Random Ramble

Transcript

Hello and good morning, Ocleo. Ah, it's been a little bit since the last Random Ramble, so I thought I would make one. I also thought I would just, like, stop numbering them, because I feel like some people, they might see the numbers and feel like they have to listen to them in order, but there is no logical sequence of events to these things at all.

So it really shouldn't matter if you listen to only one of them, or if you listen to every single one backwards. Yeah, I don't think it makes a difference. And it might a little bit as, you know, as time goes on and life changes.

Some things that I said in the past might not be true or relevant, or if I'm, like, talking about something that I'm going to do, I've either given up or already done it. But aside from that, um. ..

I don't know, I don't want to intimidate people by seeing, like, Random Ramble 865, and they'll be like, Wow, let's unfollow this guy and move on to somebody else on the homepage. Please don't do that. But, unlike the past ones, I was a bit dummy-dumb and seemed to have forgotten to take any notes on, like, what to talk about.

So I'm hoping that, cough-cough, I'm hoping that some people have left. .. left little comments in the past ones that I can kind of talk about.

A lot of people, this is going to sound ugly. Oh my god, I'm trying to adjust my, uh, my microphone without it falling down. I gotta get better about reading product specifications on Amazon before I buy shit.

Because I bought this big, fancy microphone arm to hold it up, and then, uh, lo and behold, my microphone sits ex—it's so heavy, it sits exactly at the weight limit. So if I mess with it too much, it just hits the ground. And it's really annoying.

I think that's okay. How does that look volume-wise? Is that just—okay.

Okay, as soon as I said that I think that's okay, the whole thing just, like, fell over again. I just, like, spat out 18 ums and no cohesive sentence right there, so I erased that and tried again. But one thing a lot of people seem to comment is that they love how conversational these little random rambles are, which, I don't know, I think that's part of the point, right?

I make stuff slower than— and I feel like I've mentioned this in every single audio— audio—every single random ramble like this. So sorry if you hear it again, but you're going to, because maybe you haven't listened to them all. But I make content a lot slower than some people.

I see people spitting things out, like, every single week, and I try to stick to once a month, although the most recent audio is kind of slowing me down because I'm in a little over my head with this one, but I think it'll be good. I think it'll be worth it in the end. God, I hope.

Yeah, so this is like a nice little way to break it up, and I don't know. I always enjoy following creators that I feel like aren't just some avatar on a picture that posts things once in a blue moon, and then, alright, I guess that was nice, but, like, was it? Which, oh, man.

The urge to rant about AI again. Maybe I should. I guess, I don't know.

I've seen a few people on TikTok, which, by the way, I'm sure, come on, you've got TikTok, right? Everybody's got a fucking TikTok, don't lie to me. So you should go follow me, and you should go follow Ocleo themselves, because we each have TikToks, and Ocleo makes much better things on there than I do.

But I try to be more active on there. I've seen people on TikTok post, like, uh-huh, I'm your virtual AI, I don't know, insert literally whatever the fuck you want, anywhere from Catboy to Vampire to Tamagotchi, and then they just sit there and, like, bounce in front of their camera. Like, what? Huh? I just, I don't get, I guess I don't get the gimmick.

Because an AI can do that, right? Like, what's the point of, use the AI to help you be more productive and creative and free up your time? Why are you pretending to be some bad VTuber AI, and why do people like that? Like, maybe once or twice, you know, I don't know if you guys have seen the, God, it killed me, but that VTuber concert that went super viral on TikTok, kind of as a joke, because everyone was like, I cannot believe people actually paid money for this.

But it was just, yeah, it was just some little animated guy bobbing around the screen. I don't get it. Am I too old? Is this it? Have I finally started, like, gazing at the younger generation with confusion? Like, I don't know, always happens.

Because, like, that's what AI can do, right? That's even what they're admitting. They're like, yeah, haha, I'm your little AI Tamagotchi, just bouncing here in front of the screen, just like the computer-generated one.

I just don't get it. I, oh well. If a computer can do it better than you, then how are they still doing it? Whatever.

Whatever, whatever. My point is, I don't want to be that. And so I guess something that AI won't ever really have is legitimate emotions and feelings and kind of the irrationality of humankind.

So I'm here to give that to you with a big, healthy spoonful in every random ramble. And you'll probably leave feeling confused, maybe smiling, and maybe just hit the unfollow button as soon as you see it. Doesn't matter.

It does matter. Don't do that, please. But, anyways.

Let's see what you guys have said on the last one. Can you please explain macros, Queen of Crows? Because you want to understand those.

Yes, I can. Kind of. Part of what makes this so hard whenever I make a recording explaining something is that I don't know how much people do know.

And I'm worried about always over-explaining and, like, mansplaining to shit versus explaining too little and just leaving you more confused than you started. Because, like, a macro itself. ..

I'm not a computer programmer or anything, so I just understand what people have told me. But it's just, like, imagine you're on your computer playing a video game or something, right? And, uh, I don't know, maybe you walk forward three steps by pressing W three times, turn around by.

.. maybe there's a button that turns you around, pressing O, and then you crouch with CTRL, right? Imagine you just wanted to do that, except do that with a single button.

You could make a macro that, like, you just press the macro button, which you can make whatever you want, in theory, and it'll do that for you instantly. It'll press W three times, O, and then CTRL, like, immediately. So the point of a macro in Audacity, which is what I use to edit my audios for being free and really powerful for being a free tool, is if you have a series of things that you want to do, but you don't want to have to go through the steps of doing them every single time.

Like, for me, let me see what my macro is right here. Tools. So it's under the Tools button.

You have, like, macros where you can create them and edit them and all that stuff. Oh, I can't actually do it while it's paused. Or while it's playing.

Oh, it's paused. That's the whole point. So let me pause this really quick and see what my macro actually is.

Okay, looking at it for, like, three seconds, I think I got most of it. It's, like, a limiter and then a noise gate. Oh, God, I already forgot.

Normalize, somewhere in there. Compressor, and then noise gate again. So that's all I do is just I click Apply.

I select however much of my audio I want to use it for. And then I click Apply Macro. And it does, it, like, applies those five filters in that order for me with just the one click.

And I just have to watch it load. So instead of me going through and normalizing the whole audio, applying a noise gate so that it cuts out all the, like, bits below a certain volume, applying the compressor to try to even out the volume. I have a horrible confession.

I actually don't know what the point of the normalizer is. Every time I use it, it just seems like it brings the loudest volume up to zero decibels. And that's it.

And compressor's much more useful because it tries to balance out all the audios, although it's not great. And sometimes, like, I will be listening back to it again and midway through a sentence, it'll decide that was loud, even though it wasn't, and just cut the volume out of that completely. And I have to, uh, I have to edit that myself quite a lot because I want to be heard in my own audios.

Yeah. Um, so that's the idea behind a macro. They're kind of funky.

You'll have to tinker around with it a little bit. But it's basically as if you just selected your chunk of audio and then went through the filters and chose one filter, and then went through your filters again and chose another one, and then went through your filters again and chose another one. Honestly, I should probably do this for things like, uh, the big scary demon voice that I use.

I should just have a macro for that because I use the same four effects, or three? Three effects? I think it's just three effects every single time.

So it'd be much easier to do it with one button instead of three. But yeah, that's the idea behind a macro. And it's like, uh, I don't know, I guess, speaking of AI, because I think that's just going to be the topic of the year, um, that's some kind of thing that I feel like it could really help with.

And some people are working on it. They're just not great tools right now, and none of them are free. But just, like, cleaning up audio and shit.

Instead of me using this little macro and then listening to it like, oh, yeah, I probably shouldn't have done it on this volume, or this audio section, because the volume's all funky. And AI would actually, like, be able to detect that. God, I can't speak.

Detect that for me, and adjust the macro itself based on that. And there's some softwares out there that kind of do it. I know Clio's talked to me and, like, its creators about it a little bit.

But I think it's too bad. I think people are really focusing AI attempts elsewhere instead of, I guess, helping creativity. Because, like, something like that, if I didn't have to clean up my audios every time, that would save me, like, two, three hours every single audio.

It would be so much nicer. And it's a boring bit. It's not like the writing, which I enjoy doing.

It's just, like, listening to that. Okay, my voice got a little squeaky there. There was a breath here.

Make it sound better. That'd be much nicer. Let's see, what else we got here? I don't have a lot of time, because something else you should go check out.

I am gonna go stream in about half an hour on Twitch, which, if you know what Twitch is, you should definitely go and follow me. And if you don't know what Twitch is, you should look it up. It's not my same username, though.

It's, like, my safe for work username. DayfallVA. Like, you know, day, like, instead of night, it's daytime.

And then instead of sanding up, it's falling down. Or fall, the weather. The weather, Jesus.

The season. But if you scroll down a little bit, I posted a link to it in the poll, which I definitely got the times wrong for. I am not in GMT time zone, so I did not end up going with what people voted for, because I realized afterwards that the times I listed were just wrong and would have worked for me if it was in my time zone, but it wasn't.

Anyways, yeah, I mostly stream Vampire the Masquerade text-based games, so you're just listening to me talk, which, if you're here, I have to assume you like to some extent. And maybe you want more of that, so you can go check that out, or. ..

What am I saying? It's in my link tree. Fucking click my links.

Every creator's got them. Don't pretend like they don't exist. We want you to find all our stuff.

Like, the one person, might be a bot on YouTube, that was like, Have you heard of Ocleo? To which I think I literally replied, Hey, if you look at my video, you'll see their logo down in the corner, but thanks. Oh dear, I hope it wasn't too passive-aggressive.

Love how conversational this is. You love my random ramble. Thank you, Sammy.

But yeah, if you guys want to talk with me in real time and watch me struggle with sentences, then definitely come watch me on Twitch. I try to do it the same time, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Monday's like a variety, though.

Today I'm going to stream Risk of Rain 2, because I have a craving for that game. But Wednesdays and Fridays, I'll try to keep to one solid game. So right now it's Night Road.

I also have to comment. .. Oh, I also have to.

.. God, let me read this again. I have to also second that one commenter.

Oh, I would love to be a part of your D&D campaign. Yeah, thank you, guys. It's been actually probably a few years since I last DMed a campaign.

I like to think I've learned a lot, though, and I've gotten a lot better. Love listening to you talk. You seem so much fun to hang out with.

Thank you. All the intricacies of your editing process. It's long and grueling.

I don't know. I don't really know how to get much more into depth with what I do for editing. I guess I just go through and try to make it sound as clean as possible, and that usually takes the longest in terms of editing.

Like I said, it probably takes me like two, three hours, every single audio. I want to say however long the finished recording is for me to clean up the audio, like take away all the little clicks, which I don't do that with these random rambles because, I don't know, they're supposed to be fast and fun, and the moment I start cleaning up an audio, it starts taking away the fun a little bit. But I'm sure you hear some of the clicks and some of the breaths between my words and stuff like that, or long pauses, awkward ums, stuff like that.

I always try to take that all out. But that takes me like however long the finished recording is. It will usually take me like five or six times that duration.

So if I have a one minute audio, it'll take me five or six minutes to clean it up and make it sound better in the end. Six might be an exaggeration, maybe like three to five times. That's like the majority of it, and then after that I just try to think of whatever sound effects match the image that I have going in my mind, because whenever I create an audio, I think I'm a visual person, maybe, I don't know.

To me it seems like it when I create audios, because I always have kind of a, like an idea in my head of what I'm seeing and what I should be hearing because of what I'm seeing, whether that's just background noises or if something's happening at a certain time, like in the night audio, when he's taking off his armor, I was trying to picture, I think I mentioned this last time, but I tried to picture like okay, this would be like him removing a piece, right, and then since he's on a horse, it'll take like this long to fall and hit the ground, okay. That timing was alright, stuff like that. And then I usually go over the top and start adding background music and shit like that, just because I could, I guess.

The Curse of Strahd is so dense. Yeah, I am like halfway through the book now. It is dense.

When I saw that it was 200 pages, I thought oh, easy peasy, I'll finish this in like a month, be ready to DM it right away. But it is, it is a chonky fucking book and I think when I do DM it, I will have to like be reading religiously before each game session just because there's so much information like tightly packed in there. But I've been having so much fun with it that I think I'm like partially tempted to put up a new audio poll because back on Patreon, what I used to do was after every three audios, because you know I release audios in like a free one, a $5 one, and a $10 one, kind of like in groups of three like that.

And then I go back to the free. By the third, I would release a poll for what the next three ones should be. And I don't know if I should start that again here on Oakleo or not because I, I guess I want to do certain things and sometimes, I never put up an option for an audio that I wouldn't want to make but sometimes there's audios that I want to make more than others.

And when I see that one's not winning, I'm like fuck, all right, I gotta put that like at the top of the list next time or something. But I'm half tempted to make a poll and the only like five or six options, but each option only reads vampire, vampire, vampire, vampire. I, I have this grand idea that right now is literally just an idea in my mind of planning out like an entire audio series story ahead of time.

Like an entire, not just like a bit of it, I don't know. With Space Boys, I plan out a few episodes at a time or in advance and I have like general ideas of the world, but I don't have a complete story plot arc, everything planned out. But I think it'd be fun to really do that and like totally plan out from start to finish before I even start making it a whole audio series and I'm tempted to make it be a vampire story.

But I'm also tempted to have a little mini series of uh, Count Strahd Von Zarovich from The Curse of Strahd as his own little audio series because I don't know. Some people seem to like the bad Transylvanian accent I do when I read some of the vampires in Vampire the Masquerade and having, I, if it's Strahd, he has to have a bad Transylvanian accent. Um, but it could be fun.

I don't think I've done a medieval vampire audio before. I think I do like three of them. Yeah, they are pretty good characters.

They're very interesting. I think every character is very interesting. Wow.

I'm just thinking about streaming. That's all I can do. I'm already losing sleep to Fallout New Vegas.

I, I think Fallout New Vegas was actually one of the only Fallouts I ever really played and I didn't get very far into it because I never owned it. It was like a game that one of my friends had and so I would play it when we were together or I'd watch them play it but I never played it myself. I think the first time I ever played a Bethesda game was Skyrim which I pre-ordered and played the shit out of and I can't stand it anymore.

Not that it's a bad game. I just played it so much that I don't know. I mentally can't handle it.

I see that opening cutscene and I'm like alright that's enough Skyrim for today. You don't need to start playing Modern Warfare again. Oh.

I might have to stop with playing Warzone. I've been playing a lot of Ranked but most of the times that I can play are times that my friends cannot unless it's on the weekend and solo queuing in Ranked just kind of sucks and I tend to get people I don't know what it is maybe it's when I'm playing I tend to get people from East Asia and so none of us can really communicate well with each other and there's just one of the three people sometimes it's me ends up screaming, yelling, and spam-pinging something and then we end up all dying and I get like three points at the end or something like that. It's not a great grind.

Although it is kind of fun that they put in content for the boys and running around using Homelander's laser vision is kind of fun. I haven't seen the most recent season of The Boys but that was a show that I enjoyed for a bit. When I wrote The Demon at College Bar did I write seven roommates? So when I first wrote The Demon at College like my very first audio ever I did not have the roommates planned out and I think actually I think I said five roommates or six roommates it was actually a reference to myself which is kind of funny because I think when I made that I had just finished living in it was a horrible situation a three bedroom apartment with me and five other guys and it was always crowded and I'm pretty sure there's some blood feud still going on from just how closely we all had to live.

But when I remade the College Bar Demon audio because when I first made it I don't know, it was my first audio ever I didn't know what I was doing it sounded not so good it was on my old microphone without a soundproof booth and everything it was just at my desk. Yeah, so I remade it and when I did that then I purposefully changed the number of roommates to match how many there were in the Welcome to Hell audio which, thinking about it again I actually, I might have changed how many there are because that's the audio that I'm remaking now for the next release. I think I changed how many there are this time so that doesn't match up anymore unless I'm misremembering.

Oh well. Axe is called Lynx in the UK. You know, I went and looked at their website and I was kind of like underwhelmed.

I think younger me is like remembering Axe being cooler when I was a kid because, or maybe they just totally changed their branding which is also completely possible. It's been like, what, 10, 15 years? I don't know, long time.

But they just didn't look appealing anymore.