Jurassic Hour #5: Pornography!
You know what's sad? When you start to stay away from your own website for fear that you might get a peek at it. Specifically, how nothing. Is. Happening. There.
Here's the skinny: the podcast as you two dozen people knew it got blowed up because we lost two people to perfectly defensible grown-up situations. For those keeping score at home, that's half of us.
And rather than pretend nothing had happened or would happen, Pat "Gameodactyl" Gann and I thought it might be time to change things up.
The result of all of that is in front of you. We're still Gameosaurus.com, and we still do the Jurassic Hour, but our bent is no longer strictly games. From now on, the show's focus is personalities and relationships, and the blog is a general-interest-whatever-the-hell sort of thing.
The first episode in the podcast's new format is wriggling around below these paragraphs. Our friend "Terra" joins the Gameodactyl and me for a sprawling discussion about our encounters with male and female strippers, how much porn is too much porn, when you should tell your boyfriend that you intentionally stopped using birth control to have his baby, and so much more!
Terra judged a "Male Entertainer of the Year" event in Baltimore last month, and we ask her plenty of questions about that. Listen in real-time as the Gameodactyl becomes completely scandalized.
And then Terra steps out, and Gann and I get down to the business of what we've been playing for the last month. Up for discussion: ALAN WAKE, BLUR, the sublime RED DEAD REDEMPTION, the not-s0-sublime RECORD OF AGAREST WAR and more.
The most important thing to note here, I think, is the fact that we're absolutely doing this for us and don't need validation from traffic stats and comments, though we certainly invite all of those things. We'll be trying another one of these in two weeks, and we may well solicit your participation. So if you get a plaintive e-mail or phone call from us begging for you to appear on the show, think seriously about it!
Okay, enough babbling. Let's overshare!
With music from Marilyn Manson, Sleigh Bells, Joe Budden and Chk! Chk! Chk!
(right-click to save, use theplayer below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #5: Pornography!
INTRO -- Marilyn Manson, "This is the New Shit"
01:16 - 33:42 -- Sabotage Yahoo! Answers
ACT BREAK -- Sleigh Bells, "Riot Rhythm"
36:00 - 52:15 -- Judging a male stripping contest in Baltimore
52:15 - 1:15:39 -- Pornography: great hobby or greatest hobby?
ACT BREAK -- Joe Budden, "Fire (Yes, Yes Y'all)"
1:19:55 - 1:56:45 -- What we've been playing
OUTRO -- Chk! Chk! Chk!, "King's Weed"
New home for The Jurassic Hour
Y'ALL.
One more technical update today, but first, check out this BRAIN-KICKING LOGO I MADE IN PAINT.
Done looking? Is that even possible? Okay, onward.
While I've developed some very modest Internet skills over the last few weeks, bad things still happen, and I will continue to ascribe them to circumstances beyond my control.
Case in point: a casualty.
The Jurassic Radio RSS feed didn't survive the server switch, and no amount of elementary hackery is going to bring it back. I tried .htaccess 301 fixes. I tried XML-level redirects. I brought the feed completely up to standards-compliance, which, given how sloppy I was with it over the last year, was no small feat.
But it was for naught. So I tried the nuclear option.
We have a new podcast feed for The Jurassic Hour! It's here. Spelled out, that's http://www.gameosaurus.com/hour/feed.xml. And we're up and running on iTunes already. You can check that out here.
If you click, you'll notice that the feed includes only the first three episodes of The Jurassic Hour. That's by design. The Jurassic Radio episodes will endure, but you'll have to click here to get to them. Spelled out, that's http://www.gameosaurus.com/podcasts/feed.xml.
I've got 150 GB of server space, and the 40-odd Jurassic Radio episodes we recorded comprise only about 4 GB, so they'll live on in perpetuity. If you ever want to leaf through them and can't find them, drop me a line. It's very basic, occasionally dull stuff, but it represents roughly a year of enthusiasm and fairly hard work. And there definitely were some good moments along the way — our New Year's show comes to mind, as does our October chip-sampling expo at Alex's house — so I'm preserving all of it.
Now get subscribed, and if you love me, go comment on iTunes!
The Internet’s all … different!
By now, you might have noticed that things look a little weird around here.
Good eye! After relying for a year on Alex and Amanda Gann's server help and design chops, I decided I had learned enough to host the site on my own server and build or modify every piece of code by myself.
What you're seeing now is the result of that, and I'll leave it to you to decide whether I've been successful.
But first, have a look around. Navigation has changed quite a bit, as has the layout of certain items. Our Twitter feeds, for example, have been consolidated into a *list* (ooh!) that displays only on the main portal page, which also is where you'll find the most relevant pieces of content on the site at any given moment.
Okay, let's be real. In almost every case, "relevant" will mean the three most recently published posts. We're not exactly an authoring powerhouse.
And if we're doing our jobs correctly, you'll never have to leave the portal to navigate. But just in case you do, know these things:
- Our "About Us" page, which you should investigate if you have not, is tucked away at the bottom of this page and every other.
- Same goes for the rest of the navigation tools. If you want to get back to the portal and don't know how to use your browser's BACK FEATURE, check the link in the lower-left.
- For organization's sake, categories aren't listed outright. If you want to see other posts in a given category, click on the link in that post. Otherwise, you'll have to go fishing, though we don't expect you'll need to be (or have any interest in) doing same.
Now, for the rough edges:
- Our old gallery and all corresponding picture links are permanently dead and gone. If you see a suspicious white rectangle in any given post, you're seeing what once was a big, beautiful image full of possibility and promise. I didn't export the photos in time from the old server, so they're dead.
- I did get all the back episodes of the podcast, but I'm sending them to the server now, and it's slow going. If you're trying to get to any episode of the show and aren't having any luck, give us a day. We're on it.
- I'm more-or-less content with the way things have shaken out, but there's always room for improvement. If there's a "feature" that you miss from the old site (unlikely), let us know in the comments on this or any other post. I feel relatively comfortable with PHP, but where improvement is concerned, I'm leaning on your imaginations. For I have none.
Thanks for sticking with us so far, and here's to many thousands of words and minutes of creative energy better spent elsewhere.
(For contributors: The new column width is 500 pixels. Your logins and passwords should have carried over; let me know if you need new ones. The admin link is at the bottom of the page with the navigation tools. My recommendation: bookmark it!)
Pardon our dust!
I'm in the middle of moving us to our new look. This is one component of it, but it's definitely not the only one. Refresh occasionally this weekend if you want to watch me stumble and fail with PHP.
State of the site, end of the podcast?
(I was going to craft a new narrative for all of this, but I spent a lot of time making sure the following e-mail to the other guys was as truthful and diplomatic as possible. So, with a few edits, here is that document.)
To: Gameodactyl, Gamegnathus
CC: Benji, Gameratops
Re: Podcasto (Spanish for podcast)
New plan -- no podcast today, as (UNNAMED GAMEOSAUR) hasn't started the book nor played FFXIII much, and they're the only two things I really was planning on talking about. I want to discuss both of them at some serious length -- took two pages of notes on the book for discussion questions, etc.
So we'll catch up again next week. Unless either of you have something you'd really like to discuss this week, in which case I'm totally game.
One other thing, and as a foreword, I know I share responsibility for this:
Editing together the last five or six shows, it's become fairly clear that we're going through the motions. I really appreciate everybody's involvement and the enormous amount of time each of us obviously has sunken into this project, but if I'm pulling teeth and creating a hassle for you guys, I'd just as soon not do it. And if I'm creating a financial hardship for people by harassing them into buying things they otherwise wouldn't, thereby draining checking and savings accounts and pissing off spouses, well, I really don't want to be doing that, either.
I trace most of this back to the fact that a) we're still trying to do too much too often, and b) we really don't know who we're talking to. We DO know that we're not talking to many people. Even after Pat courageously pelted the entire FFXIII launch crowd with business cards Monday, this week marks our lowest podcast and Web traffic since the first week of February.
Whomp whomp.
So the stakes are pretty low every time we get together.
Here's my proposal: I'm writing two posts today -- one for FFXIII at the 13-hour mark, one for the state of the site. In the state of the site post, I put it to readers that we intend to make episode 48 our last WEEKLY show, as that would bring us to precisely one year since we started the podcast. And then we bang out five really solid episodes.
But that's with one caveat -- if our listenership of roughly 25 people can get our weekly audience to 50 by the last episode, we'll continue doing it weekly, setting audience benchmarks as appropriate.
If not, we'll keep the feed running, and I'll find reasons to record occasional pieces of audio.
The site will continue, of course, and you're all welcome to continue contributing. Starting sometime in April, I'm moving to the copy desk at work, which means I get a raise and 7½-hour days back. That's down from 11-ish, which means I'll have much more time to myself, and I won't be completely burned out by already having spent the entire day writing and lifting. And in September, I technically hit four years with the company, which means my salary jumps by about one-third. That allows for considerably more resources for things like recording and video capture equipment.
I'm trying to prod Alex into mocking up a new design for $200 or so. Something super minimalist. One fat column spanning about 800 px, completely for body text. At the top, the logo; one Gameosaurus twitter feed that anyone can contribute to, much the way Drunken Gamers does it (@DGRadio); an ABOUT US link, a link to back episodes of the podcast; and a search util. The rest is content, all the way to the bottom.
And at that point, it's just an attractive blog (hopefully) with some audio every now and then. No expectations, no reason to fuss or feel stressed. Ben's welcome to get in on it if he wants. I'll still edit for grammar, but not for content. I'll just disagree with him vehemently 
(I confess that I was a dick during that whole process, but that was when I was plagued by delusions of relative fame and blissfully unaware of how few people we were reaching.)
Rambo, I continue to pester you about playing co-op Dawn of War II with me. I'm available all night.
Pardon our dust
As you can see, there are new things to look at all over the site. We canned the ugly Twitter widgets for even uglier scripted text, though that's a stand-in for a fancier solution to come in a few days.
We're running into a problem right now that allows body and jump pages to span across the two rightmost columns, rather than the one where they belong. This will be fixed momentarily, our extremely handy admin tells me.
Hopefully the full redesign will be implemented soon. Bear with us in the meantime.