Special Episode: That Gets My Goat
Instead of your normal Dunesteef this week, we bring you a special episode of “That Gets My Goat,” Big and Rish’s secondary podcast. After an explanation and a question for the audience, Rish complains about the trailer for an upcoming Liam Neeson movie, then complains about movies in general.
Right click HERE to download the episode, select Save Link As, and save the file to your hard drive.
http://media.libsyn.com/media/dunesteef/Dunesteef_88_Special_That_Gets_My_Goat_12.mp3%20
The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine 
November 12, 2010 at 6:23 am
I enjoy this, but think you should have a separate feed.
I am told that if you get a Posterous account, you can just drop an audio file in each post and it will create a feed for it, and it is completely free. I don’t know if there are download/bandwidth limitations, but I believe there are not. It’s worth investigating, in any case!
November 12, 2010 at 9:24 am
If there’s a goat feed, I’ll take it however I can get it. :-)
I set up fullcast on my own page. I used a company called 1and1 and set up the feed through wordpress. If I had more than one show, I’d just need to post each file into the correct feed each time. The market is always changing, so i don’t know if 1and1 is the best option now, but to put it in perspective, I pay $10 a month, and the downloads are unlimited. I’m pretty sure my storage space started at some value, and grows each month, but I’m not sure if it would be difficult to move a bunch of files over in one go on that kind of plan
I know one guy who was dropped from his “unlimited” service (I think it was BlueHost…avoid them) for having too much traffic. But he has tens of thousands of listeners. The company that came to his aid and was able to handle his traffic was ZeHosting. They might be worth looking into.
November 12, 2010 at 10:05 am
I like your goat getting! I’ve listened to 80% of all your podcasts including the banter at the end!! Yes I’m of fan if that! Oh Rish…. That’s what she said!
November 12, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Speaking of trailers that give the end of movies away, I have a video cassette of Curse of the Demon that bears a two paragraph blurb. The first paragraph gives the ending away, the second contradicts everything said in the first paragraph. That sort of ineptitude takes real talent.
November 13, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I enjoyed the goat-getting, but I also agree that it should be in a separate feed.
On the topic of movie studios only seeming to care about opening weekend, and the question of “Which would you prefer? A big opening weekend success that dies after that or a movie like Inception which builds week on week?”, I believe I can shed a little light on that.
They are actually better off having 1 million people see it opening weekend and nobody ever seeing it after that than they are with 10,000 people seeing it opening weekend but 2 million people seeing it over the entire run.
The studios (I guess really the distributors) have brought this upon themselves. Greedy for as much as possible from strong opening weekends, their deal with the movie theatres gives them *most* of opening weekend/week but then an ever decreasing amount of ticket sales.
So, a movie that goes BANG-fizzle benefits the producers/distributors of the movie a lot. A movie that goes hmm-oh-HEY-this-is-AWESOME and builds benefits the movie theatres more and the producers/distributors less. So if they can ruin a movie but make it enticing enough to get lots of people out in the first week, they’re happy. The writer/director/actors/… may not be happy with having their movie ruined for people, but the bean-counters are happy.
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution2.htm has some information on how this works, though from what I’ve heard the profit share may often be much more extremely towards the distributor in week 1 and much more extremely towards the theatre in later weeks.
November 13, 2010 at 3:25 pm
That’s really interesting stuff, Jacob.
It really sheds some light on the whole BANG-fizzle crap that we have to deal with these days.
November 14, 2010 at 12:10 am
You know, I was aware of the whole studio/theater profit-sharing deal, and the way they do it still makes no sense to me. Our local theater made enough on AVATAR to buy two $100k digital projectors. And that’s even spliting profits 40/60 a month into the run. But studios are still content with the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2s dropping over sixty percent on their second week.
But we lowly peons never understand the thinking of upper managment. Typical, I guess.
November 14, 2010 at 3:42 am
I’m a relatively new subscriber – and am catching up by listening to a selection of your past podcasts. I also subscribe to a few other short story podcasts. Each of these have their own spin, and yours is certainly unique.
You currently provide a helpful option by having the story first, and then the listener can choose (if they’re “in the mood”) to continue to listen to your banter, or not (“sorry honey, not tonight, I have a headache”).
I think you should retain one feed – by splitting you are segmenting your market and taking the risk of losing existing and potential audience. However if you decide to have a 100% banter episode, like this one, I suggest the following simple solution. Title the episodes that have a story at the beginning as “STORY-xxxxx” and those that are purely banter, “BANTER-xxxx”. Thus the subscriber can easily decide to listen or not – depending on their mood (see above).
Am enjoying your show! Thanks a lot for sharing (for free!) your hard work and talents with me and your other listeners. Much appreciated.
BESTEST
David
November 14, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Spoiler Alert: Coming soon, My Comment! Watch as I introduce myself as a newish listener, talk a bit about finding the Dunesteef, and confess that this was my first Goatcast. I’ll make some reference to the gotten goat in question, mention that I plan on stealing the word “schloaded” and claiming I came up with it myself, make some complimentary remarks about the podcast, and humbly suggest that goat episodes go out as a separate cast for simplicity’s sake.
I’ll then continue on my journey, finding love, losing love, finding an acceptable short term substitute for love, confront my most trusted friend who, as it turns out is evil (who knew?), finally come to my senses and race after the woman of my recently found/lost love, arrive at the airport seconds too late, commit 18 serious criminal acts to keep the plane from leaving, and profess my love from beneath a dogpile of police, air marshals and assorted federal agents. As the closing credits roll, I
reveal that I am in fact Keyser Söze , that you can’t handle the truth, I am your father (yes, both of you – just be glad I didn’t reference Chinatown or Deliverance), that the man behind the curtain (also me) is the wizard, and that we were on the earth the whole time. Oh yeah, and I’m married.
Betcha can’t wait to see my comment, huh?
November 14, 2010 at 9:08 pm
Nah, not interested. I’ve pretty seen it already. Maybe I’ll catch it on DVD, but I’ll probably never bother with it at all now.
November 14, 2010 at 10:40 pm
I vote against including TGMG in the main feed. I *have* listened to all of them because A) I sometimes enjoy the banter and B) I am sometimes terminally bored and in search of ways to avoid writing, but I do not look forward to TGMG the way I do to a normal episode. A conversation springing from a story I just read is interesting. A random gripefest is not. Occasionally funny moments do not make a gripefest more interesting in and of itself; I, too, sometimes have funny moments in my conversations with friends, but it is not something that can or should be widely disseminated. TGMG is amusing as a sometimes thing, but not a regular subscription thing.
As it stands, with TGMG as a separate thing, I might check it periodically to listen and see what’s on your minds, but if it were in the main feed, I would just skip over it and probably never come back. (Partially, I admit, out of spite at making me pay attention to what comes in on my feed aggregator instead of just listening to whatever is new sight unseen.) On the other hand, I primarily listen to story podcasts and have only one non-story podcast in my feed. (And that one is the Brain Science Podcast, because it’s topical, focused, and highly informative on a topic I enjoy.) I have none of the apparently more standard form “some people talk about assorted things in a vaguely thematic manner” podcasts on my list. If I followed more of those, I might be less “meh” about TGMG achieving full-time status.
Basically, you guys do a really great job creating stories, but while I’m interested enough in your thoughts on those stories to listen to your post-story conversations, I have no interest in a podcast featuring *any* two people just randomly talking about nothing in particular. Like, seriously, you could have Sirs Ian McKellan and Terry Pratchett on a “talking about whatever” podcast and I would not bother to tune in. Maybe that’s the introvert thing kicking up, that normal conversation doesn’t interest me much. I dunno. Another data point, I guess.
TGMG = Okay every now and then
TGMG becoming a second full feed = Meh
TGMG in main feed = Please don’t.
(And personally, I have almost never been surprised by a movie’s plot twists. I think the last movie where I was genuinely unsure what was going to happen was “Magnolia.” I do not watch movies to find out what happens. I watch them to see *how* things happen and to enjoy good writing, good acting, or both. Thus, trailers becoming more spoilerish is not something I’ve noticed overmuch. As far as I’ve concerned, trailers have pretty much always revealed the entire plot of a given movie. The main question for me is, “Was it done well enough to justify watching them do it?”)
November 15, 2010 at 7:06 am
Pretty much diametrically opposed to Nathaniel’s post. I am one of those listeners who sometimes skips over the story until later, but always listens to the banter.
I LOVE the banter section. Yes, I do sometimes have funny moments with my friends. But they’re not this funny. And they’re not funny in the same way. And we also don’t edit them down and intersperse them with recurrent kick-ass sound effects and funny realistic impressions. (Well, we do the impressions part, but they’re not that good.)
I’ve listened to alot of podcasts. Some are content-driven. Some are personality-driven or charisma-driven. Some are both.
It’s not true that at all for me that all voices are created equal or all funny is created equal. Some people are more enjoyable to listen to.
If this had just been a story podcast, I may or may not have continued to listen and become a fan.
But there’s a real creativity to the conversations you two have. It’s really funny and I enjoy it.
This feed, another feed, I guess I don’t have a huge preference. As long as i can listen somewhere.
November 15, 2010 at 1:46 am
This is fun a podcast like your normal show but a little different in a good way like chocolate milk with cornflakes. This was the fifth goat cast and I must say I like that it turned up as an iTunes download which is my way of saying I would like it as an iTunes feed but I don’t mind if it is part of the main feed or it’s own podcast. As a trailler watcher I must say I agree with the point that trailers give a way to much it’s a personal check point for me that I never go to a film if I feel I no to much after I watch a trailer which allows me to spend a lot less money!
November 17, 2010 at 6:25 am
I like TGMG, but I never download it. It usually just sits in my firefox, in a tab, waiting for me to remember I have a 30-minute chunk of audio to listen to that I have to be in front of my computer for.
Make TGMG a secondary feed or put it in the main feed, whichever — as long as it automatically goes from teh interwebs* to my JesusPhone, I’ll listen to it. (Plus, the banter is easy for me to listen to at work; I can’t listen to stories while I work because I get distracted.)
I noticed someone above suggested Posterous. I prefer Tumblr myself. And not just for the ~hem hem~ dirty pictures.
* I heard the phrase “search the interweb” on Babylon 5 this morning, and I laughed.
November 17, 2010 at 7:29 am
This was the first TGMG episode I listened to, prompted by the fact iTunes automatically downloaded it. I liked it and will likely continue listening. I may or may not have listened to it had it not come through the regular feed – I admit, I’ve become somewhat reliant on ITunes to do all the downloading work for me (yes, I have sold my soul to Apple. It’s very sad).
I do feel having a separate feed for it is important – just by scrolling down the comments here its very clear the listenership has varying desires. I don’t think merely renaming the files as David suggested above would be effective – I for one rarely if ever look at file names, for one thing. Secondly, for the people who just aren’t interested in all-banter segments, it would require extra fiddling with their mp3 player/feed to make sure they don’t download those episodes. And no one likes extra tasks, even if those tasks only take a few seconds.
I don’t think having a separate feed for TGMG would split the listenership/potential audience, either. It’s not like you’re talking about NOT doing the banter bit on the main part, you’re just offering something extra for those interested. And to expand listenership, just periodically plug it on the main ‘cast. Being able to say “oh and you can subscribe to it via ITunes!” would just make it easier and more inviting for king lazybones like myself…
November 18, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Been listening to you guys forever, but this is the first time I’ve listened to TGMG. My suggestion, feedwise, would be to do all of the above. Create another feed for TGMG and a feed that contains everything. That way everyone is happy. It can’t be that hard to do, but if it’s beyond your technical ability I understand.
On to the content. So I have a question for Rish. If trailers that have spoilers get your goat, what do you think of trailers that are intentionally misleading? I don’t know how many movies I have skipped, watched later and really enjoyed. The only reason I skipped it to start with was that the trailer made it out to be a love story instead of a twisted psycho thriller.
November 19, 2010 at 9:45 am
Well, no, that doesn’t make everyone happy, you’re still forcing people to get the all-banter episode if they don’t want it. Having one feed that has just the regular story/banter, and another feed that has EVERYTHING, would do what you’re suggesting (largely) No idea how much work or.. technical problems that would entail, though. And that still wouldn’t have just a TGMG only feed, but having three different feeds for two podcasts seems to be going a little overboard, maybe. Heh
November 19, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Samantha,
RSS feeds just point at files, so making extra feeds isn’t hard, and doesn’t cost anything. You just have to add each new file to the appropriate subfeed and the uberfeed and that’s it. Some authors do this when they release different books in audio, especially if they have concurrent banter podcasts. Each book gets its own feed, but fans can get everything in one place if they want it. Sometimes a podcast conglomerate will have all their podcasts in one feed as an option as well. It probably isn’t necessary for TGMG and Dunesteef, unless Rish and Big decide to keep adding shows (They have so much free time, I’m not sure what’s holding them back from doing so…haha!) I don’t think an uberfeed would do much more than dilute itunes reviews over more pages.
November 19, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Bob, in answer to your question, I too have found I’ve avoided movies I would’ve loved because the trailer made it seem like something other than it was. I suppose the trailer makers failed in those cases.
But far more often, I’ve seen a trailer that misleaded me into WANTING to see a movie, only to leave disappointed that it wasn’t what the trailer made it appear to be. In that case, though I hate them for it, I suppose the trailer guys did their job.
November 19, 2010 at 9:26 am
Bob – You mean like this one?
November 19, 2010 at 10:12 am
Wow, that is funny stuff man. I love the use of Peter Gabriel’s “Salisbury Hill” on that. It’s just such a movie trailer standard.
November 20, 2010 at 3:00 pm
That was hilarious! I kept wondering if they were going to figure out a way to make the ax through the door scene seem heartwarming!
As for the big question: I vote 2nd feed. I rarely listen on my computer, but take my ipod along everywhere. So if I were in a TGMG kinda mood, it’d would be great to have it right there with me. I probably wouldn’t listen as much if I could only hear it on the site.