Third flu's the charm
Plus some test streams and flowers
Greetings from Flu 3.0… ugh… well, at least this one doesn’t seem as bad as the last couple (August and November).
AKA: why I skipped yesterday’s Scuttlebutt video.
I also skipped the Thursday blog but that’s fine… kinda wanted to write a tribute to Scott Adams but I dunno if I’ll just come across like an idiot, too critical or not critical enough.
So I’ll leave it at this until I figure out something intelligent to say:
Poor Myles. Costume wigs weren’t designed for the big-eared amongst us, so Myles had to squish it in between his ears and it just won’t sit right.
Actually, I think I’ll skip the Thursday theme blog in general. When I have something to write about themes in my work or when I specifically write about a newly finished piece, then sure, I’ll post it on Thursdays, but it feels a bit draining to try to think of something each week. I’d rather spend that time and energy on painting and cartooning than blogging.
What else…
With Christmas over and our poinsettias rapidly declining, I’m back to floral duty once a month at my church.
I sometimes debate dropping it, but the thing is, I kinda really do like making flower arrangements and I’m not going to take the time and cost to make any for at home, usually… just have to adjust to a Thursday afternoon timing as that’s what currently works for the office. And there’s 4 of us on the floral team so it’s only once a month that my Thursday gets interrupted.
Last year I tried to grow cut flowers for these arrangements in my garden, specifically snapdragons, calendula, and gerbera, but the calendula and gerbera decided they’d bloom a mere 4-6” out of the soil, making them useless for cut flowers. And by the time the snapdragons bloomed, I’d just given up on checking so I simply bought all the needed flowers.
I do use greenery from my garden, though. I have a beast of an oregano plant that gets 6’ across every year despite being cut down to 4” in the late winter, so I always use lots of oregano for filler. And I planted a eucalyptus in my dad’s yard and harvest off that. And I have other greens like dogwood and willow… it would be nice if I could get flowers to bloom with long enough stems for vases but oh well.
This week’s Tuesday livestream was a bit of a gong show. On the one hand, I figured out how to schedule it in advance and shared the link out in several places. On the other hand, I immediately had some weird echo that I couldn’t fix and had to nix the stream and start again… which, of course, negated the links I’d made.
Sigh…
On the plus side, I did a couple of private/unlisted short test streams with a document camera and my laptop and I think they worked OK. This is what I’ll try for this Tuesday’s stream and hopefully it’ll all work when I actually go live for real.
As if a live drawing/brainstorming stream and Scuttlebutt and Paint With Pyra and reels aren’t enough, I have an idea about another video project, one that’s more of a show… it will be a bit of a public access TV-style spoof of late night TV with a lame monologue at the beginning and some desk bits like a Top 10 list and guests (but mine will be puppets… both cheap ones I already have and eventually better ones of Ricky and Myles and maybe Noah and Ursula that I have to build). And the musical guest will be me mucking about making obnoxious synth noise.
And commercials. Gotta have a crazy amount of commercials for authenticity.
We’ll see… I’ve been kicking around a version of this idea for a few years and I keep not actually doing it but it keeps coming back.
Speaking of shows, I weirdly miss my old radio show, the Vampire’s Ball on CiTR. It’s been 11 years since I left the airwaves, though I did have a couple sorta similar shows I did on Mixcloud (as Mind of maQLu) and I even tried to revive the Vampire’s Ball as a Mixcloud show a few years back but only did it a month.
The reality is it’s way more work to cut a show together as a pre-recorded one than to actually DJ live on a real radio station, and Mixcloud is clunky and a pain in the ass but currently the only legal way to do it (other than paying hundreds a month to Live365), and there isn’t really any discovery on Mixcloud so last time I got virtually no listeners… and I did post the show there for the last year I was on CiTR and still got very few listens, let alone all this time later when whatever audience I used to have as a DJ is scattered.
Oddly enough, I have a couple thousand followers on there as maQLu even though I haven’t posted there in ages, but that didn’t translate to plays, either.
Anyway, there really isn’t any sort of local community radio station that would fit the sort of show I used to do, with the former volunteer radio station in my area having folded almost 10 years ago and the current amateur radio club being for ham radio, ie: for emergency communications, not hack wannabe DJs.
And realistically, if I’m just playing music for myself, I can do that just fine with my private Spotify playlists.
Truth be told, a lot of my projects are more for my own amusement and only come to light sometimes. The Nick White Show was one like that: a project for the lockdowns that was a funny idea but turned out to be more work that it was worth. I think I have a couple hundred pages of scripts for several full-length sitcom-style episodes (20-30 minutes each) that never did get filmed, so what’s on the channel was just the tip of the iceberg.
Likewise with Ricky’s podcast: what I’ve posted is less than 5% of the content I have on the go.
Noah’s comics do get posted, but I could certainly do way more with it.
Of course, I’d like to earn an income from my characters and comics, so I need to be way better at finishing things to get saleable products like books out there. And merch.
And I have to be better and more consistent at marketing so as to find customers.
In a roundabout way, I guess part of my idea for doing a radio-like show again would be to then market those future products, but I think there are better ways to do that… or at least it might be better served by that public access TV-style show instead of a new version of my old DJ show.
Or, y’know, expanding my live drawing livestream since that actually features my characters and my art.
I’m thinking as spring progresses I may add a couple more weekly livestreams over the next few months. Maybe since the Tuesday stream is brainstorming and doodling, I could do an inking (ie, showing more finished drawings) stream and maybe one focussed on worldbuilding details and how-to?
We’ll see.