Warning: You will regret playing this audio.
Okay. Context.
For those of you who know what TheDailyFlow is actually about, or have read Flux-Pt.1, generating audio out of text is not very simple. Last Tuesday, Descript upgraded Overdub. The second voice letter was supposed to be released by Wednesday, but I thought I’ll use Overdub to generate the audio for it. I spent an entire hour reading Murakami’s Norwegian Wood to my Mac, training the voice model. And Overdub delivered with surprisingly good quality.
However, the free edition has a limited 1000 word vocabulary with it can generate, based on the training input. Which means that if there is a new word in the text being used to synthesise audio, you either pay them (out of question) or they generate gibberish.
Literally. For any word it does not recognise, Overdub says the words- Jibber Jabber.
Listen to the first audio output, which is 80% Jibber Jabber. I have also added the older transcript below- an older draft of the final article. You will most certainly need it to keep your head above the chaos. Do share your comments.
You have been warned.
You wanna make an omelette, you’ve gotta break some eggs.
Fight Club (1998), Underground novel turn cult movie
Can’t make an omelette… without killing a few people.
Neverwhere (1996), BBC TV series turn bestseller novel
It’s amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelette.
Issawi’s Laws of Social Motion (1973), obscure book by a cynical Middle East historian
The End
I will start this piece by writing backwards in time, because some stories begin when the world ends. 2018. Avengers: Infinity War
So, fun fact: a big purple dude kills Loki right in the beginning of the movie. We were very surprised and very disappointed.
Thanos snaps the infinity gauntlet and killed every interesting character in the MCU, suspiciously sparing the original six and a space Raccoon. In hindsight, after the healing effects of Endgame, it’s easier to joke about it. But back then, watching the Avengers lose for the first time really messed up our day. Instead of one knockout punch, Thanos picked apart the entire MCU. After beating everyone to pulp across planets, he woke us up from the blur of superhero steroid blockbuster train that had been running for six years. From 2012 to 2018, we only remember Black Panther (Ryan Coogler remakes Baahubali in African) and Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi makes a movie instead of printing pamphlets). But how did Earth’s mightiest heroes become so boring that we had to turn most of them into dust?
The Beginning
After exiling Loki, the Avengers took a year off trying to figure out what to do with so much success and so many possibilities, before giving us a conservative Iron Man 3, the only MCU movie to not advance the Infinity Saga. Then another skippable Thor movie came about. Looking back, The Dark World could have been a Loki movie about his redemption, but the MCU was still figuring itself out. Next year, the Russo brothers did something very interesting.
Varun Dhawan was hired as the voice artist for Captain America.
My bad. That happened later, in Civil War.
But before that, in Winter Soldier, we saw character arcs being advanced. This was unforeseen. In an industry where Johnny Depp, Dwayne Johnson Robert Downey Jr and Salman Khan played the same role to death, the Avengers started evolving. Banner and Natasha fell in love. Tony Stark came back from retirement. Steve Rogers went rogue for good. Hawkeye started a family. Then we started getting new Avengers. We got a Chris Pratt rendition of a broke Tony Stark with poor engineering skills, a Spiderman reboot with a hot Aunt May and Paul Rudd’s first break since marrying Phoebe in Friends Season 10. Hell, it even got to a point where we started expecting a Sherlock Holmes multiverse inside the MCU.
The Avengers were growing up and so were we. We went to college, shifted cities, broke our hearts, moved from Facebook to Instagram, got high, found new music, started making money and stopped picking mom’s phone calls. The world was complex and we moved on from the idea of one career, one love, one God and one Super Villain. With free 4G, Loki did not matter anymore. Sorcery failed in the face Snapchat filters. Back in 2012, mischief could end New York City. Now catastrophe was just a notification away. Everyday a new right winger, everyday a new lynching, everyday a new Avenger. We wanted a cluster-fuck of superheroes. The only world where that is possible is a world that’s always on fire. Our dopamine addiction turned into crippling anxiety. Is this what freedom looks like? Should we have stayed back in school? Where’s Thor?
The Middle
Much like Odin’s palace, Loki’s brief reign over Asgard is built on a foundation of lies, death and propaganda. Much like Thor (and Matt Damon), we are disappointed but not surprised. Then Loki falls for thirty minutes… watches Mjolnir break in Norway… Loki arrives at Sakaar- cosmic wasteland, home to all things loved and unloved. He thrives in this dumpster. He charms his way into power amidst chaos, gets cocky, gets captured, gets free, creates even more chaos and betrays Thor again. Much like Thor, we are disappointed but not surprised. However, we see a bit of heartbreak in Loki’s eyes when Thor expresses his indifference towards him, leading to a foiled betrayal. We realise that Loki’s always been the younger baby brother; breaking precious glassware just to get attention from his stronger, older sibling. Loki wants love. He became a cruel, lying God because he didn’t know how else to get it from Thor and from the people of Asgard. So many broken eggs, yet no decent omelette.
Round and round in circles we go. See Loki, life is about... It's about growth, it's about change, but you seem to just want to stay the same. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you'll always be the God of Mischief, but you could be more.
Taika Waititi is a genius. He ends up making a movie about revolution disguised as family drama. On Sakaar, the Grandmaster keeps his subjects poor and imprisoned, but refrains from calling them slaves. Once the people are armed, the revolution spreads like wildfire from the wasteland to the Golden Asgard. As much the movie is about Thor getting a makeover, the nuance lies in Loki’s redemption. When he sees Korg (played by Waititi himself), he drops his ambitions of taking the throne at Sakaar and decides to carry the revolution to Asgard. The golden kingdom was built on lies perpetuated across epochs. By setting Asgard ablaze, Loki sets himself free from the lies of his father.
Post Credits:
The Avengers travel back in time, mess up and Loki retrieves the Tesseract. We were very surprised but not disappointed. Loki was being walked away, chained and muzzled. Then… he escapes.
Part 3, coming up soon.
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