Category: production notes

One might wonder why I take off for the holidays. Since I work a standard office job, the holidays should mean extra time for podcasting, not less. And indeed, I had originally intended to run 52 episodes a year. I don’t have any family that celebrates holidays in state (raised Jehovah’s Witness), and I was happily single. My first holiday non-episode was forced on me by a new relationship that exploded into my life back in Summer of 2011 (damn, has it really been that long?).

Now I’ve got a much larger social circle and all sorts of social obligations around the holidays that take up the extra time I gained from having work off, and then some. Not that I’m complaining, life is great. I try to always keep a one-episode buffer in case of emergencies. I’ve had to dig into it once this year due to sickness, and it’s a bit stressful running for several weeks afterwards with no margin for error while I build up another episode buffer. But it did allow me to continue putting out episodes without any unscheduled interruption. :)

So Happy Holidays everyone! There’s a brief Omake next week, and we’ll be back to regular episodes in the new year!

This is a hard chapter for me, because I am not a hero or a god. Eliezer endorsed a Reddit thread about this chapter, not for the initial post, but for the replies that it received. I’ll be borrowing from it a bit. To quote PlacidPlatypus:

“ it doesn’t really matter whose “fault” it is. What matters is that it happened. The idea of responsibility doesn’t refer to anything real about what happened or is going to happen, it refers to what you are willing to do about it.”

This concept of responsibility was taught me by my parents. It was also one of the major reasons I started doubting their religion – the real world plainly demonstrated that God did not hold to this moral code. Perhaps foolishly, I continued to hold to it while also continuing to watch the nightly news. It ended up damn near breaking me. It was just one factor of many, of course, including a genetic disposition to mental instability. But I believe that this is a moral code that only gods can uphold, and that only Heroes try to.

“When you say, “This is not my responsibility,” all you really mean is, “I am not willing to do anything to make this turn out right.””

I have had to come to terms with the fact that there are a lot of things I’m not willing to do. And yet, it still remains the gold standard for me. The ideal moral code to implement if it were possible. The fact that I can’t still tears at me when it’s brought to my attention. Bujold once said that a large part of SF is the fantasy of political agency (paraphrased). The ability to make things right. In my opinion SF/F has always been the genre of the idealist. And perhaps anything that can get the reader to live some of that idealism in the world is a good thing, even if it’s a bit hard to take at times.

Also, this is taken from Eliezer’s Author’s Notes for November:

To anyone who wants to live in a saner world: the Center for Applied Rationality is now in that vital startup stage where every dollar matters – where donations greatly shorten the timeline to better research, and determine who can be hired as the first employees.  There’s a chance here to reach up toward that impossible dream of a better world where people aren’t crazy all the damn time, because believe it or not, nobody’s really tried anything like this before.  If you’ve got the power to fund this sort of thing – drop by our Berkeley office and talk to us, or attend a workshop and see for yourself what’s going on.  Or just act immediately.  Science, reason, and rationality – it’s what Muggles use instead of magic, and it’s all we’ve got.

It is with a melancholy regret that I turn the page on SPHEW. This has been a great deal of fun, and has really opened my eyes to what a good cast can do. Every actress brings her own unique interpretation to things that I wouldn’t have gotten by myself, and the zeal that they threw into the roles was inspiring. When I’m reading sometimes the names of the non-Main Characters blur together, so I didn’t really realize until I had distinct voices acting them just how unique and interesting all these secondary characters had been written. Maybe it’s because I grew up on Trek: Next Generation, but I really love mid-sized group dynamics in stories, and I’ll miss weaving these voices together every week. On the other hand, I’ll be glad to go back to a more normal schedule… splicing together 8 different audio tracks every week increased production time a fair bit.

To everyone involved – thank you! And lest we forget, thanks to Eliezer for writing all this in the first place. :)

Hoo boy, that was a tough one! Fun though! Which I suppose is a common enough theme, the tougher something is, the more fun it is to do it. When I first started mapping out this episode in my head I thought to use the Prometheus Trailer Theme for the summoning ritual. But I didn’t feel quite right about it – it was a very recent movie, so it felt fad-ish, and it was a pretty bad movie to boot. I spent way too long searching for other options. There were many I liked (the Inception theme was almost used – it has a very similar sound, and comes from a much better movie. But it sounds less horror-esque, and the music is actually an important part of the plot of the movie, I didn’t want to bring in all that baggage). Ultimately nothing really hit me as just over-the-top enough with a horror feel like the Prometheus Trailer.

Of course the full trailer theme is only a minute and a half long, so I had to do some looping to stretch it out. Fortunately the song already has a lot of abrupt swells and falls, which made good break points. And it allowed me to time the fade-out very nicely to the narration. The seams aren’t perfect, but they work.

The voice-masking effect was tricky. Generally for 60-Minute-type shows they just drop the pitch drastically. The “blurred into unidentifiability by a buzzing undertone” is easy to imagine, I’m sure we all know what that should sound like, but how the hell does one actually do it? Blurring too much makes the words hard to understand, which is probably OK if you’re beating up 11-year-old girls, but it’s a big no-no for an audio book. Underlaying a buzzing doesn’t really mask the voice at all, it just creates a buzzing in the background. I tried mixing the audio with white noise via the vocodor option, as was suggested at various sites, but that produced too much of a robotic auto-tuned sound.

I sometimes adjust the tempo of speech a bit for various nefarious purposes, but I quickly learned you can’t alter it by more than a few percent, or you get a “clicking” effect. I decided to use that to my advantage in this episode, first dropping the tempo by 70%, then speeding it back up to normal again. The clicking is an irremovable artifact of the slowing process, so bringing the voice back up to speed left the distortion. It’s not the world’s best masking, but it provides plausible deniability, and it sounds similar to how it was described.

I hope I’m not dating myself too badly with the Mortal Kombat theme. I recall a time when every other fight AMV was set to that song…

It’s amazing just how much information can be transferred visually in a written medium without even needing to read the words. The first section of this chapter is a montage, with summaries of every-day mundane activities in plain text interlaced with vingettes giving a sampling of the memorable extraordinary events in italics. One can quickly grasp the back-and-forth nature simply by looking at the page and seeing the alternating plain and italicized text. As with the POV-changes and reading-of-letters previously, I had to find some way to do this with audio cues. I read the daily-life sections in a more relaxed voice, and the vingettes with a bit more intensity, but that only did so much. It still sounded like a somewhat jumbled mess. I tried to mark the vingettes with the echo effect of the Humanism Flashback Scene, but it was far too portentous for what this was. But it did trigger the “treat it as a flashback” idea, and I settled on a variation of the “going into a flashback” noise that I remembered from Lost to separate the two narratives. It seems to work.

It’s been a busy week, so a short Production Note today. You’ve likely noticed a lot of pop-culture references in HPMOR (and for that matter, some high-brow-culture references as well). A lot of the fun of reading this sort of fic is finding them on your own and basking in the in-group glow, so I don’t generally point them out (that, and I don’t catch them all either, and I don’t want to look like an out-group loser :) ). But I must make an exception for The Tragedy of Light. Because it’s very good and you should see it if you haven’t yet. It’s a reference to the anime Death Note, and while it drags in the middle, the first half is awesome and finale ain’t bad at all. One of the best animes I’ve seen, so this is a recommendation.