I love acronyms. And so, I managed to shoehorn a series of words into RAGEcast to make it a proper acronym, which I felt represents our podcast a bit more accurately. Because we always seem to be charging our masers for subsequent firings. This word was also coined during our third podcast by Koda-P, and I ended up loving the word.

And thus, I present the renaming of our previously horribly titled podcast:

(R)elevant (A)nime & (G)aming (E)lucidation Podcast

Yay. I feel like I did something today.

wonderful touhou image above done by haniwa

-maserbeam

An interesting post by omo about the usage of the phrase ‘slice-of-life’ sparked a small chain of responses. So we did it the way we can, with our podcast. It’s not a breakthrough in thought exercise, but we’re happy enough to hopefully inform people about the rather ambiguous slice-of-life phrase we tag onto anime. If anything, we manage to add more criteria which lets one be more accurate when pinning an anime as slice-of-life.

And the image above is nekomimi mold. Of all the images I could have used, we went with an idea from the podcast. I’m too lazy to color it the proper cheese-yellow color, so you’ll just have to make do with a bad sketch.

I must know about this nekomimi-mold.

-maserbeam

I finally got the idea to use my dynamic compressor that’s actually meant for my guitar. Plugged it into the recording chain, and it seems it’s allowed us to be more relaxed about sound levels, instead of being paranoid that it’ll clip at any moment. Yay!

Normally I’d have to subject you to a long list of items that we talk about in the podcast, but since we’ve been largely talking about the 2010 Summer Season of anime, I can just link you to a site that contains a brief synopsis of the show alongside a preview image. Quite convenient if you just need a quick reference. And if you haven’t noticed the Black ★ Rock Shooter image, yes, we talk about the OVA. We also snuck in a gaming tidbit of a doujin game called Recettear, which I’ve blurbed about before already.

Capitalism, ho!

-maserbeam

Sometimes you just feel like throwing stuff. And it happened to me multiple times in the last few hours while I was QCing the last podcast for public consumption. I’m still not satisfied with the quality – I know it can sound better. I’ve already stalled it this long, and I figured to get back on track. So yes! Our podcasts are back, and now separated according to subject matter for better precision. Mish-mash of topics in a single podcast was only ever good if we were extremely professional, but we’re not. The best I can do is start making some music for the intros and transitions so it’s easier on the ears.

Come listen anyway, and burn away 2+ hours of your life.

Taste like burning.

-maserbeam

While it didn’t last very long, the podcast I did with my friends taught me a lot of things about audio recording. I did take a recording arts class once. But being able to put some of the knowledge to use was interesting. Much of what I learned about had to be re-learned again, due to brain atrophy. So what went wrong with the podcast?

A good portion of the podcast going under was just the amount of sheer edits and fixes I had to apply to the waveform. My cohorts know about this, and I had plenty of crap to fix when we were done recording. I don’t have the best setup and equipment. It was sufficient to get a nice sound to my computer, but not enough to maintain the quality. Distance from the mics, no pop-guards, one complete boom-stand, a short stick to hold my mic, and inadequate spacing plus terrible layout of my room didn’t help.

It’s a bit of a ragequit as well. I didn’t like the current content of the podcast. Even if I said we’d include derails and trainwrecks, listening to the unedited podcasts made me realize that more often than not, we talk like complete idiots. Maybe we got better in the last three, but I have my doubts.

Despite this rant, I wouldn’t abandon podcasting. I’ve found it fun. Perhaps I just need a reboot and a refocus of energy.

So what should a reader get out of reading this entry? A good podcast takes effort. It takes professionalism. A bit of garage mentality. Unpolished, but beautifully uncut.

It should be YOU. Not being someone else, but being yourself. And unfortunately, I was fooling myself.

I failed this time. Now it’s time to go fail, again. But I’m going to fail better. Because I know how to do it. (The failing part.)

Miku image drawn by nagian (http://yoroz.jp/), stolen from danbooru.

-maserbeam