Well, it’s been pretty uneventful since January 2020, no?
Since the pandemic, I have left the house a dozen times maybe, but I’ve also been doing a few other projects. First, Mikey and me, we decided to go through the alphabet, day by day, covering a new song for each letter. It became a little less day by day as it went on, but we made it from A to Z. Oh, and we stole the idea blatantly from Grace Petrie and Ben Moss, who, at time of writing, are at it again.
What else. Well, the podcasters over at Megaphonic decided to keep our sanity by playing Jackbox games once a week (i.e., a video game series of a party games that can be played over the internet). Then we started livestreaming them. In the most recent episodes, we’ve started branching out into other games. It’s been fun.
But once you start figuring out how to livestream, you might do other things with it. So I started up a long-dreamt-of project, a panel show where panelists have to draft their picks on a certain topic. It’s called Take Your Pick, and it’s based on the draft episodes of the lovely podcast The Incomparable (with host Jason Snell’s permission; they borrowed the format from someone else, after all). It’s been a lot of fun.
But once you’ve figured out how to do that… I started a daily show on Megaphonic’s Twitch channel called Wordgarbling, where I solve The New York Times crossword puzzle and other word games. This is a nice morning hang. I need to start clipping some of the “best” moments from the stream. But that then led to discovering a bunch of other interesting crossword puzzle constructors, and to me making some crosswords of my own.
Oh, and I made a virtual museum.
That, in addition to my podcasts It’s Just A Show and The Spouter-Inn, have been keeping my busy. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things… Or maybe there are a few things in works that I’m not ready to talk about yet. But that’s the update. Stay safe.