Sorry for the wonkiness of the podcast last night. I had such a hard time with this microcast.
It seems to have been doomed from the start. It took days to record that one second of audio. No, really. Well, and to mix it. No, again, really. It was a whole thing.
I guess I should start with philosophy and aesthetic…err, my pet-peeves, that is. My biggest pet-peeve is when people, especially podcasters, over talk things. It’s rampant.
Sometimes, often, the fewer words the better. Sometimes you can say what you have to say in under a second. When you can, do. We’ll all be happier.
Words are nasty horrible little things. Yeah, I know, I’m a “poet”, and a reader, an amateur linguist, and all that, you’d think I’d love words, but no, words obstruct as much as they clarify. I guess we all know that. Words also destroy thought, other people’s words are detrimental to a poet in the act of poet-ing.
The act of poet-ing (ha! how Alan Watts of me) is like brainstorming, is observing things so intensely that they fall away and little stories pop out. These stories pop out form cracks in the wall, the tree-line, the cold hard stare of a backstab-y lover.
If external words impinge on these soap bubbles of poemlets they’ll pop leaving noting but a sticky resin behind from which there’s little chance to salvage anything. You might be able to break it down and rehydrate it, but that’s generally not the case, you can burn days trying to resurrect an abortion. Sometimes you havta try though, I guess.
Words are constantly with us. They blast from television sets, and radios. Cell phone conversations, billboards…ok, fuck, I’ll stop there, you do the observing—how many words are you besieged by in a day? How many of them do you actually want?
That’s one of the reasons I prefer
Drone, it allows you to build a microcosm in a bubble to explore. A fragile microcosm that will burst at the first chance. You havta protect your perceptual inputs from unwanted agents of chaos!
Words color and distort our thoughts. Words manipulate us on the most basic and subconscious levels. Words sneak their way in and make you long for and desire and need disastrously unhealthy and damaging things.
Heh, Propaganda Theory 101, or perhaps I should call it Media Literacy. My camp keeps wondering why people keep voting against their own self-interest. It’s this, y’all. The maelstrom of corporate words have worn down their shields and they don’t have the space to develop their own, uncolored, thoughts. And you can’t blame them.
A couple generations now of declining economic conditions, worsening schools, schools mandated by law to instill a very warped and intellectually deficient world-view, bolstered by an invasive media-sphere. And it all ran by a handful of elites that are making out like bandits.
Control words and you control people. It’s simple. Thank you Goebbels, seems your side won after all.
That’s one of the things that informs my poetry and my other art. I try not to manipulate folk. I say my piece and I’m off. I try to stay lean.
So back to this episode. Originally it was 1.25 seconds, but iTunes has some serious issues with sub-two-second enhanced podcasts. Audio files under two seconds work fine in the music library, but in the podcast library will fuck up the played-flag and the resume at time-stamp and just be a misery. I had to up the duration to a full two seconds before these unintended effects went away.
I keep saying enhanced podcasts, what do I mean by that? An enhanced podcast is one that contains chapters and art-work. Apple is moving away from them, apparently, they’ve ceased development on tools that allows you to do such things. ’Tis a pity, but I think they’re doing because iTunes sucks, and you might as well make a video these days. I wish I would have.
Apple wants 1400^2 pixel artwork for podcasts (it’s bigger for podcast cover-art—2048^2). But, iTunes (Yosemite and iOS) can’t really handle shit that size. Not when the audio is two seconds, and you have four chapters, and four images. I had to knock the images down to 300^2.
And there were more problems. Auphonic.com bloated my 471k file to 1.1 megs, I have no idea why, and grew tired of looking for the reason and just posted my GarageBand 6.0.5 file (the last version that supported enhanced podcasts). It also messed up the chapters, the art would hang, not change when it should.
And before all that the recording and mixing were problematic. I’m recording with some lousy equipment, in a noisy environment, with an unprecedented hard on one’s self mentality. Torture torture! I cleaned it up the best I could and compressed and leveled best I could. Each channel. Yeah, it’s in stereo, but I have reason. Mostly the reason is fun.
Only it wasn’t that much fun. The idea popped up, and I decided to run with it, while I’m preparing episode 27 (a fairy tale or nursery rhyme or something, still toying with the title. It’ll probably be the first).
And then there’s the problems with my podcast solution, I’m using Blubrry. Blubrry is growing old in the teeth and is resting on it’s laurels. I can’t figure out, for instance, how to embed links into descriptions, or into whatever field the iOS Podcast App reveals under the album art (is it lyrics? might be lyrics, will have to check). I see this in other podcasts and I’m envious.
I’m gonna check into these issues, and more, on my next self-hating injurious spell. It helps if you’re already in a lousy mood, because it’ll fuck you up, and why go seeking for hurt and pain. Got enough already, I prefer to hold tight to what little happiness can come my way. Argh.
Oh, you’re probably wondering why all the work? Why enhance a 2 second podcast. Well, because it’s funny, for one. And why bother with a podcast if you’re not gonna give it your best (Titanium Physicists, I’m looking at you, unedited indeed, scoff). And because I like to hide messages. Back in my Papier-mâché making days I’d hide notes in my work. I had expected that in 50 years from know you’d break it, and be delighted. Or our grandchildren one day would be amazed by the depth of my love. Well…fuck. That whole life was sabotaged by crazy. Sabotaged and it’s implications traveled back in time and woe is me. Motherfucker.
The cover-art is a spectrogram, but not of the audio, of something else. There’s a clue in the chapters.
I wasn’t gonna let that slip, but it’s something to look for. I hide shit in plain sight. Because it’s fun.
So sorry if the podcast got wonky last night, I was battling many fires on many fronts and had to correct and make allowances for several cascading and hitherto unbeknownst issues. Argh.
Oh, yeah, and I can’t figure out how to embed an enhanced podcast on a webpage, if you don’t subscribe to the Dronecast with a podcatcher and wanna see it, take a look here (but I understand that that link is likely to change.
