Category Archives: Underworld Amusements

First of the YouTube series: Peter H. Gilmore on Art and Discrimination

Posted on by
1

My goal with these is to reuse material I already have in a new venue to try to pull a wider audience for my work, obviously…  I don’t expect the podcast and my books to be wildly popular, but I think there’s a larger audience than what I currently have.

Set up a few photoshop templates for text and images, and change the elements out for each interview subject. Excerpt a 3-5 minute audio segment and then adjust timing of template elements to match the time of the audio. Upload and fill in all the information.

I thought it was necessary for a lead-in and lead-out audio that could stay the same from one video to another to go along with the visuals before and after the . I don’t like that I use the word “excerpt” twice in the audio portion of the lead-in, and “favorite” twice in the lead out. The latter is less annoying than the former. I will probably rerecord the lead-in audio.

KevinISlaughter.com serves as a testing ground for things I may or may not do on the UA site. I install plug-ins, etc. here before using them on UnderworldAmusements.com.

I’m also getting frustrated with Facebook not displaying content in my posts correctly, from the podcast players to flickr photo stuff, but I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about it besides putting notes like “This ___ may not show up properly in some feeds, please view the original post”.

William Mortensen / YouTube Help Needed

Posted on by
1

Is there anyone with the time and ability who would be willing to splice audio and still images together into 10 minute videos to post on YouTube? I want to get some 2-10 minute excerpts of interviews from the UA Variety Hour podcast up but I can’t take all that on in addition to everything else. I would provide the segments already cut down and still images, you’d need to be able to edit them together and output a clean playing video, minimal effects, and uploaded directly to the account.

You can see what I’ve done recently, here:

Some prior experience needed, if you’ve got some work already on YouTube, send me a link via the contact page. You should be able to work with PSD files with transparencies.

No hard deadlines, 6 or so segments to start, one or two videos a month at most.

Nevermind, it’s getting done.

Continue reading →

TechNerd :: Field Recording Notes

Posted on by
Reply

My blog will often feature commentary on what I’m doing with Underworld Amusements. I don’t want to fill the UA blog up with non-essential materials, but that’s part of the reason why I started this. The total listens to the podcast over there is just over 3,500 – with the “test episode” having over 1,000 listens alone (a couple of days after the posting of the HR Giger episode, it has only about 180 listens). I considered pulling it down, but there’s some good stuff on it.

I recently recorded two interviews in the proverbial field (i.e., not over the phone) for UAVH, and figured I’d offer some sound samples and notes on what gear I used. I hardly know what I’m doing. I’ve done a bit of audio recording, but I’ve never had any kind of training or done any serious work with it outside of the few projects I’ve worked on over the years. My ears are as sophisticated as anything not sophisticated at all.

DSCN3196

Below is a quick and dirty edited audio introducing recordings for two sound sources.

The first sample was recorded two ways. The first half is the Samson CO1U USB Condenser Mic connected to my 9″ Dell Vostro running the free audio recording program Audacity, the second half using the Blue Microphones Mikey connected to an Apple iPod Classic. The interviewee was speaking directly into the Samson, and the iPod was there as a backup recording just in case. It’s times like this I realize I do live a dysgenic life, forgoing children to buy electronic junk to record podcasts that few people listen to and hardly benefit mankind. Hah…

The second sample is a babbling brook recorded in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It was recorded with the Samon/Netbook but using Adobe Audition.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:52 — 5.4MB)

The netbook/Samson mic is a pretty great portable set-up, but that stand/Shockmount is a real pain in the ass to carry around. It doesn’t really break down into anything portable, and the base IS a big chunk of metal after all.

The big drawback to the CO1U is latency. I’ve installed ASIO4ALL to try to reduce it, but it doesn’t get it to where I can talk and listen with headphones at the same time. This tends to be pretty frustrating, and makes getting recording levels right a bit longer, or I end up not checking them and hoping I can fix them on the back end…

UA Variety Hour – The Satanic Wedding / HR Giger | Underworld Amusements

Posted on by
Reply

I literally just spent from 8pm until 6am getting this done. I had a half of a show ready to go, and I thought the “travel” and interview sections would be a little over 30 minutes, but no, they were an hour by themselves! So, now I’ve got a new special and a half-unfinished episode…

Underworld Amusements Variety Hour

2009 Halloween Special

Your host tells the real story of a relationship that begins on 6-6-06 and culminates in a Satanic Wedding that starts in Baltimore on 9-9-09, and ends in at the HR Giger Museum in Gruyère, Switzerland, featuring an interview with dark surrealist artist HR Giger!

via UA Variety Hour – The Satanic Wedding / HR Giger | Underworld Amusements.

Oct.31st – Nov. 1st :: HL Mencken Club 2009 Conference

Posted on by
2

I just recently purchased my tickets for this years HL Mencken Club Conference.

This year I’m going to try to get permission from the hosts to interview a few of the speakers for my Underworld Amusements Podcast. It’s too bad I don’t have a number of episodes under my belt yet – just a few specials, the test episode and the one extra. It’s getting a small number of listeners so far (about 1,800+), but not a single review on iTunes, and not enough ratings to tabulate an average yet. It’s one of those credibility paradoxes… you’ve got to have some credibility to get the interviews, and you’ve got to get the interviews to have some credibility.

Maybe the mixed, but mostly positive review of last years event will put them off, or maybe not. Given Derbyshire’s own afterthoughs, maybe he’ll be up for an interview at least.

I just ordered a Blue Microphones Mikey for my iPod for “field recordings” where it’s not possible to take my netbook and USB mic. I’ll be testing it out in Switzerland next weekend. It has mixed reviews, but when I saw it had come down from the $79 purchase price to $49 on amazon, I pulled the proverbial trigger.

Underworld Amusements HAS published a Mencken book, and his work will appear in the next volume of the Iron Youth Reader.

I’m really excited that Patrick J. Buchanan and Steve Sailer are going to speak. I’ve read three books by the former and have been a daily reader of the blog of the latter for a few years now. Mr Sailer is the only person to ever write a golf themed article and make it interesting to me. That’s amazing.

Anyway, I wanted to plug the event here.

My very own blog…

Posted on by
2

It's me.

I’ve archived here years of myspace blogs, the last few months of facebook notes, and I’ll be adding a few things here and there – dated to the time it occurred.

I’m now porting this blog over to my personal facebook account, and it should show up on my twitter feed, though I don’t like twitter, other people I like DO, and I want them to know I’ve posted something here. I’m on freindfeed as well, but it’s all too much and since it has my twitter, facebook and blog feeds, it’s going to be very very redundant.

I’ve put everything in a category, at least one. “MySpace Archive” and “Facebook Archive” are self-explanatory.

As of this writing, I have the following categories:

Archivalist : Stuff I scan/document.

Arty : Um, art stuff. Things I or others do.

Bibliophile : I, book nerd.

Blog Notes : Just shit like this – who fucking cares.

Boorish : Me ranting, i.e. “commentary” and “sophistry”.

Crafty : Projects around the house. Sewing, sawing, silk-screening, building.

Design : Design projects for Underworld Amusements, freelance design that won’t scandalize the client, etc.

Outside My House : Vacations, events, etc.

Quote : Things other people have said, with or without commentary.

Skeptic : Things having to do with skepticism, atheism, critical thinking.

Slaughter House : When I pretend to be a professional photographer.

Two Cents : Much overlap with “Boorish”, but quieter.

Underworld Amusements : Notes on my projects that aren’t important enough to go on that site.

I suppose if I start adding things from the past, I’ll add a category called “Historical Revisionism“…

I’ve “tagged” only a few of the posts here, I suppose future postings will have them, and maybe I’ll get around to the backlog of items. I’ve always been terrible at documenting my work. I’ve had one or two websites about me, but nothing public. It’s been a tightrope walk, owing to the fact that I do freelance work and have a “straight job”.  I haven’t gone out of my way to hide my opinions, I just haven’t gone out of my way to publicize them in a public way like this. Take, for example, the description of  “Design” above… I won’t be posting all my freelance work here because some of my clients wouldn’t like it. Some of them have had no idea of my interests outside of graphic design. That’s a good thing. It may not be a secret, but most politically vocal graphic designers are on the left.

Obama X-Press - Snow Balls, Food Stamps, Newport

Obama X-Press - Snow Balls, Food Stamps, Newport

I consider myself a secular conservative… a “little ‘l’ libertarian”. I disagree with libertarians on a few points – death penalty being one of them… it’s not used enough.

Well, we’ll see what happens. This way I have control, and I can push my thoughts out from one location.

I will do my best to restrict posts to something worth sharing. You may disagree, but luckily for you it’ll be really easy to ignore it all.

This is me, some 13 years ago. I was in an industrial/performance group called URILLIAsekt, and the performance was called “Lycanthropy Ritual”. I don’t know if I’ve gotten more weird or less.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn0be_CXIT0

This blog is found at kevinislaughter.com, but .net and .org get you there as well.