Greetings and salutations returning readers; it has been awhile since I last posted for various reasons due to various backstage reasons, new guests to book, upcoming guests to get orientated, big shows that needed preparations, busy, busy, busy. At any rate today I am going to talk about one of the new challenges that we face, the switching of formats of solid footing. For a season and a half this was a program primarily about webcomics. Sure, there were some exceptions here and there, but even guests like Lewis Luvhaug and David Malki have connections to webcomics. The changeover kinda started last week with CB Ash, but that was before events changed with Brian Clevinger. This week there is no second guest, this week there will be no familiar discussions about webcomics, or even cousin fields in which to make some comparisons

For the next two weeks, we are going to be talking video games with a specific bent and this will be far from the last time we take ventures off the webcomic trail for that is what we do, we do more then webcomics, we do entertainment, though I am unsure if we do harder, more educational topics yet. Be that as it may, it is going to be interesting to see how all of us will adapt to this changing landscape and I for one look forward to the mixing of fields. Keep abrest of the space fore next time I will disseminate how well we are handling the curve-balls, or at least attempt to. Also, before I go I do have a non-article related announcement to make as Moonhawk Studios Presents is pleased to welcome J.L. Haramof Picatrix to the regular guest panel crew, good to have you aboard J.L.

Greetings and salutations, I know it has been a bit of time since my last article but sometimes the so called real world does inject. At any rate in this installment I want to describe some of the rigors that goes into researching the works of the various guests that we showcase on a weekly basis. The first bit of research comes from the initial contact during recruiting season, wherein a brief examination of the targeted work will ensure, if I am not already familiar with said work.

During recruiting season I do a cursory surface examination, it is really all that I can muster due to the fact that when this recruiting season is being enacted I have quite a few candidates to appraise during the rounds, so the in-depth research tends to get held off until the week of whenever so and so guest is being featured. As far as deep analysis goes, well, this varies from week to week and guest to guest, but the specific point I wish to speak about are guests that have, for right now, webcomic archives that contain hundreds upon hundreds of back episodes.

Usually I can make it through a webcomic of recent origin or a webcomic that has an archive of at most 300 to 400 pages in a day or two. Occasionally we will feature a guest that has a webcomic, a recent example being one Katie Sweet of Juathuur whose archive boasts a good thousand plus pages, it becomes quite a daunting task. It is unfortunate that the proper amount of time and effort can be invested into properly absorbing all of the details and nuances of such a backlog. This has the unfortunate effect of blunting and generalizing my interview questions.

I suppose the overall point of this article is to mention to the purveyors of these archive heavy webcomics is that the onus is going to be on you to bring forth some of the more obscure details of said webomic. Join me next time as I discuss the challenges behind researching some of the non-webcomic related project that we plan on featuring in the near futur.

I am quite aware that I have been mentioning a certain failed attempt of an episode quite a bit in my previous columns and it is true I have been glossing over it in favor of other topics of technical failure, but those had purpose, foundations and continuity and timing. Indeed this week shall be our retake with Mr. Downey and it seems very poignant to explore this issue at this point in time with those readers who have a good idea of the challenges we face on a weekly basis, provided they have read my back issues

Now some of the problems we faced that week were I am sorry to say rather atypical of this show, problems connecting Skype to Talkshoe of course; with the additional headache of having pretty much everyone having sound issues, some of it was Talkshoe interference, some of it was bad microphone or bad microphone positioning and some of it was focus failure involving roommates.

The sum of these parts was massive frustration, embarrassment and a lack of tangible results. What does separate this attempt from the last one a theoretical reader might ask? The fallout from that debacle was a changeover in recording practices. No longer do we exclusively rely on TakeShit for our recording needs; in fact, the only reason we still with that accursed program at all is for the live chatroom. Functionality. We do have other chatrooms, on Ustream and on the site here, but TookFail is still the place where people gather, plus the Ustream channel is having some technical issues of its own.

Right now our principle recording method is a combination of Skype and the call recording software Pamela and it has allowed us to overcome the many failings of of TailSpike. Not just connectivity issues, but with the Pamela recordings we get stereo sound, about a thousand times more in the way of clarity and edit options. This method has saved shows in the recent past and continues to serve us well, which should translate into a sucussful recording for Downey this time around.

Join me next time as I switch subject and talking about the research methodologies that goes on when examining the work of a guest.