2Political Podcast 129 is available

2Politiical Podcast is back with another episode: Episode 129 is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

This episode was recorded on the first of April (NZDT), but Arthur spent most of the next day fixing the 2Political website, which had “issues”. Oh, well.

2Political Podcast 128 is available

2Politiical Podcast is back with another episode: Episode 128 is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

This was from last week, and I forgot to share it here. There’s a new episode on the way, so I’d better announce this now!

2Political Podcast 127 is available

2Politiical Podcast is back with another episode—so soon!—and Episode 127 is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

2Political Podcast 126 is available

2Politiical Podcast is also back, and Episode 126 is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

July’s welcome

Today is the beginning of a new month, and the middle of winter. Both are good, the latter because it means we’re getting ever closer to spring and summer. But starting another month is always a good opportunity to refresh and renew and restore ourselves and our resolve. All of that is true for all things AmeriNZ.

June was in many was a pretty good month for me. It was my most blogged month of the year so far, just five posts short of an average on one per day, and that meant it was also my most productive month by far (by that measure) all year. This is good in itself.

This appears to have been mostly due my recent health journey development, specifically that Ī’m starting being weaned off beta blockers. I feel clearer in my head than I have in a year, and that’s a really good thing all by itself, not just for blogging, obviously.

Then last week I felt like the stuffing was kicked out of me, as I mentioned on Friday. This was, in fact, the sole reason I didn’t have 30 (or more) posts in June. This was a pity, because I had so many I was working on, mostly still in process. On the other hand, none of them were time-specific, so I have plenty of time to finish them. At the moment, it looks as if this month may have many days with two or more posts in a day (like today). Or, I have a head start on August. Either way, it’s a good thing.

There was one other blogging development this month. As long time readers know, I’ve quite literally agonised over the structure of this blog: Should I focus it narrowly? I’d often talked about spinning off all talk of US politics, sometimes adding non-New Zealand topics to the list to be spun off. I even set up another blog to take those political posts, but could never get the political ones from here to import there. This turned out to be a good thing.

I am, as Roger Green calls himself, a magpie blogger, that is, I write about what interests me at that moment. Sometimes I’ll follow the same topic day after day and then abandon it for months. Other times I kind of skip around from day to day as the newest, shiniest topic captures my eye. In other words, this blog is me, an epiphany I had only recently. Avoiding certain topics, such as US politics, would mean avoiding parts of myself.

This realisation/epiphany dragged up some other issues. I felt bad about how my AmeriNZ Podcast had become, basically, an audio blog (aublog?), as if that was a bad thing. And yet, way back in episode one I’d said I saw it as an extension of this blog. So, not only is the current format NOT a problem or a defect, it’s what I envisioned when I started it back in 2007.

In 2009, I was bullied, basically, into dropping talk of US politics from my podcast. Part of it was an iTunes review that said my podcast was “too political”, a criticism that ended up becoming the name of an expressly political podcast I created with my friend Jason, 2Political Podcast (and no, I don’t know when it’ll return). I also wanted it to be our podcast, not just episodes of mine, but once it was launched I stopped talking about US politics on AmeriNZ Podcast, and since then I almost never have.

Similarly, my YouTube Channel is mainly videos about New Zealand, one way or another, but nothing about any of the many other subjects that interest me. I think this is actually one of the main reasons I haven’t made more videos. At one point I even considered using a second YouTube Channel I have (which is not public) to make other videos and vlogs (video blogs). “Video blogs” on a different channel? When I already have a written blog and a podcast where I already, well, blog? This was one of two catalysts for changing my thinking.

The other catalyst was thinking about Facebook, as I did recently. I wrote about how I don’t post anything about US politics to my personal Facebook, and how I had my blog and the AmeriNZ Facebook Page for political things. I also wrote:

I still rarely post anything political on my personal Facebook. That self-censorship means that anyone reading what I post there, arguably, isn't seeing the authentic me because there’s so much more that they never see.

And that, dear reader, was the aha! moment, because the exact same thing is true of my podcast and my YouTube Channel—everything except this blog, in fact.

And so, years of agonising about this blog are now over. This blog will remain as it always has been—clearly the authentic me—and my podcast will remain as it has become, with the re-introduction of political talk when I have something I want to talk about. I'll share more details about all that here and in the next episode of the podcast, as well as on the podcast site, at that time. And any future videos I make will be about whatever I’m interested in at the time, just like this blog and my podcast.

All of this was tied up with a pretty little bow just yesterday. As part of some research for a future blog post, I read some of my old posts that, I quickly realised, could have been YouTube videos (too, not necessarily instead of). It was then I realised there was no reason that I couldn’t make videos about absolutely anything I might blog about.

So everything AmeriNZ—which, after all, is actually a name I originally made up to describe myself—may now include anything and everything that interests me, with very little out of bounds. Each part can for the first time truly reinforce the other parts, so I really can use the best medium to tell a story.

This is incredibly liberating—and energising.

I may in the future set up a different blog and podcast feed that are specialised (for example, just about New Zealand), but those will have material repackaged from the equivalent AmeriNZ channel. AmeriNZ will have everything.

There are good reasons why deciding this all now is important, as I’ll talk about later this month. For now, though, I’ll just say that having a specific direction and unity for all things AmeriNZ will begin to matter quite a lot.

So, it’s a really awesome feeling that years of agonising about this blog are now over—well, I THINK they are, anyway…

2Political Podcast 125 is available

Episode 125 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

2Political Podcast 124 is available

Episode 124 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

We’ve been gone for a long time. This episode is about the unexpected reason for that.

2Political Podcast 123 is available

Episode 123 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

Tenth Twitterversary

Yesterday was my tenth Twitterversary. Despite everything, Twitter and I are still here.

— Arthur Schenck (@AmeriNZ) April 24, 2017

As the Tweet above suggests, yesterday (April 24 here, April 23 in the USA) was the tenth anniversary of me joining Twitter. The fact that I forgot all about it probably says all I need to about how diminished its role has become for me. Even so, it’s nevertheless a real-time history of how my use of social media has changed.

I summed up the history of all this four years ago:

Twitter was the second social network I joined, after MySpace (I joined Facebook a few months after Twitter). My original plan was to use those social networks to promote my podcast. I did that for awhile, but Twitter was one of the first that I started using for other things—or, to put it another way, it was the probably the first that I stopped using to promote my podcast (although in those days I hardly used Facebook for anything). I set up a separate Twitter account for my AmeriNZ Podcast in December of 2009, and one for 2Political Podcast in July of 2010. [Links in the original]

In the years since, I added an AmeriNZ Facebook Page to promote the stuff I do, but I still don’t use my personal Facebook to promote anything, and seldom use Twitter either. On the other hand, I rarely podcast these days, and haven’t blogged much this year, either, so it’s not like anyone would even notice that I used social media to promote something. Instead, I use the Facebook page to share stuff I won’t share on my personal Facebook, mainly stuff about US politics.

There’s no particular reason why I reduced my use of social media, Twitter in particular—I just have. Maybe I got tired of it, or of the constant waves of negativity that seem flow through it too frequently. Sometimes I got sick of shallow thinking or self-righteousness, but that was rare. Mainly, I think I just moved on.

I don’t know how I’ll use social media in the short term, much less the long term, or even if it will exist months or years from now in anything like the form it does now. But the truth is, I really don’t care. I use social media when I feel like it, I often get interesting information from it, and I often have fun. Right now, that’s enough.

2Political Podcast 122 is available

Episode 122 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

2Political Podcast 121 is available

We’re back!!
Episode 121 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

2Political Podcast announcement

We posted a short announcement to the site, but the gust is we’ll be back in January.

Arthur Answers, Part 2: About podcasting

For today’s question, Roger Green asks: “You ought to do a political podcast – oh, wait, you do! Besides the actual recording, what goes into making a podcast ready for listening?”

What a timely question, since I just released a new episode! Okay, so Roger actually asked the question two weeks ago, and I’ve released two podcast episodes between then and now, but still…

There are two aspects to making a podcast episode—the process, and the technology needed. Both vary, depending on the podcaster, so I’ll just stick to how I podcast.

First, the basic technological information: One has to have a microphone, some sort of audio interface to connect the microphone to the computer, and software to record the episode. The better the mic, the better the sound, but there’s good free software available that isn’t too hard to learn.

When I began podcasting I used an ordinary USB headset, of the type typically used (in 2007, anyway) for Skype calls. It plugged directly into the PC I had at the time, and my software was Audacity, which is open source free audio recording software. I used that for all of 2007, until Nigel gave me a new, better mic for my birthday in 2008.

Eventually I switched to a Macintosh and used the GarageBand software that comes with all Macs (and there’s a version for iOS devices, too). I also got a better audio mixer, and that was the setup I used until this year.

The process is the same, regardless of the software: Recording, editing, creating an MP3 file, uploading that to my podcast site, then promoting it on social media.

The recording is the most obvious: Press record and speak into the mic, click on stop when finished. That’s the easy part. Next, I have to listen to what I recorded, first to make sure the levels are right—not too loud or too soft—but also to listen for “dead air” (where I’m silent), areas where I say um too much, where I make mouth smacking noises (which really irritates some people), and even where I get things wrong, in which case I may re-record that part or else cut the entire thought.

This editing process can be as complex and time-consuming as one wants, really. For my AmeriNZ Podcast, I edit very lightly—mostly to remove dead air. That’s because that particular podcast has always been a bit more free-form. With 2Political Podcast, it’s much more complicated because there are two of us talking in two separate audio tracks. If I cut something from one track, I have to cut the exact same amount, and at the exact same time, on the other track or else they’ll get out of sync.

Because I edit AmeriNZ Podcast so lightly, that takes only about as long as it takes me to listen to the recording, maybe a bit longer. 2Political Podcast, on the other hand, tends to take two to three times as long as the finished podcast, meaning that a 45 minute episode would take, on average, 90 minutes to more than 2 hours to edit, and that's part of why they take so long to post (about which, an announcement is coming soon).

The next step is to prepare the MP3 file, and add the ID3 Tags, which adds information to the MP3 file, things like title, artist, album, track number, etc. This is how an MP3 player can tell you what a song is, who recorded it, what album it’s from, etc. I know some podcasters who manually add these tags, but I do NOT.

Both Audacity and GarageBand allow one to export a file as an MP3 and to add the ID3 tags at the same time (basically, it's like filling out a short form). However, I export in a high-quality file format, open that in iTunes, and use THAT to create the MP3 file and add the tags (both of which a very easy to do).

Next, I take the MP3 file and upload it to my podcast website (which is really a self-hosted Wordpress blog, with a special plug-in called podPress to post podcasts). I can upload it using FTP software, or through the website itself. I don’t usually make artwork (called “album art”) for specific episodes, but if I do I need to make that before I click “publish”, and I need to add it to my MP3 file.

Once the file is uploaded, I then write the “shownotes”, which is basic information about what the podcast episode is about, along with links to things I talked about or other related information. Basically, it’s a blog post, except that some of it will end up with the downloaded podcast (all of the ID3 tags are there, along with the album art, and some of the shownotes, too).

Once published, I share the episode on Google+, my AmeriNZ Facebook Page, and on Twitter. Finally, I post an announcement here on this blog. The five most recent episodes of both podcasts are listed on the righthand side of this blog, too.

Then, it starts all over again for the next episode.

Finally, I don’t script my podcasts at all, and much of the time I don’t even use any notes when I record. The quality would probably be higher if I did, but I’m only now getting to the point where I feel (and sound) comfortable reading a script, something that’s come about from doing voiceovers on my most recent YouTube videos, actually.

Those are the highlights of the process, and naturally there are a lot of specific details I left out. Nevertheless, that’s the general process. If anyone wants more specific information, feel free to ask in the comments or send me an email.

Thanks for the question, Roger!

There’s still time to ask a question if you want to, just ask in the comments to this post.

2Political Podcast 120 is available

Episode 120 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

This is the last of the recorded, but unposted, episodes—everything’s now current, finally. Guess we need to get around to recording a new one now…

2Political Podcast 119 is available

Episode 119 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

This episode was recorded in late April, but it was one of our “& other stuff” episodes, not about topical political issues—or any politics, really. We do that sometimes.

Also, two older episodes that I never finished editing in a timely manner are also available on the site in a post called “The Lost Episodes”, with a tongue-in-cheek description. But if you ever wondered what happened to episodes 116 and 117, this is where they ended up.

2Political Podcast 118 is available

Episode 118 of the 2Political Podcast is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

Something odd is going on with the numbering of episodes—check the site later this week for updates.

2Political Podcast 115 is available

Episode 115 of the 2Political Podcast, our last of 2015, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.

Creating, announcing, and cheating

All bloggers do something or other that other bloggers probably don’t approve of. Whether readers care or not is another matter (often, they don’t). But the line between simple content and filler—a cheat?—is pretty fine and, I think, largely imaginary.

Personal blogs, like this one, are very different from blogs that exist to sell something—a product, service, an author, etc. Blogs selling things need to have a constant flow of relevant content pointing toward their objective: Sales. Personal bloggers, on the other hand, merely need to have something to say.

Last year, I wrote about my podcast’s eighth anniversary and said that I planned to I resume posting announcements of new podcast episodes. It came about as part of a sort of evolutionary process: I realised that this blog, my podcast and my YouTube videos are basically different ways to do same thing: Tell the stories I wanted to tell.

It had been five years since I’d last posted a podcast announcement, and I’m still not certain why I stopped (or why it took me that long to notice!), but I think I may have an inkling of why I did that: I think that back then I thought it was “cheating” to post those announcements, that I should only publish blog posts that were new content unrelated to anything else I did, including any non-blog content I created.

To be honest, I think that’s really silly. Most blog readers may not care about a podcast episode, but some might. Similarly, not all podcast listeners would care about one of my blog posts, but I put links to relevant posts in podcast shownotes all the same, and for the same reason: Someone might be interested. It’s too early to be sure, but I bet it’s the same for my YouTube videos: Some viewers may be interested in my other content, but most probably won’t be. That’s fine—but why should I make that decision for them?

I came to realise that I spend a lot of time and effort on all this various content I produce, and I’ve never been paid for any of it (and have never sought to be). So, since “consumption” of what I create is the main reward I get, it's silly not to make that content as widely known and available as I can.

That’s why I resumed posting announcements of my podcasts. So far, I’ve shared my YouTube videos the same way I would anyone else’s: In a post with further commentary. As long as I have something to say about a video, I’ll share them here in that way, and if not, they’ll also get an announcement.

What all this means is that while I once saw announcing new podcast episodes as a “cheat”, and not “real” content, I now see it VERY differently: It’s sharing everything I produce, all the content, and letting people decide for themselves whether they’re interested or not.

Related to that and this very post, there was a time that I also thought that talking about the process of blogging—what I personally do, why I do what I do, etc.—was another kind of cheat, and way too “meta” for most readers to care about. I was wrong about that, too.

Most bloggers read other blogs, and we learn from others in various ways. Sometimes that means, um, borrowing things from other bloggers, but a lot of the time it means learning to do what we do better. I’ve learned so much from other bloggers that it seems rude, to say the least, not to share what I do and why; I can never know who might find something of value in my experience, just as I have in the experiences of others.

I’m no longer even sure there’s really such a thing as “cheating” for personal bloggers. If a blogger publishes or shares things that are relevant to the overall theme of the blog, then can anything really be a “cheat”?

Of course, I have a good reason to take this stance: I have a goal of an annual average of one blog post per day, so I have an incentive to defend filler as content. Maybe that’s all it is—defensiveness. But if the posts I mentioned—announcements and ones like this—don’t count as “real”, what does? If “real” posts are only those where I sat down and composed every word without ever using a video, meme/graphic, Tweet, Facebook update, or whatever, as a starting point, then most of this blog is made up of cheats. Obviously I reject that.

Personal blogs are a reflection of the bloggers who create them—what interests them, what they’re passionate about, what they find entertaining. Readers decide for themselves whether there’s value in any of that.

Who am I to argue with readers?

This post was inspired by a comment that Roger Green left on my most recent announcement post, that for the latest 2Political Podcast episode;(link goes to the comment).

New Year’s Eve Again

Here we are again, eh? Last day of the year, about to start it all over again tomorrow, a cycle that goes on and on. I love New Year’s Eve/Day for the fresh beginning the transition from one to the other offers. I’ve always felt that way.

This has been a year like all others, filled with triumph and tragedies, challenges and achievements. So much of what caught my attention this year has been documented on this blog, on my podcast, or both. As I’ve noted in the past, this means I don’t really need to recap my year—it’s already on this blog!

However, if I was to pick only one day to remember, it would be June 26, the day the US Supreme Court established 50-state marriage equality as the law of the land. Despite all the hatred and bigotry that blocked the path, ultimately love won. There’s so much more to do, not the least combatting our adversaries who have redoubled their efforts to take away the civil and human rights of LGBT Americans, but those sad people will fail—even they must know that in their dark and stony hearts.

On that June day, the only emotion felt by so many people was unbridled joy. I watched plenty of videos that day, some of which I shared on this blog, and tears rolled down my cheeks each and every time. To go from nothing to full citizen in one swift move is an extraordinary feeling, and made all my years of sacrifice so I could do LGBT activism worthwhile.

But 2015 was about so much more than just that one day, and in my previous post I shared a great video of the year’s news highlights. Many of the things in that video also showed up in this blog.

But that was then, what about what’s next? I’d like to think that I’ll make improvements this coming year, based on what I’ve learned and done in 2015—or, maybe the things I should have learned and should have done. Either way, as always, I want to keep moving forward.

So in 2016, as I have in previous years, I want to prepare more posts in advance as Roger Green does. The difference this time is that I’ve already started work on some of those 2016 posts. Trend? Fluke? Check back this time next year.

This year I made the first tentative steps toward actually using my AmeriNZ YouTube Channel. I stopped for a variety of reasons, but in 2016 I’ll be making videos—that’s a declarative statement. As I’ve said before, it’s about having the best tool to tell a story—this blog for written stories, my podcast for audio stories, and video for visual stories.

This year, too, I started making some tentative steps toward recording more AmeriNZ Podcast episodes. Those, too, will become more frequent in 2016. Like posts to this blog, I may plan and even record some episodes in advance, but my goal is to post new episodes on a more regular schedule. Jason and I also resumed recording our 2Political Podcast this year.

I hope to be able to make a positive report this time next year—don’t we all?—but it’ll be an interesting trip, regardless of what happens. Join me, won’t you?

This is my 365th post for 2015, so I have achieved my goal of an annual average of one post per day. As in previous years, thanks for your patience this month as I pushed hard to make the goal, and thanks to Roger Green for expressing confidence that I could do it. After being sick in the past week, I definitely had my doubts! The photo above is my last selfie of 2015, and was a bit of a joke: I was going to use it on the lock screen of my phone, then didn't. It got a new life here.

2Political Podcast 114 is available

Episode 114 of the 2Political Podcast, our last of 2015, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast, or leave comments on the episode. The five most recent episodes are also listed with links in the right sidebar of this blog.