They Don’t Know

There is a site out there that rhymes with ‘the maylee like’ (I am not going to link to it because I don’t want to give them any more publicity than they are already getting by being querulous) written by some anonymous person(s). Their tagline is “commentary on GLBT podcasts”… and I somehow got caught up in their list, and they wrote the following comments about my most recent show:

They Don’t Know Episode 48

Peter chats with friends Joey, Mark, Josh, Stephen and his partner Eric. The title is so true. They talk over the voice mails. What’s the point of playing them if you are going to talk over them? Such bad podcasting etiquette. They apologize but they aren’t sincere.

Talk about gay geeks, these guys are the epitome of geek and not cool geek. They spend a time talking about cars, naked men, cat ladies, pants, and all of this is almost too hard to listen to. They are all talking at the same time and it’s hard to follow. The laughter is over modulated and hurts our ears.

These are the guys who would be social retards at any cool, hip gay party. They’d be standing on the edges saying weird things and looking at all the hot guys. That’s mean we know, but we just have a feeling it’s true.

Here is my response, it is currently ‘in moderation’ so I figured I would share it on my own site just in case they don’t decide to publish it.

I can cheerily tell you a few things about those on the ‘They Don’t Know’ Podcast, seeing as I run it and all:

1. We really don’t attend ‘cool, hip, gay parties’. Such parties tend to be run by cool, hip, gay men who spend most of their time analyzing others and finding ways to put them down so they can feel better about themselves. We go to the normal parties with normal people and normal flaws, and talk about things other than how fabulous being cool, gay, and hip are. Meanwhile, we leave the ogling to the internet where the pretty boys have the decency to keep their mouths shut (or stuffed) at all times.

2. There are upwards of five of us sitting around one snowball microphone recording into Garageband. While I understand ‘the staff’ of this blog is entitled to it’s own opinion… they have rather stringent audio standards, and it is my opinion that such feelings are disingenuous without one or both of the following:
A. Any discussion of how podcasters can improve their audio quality, keeping in mind the millions of combinations of audio hardware and software. (And no, ‘waaaah, the music is too loud!’, is not discussion)
B. Links to a charitable fund that will provide queercasters with the extra microphones, stands, pop-filters, audio boards, inline compressors, and high-bandwidth recording equipment should they just not want to spend their own money on anything more than a ~$90 mic from an electronics store.

Without A and/or B, ‘the staff’ is just pissing into the wind.

3. We have a sense of humor and we assume our listeners do as well. We have always talked over voicemails, especially if they go on for upwards of a minute and a half. Yet people keep calling back, and aren’t angry. Thus, we assume they got the joke and appreciate their call.

In the meantime, you’ll have to excuse me and my guests if we don’t really acknowledge any of the criticisms issued by this blog. ‘The staff’s suggestions seem to be useless to most podcasters, and seems more dedicated to generating negative attention with querulous commentary. Really, one could replace the whole site with a simple webpage that read ‘your audio quality sucks and we hate you, -the staff’ and save a lot of time and effort.

That all being said, I would completely understand and appreciate if ‘the staff’ chose not to waste their time on my humble efforts in the future.

Cheers.

Needless to say, I’m hoping to avoid this site in the future, and I invite other podcasters and podcast listeners to avoid it as well.

And for what it’s worth, When I write mean and otherwise insolent summaries of things on the internet, I make damn sure to put my name on it.

Feel free to leave a comment or discuss in the forums. Please try to avoid saying the name of the site or linking to it, as I don’t want them to win any publicity from me.

Tags: assholes on the internet, critical websites, negative attention

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Blog Post, Peter's Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.