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Juggling

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I haven’t updated in a while. I don’t really even know if anyone actually reads this – if they do, then I can’t tell because no one comments and there are more bots crawling my page looking for an email address to spam than there are live humans (also, I definitely have a USA Department Of Defense IP address in my analytics. Not sure what they think I am up to here).

The reasons I haven’t updated are many and varied. After I took a vacation in May it was easier to have the pattern of “not worrying about that right now”, and I am slowly working my way back to full website-productivity. The other things that I work on (when I get a precious moment free from parenting, husbanding, working and otherwise maintaining the household and life) tend to be video-game related, and I’ve been using the “I need to relax” excuse. But it’s an excuse 80-90% of the time. I can relax while writing – or I can relax while reading, which is something that I know helps my writing.

I think that I am no longer going to do the “==>” podcast – I don’t especially care about it and I think that it deserves more of an “audio drama” than “one guy talking into a mic” I still have all the files, but I think I’ll take them off of libsyn. I will start it up in the future if someone asks me to. Also the guise of “reading it to my daughter” is a pretty bad idea – she is going to start picking up words pretty soon, and Karkat is way too intense for her not to figure some of those out.

I am also working on finding a new job (current job doesn’t pay what I need – if you have a job that pays 35k with benefits or 45k without, email me seth . kleinpaste @ stumblestoryinn . com ), and a new apartment (current place isn’t the right size or shape for raising a getting-in-to-everything toddler). So yeah. I am legitimately busy right now, and I am figuring out what next to be podcasting. Hopefully it can be something with another person.

Basically I am using this post to prove to myself that I really can write a post on lunch at work. It’s not impossible, and I really don’t have more important shit to do.

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status of stuff

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Before I get going: Go see MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. You just need to. Don’t see it if you have PTSD associated with hardcore punk style (lots of leather and metal), or car crashes (basically it is one long car crash that keeps getting better), or fire. Those are the only reasons you are allowed to not see it.

So, I know I promised that I would have an episode up, and I am still planning at keeping to that, but I had to (once again) change my schedule to meet the demands of life. And I don’t even care that I may have disappointed all of my fans, considering how few they are, and how well I know them, and especially considering that the money I am paying to maintain this website is very much worth having a creative outlet.

I am finished editing the episode, and I will be recording the intro to it sometime later today, and hopefully that means that it will be published tonight after I get it formatted correctly and everything (currently both my beautiful ladies are sleeping and I don’t want to wake them with my voice). I am also still writing the next Lily story post, and that will hopefully be finished and made available by Thursday at the normal time.

At some point in the last week or two, Amanda found a file on our desktop that contained something that I was inspired to write. It was only a page or so long and I thought it wasn’t that great. Apparently she liked it, even though I don’t  really know what is great about it.

It was a high-level look at a world I had been thinking about where the last good king dies amidst prophecies of how he will return, and then all the bad guys try to keep their bad-ness to lower levels in order to not trigger the prophecies.

The kingdom goes through several evolutions of social structure and they eventually manage to have a society that can support (among other things) several successful evil necromancer-dukes, all without waking up the king. The thing is: they all really love their country, and all for different (often conflicting) reasons.

What I am envisioning is actually trying to publish a book of short stories that start from the point where the society has finished reeling from the shock of the king leaving, but have little to do with one another, except some references to influential characters and events.

This got all rambly and shit, but I don’t care. I’m just glad I have a website. What a day. What a lovely day.

p.s. if you are interested in my photography stuff, I changed the gallery. Check it out.

p.p.s Are you people sharing my website or something? my analytics show occasional huge jumps in unique IDs. Most recently on may 18th. Maybe you were all expecting my episode up? Show me some love on my facebook page if you aren’t robots – seriously: I want to know if there are real people actually reading this with their meaty eyes, you should let me know, because I haven’t met a single person who has said that they regularly check my website other than my brother and myself. I am not linking because robots follow links. just search facebook for the website name.

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A week in, and I already want to write a book.

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And, while I am really figuring some stuff out,

I STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING.

And I would still really like for you to tell me if/when I am doing something wrong. Please – you can email me (seth.kleinpaste@stumblestoryinn.com) or use the contact/feedback pages. I will get back to you, probably very soon.

So, my website has been up for a week. Time to talk about it. BUT FIRST – an idea that struck me.

This is put here as an experiment.

This is put here as an experiment.

I realized that so far I had nothing to give anyone coming here to my website, and that was really unfortunate. I think that I will be ready to launch my podcasts very soon (more on that later), but other than my photos (which are low-resolution versions of the originals), my…meandering blog posts that I will surely have, and some interesting links for you to go to on the resources page, I have not given anyone a single reason to come here. SO, I was at work one day with nothing to do but work with my hands and my brain was off on some tangents in a podcast and I thought

“Holy crap. I’m in a very unique position right now. I should write a book about that. And give it away.”

Specifically, I am in the position of ‘about to launch my first podcast’, at the same time that I launch my second and third podcast, at the same time that I launch my blog and website. Also, I was kinda hoping that I could make a brand out of all this stuff and possibly (one day) make a living off of it.

I also have a problem: whenever I start talking to people about my plans to start a website/blog/podcast/etc, I see this expression come over their face. It is an interesting expression – it is one that expresses genuine interest, but not because the subject is inherently interesting – but they are being pulled along in the wake of my interest, and they perhaps are wondering when I am going to stop making such a big wake in the waters of the conversation so we can get back to something that is interesting to more people (more sane people?). So this book will be a very good way to express this stuff to someone (my keyboard, at the moment), and return to normal conversation with all my friends.

My plan is that I will do a series of blog posts, and each of these posts will be another chapter in my upcoming book. If you think you have heard about this somewhere – you probably have. Pat Flynn is a guy that started a blog and an online business. He actually did the exact same thing – you can read his blog and get the exact same content, or you can get his E-book for free. And the best part is the recursion – his E-book is written on the topic of publishing E-books.

My book will likely have a lower production value, especially where the graphics are concerned. But I wanted to be able to give something to people, and what better to give people than a bit of perspective? I will be writing in media res, and I expect the theme to be something along the lines of a note of encouragement. A statement of “hey guys, I know it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, but I can see the end of the road from here!”. I hope that I will be able to break down the confusing parts into something comprehensible, and maybe even inspire some people to start their own podcast.

So, a week. what have I done with this week?

I put up a handful of pages, all those things that you think and see when you go to the websites of other successful internet people. I actually specifically modeled it after these other people. The difference between ‘feedback’ and ‘contact’ still mystifies me – and maybe I should merge them into one page. I think I got way too wordy on my ‘resources’ page, so I made it private until I can change it to something reasonable. Something that I am continually proud of is sitting over on my photography page. I like photos. Especially mine, and especially when they earn me an ‘A’.

I tried out all sorts of different themes, and landed on Parabola by Cryout Creations. At first when I started trying things out, I thought that I had accidentally paid for a theme (something that I absolutely should not be doing right now). But it turns out that they just know what makes people want to give them money. It is robust, it is pretty, I can modify some pretty major things that other free themes just dictate for me, it lets me fiddle with any little setting that I could even think of (and a lot that I didn’t). I think that you should try out their themes and then go give them some money. I do not get paid for what I am saying here. If website ever starts making money, I am going to give some of it to these guys, either by buying some paid themes, or just giving it to them – they just give such good stuff away. I want to show my support, and I would love it if you tried them out on your own website.

I have gotten a whole bunch of plugins, mostly at the direction of Daniel J. Lewis, specifically the 41st episode of the Audacity to Podcast. (this also exemplifies one of the best parts about blogging and podcasting – there is a record of good info just sitting around like low-hanging fruit).

I have gone out and made a bunch of social media pages so they will be ready when it is time to really do that stuff. All the links will be at the end of the blog posts, and I have a StumbleStoryInn on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. There are other links to other things, and I encourage you to use those links if you like my stuff. Hell – use those links if you don’t like my stuff. Just use the links, please.

I need to change a few things: there are a few colors that I don’t like, but my more graphically-oriented wife is not in the room at the moment. My header is certainly going to change. I like the photo that it is taken from, but it has absolutely nothing to do with apprentices, games, podcasts, stories, and only a little bit with nerds (it is japanese 6-1, by the way). I need to figure out how to turn off pointless information about the lack of commentary at the bottom of most pages. I am considering a column of useful stuff on the left side, but not sure.

Ok, this has gone on for a while, so I will wrap up after this: If you happen to come to my site right now, you would think that I am about to go to LibSyn and start my media hosting stuff. A problem happened, though – Amanda’s car died. This means that the small amount of leeway in my budget just disappeared overnight. Unless someone donates money to me, or I find a bunch of money in a briefcase in the alley out back – My plans for the podcast are to continue editing and making episodes ready, but posting them might be an interesting trick right at the moment.

Thanks for reading.

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I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING.

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But I am figuring it out.

But while I am figuring it out – please tell me what I am doing wrong. I don’t have a lot of self-awareness and I often don’t realize that people want me to do something. Telling me directly is the best way. Email me: contact@stumblestoryinn.com

I really appreciate it and if you are in Ohio, it would be really easy for me to follow through on a promise to give you a cookie (or other little pastry of your choice).

This is the first ‘real’ post that I am putting on the website, and this is the first time that I have actually built a website (or…started building a website. most of my sub-pages say ‘under construction’ right at the moment). Currently I am using WordPress, with the free theme “ilisa” [update: parabola. it is amazing]. I don’t know whether or not I will be keeping this theme around, but I like the look of it when I have no images, like right now, but I’m not sure I am going to like it with images (putting a header in makes it overlap the title of the website – first real problem I found with it).

First off, if you came here from a search engine, or a link on some sort of forum or social media…THANK YOU for visiting my website! I have no idea how much traffic to expect, or who to expect it from. If you are reading this post then either you are in the archives (thanks for looking through them!), or it has been less than a month since my website went up. Which means that you are special – my google analytics probably shows you, individually. You are that blip, and I will cherish that blip – you just coming here helps me to say “See! I am doing something that someone else thought it would be cool to look at!”, and seriously, I appreciate that – it is really easy to think that I am just screaming into the void here.

This image is mostly here as an experiment.

BUT If you are one of my friends that I have bugged and begged to come and check out my website/podcast/etc then THANK YOU for actually doing that. I really appreciate it, and I am going to make a cookie (or some other little pastry) just for you. I would love it if you would tell people about this website, or even better: if you would tell someone about one particular page on my website. If you send people to one of these particular pages, then they will probably stick around for a little bit longer, which helps me to show my awesome stuff to them. You could try sending them to my photo gallery, perhaps one of my ..three.. ..separate.. ..podcasts.., or even just the contact page, so that they can just tell me all the things that they would rather see me doing – I really am open to anything right now. So, the main point of this endeavor is to have a landing page for my podcasts, all three of which I will explain a little bit in a moment. The secondary function is to be able to publish stuff about some of the things that I like to do, like the aforementioned photography, internet stuff in general, social media stuff, and…I don’t know…talk about bonsai trees or something. I will probably complain eventually, as well.

So, the podcasts: The Nerd’s Apprentice: I think that the  Nerd World is a subculture within American and global society that is not very well understood by those outside of it. SO…I am starting the Nerd’s Apprentice as a way to try to help us nerds to be a little more self-aware, and to help those outside of the Nerd World to understand us a little bit more easily. The topics will be on all sorts of things, from tabletop roleplaying, to conventions, to why some nerds like the Sahara desert and some like New Zealand (it has to do with movies). The format will be a somewhat ‘normal’ format for nerdy podcasts I have listened to already – a couple guys sitting in front of the microphone, neither of which is 100% sure if what he is about to say will bring down the rage of the internet. I will be having a few regular co-hosts and hopefully a bunch of interviews. I am the nerd, and many of you are the nerd, but we are all the apprentice (especially those of us who are not nerds) – we all have something about the Nerd World that we don’t know. If you have an episode idea that you would like to hear me talk about, you should email me. The schedule will be once every 2 weeks on Monday morning, opposite the Apprentice Story Teller

The Apprentice Story Teller: I think that storytelling – both its art and its craft – is becoming passe` in my culture (I am American, specifically Midwestern Caucasian). I have a nephew that I know I will need to entertain at some point, and if he is anything like me or my brothers, he won’t just want to play with a football. I want to be able to keep his rapt attention with the things that I can tell him about, and inspire him to tell others a story of his own. The format will be mostly me telling you stories, but also exploring aspects of the Art of Storytelling in a discussion format with other people. I am the apprentice, and I want to record my learning process about this – and to give you the recording, so that you will be able to learn, as well. I am pretty sure that I will take submissions, and if you have an idea for a story that you want told, or if you have something that you would like to submit your own audio for it, I eagerly encourage you to email me about this. The schedule will be once every 2 weeks on Monday morning, opposite the Nerd’s Apprentice.

The Apprentice Game Master: at the time of writing, I have been out of Tabletop Roleplaying for about 2 years. I am getting back into it because of the faith that many of my friends have in my gaming abilities. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to help other people learn how to play the game, especially since I have one new player that will be playing with me. The format is quite specifically against the grain of the normal “actual gameplay” podcasts I have heard (to be fair, I have not heard very many). I am going to harshly edit out everything that doesn’t happen “in-game”, and then chop it up into 15(ish) minute segments. I will do my best to remove dice-rolls, page-turns, tangents about local restaurants, and ten-year-old inside jokes. I think that most of my listeners just don’t care about most of that, and the shorter segments will make it much easier to consume. We are both the apprentice, and I am re-learning how to GM – you could learn with me. The schedule will be 3 days weekly, probably Tues/Wed/Thurs, but I am not set on that. Thanks for reading this whole thing – walls of text are sort of my specialty. And seriously, I want to give you a cookie. You should come over.