Category Archives: YouTube
Who’s buying all this booze?
ChatGPT: Advanced Voice
There are now nine Voice options in the ChatGPT app. Each one has a different tone, style and… “personality.” (I went with Sol) It also has something called “speech-to-speech capabilities.” This means that it can pick up on tone changes, “allowing for a more natural, human-like conversation and faster interrupting.”
I’m not sure about “Advanced Voice.” If you want it to sound more like yourself then you can ask it to adopt a specific accent. It won’t be able to directly mimic your voice but it can sound like it’s from your neck of the woods. I don’t think so. If I want to hear the lilting sounds of Southeast Missouri, I’ll talk to Barb.
“It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman”
Sam Elliot has one of those instantly recognizable voices. Up there with Morgan Freeman, james Earl Jones, Charlton Heston, just to name a few. (Good list of 20)
“Are we really going down that same broken fucking road?”
I love that they let him say “fucking.” Everybody says fuck. It’s a perfectly good word and, sometimes, the only word that fits.
Apple Watch: First Impressions
THIS IS NOT A REVIEW OF THE APPLE WATCH. Just some stream-of-consciousness first impressions. Runs just over 8 minutes. One thought to get you started: the watch already knows much more about me than I know about it and that will always be the case.
Apple Watch: Protecting my hearing
Monster
Guilty Pleasure #237: Drunk Karens cuffed and arrested
After paying for the ad-free YouTube I found myself watching more videos…and more different types of videos. I quickly discovered a fondness (addiction?) for videos I came to think of as “guilty pleasures.”
Early on it was videos of third-world truck drivers crawling along mountain roads or muddy jungle trails. Next came high-speed chases captured on police dash cams. Which led me to videos of assholes being dragged off commercial flights (necessitating all passengers de-planing). From there it was a shot hop to body-cam video of “sovereign citizens” refusing to provide ID when stopped by police or troopers. The guiltiest pleasure of all is from police body-cams of officers dealing with spoiled, entitled, drunk white women. I’ve seen the term “Karen Cam” used to describe these.
Several take-aways from these videos: a) most police offers/deputies/troopers have a vast reservoir of patience. (Cursed, spat on, kicked and scratched) b) it is insanely difficult to handcuff someone who is resisting. Even for half a dozen big strong officers, it’s all they can do to get the woman’s hands cuffed behind her back… her legs hobbled… then put her in the police vehicle. Where she kicks and screams all the way to jail.
No idea why I find these videos so… addictive. Perhaps it’s as simple as seeing these spoiled, never-told-no princesses suffering a consequence. And it pleases me to know these humiliating videos are out there for the world to see.
Authentic. Real. Not weird.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and his daughter Hope at the Minnesota State Fair.
Don’t know who produced this. Don’t know if it was the Harris-Walz campaign (doesn’t look like it to me). What I do know is it didn’t come across as a slick political ad. Whoever is doing the social media stuff for the campaign knows what they’re doing. But this really works because these are two, real, normal people…not mouthing talking points (and looking creepy). NO talking points. Just father and daughter at the state fair.
Now, let’s take a look at how legacy media (WRAL TV in Raleigh, North Carolina) covered Governor Walz and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper when they stopped by Cook Out for milkshakes.
Compare that with the same “event” as it appeared on Tim Walz’ YouTube channel. See how WRAL sucked all the life, all the humanity out of the moment. Why would you ever talk to a local reporter when someone with an iPhone can do this so much better.
Drag queen helping conservatives with makeup
Landon Reid describes himself as “Artist, Oddball, Dork, Decorator, Costume designer, reaching across the aisle to help conservatives re-create their favorite makeup looks.” (Can you say “niche”?)
As far as I know I am not personally acquainted with any drag queens. But based on what I’ve seen in films, TV and on YouTube, nobody does bitchy-snarky satire better.
While it’s unlikely Marjorie Taylor Green will ever see the video above, it was viewed 192,000 times in three weeks. Mr. Reid has also re-created the makeup look of Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Rudy Giuliani and many others. (Side note: he seems to be really good at doing makeup).