A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

The super-cheap Apple refurbs that keimel linked to a while ago seem to be long gone, sadly. So with that temptation gone, I have commenced to beat up on my debt in earnest, laying $2,200 into it just now. Contrary to initial plans, I split this first payment across my credit card and personal debts. The latter involves a significantly larger total, and its interest rate is less financial than it is psychic. Taking a chunk out relives the pressure quite a bit.

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Lately I've been shopping at Amazon a lot. I ordered some audio equipment from it yesterday, including a Blue Snowball USB mic with tripod and pop filter. I haven't been happy with the results from the cheapo Logitech mics I've used in the past, but I didn't want to splurge on an XLR-based mic/board/amp setup either, not just yet. The snowball seems to have received a lot of appoving nods from podcasters as a good middle-of-the-road solution.

The trouble with Amazon is that at the same time I find myself pre-ordering Mario Party 8 at the same time, and I'm like, what? This kind of links in to the fact that if you're a gamer and you're dating a gamer, you can easily get into some real trouble. You can rationalize every purchase of a new game by convincing yourself that you're doing it out of self-sacrifice. It's pretty gnarly, man.

OK, so I wanna hold myself to my earlier promise to promote Jmac's Arcade upon publication of episode 4. I am not sure how to go about this. Any ideas?

I started to kick around the production of a very short (<= 20-second) promo but I am skeptical of how effective it would be on other podcasts, since I'm assuming most of them would be audio-only. Not that I can't make an audio version too, but meh.

Hm, and now that I think of it, I am quite hesitant to stick other podcasts' promos onto the JA episodes, since I want to keep them very short and entirely self-contained. So promo-trading deals with other podcasts may just not work at all.

Anyway, I'd like to hear any other promotion idears y'all might have.

Maybe I just need to get more snuggly with the podcasting community, of which I suppose I am by definition a member, but to which I've put very little time or effort in reaching out.

I've written the scripts for my monologues and lead-ins for next Wednesday's shoot. With a total reading-time of around eight minutes, it feels rather wordy, but I bet it will work out. Some of it will be read over clips of the games we played in the studio, and the rest will feature me standing before the SCAT green screen, which I hope will ultimately be more interesting to look at than me sitting in a chair in front of a wavy curtain.

In both cases I'll be using the DIY teleprompter rig I described before. I made a test movie, just text crawling up at a measured pace, and it seems to work fine. If everything doesn't fail spectacularly, then the end product will be much more watchable than the monologues I've had to edit in previous episodes. That means less editing time, too, even given the increased green-screen futzing I'll have to do; trying to fix performance foulups in post-production is both more time-consuming and less fun than adding in more content.

Yes, "batman4050", we will mention the Star Control petition, as well as some other updates about things that have appeared on previous shows.

After I submit this episode to SCAT and put it online, I'm finally going to start promoting the damn show. I've picked up a few remote fans, which is very nice, but I get the impression that they somehow stumbled across the show against all odds. I'd like to push its presence a little more; even at our relaxed bimonthly pace through the first half of 2007, it's still hard work to put a show together. A little bit of encouragement in the form of fresh fan mail and feedback would go a long way towards fueling me and the rest of the team. I don't doubt that it'll be forthcoming so long as I can actually stitch a good show together and then get the word out.

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I would also like to make another Jmac's Arcade. I haven't made any since October and haven't promoted them at all, and meanwhile their instances on YouTube and Google Video continue to rack up comments from the haters. This doesn't bother me, but the fact that almost nobody else has commented (except for people I already know) makes me sad, since this suggests that the people who'd actually like it aren't finding it.

I have some ideas for fixing that, but I don't feel that I deserve to act on any while it's been three months since my last contribution to that feed. So, yeah, more to do.

I really like 1000 Years of Popcorn, a short film with lovely and creative low-budget animation, puppetry, and DV joy, even though it could use some editing around the middle. (As could we all, right?) Discovered through DTV, an interesting project to give us Mac people a TiVo-style view into the world of video podcasts.

So far everything else I've seen on "Some Pig" -- and, indeed, across all of DTV -- is kind of crap. (If often happy & energetic crap.) So I also downloaded their tool to publish one's own channels, as I'm more than happy to add to the pool myself. Plop.