Author: TheSmithy

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon – Playing with reality

TheSmithy

Written by Reed Berkowitz

QAnon has often been compared to ARGs and LARPs and rightly so. It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards. It has a game-like feel to it that is evident to anyone who has ever played an ARG, online role-play (RP) or LARP before. The similarities are so striking that it has often been referred to as a LARP or ARG. However this beast is very very different from a game.

It is the differences that shed the light on how QAnon works and many of them are hard to see if you’re not involved in game development. QAnon is like the reflection of a game in a mirror, it looks just like one, but it is inverted.

https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5

A deep-learning text-to-speech tool

TheSmithy

https://15.ai/

It is really amazing!

From the website:

A deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters. The voices are generated in real time using multiple audio synthesis algorithms and customized neural networks trained on very little available data. This project demonstrates not only a significant reduction in the amount of audio required to realistically clone voices while retaining their affective prosodies, but also the feasibility of an on-demand, stable, and autonomously-improving speech synthesis application that aims to mimic a voice of limited availability. As of January 2021, this current iteration of the algorithm (v11.2.x) is the most cutting-edge in the fields of voice cloning and speech synthesis.