Kent Babin

@kentb

90 Following

250 Followers

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I just donated to Help Me Get A Phone To Keep Creating And Working @ifeoluwafavour

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"If novelists can learn how filmmakers utilize particular camera shots to achieve specific effects, create specific moods, and evoke specific emotions, they have a powerful tool at hand." Great perspective on how to show, not tell. https://www.livewritethrive.com/2025/04/03/the-best-way-to-show-dont-tell-scene-segmenting/?inf_contact_key=ae45938d25b65253aca653c05c6cd40b680f8914173f9191b1c0223e68310bb1

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First attempt at @zora. From S2 E1 of the Accidental Intrigue audio drama. Crime lord Benedict Goh (Singaporean-Chinese) and his consigliere Noah (British) discussing the potential of crypto in 2019. @jpfraneto.eth @tokenizedhuman What do you think of this format? https://zora.co/coin/base:0x7c651a6cd1ce2f87655f011488d7b395f12d61a0?referrer=0xAe9e4e5e911EbC05c2f6d3644FF895934EbED410

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Five chapters of narration complete and there is one feature that would make the process a lot better: The ability to provide semantic instructions to the virtual voice on how to read a particular piece of text, say dialogue. Startled, surprised, angry, for example, or even something more granular like "Said in the same way a person who just receives bad news on a great day". Even better if it would allow you to select the voice that reads the text. One thing this would do is eliminate the need for dialogue tags, which really aren't necessary in audio books if narrated correctly.

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A few chapters in now. I remember getting a piece of sage writing advice a number of years ago: Read your writing aloud. It's the only way you'll come close to understanding how it sounds in a reader's head. I never ended up doing it, but now I see why it's important and can be so helpful. It's a lot easier to judge pacing, flow, and transitions when you hear it. The parts that don't work sound like a wrong note was played in a familiar song.

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This has to be one of the best accounts on here right now. Epic journey. Reminds of a trip some friends and I made in a 1980 Zhiguli 011 from Azerbaijan to Croatia in 2011.

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Trying out Amazon's virtual voice feature for producing audio books. - Choose between American, British, Australian, and American South accents. - Each chapter can have its own voice. - You get a decent level of granular control over pronunciation, pauses, and voice speed. - It will take quite a while to go through the entire book and set all the pauses correctly. The obvious drawback so far is that you don't have much control over intonation and inflection. You can't make character sound more excited or sinister, for example. Combine that with expanding the vocal library and specifying a voice for individual dialogue lines and you have quite a powerful tool. A new audiobook director/producer role will be needed to help writers get the most out of it.

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For Season 2, we decided to do something a bit different. First, we wanted to make it more like an audio drama and less like an audio book. In other words, a TV series without video. Second, @culturevulture joined the crew and brought production skills that allowed us to add a sound engineering component. For the story, it had to be about crypto. There are too many epic stories in the space waiting to be told, so I chose one I was familiar with. Set in 2019 in Southeast Asia, it's a story about drug traffickers and freedom fighters using bitcoin to launder their money. The characters: 🇦🇺 Cicero - An Aussie crypto bro CEO 🇦🇹 Max - An Austrian crypto CTO 🇸🇬 Benedict - Singaporean-Chinese crime lord 🇬🇧 Noah - Benedict's consigliere 🇮🇪 Seamus - Masquerading tourist 🇲🇩 Valeria - Moldovan journalist 🇲🇲 Nang - Shan State rebel leader Not as much travel in this one, but plenty of intrigue! Listen to episode 1 here 👇

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Season 1 takes place in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan - three countries in which I've been fortunate enough to spend some time. Set in 2012, it follows four main characters: 🇿🇦 Gerhardt (Gerry) - A South African industrial espionage agent 🇩🇪 Hans - A German hydroelectric engineer 🇺🇿 Colonel Ivanov - An Uzbek state security service colonel 🇹🇯 Amir - A Tajik oligarch It's part travelogue, part espionage. But that's not all. Karakalpakstani independence? ✅ Rogun dam? ✅ Aral Sea? ✅ Duplicitous German BND agents? ✅ Saunas and vodka? ✅ Bazaars? ✅ Listen to episode 1 👇 https://open.spotify.com/episode/1dN39VgYJaxuO8dNcmG8CM?si=o6ZsXg1aSsq9CTgoUyNsxA&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A3fd6ggUc18Kg8tn2otjBiN

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We're down to crunchtime in @gitcoin GG23! @carboncopy-refi can use every ounce of support in our mission to help on-chain projects make off-chain impact. 🙏

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Three years ago, after making it about 80% of the way through my third novel, I decided to shift gears to a different kind of fiction project. Novels take a long time and I needed something with a quicker turnaround time. That project became an audio drama podcast called Accidental Intrigue. Season 1 - an espionage thriller set in Central Asia - was such a blast to make that we decided to follow it up with a second season. Today, I hit publish on the final two episodes of Season 2 - a crypto thriller set in Southeast Asia during the heady days of 2019. Special shout out to @culturevulture (whom I'll officially introduce in another post) for his superb voice acting and production skills in Season 2. You only have to compare the production quality of the two seasons to understand what a difference it makes having someone who knows what they're doing. If you like fiction and podcasts and crypto, this might be for you! https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/accidental-intrigue/

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Only a couple of days left in @gitcoin GG23! One of the rounds @carboncopy-refi is in is the dApps and Apps round. Aside from using the funds to improve our impact dashboard and dataset, we're really excited about a partnership with @greenpillnetwork Writers Guild to develop and publish Web3 tooling guides for impact projects. There's a lot of standalone documentation out there, but very little that ties it all together. If you're feeling generous, like open-source software, and want to see better Web3 tooling documentation, we'd sincerely appreciate the support! https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/867/128

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Co-authoring is likely the way forward for the relationship between fiction writers and AI. You get to establish your voice and the AI does the things that offer you the most resistance while providing an editor's polish. Thanks, @vgr, for including your process in the post!

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Some great climate projects in Epoch 7! Be sure to allocate if you're a GLM staker!

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Just finished The Residence on Netflix. Really well done. Perhaps dragged out a bit, but delightfully quirky. Favourite random bit was the calligrapher who happened to have an off night. 😂

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Surfacing this for visibility. Excellent analysis by @aviationdoctor.eth, as always.

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Thoughts on this one @aviationdoctor.eth? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/17/at-least-eight-injured-as-delta-plane-flips-upon-arrival-in-toronto-airport

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https://warpcast.com/simondlr/0x72c4efaf

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For the Mavs, the trade is about looking at a future dominated by Wemby and saying, "Luka, as good as he is, ain't it."

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Finished Squid Game S2 last night. At the beginning of E7 (last of this season), I was like "No way they're wrapping this up in a 59-minute episode." Low and behold...

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