Show HN: Defcon and HN, the only two audiences I might find

Oh, I guess I should have linked the reason I mention the limited target audience that will get the "punchlines", especially for those who don't feel like watching a video or listening to a 50+ year old white nerd's attempt at producing a "rap" diss track. Here's the lyrics I've been sitting on for a couoke of years trying to make this.

https://killsignal.net/El_User/full_lyrics.md

Incredible flow.

The captions are constantly lagging behind the audio and parts of them seem to be missing or corrupted.

apologies I answered the three of you all in this one reply. Hope it's of enough interest and easy enough to discern if something is not what you asked.*

OK, really? Y'all dig it; that's really cool. It is my first foray into creating something rap-adjacent (if you dont count the AI version mtlsnk discovered, and that was two years ago. I wrote the lyrics longer ago than that, slowly adding to them as new rhymes would come into my head. I really wanted it to exist but I don't have a typical voice you'd associate with rap (as you can hear even in this track's vocals.. Even with all the digitala help making it sound like I know what Im doing, the tone and tibre of my voice remain very much not a rap voice.) Oh and thanks for calling out a line that had you rolling; that's one o f my favorites. The bit about Hans Reiser might be a little risky, but very few people are going to have all the pieces to know what that;s (morbidly) funny as a diss.

I have basely zero natural flow really, and I was too self-conscious for many many takes to have anything worth keeping. That "incredible flow" you heard, zahlman, is the result of tedious manual slicing and moving and chopping of syllables in an old copy of Audobe Audition and to a lesser extent Audacity. And VocAlign is your friend. (I've seriously come to doubt that any recordewd rapper is as tight and precise as it sounds on the album and suspcet VocALign or something like it is the Auto-Tune (well, the other auto-tune, since they do use auto-tune too) of Hip Hop production.) I do most instrumental sequencing in an even older copy of Sony ACID Pro, but I'll have to put a little time and effort into listing the VSTs used if you're interested in that.

I'm actually working on documenting more of that production stuff that because the handful of people in the real world who have heard it aren't really familliar with a lot of the terms, but have told me that can tell that someone is geetting insulted and likely outclassed and they just really liked the track regardless. Amazing.

I'm curious, was I right that I could find enough folks who understand at least the surface "battle rap" style punch lines, or are you guys just saying you like the song? This is very, very different than anything I've made before.

Yeah I'm stil working on the subtitles. Subtitles are a solved problem, right? Well, not when you want to display something like /etc/passwd (and many such things) it becomes a pain.. The funny thing is that the main purpose in making a video was to maks e Lyric videom but that ended up the last thing I did insofar as editing the video, and it doesn't work right. I was tired from being up for two days trying to finish it.

I'm finishing up the lyric aligner I made for this video (which is why it's missing a section and starts to lag. But I was soo tired of editing and I wanted people to hear it so I took a break and upploaded it anyway I digress.) It let's you have a spoken lyric sheet for the aligner (whisper and stable_ts) to listen for, where you can put words in their phonetic spellings like you would for TTS, but the another lyrid sheet for presentation spellings that will be used in the subtitles. This was necessary due to all of the technical terms and acronyms that may not be pronounced in an expected way by the aligner tools. It zips (interleaves) the two together and creates a yaml file for hand editing tweaks suchas subtitle effects, then it generates the proper .ass file for that. I'll push the lyric aligner up to the repo when it's working 100%.

Thank you for the kind words. As I said, this is very different from what I've done before. A buddy and I put out a post-punk/new wave album in 2007 under the nema The Detached. It's free on the same site. Mostly we were doing pastiche of TubeWay Army, Devo, etc. You can find all of those tracks at https://killsignal.net/thedetached/ There's a couple of tracks the other half of the detached did not want to do, so they're solo efforts, like https://killsignal.net/thedetached/3.scottvr-every_day_I%20d...

Im on vocals, keys and occasional guitar. Dave Griggs played bass and guitar. Drums were all on my laptop.

Oh and I guess I released a video for an unfinished (sensing a theme?) cover of Black Sabbath's "Changes" you might enjoy, if you're info horror and such. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btgKG0tWxg This is a different side of my limited vocal range and stylings. :-)

Rap is new to me; to get it to sound good takes surgery in a DAW slicing, moving, shifting, quantizing, etc. Even my Voice Live Rack can't make me sound like a rapper. Which is why the song maybe sounds more in the direction of 90's industrical club music (Front 242, Ogre from SkinnyPuppy, a lot of those guys were essentially "spoken word to rhythm, which one might call "rapping". Even if "El User" succeeds as "rap", I think we can all agree it is not so much "hip hop".

I'm so grateful you guys listened to it and enjoyed it. I just wanted a vehicle for the lyrics (which might be deeper or more layered than the nerd humor allows people to see. I don't know, which is why I wanted out in the world. I will get back to work on the multiple aligner tool and get the video perfect soon, and I'll let y'all know.. Oh also discoveref that the very last line, "#!bash" accidentlaly was elided from the final mix, so Ill have to tack that back on and make it not oend so abruptly.

Again thanks a lot for the feedback.

--Scott "UID Zer0" (I don't realy use that name; I just made up the DJ Defrag and UI Zero duo because I don't of course have a "rap name", but needed to be able to use some rap cliches like "first name x, last name y"