I’ve been mucking around in a very rudimentary and pointless way with a few nerdy things recently. Instead of making sourdough and hoarding blogroll, the impeding lockdown v2 has got me futzing with RunwayML and Wav2Lip.
And god forbid posting the results on TikTok!
Why TikTok? I know, right? It’s pointless. I’m too old for it. I don’t get it. I don’t really like most of what I see on it. And I have precisely 0 followers (not even my own kids). But TikTok does have one thing going for it (that none of the other platforms do): the ability to use music freely. And being able to use big tunes might make my crappy hacks appear a little less crappy.
I’m not posting stuff because I want lots of people to see it (yet), but it forces me to finish things (at least to the point where they’re ready to upload in a quiet way). If I don’t force myself to put things somewhere – I just end up with unfinished junk littering my hard drive. So much better to have somewhat finished junk littering the Internet. Right?
By the way if you want to do the lipsync thing it’s not too hard. You just have to not be intimidated by lots of scary looking boxes of code. There’s a really really good piece about how to do lipsync deepfakery over on the Verge that tells you everything I wish I’d known before I spent 2 late nights struggling to do it the hard-er way.