Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for January 26 2024 – Clangy Clangy Phone Rings

In this episode I play a song by The Gentle Readers; I am back on the Eat To Live plan after almost two years away; retirement also leads to engineering what the rest of your life looks like; using the older men in my life as positive and negative examples on how to age; I had a surprisingly rational conversation about assisted living; I have volunteered to help with Reloadio; the first listener who can identify the seam between the two chunks of the show will win a free t-shirt shipped anywhere in the world; I watched the Black Sabbath movie; the change in the social contract about phones in fascinating; capitalism and the short term focus drives me insane; layoffs make me insane; getting laid off changed my entire approach to work;

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, January 26 2024.

Links mentioned in this episode:

 

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for Nov 19 2020 – Supporting the SubGenius

In this episode, I play a song from Rocket City Riot; the film lifecycle makes crowd-funding movies awful; why are the film backers who rise to the occasion of support always last in line? all that said, the documentary is good; Dr Hal is the first postal correspondent of the Box of Rocks zine; I supported Precursor on Crowd Supply then changed my mind; boy did I love the Sharp Zaurus; I no longer want to do personal travel with a laptop in my bag; I have envy for the next generation of Galago Pro; inSync is my new solution for syncing password files from Linux to OneDrive.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, November 19 2020.

Links mentioned in this episode:

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Podcast Quality Vs. Engagement

My Podcast Listening Experience

A few years ago there was a blog frenzy on here about podcast production. I listened to a podcast where the host was demonstratiing how he made his show sound professional, with his Heil microphone and his compressor and effects chain. I listened to that show and in fact I thought that his show sounded better when he turned off all the vocal compression. Before he sounded like a truck rally commercial, after he sounded like a person conversing. Of course, via Twitter he rallied his faithful listeners to come and tell me how wrong I was and this was the result.

Around that time I made myself a little sketch but I didn’t have a working scanner at the time so this was confined to a 3″ X 5″ index card in a pile of detritus in my office. The other day I ran across it and immediately relived the whole argument in a flash, as much fun as that was. In itself, it was a rehash of a 2005 era running of the bull when Stephen Hill of the Hearts of Space radio show weighed in via Steve Gillmor how he though podcasting would never go anywhere because the audio production was so frequently too low as to be unlistenable to him.

My opinion was always hard to articulate but approximates to :

There is a floor of production and processing below which I can’t stand to listen no matter how good the content.
There is a ceiling over which I can’t stand to listen no matter how good the content.
There is some content that I find god awful no matter how good or bad the audio quality is but the opposite doesn’t hold true.

This is easier to represent graphically, and here with my meager talents and illegible handwriting is the sketch I drew myself to figure out what I was talking about. Some of these shows and networks I haven’t listened to in many years but I’d say that this all holds up pretty well in terms of me still agreeing with it. I’m not mentioning the names of the original folks who were so opposed to me because I don’t want any Google Alerts to bring in a lot of douche baggage. Still, I like the concept and stand by it so here you go inkernet. Enjoy!  

Update: I didn’t listen to the show when I first drew this graph but I should have added to it. I’d put George Hrab’s Geologic Podcast about halfway between Hour of Slack and the listenable/unlistenable line. I like the show and am engaged with it each episode and long term as a subscriber, but there have been shows where the produced stuff put me off to the point of getting an itchy skip finger. It’s also worth noting that my single favorite episodes were the three hours of him just talking with his friend Milton about Trebuchet . No bits, no jingles or stingers or bumpers, just lots of talk and bits of music.

Update 2: I saw via FriendFeed that Evo Terra mentioned on Twitter this XKCD cartoon. This is a different angle on the same exasperation I feel sometimes.