The thing this was hiding never really materialized, but I honestly had no problem with a Nyan Puffin on my website. So why change it?
As we mentioned on this week’s episode of the show, we are moving away from being on the radio to a podcast only format. In discussions with people regarding the change, we’ve received may questions that contained some concerns and a few hopes. Here are the answers:
Q: Are you ending the show?
A: Not at all. We are no longer on commercial radio, as of July 2016. At one time we had several stations carrying the show, but in the last year that had winnowed down to a single station on which we were paying for airtime. We decided to focus our resources elsewhere.
Q: Are you hoping to get back on the radio?
A: Yes. Broadcast radio is important to me. I can’t say more at this time, but I would not be surprised if we were back on the air this time next year.
Q: Are you going to change the show format?
A: No. Our current plan is to produce one hour of free, FCC-compliant content a week, produced as if it were live radio. A live production style has advantages beyond being on the air, especially since we plan on returning to live streaming once we have the studio set up in the new house.
Q: You’re getting a house? You’re moving away from Tacoma?
A: Yes. Hell no.
Q: Does this mean you’re going to start swearing?
A: Not really. I decided I wanted to keep the show part of the show clean. Not only does it make it easier to use these podcast-only shows in some future on-air time slot, but some families who listen to the show over the feed may object to a change in language.
However, you may have noticed that we relax on language after the show ends on podcast episodes, and in feed-only content. It’s a bit of a compromise, but it’s a compromise that seems to be working, so I don’t plan on changing that. Feedback would be welcome here.
Q: Is the advertising is going to change?
A: Very likely. We stopped pursuing advertising at the beginning of the year in anticipation of this change, and we’ll be revisiting it once we complete some other things that are important to the move away from radio.
Q: Is Peggy’s Challenge going away?
A: Unlikely. We have other costs which need to be addressed in order to keep the show going, and some people would rather give us a tip now and again rather than be a regular patron.
Q: What about the post-show meetup?
A: What about it? We stopped mentioning it every show when it was becoming clear that most people listening would need at least a very fast plane and at most a stargate in order to attend. So we made the postshows into a meetup, added them to the website, and kept it off the air. None of that will change with the switch to podcast-only production. The post may far outlast the show.
Q: Okay, so what the hell was the 8-bit Puffin about?
A: Thanks to some input on a listener poll we did in 2013, I was planning on starting a subscriber program to help fund the show. In the original designs for the site, that was where the login was going to go.
The subscriber program didn’t happen for reasons, but the idea lives on in my Patreon.
