynch would be so proud

Every year, for 48 hours, I take a deep dive on reading up on random trivia for this film. This is a pretty good dump of random insights.

Nice review and insights on the previously lost footage from the original shooting script. I love this movie. These bits aren’t needed to improve the film but they are still interesting.

As I understand it, this is quite significant. This paragraph in particular pretty much sums it up: "If Tumblr were to add ActivityPub support, it means users on Mastodon could follow Tumblr users’ posts from their own Mastodon instance — without having to use the Tumblr app. It could also provide Tumblr users with an entry point into the so-called fediverse without having to face some of the complexities that are involved with signing up for Mastodon for the first time."

I have used Atom for years. It has plenty of quirks and is far from perfect but switching editors is a huge pain. Not stoked about this but hopefully I can migrate to greener pastures.

now THAT'S a trailer

I was invited to partake in a profile over at Nashville Voyager and I decided to take it as an opportunity to really share my story. I'm not sure if anyone wants a tome of text about my history with the Internet but it's out there if anyone does want it!

I tend to be a bit self-deprecating so I feel oddly obligated to point out that I'm not really sure what Nashville Voyager is. The folks at Grand Palace had their own profile back in September and recommended me. I was invited to fill out a lengthy form containing the questions you see in the interview. The site itself is filled with pages and pages and pages of similar profiles from all sorts of people around Nashville. There's near zero editorial input on the interviews - these are all people describing themselves in their own words (myself included). I don't think it's a bad thing by any means but I have questioned what the purpose of the site is.

That's not to detract from my glorious interview! I'm happy to have been asked to submit and I'm, mostly, happy with the answers I provided.

I had no idea this existed and it is as absurd as I'd hoped for

Holly+ is an AI voice model from Holly Herndon that allows anyone to upload audio to the tool and get back audio in the distinct Holly+ voice. There's a wonderfully insightful rundown on the whole project and the larger topic of voice impersonation (see Midler v Ford, Waits v Frito-Lay, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Anthony Bourdain Voice Deepfake, etc etc).

Coupler (one of my favorite ambient musicians outta Chicago) teamed up with Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Sam Rolfes to create a cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" and set it to pretty wild mocap'ed performance featuring a semblance of the Holly+ avatar.

That's a lot to digest but the summary is: smart and talented people crafted a cover of a classic country song using some (currently) cutting edge tech and the results are worth your time. The cover itself isn't a far cry from the original but the quality of the Holly+ vocals are stunning... it's hard to believe that it's an AI generated experience rather than an actual human performance.

another Nashville artist that checks all the boxes for me; social commentary, memorable melodies and a dark delivery.

Continue to love this band and their videos just further solidify that enjoyment. Top notch.

As I continue helping to produce podcasts for We Own This Town, I've found that the biggest blocker for releasing shows is the actual editing of the podcast. This isn't exactly a surprising revelation but it turns out that cleaning up an audio file is a considerable amount of work.

I currently use Audition to perform this task but lately I've been really fascinated with a new type of tool that allows you to simply edit a transcript of your show while simultaneously editing the audio itself.

I started with Descript, a desktop app that allows you to edit both audio and video via transcript and even overlay your own additional audio if you want (i.e. music queues). It's quite nice and works relatively well without too many abrupt edits but does have a pricing plan. You get 3 hours of transcripts free but after that, you'll need to pay $12 per month. Not a bad deal by any means and my experience with the app has been pleasant. They've even got an experimental feature that lets you insert new audio with voice cloning!

More recently, I've been playing around with Edit Eddy, a web based version of the same thing developed by Headliner. The app is currently in beta, so it's entirely free to use. I doubt that will last forever but I'll take what I can get right now! It's certainly a bit less feature rich than Descript (for now) but the basics are all there and seem to be more intuitively executed in terms of UI/UX.

Both seem to be very solid options if you're looking to try your hand at editing some audio with a rather clever new technique; deleting text.