Irregular Podcast! #1

Transcript

Coming at you from sunny Sydney - it is actually sunny outside. You know I have no idea what I'm going to say on this thing. There is no script, I am completely unprepared.

I had the idea to do this about three hours ago, and I rummaged through a drawer and found an old microphone, plugged it in, downloaded Audacity, and I've just got it running, and I clicked "record" and here I am. So... I don't know what the hell I'm gonna talk about.

Well the first thing is: This is coming at you in glorious "surround mono". Listen to the absolute identicalness of the sound coming at you from both speakers! That's amazing.

Let's see. I though I'd make this five minutes long - roughly - so, what am I going to do in the next... four minutes and five seconds? I suppose we're going to talk about Irregular Webcomic! and see what's going on [static] there.

Sorry, I just switched off for a bit there. I was getting some static back through my headphones and I wanted to check it out. I may be able to filter it out, so you probably didn't hear anything anyway.

Let's... yeah... talk about the comic! Okay. Let me just bring it up in my browser here. This will take me a second. ... Right, let's go to the archive! I'll just pick a number at random and I'll talk about it.

Eight hundred and sixty nine. So go to your web browser and check out Irregular Webcomic! #869! This is now an audio commentary of that strip. And looking at it, I can see it's Marcus and Julius standing outside the Colosseum in Rome. This is fantastic, because this is actually a photo that I took myself in Rome in 2001. I was over there for three weeks, having a holiday. It was a great lot of fun. I took a lot of photos and a few of them have appeared in Irregular Webcomic! And because this is live and unscripted, I have no idea which other strips they are in.

Anyway... Next strip. Number 870. This is Monty Jones and where is he? Let me read... Oh okay, he's on the Acropolis in Greece. The background here is actually another photo - the background in the first three panels that is. This is a photo of the Acropolis in Greece. This photo I did not take, because I've never been to Greece. So I actually used a photo that was... Good question, where is this from? It's either donated to me by a reader, or it's taken off a... - boy, this is harder than I thought, filling this time like this - taken off a... ... ... a royalty-free stock photograph site, such as morguefile.com. That's M O R G U E F I L E.com. I recommend this site if you're ever looking for stock photographs.

Hm, okay, now... How many... How much time do we have left? Another minute and a half...

Back to the comic. Number 871. Here we go. Duran Duran posters! Fantastic! I don't have any of these. I in fact have no Duran Duran music at all, although I did grow up in the 80s and listened to a lot of Duran Duran at the time... mainly when it was played on the radio, because as I said I didn't have any of it myself... This is really boring isn't it?

Next strip. 872. Ah, this is the fantasy-gang! Paying for passage to Footcrag. Excellent. This is the relatively beginning of the quest that is ongoing now, some... 600 strips later. That's nearly two years of strips. That's quite a quest... Yes, anyway... Anyway that strip, number 872... The background there is a river of course, which is actually a blue tablecloth on my dining table, just with some LEGO-bits placed on it, and notice in panel two, just at the top right corner, you can actually see the edge of the table. That's just that tiny little black speck there. You probably saw a whole lot more when I took the original photo, but I just cropped it down to that bit... So, often in the photos that I take for the comic, there are actually in fact lots of background images from my living room and my desk and so on that are cropped out, so all you can see is the actual scene that I intend...

How are we going for time? Ooh! Five and a bit minutes! I think that'll about wrap it up. Maybe next time I'll have something more interesting to listen to. See you next time!

Programme Notes

Although I say that I took that photo of the Colosseum, the written annotation for that strip states that it was taken from morguefile.com, which is actually true. I did take several photos of the Colosseum, but I don't have any that worked as well as a background for that strip, so I used a stock photo. That will teach me to try and comment on strips on the fly like this.

On Duran Duran, it was actually the girls at my high school who listened to them when I was growing up in the 80s. Us guys didn't like that sort of music back then! I've since come to accept that they do sing a few songs that I quite like.

Finally, this initial podcast was a complete experiment. I just thought it would be cool and fun to hit "record" and not know what I was going to say. I don't think it worked very well, and I'm very hesitant to try one like this again. In future, the podcasts should be better planned and executed. At least I hope so.