(115b & 116) Production Notes

Last week the podcast website went down for a few days. For the few people who noticed, it was a blip. For me, it was a personal crisis. I spent the entire first evening flailing at it ineffectively. The next day at work I was horribly depressed. I assume it’s like what having a sick kid feels like. I thought “Shit, I recognize this emotion. This is what my life was back in the bad old days. This is what it feels like for life to have no purpose, for existence to be meaningless. No wonder I drank so much. This is awful.”

Yes, I know it’s a silly over-reaction. My emotions are stupid! I spent the following evening and the morning of the next day continuing to make repairs. Ultimately I had to deleted WordPress entirely and reinstall it clean (something got corrupted, I still don’t know what) and revert to backups, then recreate the last few weeks (which hadn’t been backed up yet). I was hesitant to do all this, because I didn’t know how badly it would screw things up, but it turns out there was very little screwing at all, as far as I can tell. Everything is OK again. Plus my life has meaning. Yaaaaay! Crisis averted. :)

Life Lesson y’all – back yo shit up.

(One might think the life lesson is not to let your sense of personal worth be entirely dependent upon a flimsy piece of tech which can be destroyed with an errant power surge, or which you can be cut off from permanently by someone snipping a few wires. Maybe to find purpose in something more stable and physically present, such as the love of the people around you. Those people have a very different way of thinking than I do. Plus I would remind them that accidents and disease are a thing. I’ll stick with my mp3 files, thank you very much. At least they can’t move away to pursue careers elsewhere.)

As for this week’s episode – I tried to lighten the mood when I switched to Anna’s POV, I hope it came through in my voice and my choice of music. I had to go with a song from the Jet Grind Radio soundtrack, as JGR (or JSR for your purists) is the closest I came to athletics in my youth. :) And boy did I spend a lot of hours on it! So when I think sports, these are the songs that come to mind.

You may notice I snuck in another new voice, as Flitwick. That was a last-minute change. When I was listening to the final episode I was hit by just how out of place my Flitwick sounded. I’ve gotten really used to hearing other people doing the other voices, and me doing Flitwick was jarring. Thanks to Francis for volunteering at the eleventh hour! I’ll back-edit all the previous Flitwick lines the same weekend I find the time to fix the Patils lines. So, you know… Thanksgiving?

And damn – we’ve made it to the denouement arc.