a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
14:26 – : I’m going to barcamplondon xiii next week. I went to number 3 in 2007 and number 10 in 2014. There’s an arithmetical gag in there somewhere.
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
15:52 – : Good lord! It’s Friday afternoon again.
12:58 – OK. I’m seeing many places where this needs saying.: Many things can be true at the same time.
Even things that you have always thought were mutually exclusive.
I think the work for us to do now involves making spaces (within and between ourselves) in which all the overlapping, layered narratives can live, rather than trying to find one unifying story for us all to get behind.
It’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not necessarily how we were raised, or how we’ve lived for most of our lives, or even how we’d like it to be.
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
I’m reminded that it’s now eight years since I wrote this song:
At that point, it was easy for some to say that we didn’t know what was coming. I think it’s less easy now. Even so, the temptation remains to think that these men don’t really mean to implement the things they’ve talked about in election campaigns, that to do so would be crazy. But we live in crazy times alongside crazy people and the line between crazy and sane isn’t as clear cut as we’d wish in any of us. Neither is it as straightforward to diagnose in others as seeing whether a person cast their ballot the way we agree with or not.
I updated this song a little when I released it as part of “Half A Pound Of Monkeybread” – in particular, I wanted to point at fascism where others saw bufoonery. If more bufoonery is all we get, I’ll be very glad to be proved wrong.
I’ll blog about this properly when I’ve got my head around it a bit more.
Basically, I took a bunch of Tuttle-related videos and documents and fed them to Google’s NotebookLM – one of the standard outputs from that is an “Audio Overview” examples of which you may have heard elsewhere – they take the form of a “deep dive” podcast between a man and a woman, all artificially generated.
I followed the instructions on this video to make avatars of each of the speakers and animate them with lip synching.
I added the following prompt when generating the original audio: “Imagine it’s 17 years after the founding of the Tuttle Club. Target an audience who knows of Lloyd, but isn’t aware of Tuttle or his contribution to it.”
There’s another 14 minutes of audio, but I only had the patience to do the avatars for the first 50 seconds.
Older viewers/readers may be familiar with this story, but I don’t think I’ve ever told it while actually doing the thing that I was talking about in the story!
Others will have seen the “finished product” but not necessarily see how it emerges.
This is in the “extended voicemail” format where the narrative wiggles around as much as the lines I’m drawing 🙂
I dug into an old backup drive at the weekend and found this. I’ve been looking for it for ages.
It’s the very first piece of video that I made and shared via the internet. This was August 2005, 8 months after I’d started podcasting in a similarly impulsive, unplanned and amateurish way (three adjectives that have defined my career ever since!)
We’d heard of YouTube by this time, but I don’t think it was available in the UK so this was originally at libsyn.com where I was hosting my podcasts (audio blogs) – I can see I used a thumbnail of me gurning in the original blog post that linked to it.
Within a couple of months I had my first (unpaid) promotional vlog series for a line of men’s grooming products. So yes, I happily describe myself as an (if not ‘the’!) OG beauty vlogger.
I finally joined YouTube in March 2006, by which time I was regularly collaborating with Debbie Davies on our (too) short-lived series “All This And Brains Too” so my first video on YT was “Desperately Seeking Harvey”.
I’ve made a playlist of all the vlogging and vlog-like content I’ve got. I find it annoying that I can’t seem to edit the metadata so that things will show up in the order they were created rather than when they were uploaded. But that might just be me being old.
If you’re silly enough to try bingeing that vlog playlist, do let me know how far you got before your brain melted.
I’m trudging across the gap between my aspiration and my ability to fulfil it. Too much b-roll, not enough meat. Never mind. I’ve managed to get the red nose treatment on the thumbnail here.
It’s all helping me to see what I need to work on more. And in the meantime, I’m lucky enough to have work work to do. More fun again soon.
Stating the obvious today.
I got sidetracked today, thinking about how to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.
Another day, another videoblog.
I went up to London for a couple of meetings and remembered how tiring it can be to just exist sometimes. It was nice though to hang around the West End without the tension I used to feel that I ought to be somewhere else doing something else.
Fun to see my subscriber count going up on YouTube after a long flat line for so long. I’m making a determined effort not to look at any other stats though, just post these things and get on with life.
“I don’t know if this will be a ‘daily vlog’ or a ‘daily vlog except when it isn’t'”
“I don’t know what I’m talking about”
Classic Davis Vlogging
Something something, whatever it takes to get me working out loud again.
The convention will be that the date on these will be the day they get published, but they may contain footage shot at any time in the past, present or even the future. I think.
Perfect Path 