25-5-3-Sa
123 ⏳ 242 🗓️ W18
RMSDJ 📖 ✍🏽
🌡️ 66° – 55° ☁️ ☂️
🌒 ♋ ♌
AFTERNOON
The afternoon unfurled in a kind of dim composure — the skies wrapped in wool, the air hushed as if rehearsing rain. I made my descent to the lobby to retrieve my tripod, newly arrived. There I encountered Brian Aquino, dressed casually in a modest pair of Jordan sneakers.
When I asked after Caesar, Brian motioned to the staff restrooms. One, he noted, sits near my quarters beside the patio’s glass doors; the other, farther down, is tucked beside the manager’s domain.
Moments later, Caesar appeared — cloaked in black, his steps light, his sneakers soft on the tile. He spoke of Brevo: a platform to marshal contacts and choreograph digital correspondence. Alongside it, he uses 7-Day Leads, a service built to nurture cold contacts into warm prospects. Together, they form a mechanical duet — strategy and scatter, catch and call.
💡 Lao Tzu: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
🙏🏾 What Caesar builds in tools, I must balance with emptiness — the clearing of inner clutter.
We shifted to a discussion of 11 Labs. Caesar spoke with quiet authority about its voice cloning potential. By feeding it a script, one could generate a voiceover — a seamless mimicry ideal for content creation. I was intrigued. A voice borrowed from oneself — what curious alchemy.
❓ What defines the voice — the vibration, or the volition behind it?
Lunch was modest but textured: roasted chicken breast, a few rotisserie slivers, rice tangled with pumpkin seeds and cashews, supplemented coffee, a single Biscoff, and a piece of dark chocolate. These things nourish more than body — they instruct the senses.
💡 George Eliot: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
🙏🏾 My tools may be digital, but the transformation is personal.
Later, a musical detour: a playlist called Cosmic Guitar. It hovered between meditative and strange, like surf music staring at the stars. The melodies moved like comets wrapped in nylon strings.
The weather, meanwhile, remained contemplative — the sort of gray that suggests both pause and permission.
Caesar, ever the technologist of temperament, guided me deeper into 11 Labs. The price: $11 monthly, with a $22 initiation. I chose the Pro version, earning 50,000 credits. These credits are units of speech — the currency of vocal duplication.
💡 Simone de Beauvoir: “Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
🙏🏾 The delay is not in the tools — it is in our permission to use them boldly.
I began recording my voice. Naively, I believed a short sample would suffice. But 11 Labs asked more of me — a full 10 minutes. Thankfully, I had already narrated over 15 for my audiobook. My first attempt was clumsy; the process, like poetry, revealed its form only through patience.
❓ Is the authentic self something we record, or something we refine through repetition?
Caesar reminded me to wait until the 123 prompt finished fully before proceeding. Once aligned, I recorded several diary entries. The software now labors in silence, rendering my voice in electric echo. It shall take 5 to 6 hours. That, to me, speaks of care.
💡 Coach: “A voice may speak truth, but only silence proves it.”
🙏🏾 The quiet between recordings teaches more than the playback ever will.
Marlene, the building’s maintenance steward, stopped by to collect an Amazon parcel. She mentioned her birthday falls tomorrow — under the sign of Taurus, where steadiness meets devotion.
Later, I indulged in a late repast — a hamburger pressed between ciabatta, crowned with spreadable sharp cheese, spinach, honey barbecue sauce, dry Italian salami. Potato chips and cashews followed. I sipped lemonade with quiet thanks.
11 Labs performed admirably. It stumbled only once — mispronouncing my cognomen, Sydnor. I will, of course, correct this. But the rhythm? The tempo? The hesitations between thought and speech? It honored me there.
❓ Can a digital version of oneself still carry the soul’s inflection?
Rain came softly as a benediction. The sky, after so much restraint, finally wept — but gently. And I, grateful for the pause, rested without guilt.
Gratitude
I give thanks not for the brilliance of machines, but for their humility — how they ask for more before they can give.
I give thanks for Caesar’s quiet orchestration, for his way of moving through code as if it were prayer.
I give thanks for my own curiosity — unwearied, undeterred — outrunning the skepticism that once ruled my breath.
I give thanks for the warmth of ciabatta against a cool hand, for the way a guitar sings of stars without speaking their name.
And I give thanks — solemn thanks — for the strange grace of hearing one’s own voice outside the body and not turning away.
💡 Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
🙏🏾 Today, I do both — reflect and move.
RMS INSIGHTS ✍🏾 