ViCasting.com

Logan and Will get into the importance of pacing your plot points - mostly in your literary writing - throughout the course of your story, as well as a postmortem of the Joey Goebel interview from a few weeks back.

Here's hoping tonight will be different.

The rules of the game are as follows:

1) Whenever the word "fuck," or any permutation therein, is used by either Logan or Will, take one drink.

2) Whenever the novel House of Leaves is mentioned, take one drink.

3) Whenever a drink is taken on the air, take one drink.

4) Whenever the words "golden," "shoehorning," "totally different animal," or any permutations therein are used, take one drink.

5) Whenever Tom Waits is mentioned - finish the bottle.

We'll be back next week, or earlier if we feel particularly benevolent.

--Logan

I'm very excited to see where this takes us, as we have two more guaranteed interviews that will be happening over the next couple of months - I'm hoping to have one interview a month, but I'm not going to push it - and I am working on acquiring more people from all different areas of literary and filmmaking publication.

Needless to say, this is really cool.

--Logan

Some of the garbling on Will's end clearly is something going on with Sound Forge; I have a feeling that he may need more RAM in that sucker, unless he's doing the show off his Alienware, in which case, I have no clue why I would have an easier time of it than he.

Next show, though, I have a couple of ideas that we're going to test out before hand, and I will make sure that the acoustics on my end are better off. I'm sure Will would do so, as well. If you guys know how to help out with some of the issues you're hearing, by all means, e-mail us!

--Logan

-- Fresno? Fresyes!

-- Pulp Fiction (iMDb)

-- Blair Witch Project (iMDb)

-- Poor Man's Steadycam

-- IFC Media Lab

-- Channel 101

-- YouTube

-- Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive

-- Stephen Graham Jones

Music

-- Psycheasthetic

-- Cursive

-- Revolution

-- An all filmmaking show!

-- Logan talks about his student acting gig and gets overly self-absorbed

-- How independent filmmaking has never been better

-- The various methods of filmmaking publication

-- Announcing our first interview

-- More!

Tonight's a really thick night for me, so we'll try again tomorrow. First rule of cords - if you think you need one, buy two. If you think you need two, buy eight.

However - don't fret, we've got three interviews lined up, and our first one is imminent, so we'll be recording it and then putting it up ASAP.

Hang with us!

--Logan

We will probably be late for show #10.

That is all.

We finished recording show #008 this past Wednesday, and I'm going to spend some time editing it and wait until next Wednesday to post it. That way we can finally get things aligned properly. I want to have Wednesday be when we post a show and record the next one to give me a full week to edit it all throughout. It's just nicer that way, and then, with it being hump day, if we for whatever reason don't get it rockin' that night, we still have Thursday, Friday, Saturday, etc. to get it done, with plenty of time to clean up the audio and what not.

Again, we're getting interviews lined up; we have some actually saying yes, which means eventually we'll be getting something nailed down. I'm still working out the kinks with recording Skype calls, but I think we'll be all right.

Anyway, see you Wednesday!

Also, Will had some problems with his computer, and so I took out what chunks I could where that happened, but a little over the fifty minute mark, you'll hear a little bit of garbage in there. We're hoping that dropping the overall quality and bit rate should fix it, and with it being a spoken word (mostly) show, you shouldn't notice much difference.

With that said - if you're on the latest part of iTunes, you'll see we've got our chapter markers up, now. It really doesn't work right now if you're looking for a particular segment - occasionally I threw stuff in there because it was funny and not because I was marking out a section of audio - so you may want to open the "album artwork" window and just keep an eye on it as you listen. I have the show links on there.

I may be losing a few listeners as a result, because I believe now the only people who can listen are iTunes people, or those who can play .m4b files. I'm not too concerned, as I have the stat numbers and when they show it to me in a pie chart, the number of people who don't use iTunes seem to have a line's worth of the pie. Not even a slice.

If you don't have iTunes, your only excuse should be that you're on a Linux distro. And if you're on Linux, chances are there's something for it that you could use in place of iTunes. Again, not worried. Just a heads up.

Wednesday evening: Record

Thursday-Saturday: Edit

Sunday: Publish

We figured that since Wednesday is LOST night, we would both be around and not doing anything like partying or sexual perversions, so it would be easy for us to just record. Which means, yes, tomorrow we are scheduled to record.

5:37:51 PM Will: I'm thinking I'm gonna re-seduce the chick I lost my virginity to.
5:38:40 PM Logan: Yay.
5:39:03 PM Will: 'Cause she's hot. And has money, so I could probably convince her to come to me
5:39:09 PM Logan: Whoo.
5:39:21 PM Logan: See if you can't get her to donate to Misnomer.
5:39:27 PM Will: No.
5:39:36 PM Will: 'Cause then she'd be curious, and want to listen to it.
5:39:51 PM Will: And then any chances of successful seduction would implode.
5:40:06 PM Logan: Then lie.
5:40:20 PM Will: I'm not a very good liar.
5:40:48 PM Logan: ...
5:41:00 PM Will: Yeah, that was a lie

Even the insane, and I mean the deepest of the clinically insane, think in a structure. Instability, deception, skewed perception and the like must still follow some form of logic. The way your character makes connections and associations, his progression of thought, and his moral barometer must follow an internal consistency. Otherwise, you're working with something random and, regardless of what deconstructionists want to say about it, you cannot build character without some kind of pattern. That pattern can shift and evolve, but it has to for a reason.

"I'm dead, doctor."
"What, Joe? That's absurd."
"Really, I mean it. I'm dead, 100% dead."
"Can dead people bleed, Joe?"
"No. I don't think so. Why?"
"Well, if I do this..."
"Hey, ow, goddammit."
"See, now you're bleeding. Ergo, you are not dead."
"Isn't that something?"
"It certainly is."
"Dead people can bleed."

It's all about interior logic.

I totally mangled the quote, but there you go!

House of Leaves site (link)

Craig Clevenger (link)

Stephen Graham Jones (link)

Endless Blue site (link)

Urbis (writer's workshop) (link)

Dove Chocolate (link)

Audacity is dead to me, now. I am officially making my move to acquire GarageBand 3. Ubercaster couldn't come fast enough, but they're taking their time to develop. Whether they make it to have a release in the first quarter of the calendar year, really remains to be seen - I have my doubts - but I do appreciate that they seem to be taking their time to not only develop it well, but also to not burn themselves out on it. One of the most hated enemies of open source development is that of overheating programmers.

Nevertheless, I have already switched to Quicktime Pro for the bulk of recording on my end; Audacity is such a resource hound. I don't mean to defame the program, as Will uses it on his Windows machine and hasn't reported any problems whatsoever, but I just think the version for OS X was rushed. Throughout the course of editing this past show, my computer crashed no less than twelve times. This is not an exaggeration; I counted at least twelve and then cried.

Show notes will get posted tomorrow, more than likely; I can't be bothered with it today, as right as I type this I'm waiting on my second class of the day, and have estimated that my time spent on campus will amount to a shade over twelve hours. Thursdays are no longer days of happiness for me, but Friday is a beacon of light, so I can spend some time re-listening to the show and typing up the links as I go.

As for audio quality - I know. Pops and clicks abound. The former comes from my amateur knowledge of this new microphone. I am actually amplifying most of what I say in editing, despite having the gain turned up to Eleven. I will have to see what I can do about that. But things like touching the microphone, playing with quarters, playing with ink pens, paper, etc. will cease next show. Hypothetically. When the show gets started and my neurotic ticks become pushed into the unconscious mind, you never know what can happen. I may actually chew on some chocolate. Next Show's Topics: Author Personas, Character Deaths

The problem is that everytime I try to upload it over FTP, it starts uploading at a good speed, and then within about thirty seconds, winds down to less than 1 KB/s.

Very, very frustrating. I'll see if it's me and try to upload over my college's connection. I've been trying to upload all last night and it just wouldn't do it.

1) Will's sick, still, and on-and-off, so this next show we've got my good pal Nick to fill in.

2) Nick filled in nicely, but technical problems and my brain-to-mouth connection just made the show a flat out disaster. We have the audio, just on a number of tracks that I'm going to have to splice together. It took about three hours to get one hour of audio with all the issues. Not fun.

3) Show #6? Probably not until Wednesday.

4) Thursday? Will should be up for recording by then, and this time I won't let him run off to "get drinks." He can drink on the show.

Clearly, Will's 102-fahrenheit fever can only have one explanation.

Needless to say, we haven't recorded, and thus it may be until Monday, I would gather, before we record again, which is... well, it may very well become our new schedule. Plan for Thursday, actually record on Monday, lay it down on Wednesday.

Yeah. Yeah, I think we can work that.

GarageBand 3, by the way? I'm there. You don't even know. No, really, you don't know.

I've played around with Quicktime Pro's chapter-making abilities. I'm able to edit the show in a good three hours if I sit down and do it. I'm not entirely certain how Podcast Maker would work with Libsyn. Perhaps if I had something that had me do more of the work, it would feel like it was worth the investment. I do need something better than Audacity, now. I believe we've gotten to that point to where we need some better features.

Ubercaster looks very, very promising, but it has yet to reach beta, and with the way Audacity likes to crash - nay, not crash, I believe the closer term is detonate - at the most inopportune times (like, say, after I've forgotten to save every three changes, and I decide to make just one more addition and I'll save this big different version), I could use some better software.

I'm considering GarageBand, which I guess if you're on a Mac (and I am), supposedly it's the best thing around. I may do my basic recording via Audacity, and then edit on GarageBand. I think just straight up audio, while many podcasts do that, doesn't quite do it. I like to have an all-around show. As you're listening, have chapter pictures with clickable links. The show notes while you listen. Obviously, if you're on iTunes - and from the numbers, nearly 100% of you are - you'll have this capability. Since you can make chapters in Quicktime Pro, I assume you can see them, as well.

If you're on WinAmp... I don't know, man. I don't know. I left 1999 a while ago.

I am getting better at editing, I think. It would be nice to have some audio people making or finding sounds that would fit what I'm looking for. What I do find is just patchwork, and I'd like to get something a bit more, y'know, that p-word. Professional.

Update: So much for Audacity. At about 8:30 into the show, silence. I had a bumper in there. I know I did, because I heard it when I did my final listen to make sure there wasn't any dead air. And it has disappeared. So I've had to re-open and simply erase that dead air, and then re-upload the file. We may have seen the last of Audacity for me.

Bash Quote Database (link)

Chuck Palahniuk's Official Site (link)

UnFiction (Alternate Reality Game hub) (link)

Endless Blue (link)

Next Week's Topics: Short Story Cliches; Lighting in Films

In any case, no, podcast hasn't been recorded. Did I say it'd be done by