Podcast update, thoughts on blog survival, and a barren visual field, choking, sun beating down, placing one foot and then the next.

Where to even start.

I don't feel much inclined to write a huge amount regarding the whole Blogger/Google thing. As a summary of the larger situation, this link does about as good a job as one could want at just helping to explain some of the factors involved. Also, someone in the comments made the excellent point that when you're using a service that you aren't paying for, what you can reasonably expect in customer service has to be scaled back to a great degree. It should be obvious, but it really hits home when years of output that you obviously view as precious is on the chopping block that Google really doesn't owe you a damn thing. When you're asking for help and cursing the anonymous indifference of the experience... it's a humbling thing.

Anyway, my "behind the wall" thoughts can be pretty easily surmised from the comic below (which, lest we kid ourselves, no one from Google actually read, but is, I think, one of the best things I've ever made), and from my fading-patience borderline hysterical whining during last night's podcast.

Speaking of which; the podcast. August was a month of rough-edged shows. The show of August 5th went long, meandering, and weird. After it was recorded, I thought, "I won't promote this one. I'll just let it sink." This called down the hex on the show, and the next one on August 19th had a software failure that we didn't catch during recording, resulting in about the first 15 minutes being recorded, and nothing else. About three songs or so, and out before the first mic break. I remember the show being fairly decent (and that fragment is available for listening if you really feel so inclined), but one thing I've learned about doing these is that without an archive, it's as if they never existed. After this, I was thinking of releasing the prior show, which on further listening wasn't as bad as I originally thought (perhaps), but then there was... well, that whole Terms of Service Violation thing I said I wouldn't write much about.

So, here we are. August 5th, 19th (the fragment), and last night's, September 2nd. Which is still under the hex, if you're curious. Weird meandering, overly loud bed music for the first few minutes, and kind of middling sound quality throughout. I'm wondering if I should be reducing my levels as a whole. Although I guess it's possible that a lot of my vinyl is just kind of dusty and beat up.

Every individual WHFR show page now features both Flash players and MP3 download links for portability. So although I'm shirking my individual, lovely show summaries, there isn't actually any loss of functionality.

I'm striking Google and podcast backlog from my list of topics I'm behind on.

It's a weird feeling, being back, open to the public. When the blog was closed and on the edge of being killed (presumably), I felt real, genuine anxiety about its future, and about the scale of the potential loss. And it was a strange feeling to peruse it myself, as usual. For those two weeks, it was a true private garden, rather than my tucked away space. Real internet isolation. It really forced me to think about it. And now that the initial relief and (this sounds sort of hokey) joy have subsided a bit... well, now I just have another unpopular blog that I can't even get most of my friends to read, with the majority of visitors only floating in from Google's image search, looking for pictures of breasts. June and July saw a pretty marked uptick in these fleeting, fairly unimportant visitors. But even so, having 50 or so hits a day does usually snag at least one visitor that seems to really look around and read a bit, so... that's progress, I suppose.

I'm curious to see how long it takes for the hits to rise up to where they were, or if they even can.

Apologies for what might be construed as a negative tone. I suppose all of this has traumatized my feelings about the site, and I'm still figuring out what the hell I'm doing. Changes? Maybe. Nothing major. We'll get to that soon enough, I suppose.

Also, as the observant among you may have spotted, this piece of text is aging. Hence the hasty posting, and absence of the usual amount of visual splendor. It feels very strange posting unadorned text. Consider this a long, boring, unnecessary public service announcement. In other words; too long, didn't read.