Jason Scott here, again nestled among the trees in my little treehouse/pod near
the Holiday Inn where I spend the other 360 days of the year when Notacon is
out of session.
If last year's Notacon Radio rocked (and it did), then I'm running
out of words to describe how incredible this year's was. Not only did we have everything
we had last year, but this year was the birth of WGET, an actual Notacon Radio
Station.
We got off to a much rockier start than we should have; the reason for this was that
I didn't do a test setup on Thursday night, deciding to take it easy and figure we could
whip things together on Friday. Big mistake. By not having the full focus on the NOC guys
(who now had paying attendees and their network needs to handle) and letting myself get
tripped up on a year-old set of settings which I'd long forgotten, we had to spend a
lot of time getting things in tune. I had forgotten that the machine oddcasts out to
one of the NOC machines, which then functions as the Icecast server; instead, we wasted
an hour trying to get things running fully on my laptop. No such dice. However, once we
hammered out all the bugs, (and for this, one has to thank the tireless efforts of one
Muchomas on the Notacon crew)
we were back in business. Except, well... I forgot the power
supply to my mixer. And it was a completely whack-ass voltage. Oops! Once again, Notacon
staff came to the rescue and we were
lent a nice mixing board
to attach everyone to. And we were off!
I must stress this one point: unlike last year, where I spent a large part of notacon
working the mike and doing the shows and guiding others to take over, I would say I was
on Notacon radio less than a half-hour total the whole weekend. If you listen to the
audio files we have, you might hear my voice in the background,
but that was literately me running between different events, stopping by to make sure
everything was working as expected (which it was) and then blowing out a few assy
jokes before walking away again. I was almost never on mike, and I never once
was "Lead"; I was just another dope nearby weighing into whatever the "show" was up to.
Last year, our big leaders were ech0 and Citadel. This year, the mike was owned by Irv
of Dial-a-Dork and Dexter Douglas of Living in Syn. Between the two of them, they clocked
well over TEN HOURS on Notacon Radio... or should I say... WGET.
"Hey, you know, I have an FM transmitter at home."
And with those fateful words, we put Notacon Radio on the air for all of Saturday. But
let's leave that aside for the moment.
After the rough start, the Notacon Radio table became a compound. Last year, we
took up a table that was set at an angle. This time, we took over 4, and had food,
laptops, wiring, pamphlets, booklets, knapsacks, signs and a billion chairs and
crap all riding up the corner. The Notacon Radio staff swelled to well over a dozen,
with many people jumping into the mix over time, and a lot of folks joining in
who weren't even at Notacon.
Not content to duplicate the efforts of last year, the Notacon Radio Posse (an
affiliate of Infonomicon, Dial a Dork, Living in Syn, and
six billion other shows)
wired the show not only into FM, but Skype, meaning that folks were actually
calling in and joining the show as co-hosts. ROCK!
Friday night was dominated by Dial-a-Dork in the guise of Drew and Ira, who took
over the mics and went whole-hog with everyone until well into the morning,
easily surpassing last year's record. They jammed for 5 hours with visits
from tons of people, including a return of Drew Curtis of fark.com
who once again sipped his drinks and laid down the insights. Great stuff, as always.
We started on Saturday around noon and by the time I finally shut down the place,
it was 3 in the morning. FIFTEEN HOURS, ladies and gentlemen.
Again, I didn't do much of it at all. Slick0, Ponyboy, Dexter, Lowtek_Mystik,
Drew, Droops, Zack, Kizzle..... and so many others, who I am sure will bitch at me to
add them in. I could barely keep track! Again, I was doing three presentations,
two "events", and generally making conversation all over the conference. I was barely
there!
Up in the consuite, I brought a clock radio and tuned it to WGET, and on the second
floor, while people were talking and snacking, you could hear a whole other
conversation taking place down on the con floor. It was great, a constant show
about Notacon playing in the background of the Notacon Consuite. How kickass was that?
The highlight for me was in the evening of Saturday; I came in while a bunch of people
were doing stuff, and they gave me headphones to talk on the Mic.... and there's
Strom Carlson. Holy Shit!
See, the gang was not content to "merely" have a radio show at the con, with a wireless
connection and beaming out to the world at large, along with a low-power FM transmitter
(honest, FCC) that could let a couple floors know of our hijynx. No, they wired in Skype,
and added an Asterix box, and started taking high-quality call-ins from the Internet.
Including Strom. When I popped on those headphones, he might as well have been
talking to me from across the table. You can hear on the recording my being stunned
at this, sitting in the middle of a conference, in the network room, talking to a guy
a thousand miles away about stuff we can both see thanks to a webcam. Surreal. During
this point, someone put up "driftnet" on a projector wall, which started sucking in
every photo/image that people were browsing. Well, you can imagine what people, once
they discovered what was going on, then chose to intentionally browse. I saw things that
would make Satan buy a milkshake and cry. And on audio, you can hear the pain, the
sound of dozens of people looking even when they do not want to. All of this while talking
to Strom, over skype, on a webcam, broadcasting on FM, to the world. Perfection.
All in all, we were on the air for over a DAY. OVER A DAY. 24 HOURS. Insane. And it's going
to take me weeks to finish thanking everyone and linking everywhere properly from this
site.
Are we doing this next year? HELL YEAH we are. And it's going to be even BETTER.
