Tonight’s artwork was a never-realized, very different-looking Enterprise from Ralph McQuarrie.

I cleaned the apartment today. Or, at least, I cleaned the floors of our apartment. No small task, mind you. All the vacuuming and the floor squeegie-ing. Oh, yes, I CLEANED those motherfuckers. You could eat off that shit if you wanted to…which is totally legit if you’re a dog who has cleanliness concerns, as in, you needn’t be concerned oh worrisome dog, these floors are in fact cleaned for you and you may eat of them.

I did some fun research stuff with Adobe After Effects tonight to see if it might be possible to add some fun visualizations to the videos of our podcast. Yes, you read that right, VISUALS for our PODCAST. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but I figured if I can do some cool look animation-stuffs to move along with the audio, maybe people might actually enjoy “watching” the podcast. Not that I’d expect anyone to really watch for more than a couple seconds at a time, but it would still be visually arresting when looking at the thumbnail clip and pique the interest of anyone perusing on through. Perhaps even keep some people watching exclusively on YouTube, which would be awesome, because we can totally put ads on that shit and maybe recoup expenses. A man can dream.

I’m not sure if it’s a “go” yet though. I did some rough mock-up work tonight, mainly to familiarize myself with the techniques involved, and it’s currently rendering through the night. If it can accomplish that (and there’s also a counter on the render screen that will tell me exactly how long it took), then it’s a green flag waving for me. I’d consider something around an 8-hour render time acceptable. Anything more than that, however, and we’re in territory that’s just not worth it. I’ll figure out a way to animate something much more basic than an actual element that dances to the audio waveform, and we’ll just loop that shit over and over for the 30 minutes of the podcast. People probably wouldn’t even know the difference, to be honest. I guess I’m saying, if it’s easy enough to just render while I sleep, sure we can get fancy. Once I get the template set up, all I’d ever have to do is drop in the newest audio file, maybe change the on-screen text, and then send that baby to render and I sleep. Then, an upload in the AM before I walk the dogs, and viola, we have a “video podcast” every monday morning.

We’ll see.

Tomorrow is a writing day! In fact, I think we’ll cut this entry a bit short tonight, so I can go and map that out, what I want to get done and when. Let’s do that, and then I can even get a bit of reading done tonight as well.

Till tomorrow kiddies. Today was a good day 🙂