Toward the end, when Pardo wasn’t feeling well, Darrell Hammond would fill in and do such a good impression, that it’s almost impossible to tell when it isn’t really Pardo. After Pardo’s death, Hammond took over the announcing duties full time, but uses his own voice. Everyone agreed that he shouldn’t continue the Pardo impression.
I was thinking it kinda did, but kinda didn’t, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Someone in another post nailed it for me. Whoever made this used all of George’s stand up specials to train the AI on his voice and cadence, so George of course sounded young in his early work and old in the later ones. The AI mixed that together, so you get a voice that’s not quite his younger voice and not quite his older voice either. That made perfect sense to me why it sounds like George, but still a little off.
I’m going to just leave this here…. 🤣
7 hours, 34 minutes, and 3 laughs.
The bit about AI Bill Cosby made me laugh the hardest. “You get all of the Cosby jokes with none of the Cosby rapes!”
See, I disagree. Someone retelling their memory of some of his bits, or your nephew performing at his birthday party would be telling old George Carlin jokes. This was new material and was topical, which I think is cool. It’s hard to know what George would really think about today’s climate, but I can’t imagine it would be too far off from the this.
Was it perfect? No. But if I know what it is going in, I can sit back and just enjoy it for what it is - entertainment.
Y’know, I was a pretty big Carlin fan, I had a few of his albums and even saw him live in concert once. I listened to the whole thing while driving, and I thought this was okay. It’s obviously not George Carlin, but it sounded a lot like him, and I can imagine he would approve of many of the jokes. It wasn’t a laugh-a-minute, but I did get lost in it a couple of times and forget that it wasn’t really him, and I did laugh out loud a few times as well. (The joke about the best comedian for AI being Bill Cosby got me!)
Carlin’s comedy was very topical, which doesn’t always translate to today, so having new, up-to-date Carlin bits are actually cool. I can understand his daughter’s apprehension, but at least people are talking about her dad again, so I would think that’s a good thing.
Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think Kbin/mbin is for me. I signed up for a smaller mbin instance to give it a try. I realized that I would have to manually move all my communities over (which is too many to do), and that some of the ones I follow and are active in aren’t federated with mbin.
Yeah, I definitely understand, which is why I moved off of lemmy.world. But the other mbin instances are really small in terms of members, so that makes me nervous that they aren’t going to be around long term. I get it, there’s no guarantee with any instance, but one that has a miniscule number of users makes me gun shy.
Okay, I’ll give it a few and try again.
Gotcha. I’m not a huge fan of PWAs when it comes to Lemmy/kbin/mbin, but I’m willing to give it a try.
Yes, sorry, I didn’t realize that when I replied. Unfortunately I’m on iOS, and Interstellar is only for Android/Linux right now.
I just tried signing up at fedia.io, and I got the response “429 Too Many Requests”. It doesn’t inspire confidence that I can’t sign up for the largest and most popular (and represented in the screenshot above) instance.
Could you be more specific about which ones? I tried to log in to fedia.io in Voyager, and it wouldn’t connect.
A tangle of cables? I’ll feel right at home! …and right at work! 🤣
The big question…
Do any of the apps work with it? I’m using Voyager right now, and this is a dealbreaker for me if it doesn’t. (I’m assuming the answer is no, but I thought I would ask.)
I still use Gmail, Gcal, and Google Drive, but when they killed GReader is the closest I’ve ever come to dumping all things Google. In the end it was just too much hassle to move everything, let everyone know my new email, etc., but I’m still not over it.
That said, it’s not free, but I’ve been on NewsBlur since the GReader shutdown, and that’s been 10 years now I think. It’s very similar in use to GReader, and has got a lot of great features and customization options. It’s also run by one very active dev who keeps it updated, fixes anything that breaks, and answers questions on the forums. So I’m supporting an independent developer and not a company. It’s well worth the cost to me, and I use it multiple times a day every day.