Okay, as stated elsewhere I have some interest in doing a podcast or similar, someday, maybe, probably not soon.
Hell, “probably not soon” is an understatement, looks like I’m leaving this place behind, and I don’t really know where I’m going. Lots of mixed feelings about that. I’ve lived here far longer than anyplace in my life, and been more comfortable here than anyplace I’ve been. All of that is hard to just turn your back on… but it’s also true that I’m less comfortable here than ever, and it’s getting steadily worse, less and less comfortable with no end to that trend in sight. In this past year things have happened that have made me re-evaluate my situation, jerked me way out of my comfort zone and forced me to look at my life like an outsider looking in, and, bottom line, I don’t like it anymore. This isn’t how I want to live. It isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life. I guess this isn’t who I want to be anymore.
So, it may be awhile before I have a place to set up for podcasting, or time to set up for it.
Doesn’t keep my interests from ranging far and wide, of course, for better or worse.
So, with a beginner’s interest I’ve watched a lot of Youtube videos, read a whole lot of articles on-line, and for the really, really technical stuff I’ve been watching my old DVD of Pump up the Volume over and over. Altogether, by Internet standards, that makes me an expert in the field. No practical experience, of course.
After a half-dozen times of watching Pump up the Volume, the simplistic plot fades away and the background comes into focus, I start seeing more and more details about all the late ’80s technical junk in Hard Harry’s basement. A lot of it reminds me of stuff I’ve owned myself, and the cluttered basement certainly reminds me of the cluttered home office where I’m typing this. A thousand half-forgotten things that not only were interesting, they still are… but they don’t fit anywhere. I guess that’s why they are interesting, they aren’t easily categorized and pigeonholed, aren’t easily put away in labeled boxes, so out in the open they sit.
So it goes.
It’s all gonna have to be boxed soon, though.
Y’know, I was going to make this post about a specific piece of hardware, but to hell with that, I’ve digressed way too much already, may as well go with the flow at this point. I’m going to re-title this and forget specifics.
Of course, I can’t actually copy anything Christian Slater does in the movie in my own efforts, because me imitating Christian Slater is going to come across exactly the same as me imitating Jack Nicholson, and nobody wants to hear that, me included.
Has anyone else noticed the parallels relationships between Hard Harry and, um, what was the character’s name… Mark Hunter, his dweeb alter-ego on the one hand, and Max Headroom and Edison Carter on the other?
I guess nobody under 35 or so has a clue what I’m talking about. Or 40, maybe. Not sure. Mid-’80s, say 1985, you probably had to be at least around 15 to appreciate it at the time, that was 31 years ago and counting, so… at least 45, roughly. Shit, I’m old.
Max Headroom was sort of Edison Carter’s hidden, wilder, unrestrained side, unleashed, and Hard Harry was Mark Hunter’s hidden, wilder, unrestrained side, which just happened to sound a lot like Jack Nicholson. Max looked like fiberglass like a scratched record.
In the case of Edison Carter all it took to get Max Headroom out in the open was being hunted, severe head trauma, near-death, and then having his brain scanned into a computer. In the case of Mark Hunter it took a lot more, the horrible isolation of being a teenager trapped in the sterile suburbs, caught in the nightmare world that the adults designed for themselves and little kids, completely ignoring anyone from about 13 years old until marriage. I was there. It was rough. Maybe it’s better now, the kids don’t seem as rebellious. I sort of hope so, for their sake- but on the other hand we could sure use more “rebellious” about now.
Anyway, by my own standards (not the Internet’s) I think I’m starting to get a handle on my initial technical options for podcasting, and it’s always fun learning, but I have a lot of misgivings.
Exactly why am I interested in podcasting? More specifically, why is writing here (to my best-guess audience in the high single-digits, maybe not even that) not enough?
I’ve got a decent speaking voice, I’m reasonably articulate, I can talk to non-technical people but I have the technical background to tackle about anything I might need to, but those are all just reasons it might not be too difficult to do, not really reasons to do it.
Well, part of it is certainly my tiring of shouting down a well to hear an echo. I started a blog partly go get away from my previous websites where there was no way for people to respond, no way to gauge reaction, no interaction practically possible. So far it hasn’t worked much. I can think of many possible, even probable reasons why that might be- I don’t mind the fact that my interests are so esoteric as to put off most people, but there must be a remainder out there somewhere.
I recently heard that there are an estimated 480 million English-language blogs now. Okay, that’s clearly part of the problem. There are a lot more blogs out there than there are human beings in the United States. That’s not even counting other personal-expression on-line venues like Facebook pages or Google+ or Youtube. Like computers, everyone’s got one, and nobody is much interested in anyone else’s. Nor is there, generally, much reason to be.
Four hundred and eighty million. So, part of the reason that Slashdot and Boing Boing and Hackaday and Craphound are well known is that they started early enough to stand out a bit. These days, it’s not so easy.
So it’s tempting to drift into the related but (so far) more-sparsely-populated area of podcasting, where there’s more chance of being heard literally, and thus, apparently, more chance of “being heard” as a figure of speech.
The question then becomes… is it going to reach the audience I want to communicate with?
There we run head-on into my prejudices. They may not be prettier than any other prejudices, but they’re not trivial.
I’ve always been more than comfortable with the written word. I was a bookish kid growing up, really had little choice since I was an only child until my early teens, and we moved just about every year, so I had few friends, indeed I was used to everyone but my parents being in my life on a very temporary basis, and my books were my main entertainment, rapidly my main conduit of information not filtered for “children” or “juveniles”, and became my friends. My earliest heroes were characters in books, and later the writers that created them.
For the past some decades I’ve made my living writing- writing programs. A somewhat predictable audience, perhaps, and not much for character development and plot structure, but they are hell on inaccurate syntax and have absolutely no tolerance for elements that make no sense, or ambiguity.
Okay, maybe not the most relevant background for writing for humans, but at least it taught me to type easily. Or, rather, I painfully taught myself to type until it was easy.
Bottom line, the question is, do I want people who are considerably less oriented toward the written word than I am as an audience? Do I have any real desire to cater to the “TL/DR” crowd, or for that matter to cater to those whose attention span last for just about 140 characters?
Actually, I didn’t do too badly at that last.
I’m honestly not sure if I have anything to say that they’d care to hear… or, put another way, I’m not sure I want to say what they’d care to hear. To me, ideas are the important part of any exchange of words, and you can’t develop or even express most worthwhile ideas in short sound bytes.
If I do a podcast it’s not going to be a bunch of ideas trimmed down and simplified for short attention spans.
If that makes me hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-touch, well… so be it.
– Robert the Wombat