Culuture Conquistadors Update

I figure I'd take a day to promote one of my major projects, The Culture Conquistadors Podcast. The podcast is an audio journey through the arts. Well mostly movies but sometimes television or music. Charles and I have collaborated on other side projects before but the Culture Conquistadors Podcast maybe the most enduring one. For two years, we published an episode every other week. Some of our discussions meandered for over an hour. One of our triumphs is the AniMadness Bracket.

But then Charles and I ended up as roommates¹ and the time for recording disappeared. I'll admit, I'm at fault for a lot of it. Often we'd schedule a recording session but then I'd cancel last minute and we'd just keep pushing it off. During our "Roommate Period", we recorded just four episodes! It was a fun time. Charles was a great roommate for me but our podcast suffered. In July, our lease ended and we moved in with our respective significant others.

The Culture Conquistadors website has also hung over my head during most of this time. I'm responsible for the technology aspects of the podcast and we've both been unhappy with the website. Figuring we should re-launch the podcast with Season 3, I decided it was now or never to do a website overhaul. Much like Concrete Chaos, I moved the Culture Conquistadors website to Wordpress. I love Drupal and will continue to use it but for the current needs of the podcast, Wordpress is just better. We've integrated analytics for both the podcast episodes and the website itself.² It's a pretty plain website but it works for us. Maybe in the future we'll add some more stuff but we're focusing on the actual podcast for now.

Speaking of the podcast, Charles has streamlined the production process. Previously, he worked hard to clean out "umms" and "uhhs" and other things. While he still does this to an extent, it's much more focused and the production timeline has gone from days of hard work spread over a few weeks to a couple hours over a few days. The end result should sound a lot more natural with fewer cuts. I've also upgraded my recording equipment with a Blue Yeti mic. So hopefully, the episodes sound not just more natural but clearer.

With that production process revolution, we've worked hard to try some new things with the podcast. For Spectre and Mockingjay, we've split the discussion into a preview and review. Taking what would've been a two hour conversation and splitting it and making both discussions more focused on the topic. We've also been on a weekly recording cadence. The publication of the episodes hasn't quite hit an exact rhythm yet but we're recording every Tuesday night! I'm not sure we'll be able to keep it up forever but it's encouraging that we've managed to do so for the past couple months.

All in all, the podcast is in far better shape than it was for most of 2015. We're excited for Awards Season, playing Fantasy Movie League and looking forward to continuing to produce a podcast that we hope will grow. But even if it doesn't, we're still having fun doing it.