Marble Operator at GMX V4

The fourth annual Geek Media Expo concluded earlier today. Marble Operator was in attendance, as KissofJudas and I were there.

There were lots of interesting guests at the expo, ranging from voice actors Billy West and Rob Paulson, to Nostalgia Critic/That Guy With the Glasses Doug Walker, and even British adult film actress Tanya Tate (which seems very odd, but she was labeled as “superhero cosplayer”, so, whatever).

However, KissofJudas and I were there for one specific reason, and that was Marble Hornets. Troy Wagner, Joseph Delage III, and Tim Sutton were there, along with a special guest, Brian Haight. As Troy joked during the opening ceremonies, they stuffed him in the trunk of their car and drove north to Franklin, TN for GMX.

Throughout the convention, the guys had a booth near the dealers’ room (for much of the panel they were at the end of the hallway outside the room, later on they moved inside the actual room). They sold DVDs and autographed stuff, and generally chatted with anyone who visited them. It was that Friday evening that KissofJudas and I got in line, had them autograph our DVDs. (Note: I have the original, typo version of the season one DVD, which Troy and Joseph enjoyed seeing (“Hey, you’re one of the originals!”)

It was great meeting them for the first time. I mentioned the podcast, and they thought it was cool.

Anyway, the Marble Hornets guys hosted two panels at the expo. The first was a Q&A session, which I recorded on my 3DS. (I sat in the front row, holding up my 3DS to record, and Joseph kept staring at me) I’ll see about uploading this footage to YouTube soon.

The second panel was a live commentary on season two, which started at around 1am central Saturday night. In the half-hour leading up to it, Tim tweeted that it should be a pyjama party and people should show up in their pyjamas, and that he definitely would. Sure enough, he did.

That’s enough for now. I’ll set about filing a report on the report for Marble Operator podcast, so that’ll be up on the feed soon.

I had a great time at GMX and had fun meeting the Marble Hornets guys.

UPDATE: This is weeks old, but I have the MH Q&A panel posted on my YouTube channel.

Radio Free Caemlyn’s Creepypasta Series

So, it’s October, it’s autumn, it’s harvest season, but in particular, Halloween is at the end of the month. All sorts of creepy shenanigans ensue.

Since earlier this year, I’ve been recording creepypastas for the podcast. What is a creepypasta? Well, the name comes from the phrase “copypasta”, which itself is a bastardization of “copy and paste”; the phrase refers to stories that are not original content, but rather copied and pasted from another source. Creepypastas are simply scary stories that are generally copied and pasted in new threads. Like so many Internet memes, creepypasta and copypasta were phrases used on 4chan, mainly the /b/ section.

Anyway, etymology lesson complete, on to the point of this post. As I said, I’ve been recording many creepypastas for Radio Free Caemlyn, and, given the nature of that podcast feed, things tend to get lost in the shuffle. Here, then, is a linked list of all the creepypastas I have recorded for RFC.

Furniture
Draw-a-Person
One-Man Hide-and-Seek
Sleep Tight
CB Radio
Mr. Odd
Under the Bridge
The Chernobyl Experiment
Awakening
Lightning
The Apparition in the Water
Unnatural Photography
The Keyhole
Repercussions of Evil
Time Traveler
The Lighthouse
Discarded Knife
2D
Dark Circle
Echo
Thump
A Mother’s Power
The Room in the Attic
Lamp Light
Advice
The Masterpiece
4AM Japanese Game Show
Energy-Matter Transfer Machine
The Rake
Mr. Bone’s Wild Ride
The Mysterious Disappearance of Ashley, Kansas
LSD: Dream Emulator
BEN: TheTruth.txt
BEN
About Candle Cove
Majora’s Mask
Lavender Town Tone
Box in the Back Room
Working Late
SMWCentral Mario ROM Hack
AdventureTime.avi
Lost YouTube Video
GLinux
Pokemon Sleeping Emerald
Zelda 64 Beta
A Face in the Crowd

Radio Free Caemlyn’s SCP Series

On Radio Free Caemlyn, I have been doing creepypastas. Part of this has been various SCP entries. For those unfamiliar, SCP is a collection of creepypastas, based on an organization, the Foundation, and their attempts to Secure, Contain, and Protect hundreds of objects that possess unexplained, perhaps even supernatural, abilities, that could greatly damage not just mankind, but the world. Each entry is structured as instructions on secure containment of a specific object.

I’ve recorded a number of these for Radio Free Caemlyn, and, as a way of organizing through the cluttered podcast feed, I here present a listing of all the SCP entries I’ve recorded.

SCP-002: The “Living” Room
SCP-024: The Game Show of Death
SCP-028: Knowledge
SCP-043: The Beatle
SCP-048: The Cursed SCP Number
SCP-052: Time-Traveling Train
SCP-072: The Foot of the Bed
SCP-079: Old AI
SCP-087: The Stairwell
SCP-100: The Worst Thing in the World (Entry no longer exists)
SCP-119: Timecrowave
SCP-131: The “Eye Pods”
SCP-153: Drain Worms
SCP-158: Soul Extractor
SCP-173: The Sculpture
SCP-192: Flawless X-Ray Machine
SCP-221: Compulsion Tweezers
SCP-226: Puzzle of Terror
SCP-261: Pan-Dimensional Vending
SCP-293: Obsession
SCP-313: Powerful Hand Dryer
SCP-330: Take Only Two
SCP-400: The Telephone Box (Entry is now archived)
SCP-461: ZICU-TV
SCP-478: Tooth Fairies
SCP-566: Word a Day
SCP-1165: Minus Level
SCP-1207: Not a Mirror
SCP-1305: Cat Lure

Radio Free Caemlyn Main Series

Over on Radio Free Caemlyn, the episode listing is cluttered with various ideas for shows. There are Friday Night Trivia episodes, there are creepypasta recordings, there are poetry readings, and there are the “main series” episodes (usually studio episodes wherein I discuss various topics).

To make sorting through things a bit easier, I’m going to post all the “main series” episodes here, and update as necessary.

Note: I actually didn’t start numbering with episode one. Don’t know why, don’t remember why, but for some reason the first episode is labelled as episode twelve. Doesn’t make sense, but there you have it.

Another note: subtitles for these have nothing to do with episode content. The episode descriptions contain that information. The subtitle is always some sort of play on the episode number. It’s a thing I got from the Mike O’Meara Show podcast.

Anyway, episode listing:

Marble Operator at GMX

The Geek Media Expo is an annual convention in Nashville, TN, representing various facets of geek culture. The 2012 event is the fourth annual GMX.

Last year’s GMX saw the Marble Hornets guys in attendance. They hosted three panels, and had a booth at the dealer’s room. Their first panel was a Q&A session about how to make a web serial, their second was a live commentary on season one entries, and the third was a more casual Q&A session on Marble Hornets. They also had a booth at last year’s GMX, selling Marble Hornets DVDs.

So, Troy, Joseph and Tim are appearing at this year’s GMX, hosting some panels, and with a booth again.

I am pleased to announce that two of the three main co-host trio of Marble Operator will also be in attendance. KissofJudas and myself will be at this year’s GMX. We’ll be among the guests at the expo, hoping to meet the MH guys. I’m also hoping to record a bit of an interview with them for the podcast, but we’ll see how that goes with what time they can spare.

So there you have it. Marble Operator will be present at GMX 2012. I’ll try to have something with me to identify me as a Marble Operator co-host, so feel free to say hello if you see either of the cohosts. It’d be neat to meet listeners at the expo.

Geek Media Expo 2012 is October 26-28. Hope to see you there!

The RaT Project Returns (Updated)

I was just throwing together a posting to my Google+ page, in which I talk about upcoming podcast plans, and I made the decision to bring The RaT Project back to the airwaves.

The RaT Project was my first podcast, which I started six years ago. It was in early 2006 that I had discovered podcasts, mainly through the then-new This Week in Tech podcast (live.twit.tv), hosted by Leo Laporte, and featuring many familiar names from the old TechTV cable network (Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and others). I was learning about what podcasts were, and, realizing how simple a podcast was to make, I started my own.

(To know more, I recommend listening to an episode of Radio Free Caemlyn I recorded a while back, wherein I discuss my life-long love of radio and broadcasting)

Anyway, The RaT Project started off as an occasional audio blog, and I’d occasionally discuss some gaming news of note. I’d upload the episodes to Putfile (a site that no longer exists, as far as I know), and link them on The Outcasts Guild, a messageboard I frequented.

Eventually, I found out about TalkShoe, where the show lives to this day. I started playing around with doing live shows, after migrating much of the back catalogue to that site. So that’s how the show started on TalkShoe.

There was quite a while, two years or so ago, when I would regularly do shows on Saturday nights. Gaming news, tech news, those started each episode, then we launched into each week’s particular topic. The show gained quite a few regulars, including DaveAC, Logan*, and Graeme “The2ndDoctor”. Then, life intervened, I went back to Uni for my last year, and the show got shelved.

The show has been on indefinite hiatus for long enough, now. The back catalogue, which includes my early attempts (though I’ve removed the pre-TS shows), is still available for download.

In the time since I’ve put the show on hiatus, I’ve received a lot of requests to bring the show back, from either people who were participants back in the day or people who’ve discovered it since. The show is popular, and it is wanted again. So. What now?

On 1 September, a Saturday, The RaT Project Live returns to the airwaves, at 9pm EST. The show will precede Squidlord’s Operation BSU, of course (which has made the transition to Google+ Hangouts, a thing I am still considering), but we’ll see what happens. We’ll still cover the same topics, and discuss the latest gaming and tech news, and discuss various topics each week.

I hope to see you there. Still on TalkShoe for now, while I see how Squid does with Hangouts. We might transition there at some point. But TS for now.

UPDATE: Turns out, Doctor Who returns 1 September on BBC America, at 9pm EST. Same time I was planning on doing this show.

So. DW runs for five episodes, so the weekend after it ends, RaT Project will resume.

TalkShoe or Google+ Hangouts?

This is an extension of a thing I’ve debated for a long time, at least as far as Friday Night Trivia is concerned.

The basic idea, from a couple years ago (when I started doing FNT), was to include images or perhaps even video into the trivia shows. Back in the beginning, I was structuring Friday Night Trivia like Jeopardy! episodes. To keep the players aware of which questions were still available to choose, I’d need a visual representation. Back then, I made charts to go along with the trivia shows, but had no way of displaying them in any way other than repeatedly uploading updated images.

Skip ahead to now, when Google+ is a thing, and Hangouts now have on-air functionality. Start a G+ Hangout, go live, and you can share audio and video with everyone in the room. It’s a similar setup to TalkShoe, except with G+, you have to be a G+ member in order to join the Hangout. On TalkShoe, you can join anonymously as a guest. This leads into a list of things to take into question when determining whether to do Friday Night Trivia (or any podcast, really) on TalkShoe or Google+ Hangouts. Anyway…Friday Night Trivia has settled into a regular crowd, most of which are on G+. But not all.

Anyway, what would moving trivia to Hangouts mean? Improved audio quality, shows would be posted to my YouTube channel, those are the two main things (I could also extract an mp3 to upload to the RFC feed). Besides that, the show could continue to grow and improve, with all sorts of new category ideas opened up with the functionality G+ Hangouts offers. Then there’s the stability of G+ as opposed to TalkShoe, which is wont to have the occasional issue.

So, what does all this long-winded gobbledygook mean? (Also, Chrome’s spellchecker actually accepts “gobbledygook” as a word) It means I’m considering moving Friday Night Trivia to Google+ Hangouts. It’s not a definite thing. As things stand, I’m leaving the show on TalkShoe, with Radio Free Caemlyn. It’s really up to your response, the listeners and people who’ve been regulars at Friday Night Trivia.

So, I turn to you. Listeners and participants, what do you think? Should Friday Night Trivia stay where it is on TalkShoe, where everything works and we’re familiar with the format? Or are Hangouts a viable alternative, and something we should try at least once? Let me know.

The Eye of the World ReRead

In these months leading up to the release of the final The Wheel of Time novel, A Memory of Light, I’ve been doing a special series of podcast episodes wherein I read the first book in the series, The Eye of the World. While I might not finish the first book, I probably won’t be reading subsequent books. Even having picked up the pace as I have, I’m currently only 16 chapters, 212 pages in. Nowhere near halfway.

Anyway, I thought I would compile a list of just the reread episodes, in order, rather than have to scour the RSS feed for them. Here they are:

Prologue: Dragonmount
Chapter 1: An Empty Road
Chapter 2: Strangers
Chapter 3: The Peddler
Chapter 4: The Gleeman
Chapter 5: Winternight
Chapter 6: The Westwood
Chapter 7: Out of the Woods
Chapter 8: A Place of Safety
Chapter 9: Tellings of the Wheel
Chapter 10: Leavetaking
Chapter 11: The Road to Taren Ferry
Chapter 12: Across the Taren
Chapter 13: Choices
Chapter 14: The Stag and Lion
Chapter 15: Strangers and Friends
Chapter 16: The Wisdom
Chapter 17: Strangers and Hunters
Chapter 18: The Caemlyn Road
Chapter 19: Shadow’s Waiting
Chapter 20: Dust on the Wind
Chapter 21: Listen to the Wind
Chapter 22: A Path Chosen
Chapter 23: Wolfbrother
Chapter 24: Flight Down the Arinelle
Chapter 25: The Traveling People

So there you go. If you can stand to listen to my voice reading things for hours, then….there you go.

So, How Do You Capture Audio Clips?

It’s a question I’ve been asked several times, mostly on Twitter. The explanation is longer than 140 characters, and would take multiple tweets to answer. Also, given the transient nature of tweets, I’d have to retype in case someone else asks.

So here’s my tutorial for how I capture audio for use as clips on podcasts/netcasts.

First of all, I use Audacity to grab audio clips. If you don’t have Audacity yet, for some reason, grab it, it’s a free download, and a great program.

Anyway, set Audacity’s audio input to Stereo Mix. Look for the microphone icon on the menus along the top.

Now, the screenshot I have has “SigmaTel Audio: Stereo Mix”. That simply refers to my soundcard settings. The dropdown list for microphone settings in Audacity should reflect your computer’s soundcard settings, but “Stereo Mix” should be there somewhere. Stereo Mix is what you are looking for. Stereo Mix tells Audacity that it should record whatever audio your soundcard is playing.

Now just load up the video you want to grab video from. It could be a video you have on your computer, which you play in VLC, KMPlayer, whatever. It could be from YouTube. Whatever, just load a video and get it ready to play.

Got that ready? Now, before you hit play on the video file, you need Audacity to start recording. Switch back over to Audacity, and hit the record button.

Good, with that taken care of, go back to your video and hit play.

Now, for longer videos, if you’re looking for a certain clip, just skip ahead to wherever the clip you’re looking for is, and let the video play. Once you have the audio you want, pause or stop the video, go back to Audacity, and stop recording.

There, you’ve got the audio you wanted there in Audacity. From here you can trim down the selected audio to what you specifically want. Two ways to do that, both require you to highlight your desired audio. Just click at one end of that bit of audio and drag to the end. Either hit CTR+T to trim it, or go to File and choose Export Selection.

There you go, that’s how I grab audio and make audio clips for use on podcasts, specifically those that I use on Marble Operator. Hope that helps!

A note: should nothing appear in the microphone settings in Audacity (either in the menu bar or in the main window for preferences (just hit CTRL+P in Audacity)), check the audio settings in Windows itself.

I know, I know, that’s Windows XP, not Windows 7 or 8, but it’s what I am using. What you’re doing is the same: check the audio input, to see if Windows itself has anything listed. You should see your soundcard listed, at least the drivers listed. (In that screen, you see AK5370, that’s my USB mic)

UPDATE: A much easier solution to this problem is to install the Easy YouTube Video Downloader add-on for Firefox. Once done, simply choose the “MP3 (128k)” download option.

Friday Night Trivia LXI – Gameplay Update

Direct Download

DarthSkeptical was the guest host for last night’s Friday Night Trivia, the 61st edition of that series. At the start of the show, Darth introduced a change to his formula of doing questions. Instead of just waiting for someone to either correctly guess a question or for everyone to just give up, he sped up the process by giving everyone one guess to each question. Should everyone guess incorrectly (or if it just seemed that everyone was stumped by a particular question), Darth would call time on that question and introduce multiple choice answers, and everyone would have to type in their choice in the chat room.

I quite like this change to what had been the standard formula. This eliminates all the dead air that we usually end up getting during trivia shows (and what, in effect, makes the recordings so unlistenable, in my opinion). This also speeds up the shows quite a bit.

Definitely a welcome improvement to the trivia shows, and one that I’ll be implementing whenever I host.

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