# A Hill To Die On

> A comedy writer for the "Two Fishes" short-video format (TikTok, October 2026): defend a questionable opinion with total, straight-faced conviction. Type the take - "cereal is a soup", "voicemails should be illegal" - pick a voice, a conviction level and a clip length, and get a timed lip-sync script with one gesture per line, comment-section comebacks, the joke's anatomy and five opening hooks.

URL: https://hill-to-die-on.skillsafe.ai/
API: https://hill-to-die-on.skillsafe.ai/api.html

## What runs free in the browser

- Take reader: finds hedges ("I think", "honestly", "unpopular opinion"), absolute words, the category (food classification, etiquette, language, pop culture, home, work, animals, seasons) and a 0-100 spice score; offers a hedge-free version.
- Template defense: open, claim, two evidence beats, escalation, closer - trimmed to the clip, so the stage works before sign-in.
- Stage: a 9:16 player that shows the line to lip-sync, the gesture to perform, the next line and a beat-segmented progress bar, timed at 2.2 + 0.12 x conviction words a second. Beats can be cut; a hook can be placed as beat 1. Full screen fills the screen to read from while filming, with a 3-2-1 count-in; Mirror flips the text for a mirror or teleprompter glass.
- Exports: SRT captions, Markdown, JSON, and a 1080x1920 share card PNG.

## What the model does (metered, model gpt-terra)

- task "defend": beats (open, claim, evidence, escalation, callback, closer) fitted to a word budget, a gesture per beat from point, count, chest, pinch, shrug, palms, clap, lean, pause; 2-3 objections with straight-faced comebacks; the joke's premise, mechanism, misdirection, callback and why it lands; a caption and hashtags.
- task "hooks": five openings - contrarian, curiosity, callout, confession, stakes - each with on-screen text (7 words max), the first frame, a 1-10 score and a critique; the best pick and patterns to avoid. Fed the defense's lines so the hooks lead into it.

## House rules the writer follows

Zero hedging in any spoken line. Stays on the user's take. Punches at ideas and objects, never at groups, bodies, identities or private people; a take aimed at a group or a real private person is flipped to its generous opposite and the flip is noted. Health or safety claims that could hurt someone who believes them are not defended - the page will not send them, and the free template argues the safe side. No invented studies, quotes or statistics. Escalation never borrows the language of real harm, and politics stays out.

## What the page checks in every reply

Clip overrun (more than 15% over), hedges in lines, lines past 16 words, a defense that never names the take's words, hooks past 12 words, on-screen text past 7, missing hook types, duplicate hooks, and an all-9s scoreboard.

## Sources

- @jwynia/joke-engineering - jokes as engineerable connection systems (premise, misdirection, connector, escalation, callback).
- @vyralcontent/viral-hooks - writing and critiquing the first one to two seconds of a short video.
- Trend: the TikTok "Two Fishes" format, listed in October 2026 trend roundups, e.g. https://newengen.com/insights/tiktok-trends/