2 min read 430 words 6 links

🌟 Overview of the Week

Room 302 Studio Website Redesign

I've been working with Room 302 Studio Member Sam Vogtto rethink the studio website for 2024.

🎨 Creative Endeavors

AI-Generated Personal Fanfiction For Morale

I got a little distracted and worked with the robot to write some cyberpunk fanfiction based on my life, for morale purposes - before I knew it, I had 16k words, which when converted to audio with ElevenLabs' new Projectsfeature, resulted in a nearly [2-hour audio file](https://res.cloudinary.com/ejf/video/upload/v1703099932/ElevenLabs_2023-12-19T21_41_04_EJ_Cyberpunk_Story.mp3. The fun-to-effort ratio is out of this world, and I mostly worked as an editor and choose-your-own-adventure player. It's cheesy and dumb, but it made me laugh a few times, and it's as entertaining as any other poorly-written TV show I could be watching.

Every time we hit a decision point, I would ask for 5-10 approaches of how to continue. Sometimes I would choose one, or combinations. I probably only wrote 2 or 3 lines of dialogue myself in the entire thing. I also ended up discarding 2-3 times the content that I ended up using. I also struggled a lot to get ChatGPT to be creative enough for me; most of the best content came from dialing the temperature up to 2, turning half-p down to 0.5 or so, and pasting the entire contents of the story until then (with no chat/assistant dialogue to confuse it).

💡 Technical Accomplishments

YouTube 'Watch Later' Scraping

It is annoyingly difficult to pull down your entire Watch Later playlist, which for me, is over 300 videos that are extremely specific to my interests. Unfortunately for me, they are all mashed together in increasingly-inaccessible parts of the YouTube UI, and I want to be able to use them to create my own tools for watching things I have decided are worth watching, rather than doomscrolling.

  • Step 1: Go to the Watch Later page on YouTube
  • Step 2: Scroll to the very bottom of the page
  • Step 3: Inspect Element on one of the Watch Later videos, and find the parent DOM element that holds all of them
  • Step 4: Copy as HTML and paste into a new file
  • Step 5: Add some styles and javascript to hide parts of the page we don't want
  • Step 6: Select All on our newly-trimmed page, and copy into watchlater.txt
  • Step 7: Run the text file through text-to-csv.js to create a .csv of links
  • Step 8: Finally, at long last, have my Watch Later playlist as data I can use elsewhere