Episode 1 – I assume it’ll get better as i go along
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Episode 1
Dateline: 20th of March.
Website.
Morning.Computer.
Short things by Warren Ellis:
“I would dearly love more five-minute podcasts. Some podcasts seem to take five minutes just listing and talking up their sponsors. Find the shape that the piece actually fits, rather than the shape the current culture expects it to be.
You might be more likely to finish it. Hell, I might be more likely to finish it.”
So, I did record a version of that quote. With Warren’s accent.
But in my mind’s ear, I can only ever hear him after Stephen Fortune made him drink another bottle of wine in less than forty minutes. So it came out a bit towey, and I thought that was a bit bad.
So, I didn’t.
I’ve always wanted to do a podcast, in fact. I had one for three years, from 2003 to 2006—early doors in that respect. I recorded it on one of those little white MacBooks, if you remember those. It was a slightly eccentric music podcast with my friend Mark at university. He had a cat called Hendrix that used to come and sit with us while we recorded. Hendrix was basically the co-host.
I was on another one called Start, Select, Reset, which was about video games, probably around 2008, and that was terrible. I’m pretty glad none of those exist on the internet anymore.
But coming back to the quote—I’ve been thinking about doing a short-form podcast for a long time.
In fact, I’ve recorded a couple. I did a whole series about Squareeel, the British rival to Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV, and I threw it all in the bin. Some of that content did see the light of day at DebCon1, though. The reason I scrapped it was because, in my mind’s eye, I thought of each episode as a jewel. I wanted it to be amazing. And every time I recorded it, it just didn’t come out the way I wanted.
And that’s why I’m doing this podcast—because I have absolutely no intention of it being a jewel.
So, what do I want to do?
I’m not sure, really. I’m kind of inspired by Mikey’s long-form newsletters, which I miss.
And… I don’t know.
What am I inspired by? It’s got to be weird. It’s got to be really weird.
I’ve got loads of content sitting on my laptop—field recordings from Chernobyl, weird interviews recorded drunk on my phone with the microphone I’ve been carrying around for about five years.
Yeah.
So, I set myself a couple of ground rules for this podcast project thing I’m going to be doing now.
First of all, it shouldn’t take me any longer than an hour from start to finish—writing and recording—because, well, I’m a busy man.
Well, I’m not. I’ve been unemployed since September.
But, you know, you get the picture.
What else?
I’m going to pick the topic on the day. Just go into it completely blind. I think that’s probably quite a good idea. Quite fun to do.
I mean, I’ve already failed at recording this podcast in an hour because I spent two hours this morning making the theme tune intro in Renoise. So that’s a complete failure. But I quite like the idea of settling down and ranting into the microphone for five minutes.
I did a lot of stuff with voice when I was at university, so I got quite used to listening to the sound of it. And, you know, if you’ve ever met me—I quite like it.
So there you go.
Speaking of learning the sound of your own voice—
Since I’ve been sitting here recording this today, this morning, there’s this thing my friends always complain about: how I just power down in the middle of a sentence. Complete dead air. Just—at the end of a sentence—I’ll stop.
And then I’ll start talking again.
Sometimes, it can go on for, like, ten, fifteen seconds while I’m trying to speak. It gets worse when I’m drunk.
But it’s pretty funny being able to see it on the display—just watching it go completely dead.
And, you know, I think I’m going to leave it in.
Because it’s how I think. It’s how I talk. It’s, you know, articulation and all that. And there’s not really much I can do about it.
Permanently Moved
Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo
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