I’m in a podcast AGAIN!

Long-time readers will recall that several net-decades ago I entered an audio of myself reading a 100-word story into one of Crap Mariner’s podcasting Weekly Challenges. (I think I actually won that week, too; very validatin’.)

Well, for no discernable reason, I have done it again! (At this rate, by the year 2100 I will have produced, well, several of these.)

In truthness, I think I mostly did this one because I was driving along somewhere and started talking to myself in funny voices since I was alone in the car (you do that, too, right?), and I remembered for some reason what the theme of the weekly challenge was, and a story sort of (what?) precipitated out.

Anyway, I kinda like it.

Go over and listen (or read), an’ vote for whoever you like. Or not. :)

These are still pretty much the only podcast I ever listen to. (And even these are kinda long, at over 30 minutes, since there are N stories all being read in the same podcast, for N small but greater than two.)

I’m in a podcast!

So… I’ve mentioned that I don’t really listen to podcasts. And then more recently I dove into a Kanomi comment thread in which she was noting the rather obnoxious tone of some other SL podcast, and which sort of reinforced my negative impression of podcasts in general, in that:

(A) I found the podcast (like every other podcast over two minutes I’ve tried to listen to) ‘way too slow-moving and content-sparse to be worth the time, and

(B) While I am assured by a mutual friend :) that the people in the podcast are really a bunch of perfectly nice people just sort of fooling around, they actually come off as sort of obnoxious jerks; my theory is that this is because people often feel free in a podcast to say whatever the heck pops into their head (and it seems to be against the cultural tradition to do multiple takes or editing or anything), whereas in text weblogs people do proofread and edit and have second thoughts and stuff.

(I really shouldn’t have said, in the Kanomi thread, that podcasts are a waste of time simpliciter; that apparently insulted at least one podcaster, and I didn’t mean to insult anyone. I just meant, of course, that they are in my judgement not a good use of my time. To each eir own an’ all.)

But so anyway. One of the discussors (discutants? is that a word?) in the debate was ol’ Crap Mariner, who I’d been vaguely aware had a podcast thing of some sort, an’ Crap mentioned that he has a short attention span too :) and that his podcasts are like under two minutes long and that sounded good, so (after a surprising amount of searching about) I came upon Crap’s 100 word stories, which is pretty fun.

I love microfiction!

I admit I still prefer reading the tiny stories to listening to them, for whatever reason. But the general idea is neat, and they do fit inside my tiny podcast patience, so I can listen to them and feel myself somewhat less podcast-ignorant.

And!

And Crap also has this fun weekly thing were there’s a theme / topic / prompt, and people are invited to compose and record their own 100 word stories on the theme and send them in, and one of them gets chosen as the winner (through I process I don’t really understand) and the winner gets to choose the topic for next week, and all of the submitted stories get put together with Crap commentary and posted as a podcast itself.

The theme for #169 was “That’s not thunder, it’s…”, which was sort of intriguing, and like I said I love microfiction, and anyway…

I wrote a 100 word story, and recorded myself reading it. and sent the file to Crap, with the result that my actual voice appears in it. And not too long in, since I think I was like the 3rd story, and Crap didn’t start seriously wandering off on tangents in his commentary and talking to his cats and stuff until about story 5 hahaha.

(Most of the stories are funny and/or involve farting and/or have music tracks and intros and stuff, and mine being just a semi-serious (and too quiet) a cappella reading of a semi-serious story, it doesn’t really fit in all that well. But hey is fun anyway!)

So if you want a rare opportunity to hear at least one of the voices of Dale Innis, check out Weekly Challenge #169 and listen to the podcast. Or just read the story; the text is up there too. :)

Do I *have* to like podcasts an’ videos an’ all?

A rant! Curmudgeon mode on! Whiners engaged! :)

Do I have to like podcasts an’ videos an’ all? ’cause, well, I don’t.

People…. talk…. really…. really… slowly.

Not only that, but listening to a voice means either disturbing the people around me (and there usually are people around me), or finding some annoying ear-things with wires and all. Watching a video means spending the bandwidth to download it, hoping it will be compatible with whatever the heck the web browser decides to give it to to play, and then listening to the voice that goes along with it (see above).

I watched the little video about someone’s impression of SL’s Fifth Birthday here, and it was not a content-dense experience. It look a perceptible amount of time to start playing, and it ran long enough that I got interrupted once by someone popping in to ask me about an email. In actual content it had maybe two short paragraphs of text, that I could have read in maybe ten or fifteen seconds; the titles and background music and cute flythrough zooms of various SL5B builds and closeups of the author’s AV face added nothing whatever to the information content (intellectual, emotional, or aesthetic) of the piece.

Not to pick on this particular video; they’re pretty much all like that, where “they” is podcasts and videos that are delivering what’s essentially a narrative verbal linear message of some kind. Not content-dense, not efficient users of my time.

I almost never listen to podcasts. The people talk too slowly, they stop to chuckle at themselves or fiddle with the microphone, they in general exude a “you have all the time in the world to sit there listening to me” attitude that, I have to admit, annoys me. Sometimes people post “utterz” to twitter; I started to listen to one once, and decided after fifteen seconds that it wasn’t a good use of time.

I’m perfectly happy to take my time one-on-one with a friend, or many-on-many at an interesting party or gathering. Dunno why; likely because it’s interactive, and mutual. But listen passively to someone talking at the terribly slow speed of speech, or spend five precious never-to-be-recaptured seconds watching someone’s cute title-fade before the possibly-interesting part of their video starts?

No fanks.

Okay okay end rant. :) Was fun, tho!