Make Something Every Day – FAIL 001 (was Podcast)

Perfect Path

English - August 31, 2021 18:44
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Previous Episode: Make Something Every Day – Film 001

Next Episode: Make Something Every Day – Coding 001

It was bound to happen sooner or later. My heart kind of sank when I saw that I’d drawn “podcast” today. I haven’t made a podcast for quite a while and the reason for that doesn’t seem to be that I haven’t given myself time to do it. Because today, I gave myself the whole … Continue reading Make Something Every Day – FAIL 001 (was Podcast) →

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

My heart kind of sank when I saw that I’d drawn “podcast” today. I haven’t made a podcast for quite a while and the reason for that doesn’t seem to be that I haven’t given myself time to do it. Because today, I gave myself the whole day to do it and I couldn’t do it.

Or to be more precise, I couldn’t do anything that I wanted to publish. So in that sense it’s not so much of a fail – it’s just like those other days when I made something, and I wrote about it here, but I didn’t show it here, because it wasn’t finished or interesting enough or whatever. Except those other days I felt quite good about the doing, whereas today I didn’t even enjoy the process.

I started podcasting a long time ago. There are teenagers making podcasts today to whom I could legitimately say “I was podcasting before you were born, kid!” And when I started it was a very exciting way of getting my voice out there. And saying things in a natural way, as they came to me, rather than crafting something written. But today everything was bleh, my heart wasn’t in it and I kept thinking of other things I’d rather be spending my time on.

I started off making a little intro and pulling in bits of audio from the scrap pile, a bit like yesterday’s film piece. And I made a little list of the things I might want to say but when I started actually making some stuff, I was way too self-conscious and blabbery.

So I went for a walk and a think and a coffee and got some groceries and thought perhaps I was just taking it too seriously. So when I got back i invented a little game – take 10 flickr pictures at random and then talk about each one. I use this tool and set it up so that I couldn’t actually see the pictures but was able to copy the URLs and then open them while I was talking. It still doesn’t sound like such a bad idea now that I write about it, and I gave it a good shot, but once it was finished and I’d put on a little outro, I knew that I wasn’t going to share it, it just needs much more work to whittle it down to something listenable.

Now long-term listeners of mine may be thinking “when did this worry you in the past? We’ve heard some atrociously unlistenable tosh from you and we still love you.” but for some reason this is just not as easy to publish and forget about as either the old old stuff or the other things I’ve been making in the last few days. There’s something more intimate about putting my voice out there and this just feels like bad impro.

Dunno. It may pass, but for today, I’m not sharing it and can’t really see anything in the medium that interests me – and this is me, who in every other area so far has thought “forget the established forms, just do what you want to do with this thing”. I don’t know whether I want to keep “podcast” on the list.

Eh. We’re allowed to have such days.

For completeness, here are the photos I talked about. It’s quite weird seeing what came up.